The Rudolf Steiner Archive

It cannot be denied, even by those who have made only a slight study of spiritual life, that the subject chosen for our consideration to-day has aroused an interest in the widest circles, and we might add, that this desire for knowledge is of a scientific character. On the other hand, there seems to be an ever increasing tendency toward the formation of a world-philosophy, in which such questions as are associated with the name of Christ find no true and proper place.

A previous lecture that I gave some few weeks ago in this building under the title, ‘The Origin of Man’, and a continuation of the same, upon ‘The Origin of the Animal World’ (delivered in the Architektenhaus) will doubtless have made clear to you a point to which I shall now again draw your attention. In every age, including the present period, the general conceptions and sentiments concerning such fundamental questions as ‘The Origin of Man’ and others of a similar nature, including those relative to that Being to Whom the name of Christ has been given, are directly rooted in, and dependent upon the accepted concepts of some prior age.

We have already seen while considering various matters connected with man’s origin, that as a matter of fact, those theoretical ideas and conceptions which have sprung from the general mode of thought prevailing in our time are fundamentally at variance with the actual results of scientific research. On the other hand, it is just in this relation that we find the conclusions arrived at through the medium of Spiritual Science, which traces man’s origin back to spiritual forms, and not merely to that which is external and physically perceptible, are in full harmony with the results obtained in the field of Natural Science. Perhaps nowhere do we find this want of accord so marked between that current cosmic concept, which is so general in the thoughts and hearts of the people of our day, and that which science has been constrained to adopt, as in the case of the Christ-conception. This divergence may well be due to the fact that the questions involved belong to the greatest of all those concerning the cosmos. However, since the coming of the Christ-Movement into the world’s history, man’s power of conception concerning the Christ-Being and the form which it has taken, has ever been such as was best adapted to a particular period, or as one might say, was best suited to that section of humanity which was occupied with such thoughts.

During the first centuries which followed the advent of Christianity into the world’s history, we realize in connection with a certain trend of ideas and spiritual tendency which has been called Gnosis [a term denoting a higher spiritual wisdom claimed by the Gnostics], that grand and mighty concepts were formed with regard to that Being whom we term The Christ. We find, however that the universal acceptance of these exalted gnostical conceptions continued for only a relatively short period as compared with that idea of The Christ which was, as one might say, generally approved and spread among the people, and later became the essence of the Church movement. It will be enlightening to consider briefly those lofty Christ-concepts which were evolved in the form of gnostical conceptions during the first centuries of the Christian era—not, be it understood, because Spiritual Science would seek to cloak those ideas which it has to put forward with regard to The Christ beneath a mantle of gnostic notions; such an assertion could only be made by those who because of the immaturity of their development in the field of Spiritual Science, are wholly incapable of truly differentiating between the nature of the various events and conditions which are met with in spiritual life.

In many ways the concepts of the Spiritual Science of to-day, which will be recapitulated in this lecture, extend far beyond the ancient gnosis of those early Christian times; but this very fact makes it the more interesting that we should at least touch upon these old spiritual conceptions. There are many different points of view in connection with this by-gone higher wisdom, and various degrees of light and shade in that olden spiritual trend of thought, and we will draw attention to one of its most important aspects and which harmonizes best with the teachings of Spiritual Science in our time. During the first few centuries of the Christian era, this ancient gnosis put forward the most profound ideas concerning the Christ-Being—momentous indeed in relation to that enlightenment which came with the dawn of Christianity. This higher spiritual wisdom maintained that the Christ-Being was eternal, and not alone associated and concerned with the evolution and development of humanity, but with the surrounding world of the cosmos taken in its entirety.

When considering the question of the Origin of Man we found that we were taken back to a form of humanity which floated or hovered, as it were, entirely in spiritual heights and which was not yet familiar with, nor embodied in, an outer material covering. We have seen that during the process of the earth’s evolution, mankind, starting from a purely spiritual state, gradually changed into that of a lower and denser form which we now call man; and that owing to the materialistic outlook of the present theory of evolution, which merely follows man’s earthly history backwards, his beginning has been traced to external animal forms. Spiritual Science, on the other hand, leads us directly to previous states which approach ever nearer and nearer to the immaterial soul, and finally points definitely to a spiritual origin.

The old gnosis sought the Christ-Being in that region in which mankind hovered before he had assumed his material existence, and where he felt himself surrounded alone by spiritual life and spiritual reality. If we understand this ancient gnosis rightly, then must we look upon it from the gnostic point of view, that when man had so far developed as to have reached a point when his Etheric Body should be enclosed within a material covering in order that he might take part in the general course of physical evolution, there remained behind in the purely spiritual realms what might be termed a by-gone companion of man or ‘alter ego’, in the form of an element of the Christ-Being, which did not descend with him into the physical world. Further, according to this conception, mankind was destined to undergo a process of continued development in the material plane, and it was his mission to show evidence of achievement and progress. Hence, according to the gnosis, this Christ-Element continues to dwell in the spiritual realms while mankind undergoes his period of material evolution, so that during the whole time of man’s earthly history, the Christ-Being is not to be sought in that region to which man is related as a physical perceptual entity, but alone in the realms of pure spirit.

That particular period which we call The Birth of Christianity, the ancient gnosis considered of especial import in the evolution of mankind upon Earth. It was regarded as that glorious moment when the Christ-Being entered the physical perceptual world in order to give an impulse to spiritual activity, for man had of himself retarded the soul’s development after he had descended upon the material plane. The gnosis looked upon primeval man during the very beginning of his evolution as a spiritual being bound to a world in which The Christ was then active, and it considered that He again descended upon our earth, where already for a long space humanity had been undergoing material evolution, at that particular period from which we now reckon our time.

The question now arises—How did the ancient wisdom actually look upon this descent of a purely spiritual being into the evolution of humanity? It was regarded in the following manner:—According to the gnosis, an especially highly developed human individuality to Whom historical research has given the name of Jesus of Nazareth, had achieved such exceptional spiritual maturity that at a particular period definite soul conditions had come about, in virtue of which this singular personality had the power to absorb certain Divine qualities and wisdom from the Spirit-World, which up to then no man could acquire. From this time on, so the gnosis states, the soul of this especially selected personality felt itself sufficiently advanced to surrender to the indwelling of that Divine Being, Who up to that moment had had no part in the actual progress and development of humanity—namely, The Christ. That event which took place on the banks of the Jordan when Jesus of Nazareth was baptized by John, and which is recorded in the Bible (Mark i, 9 to 11), was regarded by this ancient gnosis as a manifestation of the entering of the Christ-Being into the course of human evolution. The gnosis further declared that some very singular spiritual condition had been engendered with regard to Jesus through this sacred baptism, which event we may consider as wholly symbolical or otherwise.

We can obtain an idea of what underlies this gnostic concept if we pursue a line of thought somewhat as follows:—We begin with a realization of the fact that if we carefully observe the lives of other people, using those methods of thought which lead us to the very depth of the soul, and not the superficial mode so general in our time, we shall often find in the experience of such persons moments fraught with epoch-making events, when they feel that they stand at a turning-point in their lives. A situation of this nature may arise through some deep-lying sorrow or other trial of earthly origin. Then indeed they may say:—‘That which has now befallen me differs from all my previous experiences, for it causes me to look upon myself as a man transformed.’ Certain it is that in the case of many people there occurs at times something in the nature of a crisis, such as might be described as an awakening and renewing of special and distinctive forces of soul-life.

If we imagine an experience of the above kind as representing in very imperfect and elementary manner an inner event similar to that which the gnosis regarded as having taken place at the time of the baptism of Jesus in Jordan (St. Mark i, 9), we can then readily conceive an entirely different form of happening hitherto unknown in connection with human existence, and quite unlike any which may break in upon men’s souls and is born merely of earthly trials and vicissitudes. That Divine power and supreme spiritual quality which flamed up in the soul of Jesus of Nazareth manifested in wholly new indwelling attributes, and therefrom arose a Godlike inner life shedding fresh light upon all forms of human culture quickened by its example. It was that Divine Essence which entered into the innermost being of Jesus of Nazareth—that glorious and most Holy Spirit creating in Him a new-born life, that the ancient gnosis termed THE CHRIST.

The gnosis clearly realized that through The Christ there had come to mankind something in the nature of a new impulse, an impulse differing utterly from any that had been before. For all that Godlike stimulating power which was brought forth and unfolded in Jesus during the three years subsequent to His baptism by John was such as had never up to that time found place in the evolution of humanity. The gnosis states quite definitely that we must not consider a particular man [Jesus of Nazareth] as The Christ [as is oft-times done], but that we must realize and look for The Christ in the Divine Spirit which manifested IN Jesus, through those sublime and singular qualities that were latent within his innermost being.

We have characterized this ancient spiritual wisdom concerning The Christ in the above manner, in order that it may be easy of comprehension. In the example previously cited of a special turning-point occurring in the life of a human soul, we have an instance at least in some ways analogous to the Christ-Event expressed in its most elementary form. It is especially difficult for mankind in these modern times to realize that circumstances of fundamental historic significance are directly connected with this outstanding incident, and which are of such momentous import as to form what might be termed the true centre of human evolution. When we compare this gnostical concept with various statements of Spiritual Science brought to your notice during these lectures, we find that it has in truth, no matter how we regard the facts, not only a grand and glorious conception of the Christ-Being, but it also evinces an exalted idea of man’s being, for it regards him as involved in an impulse, coming directly from the spiritual realms, and brought to bear upon the actual course of his historic growth and development. It is therefore not to be wondered at that this ancient gnostical conception was unpopular. Anyone who has obtained even a slight insight into the circumstances connected with the progress of mankind during the early centuries of the Christian era and onwards, the existing state of the human soul and the various conditions of social life at different periods, must at once admit that such concepts imply a loftiness of sentiment that was certainly not destined to find favour among the people. In order to appreciate this point we have only to consider the spiritual life of the present day.

Whenever conversation turns upon any idea similar in character to this ancient higher spiritual wisdom, the majority of people at once say:—‘That is all an abstraction, a purely visionary notion—what we want is reality, something which directly affects our actual material life.’ Thus it is that even in our time mankind for the most part regards the old gnostical conception, as outlined, merely in the light of a wholly abstract impression. Humanity is still far from experiencing the feeling of greater satisfaction which comes of spiritual thought, and of realizing how much more true is the substantiality of all that underlies those spiritual concepts to which we may raise ourselves, than is that of things which most men regard as perceptual, concrete, and as having absolute reality. If it were otherwise we would not find, as is the case in the arts and professions, that man is ever urged toward what may be touched and seen, while all that is of the spirit, and calls for inner upliftment of the soul for its apprehension, is pushed aside and regarded as abstract and visionary.

It is not possible in a few words to explain just how the popular conception of the Christ-Being evolved in the minds of the people. But it may be said that an echo of the true Christ-Concept, which pictures a Divine Being incarnate and abiding in the man Jesus of Nazareth, has lived on through the centuries side by side with that simple idea of Jesus, which looks upon Him as born in marvellous manner and as ever approaching mankind with divine tenderness and love; a theme which is developed even in the story of his childhood. In this concept we find Jesus of Nazareth hailed by humanity as its loving Saviour. And it is in that holy sense and feeling evoked by the deeds of this beloved Redeemer that we find a dim echo of the ancient gnostic Christ-Concept. During the whole course of what we might call the external history of Jesus, there is found an upturned vision which realized the presence of some great secret truth, some awe-inspiring mystery, which even as Jesus walked the earth endowed His personality with superhuman attributes. And this superhuman quality has been termed The Christ. Further, we find that as time went on humanity became ever less and less capable of understanding that bold concept, The gnostic Christ, and this ever-increasing inability of comprehension has continued even up to the present day.

Already in the Middle Ages we note, that Science only dared to reason concerning that which is external and directly apparent to the senses, or about those things which it conceived as lying beyond our sense-perception in a kind of world governed by natural laws. It did not feel itself called upon to probe into those factors and influences which have entered into and played their respective parts in man’s evolution, in the form of noble and uplifting spiritual impulses. Thus it was that in the Middle Ages, questions concerning the origin and evolution of man in which the Christ-Impulse made itself felt, became solely objects of belief. This spiritual faith, however, continued on among the people from that time, side by side with all that was regarded as Science and absolute knowledge, but which took heed only of the lower order of cosmic matters and events.

At this point it is of interest to note, that from the sixteenth century onward, this twofold method of thought has ever more and more tended toward a crisis, and for the reason that mankind was always prone to direct and confine his powers of cognition to the perceptual world alone, and to assign all matters of spiritual origin and dependent upon spiritual progress and evolution to the category of mere dogma.

We cannot, however, enter upon this subject at the present time, for it is more essential that I now draw your attention to the fact that in the nineteenth century the course of development led mankind to a point where, as one might say, all true conception of The Christ was wholly lost, at least to a very large proportion of the people. But, nevertheless, we must admit that among a small section of the community the ancient gnostic concepts still lived on, and were yet further developed after a manner which we might regard as bringing about a deeper insight into the Christ-Impulse. In the case of the majority, even among the scientific theological circles, there was a general renunciation of the true Christ-Concept. An attempt was made to centre all in the personality of Jesus of Nazareth, and to look upon Him as One possessed of singular attributes, and especially chosen because of His profound and all-embracing comprehension of the laws and conditions of human evolution, and the Divine inner nature of mankind—but even so, to be considered as a man—although a man transcendent in all things. Thus it came about that in those days in place of the old Christology, there grew up what might be called a mere Jesus-life-research. The results of this mode of thought and study became ever more and more incredible, when considered in the light of all those Divine qualities which dwelt within the being of The Chosen One, Jesus of Nazareth. For according to these investigations Jesus was to be regarded as One specifically selected as endowed with supreme and unique spiritual attributes, but nevertheless possessed of human individuality.

The crowning point in this class of conception is reached in such works as that entitled The Nature of Christianity, by Adolf Harnack, and other similar attempts in the direction of what we have termed Jesus-life-research, and which have appeared in many and varied forms. For the present, however, it is only necessary to merely draw attention to the results obtained from deep and earnest study along these lines, and since this subject is the most modern of any with which we are concerned we can do so very briefly. We would say that the methods employed during the nineteenth century in order to authenticate historically those events which occurred at the beginning of the Christian era, have led to no actual positive conclusions.

It would take us much too far to enter into any kind of detail respecting this particular trend of thought; but anyone who will make a careful investigation into the results achieved in modern times in this connection, will know that an endeavour has been made to apply the ordinary methods of external research, to prove that the personality of Jesus of Nazareth actually lived at the beginning of our Christian spiritual life. Now this attempt to demonstrate the existence of Jesus by such historical means as may be applied in other cases has merely led to the following admission:—‘It is impossible to confirm the personality of Jesus of Nazareth by external material methods.’ But it by no means follows that the negative assumption, which claims that Jesus never lived, is thereby proved. These material investigations have simply shown that we cannot employ the same historical means in order to verify the life of Jesus of Nazareth, as may be used to demonstrate the existence of Aristotle, Socrates or Alexander the Great. But that is not all, for of late this field of inquiry has led to serious difficulties being experienced in quite another direction.

It is only necessary to refer to such works as those by William Benjamin Smith, published by Diederich of Leipzig, to realize that the result of painstaking and exact research into Biblical and other documentary records relating to Christianity has again revealed the fact that [in many instances] these venerable documents cannot be referring to those matters to which, during the greater part of the nineteenth century, it was generally supposed they had reference. A special attempt was made to reconstruct the life of Jesus of Nazareth from the results of philological investigations into these ancient chronicles; but in the end it was found that in the very writings themselves there was evidence of an underlying significance of quite a different nature from that which appeared upon the surface. It became apparent that in spite of every effort to picture the life of Jesus by employing the most carefully chosen and exact methods, the Biblical records, those Christian documents wherein mankind feels itself upon a firm and truly Christian foundation, hardly mention Jesus of Nazareth as a human being. External science is thus driven to the following statement:—‘The ancient records scarcely ever allude to Jesus of Nazareth as a man, they refer to Him as a God ‘; and again to this remarkable anomalous assertion: ‘It is an error to believe that any proof may be found in the original Christian documents of the existence of Jesus of Nazareth as an actual human personality. Rather do we come to the conviction that what the evangelical and other olden sacred writings state is, that in the very beginning of the Christian era was a Deity, and only when we recognize this fact, does all that is written in these aged chronicles become of true significance and import.’

Now is not this all very extraordinary? According to the investigations of our period, when we allude to Jesus of Nazareth, we must speak of a Deity; but this same period and same line of research admits of no reality in this God or purely Spiritual Being. How, then, does present-day science regard The Christ? He is looked upon as a visionary creation, a mere ideal concept which insinuated itself into the history of mankind, and was called into being by a folk fantasy born of mental impulse. According to the latest investigations in this field, The Christ is to be regarded not as a reality, but as a kind of imaginary god. To put it plainly, we would say:—Modern scientific research is brought face to face with something for which it has absolutely no use; for what can it do with a God in Whom it has no faith? External science has merely proved that the Bible records speak of a Deity, but it knows of naught else to do with this Deity, than to ascribe to Him a place in the category of visionary concepts.

We will now compare the attitude of external Science as characterized above, with what Spiritual Science has to say upon the matter. At this point I should like to mention a book entitled Christianity as Mystical Fact, of which I am the author. The fundamental idea underlying this work has been but little understood. I have therefore endeavoured to set forth its object more clearly in a preface to the second edition. My intention was to show that the history of mankind—World History—is not complete in that picture which we can generally obtain from external history and external documents, and for this reason:—Throughout all human evolution spiritual impulses are at work, spiritual factors are present, and these we must attribute to the agency of spiritual beings. If with this concept we compare the whole nature and method of the historic world-conception put forward by Leopold von Ranke and others, we can only say:—The highest point to which the Science of History has as yet reached is, that it actually speaks of historical ideas as if they were subject to the intrusion of abstract impressions coming, as one might say, from without during the course of human evolution and the development of Nations and of Peoples. That is the utmost extent of general belief in this direction. But ‘ideas’ are not what historians consider them to be, and do not develop force and exhibit power. The whole process of human evolution would be lifeless and spiritless if it proceeded merely historically, and if it were not that those ideas which enter into the souls of mankind are the expression of invisible and supersensible impulses, which rule and govern the whole field of human growth and development. Behind all that is revealed in this external progression, there still remains something which can only be unveiled by those supersensible means at the disposal of Spiritual Science, where the methods are applicable to things which are beyond the powers of our sense-perception. Attention has already been drawn to this subject in a previous lecture, and we shall again refer to it at some future date.

I could demonstrate to you how the Christ-Impulse entered historically into the evolution of humanity in such manner that it proved itself to be an actual continuation of that self-same influence which played its part in the spiritual development of mankind in the by-gone days of the ancient mysteries; the actual nature of which is even yet but little understood. A true comprehension of all that was accomplished in pre-Christian times by the olden mysteries in connection with the laying down of spiritual foundations for the development of nations and of peoples can only come, when, through the methods of modern Spiritual Science, man has gained an understanding of that particular form of development through which the soul is transformed into an instrument capable of apprehending that Spirit-World which lies behind all things material and perceptual. In these lectures I have many times referred to transformations of this character.

We now know that mankind, who in these days is in a sense confined and only interested in the immediate experiences of his intimate soul-life, may verily raise himself above his present state and assume a more perfect form of soul-being which can live in the Spirit-World, even as the human counterpart lives in the physical world. Through the study of history in the light of Spiritual Science, we learn that the possibility of thus raising the soul-being to spiritual heights through a process of purely intimate individual soul development, has come about gradually during the evolution of mankind, and was not known in primeval times. Whereas the soul may now through its own effort and measures rise freely, and while still possessed of its individual quality acquire the power of spiritual discernment, in pre-Christian times such was not the case; for the soul was then dependent upon an impulse born of certain modes and procedures, which were a part of the rites performed in the Sanctuaries of the Mysteries.

In my book entitled Christianity as Mystical Fact, I have presented a somewhat detailed account of those ancient rites which were conducted by the priests in connection with the soul. These ceremonies took place in the various Temples of the Mysteries, as they were then considered to be, but which in this lecture we will regard more as Temples assigned to spiritual instruction. What actually took place in these sanctuaries may be briefly outlined as follows:—By means of certain methods and observances the soul was freed from its bodily covering, and it was made possible for it to remain for a time in a condition similar to, though in many ways differing from, the ordinary sleep-state.

When we consider the sleep-state in the light of present-day Spiritual Science, we look upon it that while the human frame remains quiescent and sleeping, the actual centre of man’s Etheric Being is situated outside the recumbent figure, and that during such state the power of the true inner essence of this etheric nucleus is so low that unconsciousness supervenes, and the nucleus becomes, as it were, enveloped in darkness. The methods employed during these ancient mystic rites in order to affect the human soul were as follows:—Through the influence of certain advanced personalities, who had themselves passed through similar mystical initiation, a species of sleep-state was first induced. This was of such nature that the inner forces of the soul were thereby strengthened and intensified. When a certain stage was reached the soul left the body, which was then in a condition of deathlike sleep, and for a time entered upon a psychic existence, a kind of sleep-life, during which it could look upon the Spirit-World with full consciousness. While this sleep-life continued, the soul was able to realize its true position as an inhabitant of the spiritual realms. When, in due course, the soul was brought back once again to ordinary mundane conditions, there came to it recollections of all those things which it had observed and experienced while freed from the body. It was then that it could [while active within the human form] come before the people and stand forth as a prophet, bringing to them proofs of the existence of a Spirit-World and of an eternal life to come. In those olden days it was in the manner above indicated that the soul was enabled to take part in the life of the spiritual realms; and in the mysteries were found the canons to which it must submit, and for a long period, in order that the supreme spiritual leaders in the ancient Mystery Sanctuaries might bring about the final consummation of the soul’s desire.

We will now ask this question:—Whence came those ancient standards of human conduct which have been passed on by peoples spread throughout the world during the course of man’s evolution; and those flashes of spiritual enlightenment proclaiming his Godlike origin and the eternity of the soul? The answer comes through Spiritual Science; from it we learn that this olden wisdom originated with those who had themselves undergone initiation after the manner we have outlined. There is a reflection of these primeval moral precedents, manifested in strange and curious fashion, in connection with Myths and Legends and various graphic portrayals of the past; for in these very fables we find depicted many of the same experiences which came, as if in a living dream, to the initiates in the Mystery-Sanctuaries. Indeed, we first begin to understand Mythology rightly, when we regard the forms and figures there presented, as pictorial representations of things which appeared to the spiritual vision of the Initiates during the time of their participation in the secret rites. If we would establish a relation between the mythological conceptions of olden times and the religious teachings of an earlier age, we must hark back to the ancient mysteries and ponder upon all that lay concealed therein, deep hidden from a profane external world. Mysteries revealed to those alone, who, through severe trials and unswerving observance of that secrecy and restraint imposed upon all, had truly fitted themselves to take part in the dark ceremonies of initiation. We cannot, however, at this point enter into the actual circumstances which led to the close veiling of the mystic rites performed in that now remote grey past. But when we turn our gaze backward and follow the course of spiritual development in pre-Christian times, we realize that it was ever in the dim obscurity enshrouding the inscrutable observances of that by-gone age, that man’s soul unfolded and was strengthened.

The souls of men were not so fully developed in the past that they could of themselves and of their own efforts rise upward and enter the realms of the spirit, while merely dependent upon their immediate powers and unaided by the ministrations of the temple priests. In my book, Christianity as Mystical Fact, I have pointed out that even while external history ran its course a change was taking place; and it has there been my object to show how the whole plan and design underlying human evolution was such, that when the turning-point was reached which marked the birth of Christianity mankind was already prepared to enter upon a new era. This change had come about because of all that man had experienced and absorbed through repeated reincarnations, and through knowledge gained from initiates concerning the Spirit-World. From then on he would have the power of upliftment to spiritual heights within his own innermost soul, which could henceforth rise of its own effort, free from all external influence and unaided by those means which it was the custom to employ in the by-gone days of the mysteries.

According to the views which we now hold, the most outstanding event that came to pass in Palestine, in connection with the spiritual progress of mankind was the final perfecting of the soul, so that it should be fitted for what we might call Self-Initiation. This ultimate consummation had been approached gradually and the necessary preparation had extended over possibly hundreds of years; yet the end came just about the very time when that special turning-point was reached which marked the beginning of the Christian era. The soul was then so far perfected that it was ready for self-initiation, during which act it would be merely guided by those having knowledge of the true path and of the trials that must be endured; henceforth self-initiation might be achieved without external aid rendered by Temple priests, or by leaders having understanding of the mysteries. And further, through the founding of Christianity all those other rites and observances which were performed time and time again in the innermost sanctuaries of the Temples, memories of which are still preserved in Legends, Myths and Mythologies connected with folklore, are found to have a place in that Grand Plan which underlies the world’s history.

If we would indeed understand the Gospels, we should ask ourselves the following question:—‘What experiences were essential to a candidate for initiation in the days of the ancient Persians or Egyptians, who desired so to uplift his soul that it might gaze directly upon the Spirit-World?’ Injunctions concerning such matters were clearly set forth and formed the basis of what we might term a Ritual of Initiation. These commands and instructions covered a time extending from a certain event designated by some as The Baptism, and by others as The Temptation, up to that moment when the soul was led forth and blessed with a true discernment of the spiritual realms. When we compare such Initiation Rituals with the most important statements contained in the Gospels, then (as I have shown in the book to which I have just referred) we find that in the Gospels there appear once again detailed narratives concerning ancient initiation ceremonies, but here the descriptions have reference to that great outstanding historical character, Jesus of Nazareth. It further becomes clear that whereas in previous times an Initiation Candidate was raised to spiritual heights in the seclusion of the Temples of the Mysteries, Jesus of Nazareth, because of the course which history had taken, was already so far advanced that He not only remembered His experiences in the Spirit-World and thus brought enlightenment to humanity, but He became unified in spirit with One, to Whom no earthly being had as yet become united, namely, The Christ-Being. Thus we find a great similarity between the narrative of the spiritual development of Jesus of Nazareth up to that moment when The Christ entered into His soul and during the following three years when He drew inspiration and wisdom from this Divine source, and the descriptions of the wonted course of the ancient forms of initiation.

In the accounts which tell us of all the trials and experiences which Jesus of Nazareth underwent in those olden days, we find the events connected with His initiation clearly marked by the magnitude and Godlike nature of the spiritual facts which underlie the historical descriptions. This is especially noticeable in the Gospel of St. John. While in previous times countless aspirants had taken part in the sacred rites, they had only advanced to that point when they could testify as follows:—‘The spiritual world is a reality, and to such a world does the human soul belong.’ But when it came to pass that Jesus was Himself initiated, He became actually unified and at one with the most significant and outstanding of all spiritual beings ever remembered by former initiates; and it was toward this supreme initiation that the ordered plan underlying all ancient forms and ceremonies had its trend.

Thus do we behold The Mystery of Golgotha emerging from those secrets which were hidden in the dark mysteries of the past, to take its place in that grand design so fundamental to the world’s history. As long as man refuses to believe that in a certain locality and at a definite time Jesus of Nazareth was blessed with Divine initiation, and imbued with the spirit of The Christ in such manner that this Almighty influence could stream forth and act as an impulse upon all future generations—just so long will he remain unable to realize the true import and meaning of the Christ-Impulse in its relation to the evolution of mankind. When through the study of the basic principles of Spiritual Science the reality of great spiritual events such as we have portrayed is admitted, then will first dawn a true comprehension of all that has come to human evolution through the advent of the Christ-Impulse; and we shall no longer degrade the Gospels by discovering in them four separate rituals of initiation in which matters and circumstances concerning Jesus of Nazareth are hidden away and mysteriously concealed. When we come to understand these things rightly we shall realize that everything which followed as a result of the event in Palestine, held a deep significance for all later periods in human evolution.

Now, although what we may term man’s deepest life-centre has always been, so to speak, near at hand, nevertheless this very life-centre was something the awareness of which had not up to the time of that great happening really penetrated into the consciousness of mankind. It was ordained that through The Mystery of Golgotha men’s eyes should be opened and a new era entered upon, in which it would be realized that in the life-centre, the Ego, there manifests an element which is common to both individual man and the entire cosmos.

If we would know in what manner that great and vital change which was wrought in the world’s history by the coming of the Christ-Impulse, is regarded when viewed in the light of Spiritual Science, then we must first realize that:—Man, in respect of his being, consists of a Physical Body, an Etheric or Life Body, an Astral Body, and deep within and underlying all is the veritable Ego¹—that true I, which continues on from incarnation to incarnation. Now, an awareness of the presence of this ultimate centre of life broke in upon man’s consciousness last of all. So that in pre-Christian times he had no thought of its existence. Even as the Physical Body is directly united and in contact with the Physical World, and the Astral Body with the Astral World, so is man’s deepest life-centre, the Ego, born of that Spirit-World which passeth man’s uttermost understanding. Hence, that great message which Christianity and the Christ-Impulse brought to mankind may be thus expressed:—Seek not the Deity and the Godlike primordial principle in the Astral Body, but in man’s innermost being, for there abideth the true Ego.

Previous to the advent of Christianity man would exclaim:—‘My soul is indeed rooted in the Divine. It is the Divine quality alone which can extend the vision and bring unto me true enlightenment [through the powers of those who have a deeper knowledge of spiritual matters].’ But now he is learning to say:—‘If thou would’st truly know where thou canst unveil the profoundest depths of all that is Divine and active throughout the world; then look of thyself within thine Ego, for therein lieth the channel through which cometh unto thee the Word of God. His voice will break in upon thy conscious state if thou but rightly understandest that because of the Mystery of Golgatha, the powers which are of God have entered into mankind; and if thou wilt but realize that then indeed was a glorious initiation truly consummated—to stand forth as a grand historical event. But especially does God speak unto thee, if thou but exaltest thyself and makest thy soul to be as an instrument, able and fitted, to apprehend that which is of the spiritual realms.’

Before that supreme act came to pass at Golgatha, the way of those who would enter upon the life of the spirit, lay through the deep mysteries of the Temple Sanctuaries. The actual awakening of the Divine consciousness which speaks through the Ego is the very essence of the Christ-Impulse; and the growth and development of the ancient Initiation-Principle paved the way and made it possible that this great impulse should come to humanity. During the whole future course of evolution, because of the Mystery of Golgatha, there will enter into men’s souls an ever-increasing clarity of understanding and discernment of the Divine Spirit to which man is so truly united. That same Holy Spirit which even now speaks through the Ego, when man has indeed freed himself from all earthly conditions and circumstances.

He who can understand the Gospels from this point of view will realize the wonderful evidence of racial development and preparation for those coming events which were brought about in the past by the powers of the Spirit-World. It will be apparent that throughout the ancient Hebrew evolution, mankind was ever being made ready to hear the voice which would later speak through the deep centre of man’s being, the Ego-centre; even as the spirit of the old Hebrew race spoke to Judaism. But the people of other nations had heard no such voice, for they were only conscious of the Divine Spirit as it held converse with the soul in the case of those who were truly initiated.

It had become clear to Judaism that the evolution of mankind is a continuous process of development and progress, and that deep within man’s Ego there dwell those mystic forces which appertain to his innermost being. Hence the Jew became conscious of this thought:—‘When as an isolated personality, a part of the ancient Hebrew race, I look back upon the course of man’s evolution from the time of Abraham, and realize that Supreme Deity who has ruled over all things from generation to generation, there comes over me a vague undefinable feeling that everything which is Divine and of that Holy spiritual power which has fashioned the individual qualities of mankind, lives in me.’ It was in this way that the separate members of the old Hebrew race felt that they were united and at one with Abraham—their father. But Christianity definitely states that all such thoughts and conceptions concerning the Godlike qualities in man are lacking in completeness and fail to picture him in his most perfect form; even though he believe within himself that – ‘I AM THAT AM’. A true realization of those Divine attributes and forces which are active deep within mankind can only come when there is a clear apprehension of those things which are of the spirit and lie beyond all human generations.

Therefore if we would give the above words their fuller and truer meaning we should say:—Before Abraham, was the I AM. This implies that man’s Ego is eternal; and that in the beginning was the same Godlike element which has continued on throughout all generations and will be for evermore. To this the Hebrew would add:—‘Look not upon that which fadeth away and is of man’s material being, but regard only the Divine Essence which has lived and flowed in the blood of all descendants of Abraham, who was indeed our father. See to it that ye shall know and discern this Holy Spirit in each one of God’s children. But seek it not in the bond which uniteth brother and sister, but in that which abideth in each one of you and cometh to the light when man, in very solitude, shall know himself in his innermost soul, and cry out, I AM.’

Christ Jesus uttered words of similar intent and which we must interpret in like manner; with one modification they are as follows:—‘If any man come to me, and forsaketh [‘Hate’, see Luke xiv, 26] not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple:² We must not regard the significance of the above passage as in any way conflicting with the just claims of relationship and child love, but rather as indicating that The Christ had brought into the world that Principle of Divine Spirit which each individual man, because he is man, may find if he but seek steadfastly in the very centre of his being. It was because of this transcendent deed that, henceforth, mankind would enter into ever closer contact with the very heart of Christianity. Then would this most sacred principle rise up supreme, and while overcoming all diversity and error, bring about the realization of that universal quality which all may discern who but look deep within.

The Gods of old were national gods—gods of the peoples—and had relation to certain racial peculiarities. We still find something of this nature in the East among the Buddhists. But the God who stands revealed through Christianity is One who will raise mankind above all human discord and divergence, and lead him on to that which he truly is, because he is indeed MAN. He who would gain knowledge of the fundamental character of the Christian Doctrine must necessarily regard those spiritual powers and impulses which have guided supreme events in world history as realities [he cannot aver that all was begotten of mere chance actions and purely human mental activity]. He must break away from previous concepts of what is basic and of primary historic import; for happenings which have long been so regarded are in reality but upon the surface of the world’s actual growth. Underlying and controlling all human progress and development are beings far above man’s normal powers of sense-perception who are just as real as is the animal and the man in our material world. Supreme and preeminent among those spirit mentors who govern and direct the growth and development of mankind is THE CHRIST—that Christ, who, according to the ancient gnosis, was active in the body of Jesus of Nazareth during a period of three years.

Once again do we realize that Spiritual Science has attained to a concept and an understanding that enables it to throw light upon matters which have already claimed the attention of external science. The latter has been forced to admit that [in respect of The Christ] we are not merely concerned with a man, but with a Divine Being who, while He ruled and gave guidance must, nevertheless, in a certain sense, be considered as active within the man, Jesus. Here, however, we come upon a situation with which external science is unable to cope. Spiritual Science, on the other hand, leads us to the direct contemplation of beings thus acted upon and made subservient to divine spiritual powers, in the manner indicated, and regards such states as of actual occurrence; hence it can approach this sphere of modern investigation in a proper and logical manner. An amazing feature of twentieth-century spiritual development will be that external science will recognize and acknowledge that the concepts of the nineteenth century were in error, in so far as an attempt was then made to reduce the life of Christ Jesus to a life of Jesus of Nazareth only. Further it will be found that the final result of all research in this field will prove that in Christ Jesus we are concerned with a God; and when any science proclaims this truth it is a sign that it has begun to follow the true path. Spiritual Science would merely add that if mankind once admits the verity of the above statement, it may go forward ever assured that it is upon a certain and absolute foundation. The concept expressed in the above assertion is certainly in direct opposition to that material monistic cosmic conception, which has been formed in modern times.

In two of my previous lectures to which I have already referred, namely, ‘The Origin of Man’, and ‘The Origin of the Animal Kingdom’, we have seen that Spiritual Science was in complete accord with the actual facts brought to light by external Science. We would here say that in the matter we are now considering, Spiritual Science is again disposed to associate itself with the results of conscientious scientific research; but where there is doubt and divergence, it will be found that external Science will fall short of that goal which may be reached through the methods of Spiritual Science. In these days man regards human life and human understanding, as they appear to him in the physical world, as if they were irreconcilable with a closely associated and actual outer spiritual realm. He further believes that at the uttermost, man’s greatest fault can only lie in forming wrong conceptions of the material world, or in doing something which is looked upon as detrimental or malicious, and which does not conform with outer and apparent progress.

It is the custom at the present time in connection with the existing cosmic concept, to seek the origin of phenomena only in that which is close at hand; and it has become more and more clear the further man penetrates into spiritual life, that a point has now been reached with regard to this method where a complete change in ideas has become necessary. Both natural science and history have come to a stage where there is a definite scepticism concerning all spiritual matters, and these external sciences are now merely employed in collecting and associating outer perceptual facts, wholly regardless of that underlying spiritual reality which may be apprehended in all phenomena capable of sense-perception. One might almost say, that our present period has reached a point where scientific thought must be reversed, and assume a directly opposite attitude. The soul, through its constant inner striving, will in the end lead ultra materialism and ultra materialistic monism to adopt a concept, which as yet has played but a small part in man’s ideas concerning the cosmos. But in future investigations into the origin of things there will enter thoughts and ideas, so far, not generally accepted.

In my two works, Philosophy of Spiritual Activity and Truth and Science, I have explained that man has been compelled to assume that the position in which he finds himself relatively to the world, is not his true position; and that he must first undergo a development of inner-life so that he may recognize reality in natural phenomena, in order to be able to place himself in just and ethical relation to such phenomena. Further, in the mind of man there must dawn a clear understanding of the fundamental idea in redemption in addition to mere apprehension of causative factors in life. It will be a task of the twentieth century to gain general acceptance of the concepts pertaining to Redemption, Deliverance and Reincarnation, among the external sciences. The position which man has himself assumed as expert and judge of the world does not represent reality; for he can only arrive at true concepts after he has freed himself from his present false ideas, risen to a higher standard of thought, and overcome those barriers which cause him to view all things in distorted and unreal form—such a consummation would be Perceptive-Redemption.

Moral-Redemption comes about when man feels that the position which he occupies in his relation to the world is not his veritable standing, and when he realizes that he must seek a path leading over those obstacles which tower above him, blocking the way to all things appertaining to his true place in life. Concepts of the soul’s rebirth upon a higher plane, will yet be evolved from the wonders which come to light through the investigations of natural science, and the results of historical research. Man will then know, if he pictures the world as in a photographic image and conjures forth a vision of the scientific and historic progress of mankind, that this vision does not represent the material world alone, for underlying all human advancement there is clear evidence of a mighty spiritual plan of earnest training and development. He will no longer believe that the world as depicted by science is a mere physical creation, for he will realize that God’s laws are ever operative in such manner as to bring about his gradual unfoldment. If only natural science would extend its sphere of action beyond a mere portrayal of the perceptual world and rightly educate mankind, so that the human soul might break away from a position which is untenable, and rise to a state which would permit of its rebirth into a more exalted life—and if man could but know how glorious would then be the freedom from that restraint which ever hinders his upward progress, he would indeed have developed within himself those things fundamental to a true world concept of the Christ-Impulse. He would realize that he has power to look back into the grey mists of the past, to a period to which we have often referred, when his true being dwelt in a purely spiritual realm, later to descend into the material world that he might there of his own effort further his growth and advancement. Then would mankind understand the reason why it became imperative, that at a certain definite period in earthly progress a complete change of thought, a reversal of ideas, be brought about; he would know that it was in order that all might be empowered to tear themselves away from those false deceptive material concepts, which have entered so deeply into man’s consciousness. It is the Christ-Impulse which has checked man’s fall, and has saved humanity from being utterly immersed in those things which are but of the material world [and have neither value nor reality].

With respect to the evolution of humanity, The Christ is to be regarded objectively as the [Divine Principle] which is the source of our experience of a sacred power and quality entering the soul when reborn, and freed of all those primal transgressive tendencies which seek to find expression when man is associated with external earthly progress. It is this most holy essence, flowing in upon the world, which is indeed that manifestation we know as The Christ.

If the twentieth century would but regard the glorious realities of man’s inner life in a serious light it would understand the Christ-Event, and no more be in conflict with the concept and verity of those happenings which take place during the soul’s rebirth into a higher sphere. Spiritual Science would then prove that the same actual principles underlie all historic progress and development, as obtained in the case of external natural phenomena and occurrences. With regard to man’s ideas concerning the cosmos, he has fallen into that very error which finds expression in the words of Schopenhauer:—‘The world is my own conception.’ This statement implies that we are surrounded by a universe of colour, sound, and so forth, dependent entirely upon the action of the eye and other sense organs for its being. But if we seek to comprehend the world in its totality, it is not true to say:—‘All colour has existence only in virtue of the physical constitution of the eye.’ For the organ of sight would not be there, if the light had not first conjured it into being. If, on the one hand, it is true that the sensation of light be determined by the eye’s structure, then, on the other hand, it is equally true that the eye has been created by the light through the sun’s action. Both of these verities must therefore be involved in one incomprehensible reality. Thus do we realize the truth underlying Goethe’s words, when he says:—

‘The eye must thank the light for its being.’

From animal matter the light has brought forth a corresponding instrument suitable to receive its impressions. Thus has the eye formed itself in the light, so that it may be sensible of its touch in order that the illumination which is within may meet and blend with the rays which come from without. Even as the eye has been fashioned through the light’s action, and apprehension of the latter comes through the agency of this organ of vision, so was the fulfilment of man’s inner Christ-Experience and rebirth of soul, brought about by that supreme Christ-Event—The Mystery of Golgatha.

Spiritual Science tells us that before the advent of the Christ-Impulse, such inner experience could occur only under the stimulus of an external influence wrought through the agency of the mysteries, and not as is now the case, through a form of self-initiation induced within man’s very being.

There is a certain similarity between the relation of the colours and the light waves to the eye, and the profound mystery of the inner Christ-Experience; for as the eye apprehends the bright radiance of the light, so in man’s deepest being does he become conscious of the Divine Essence—The Christ. That his soul can rise up, and of its own effort transcend all previous limitations, is now possible because the resplendent sun—that grand Mystery of Golgotha—has shed its glorious rays upon the world’s history. If it were not for that supreme objective event, and the objective Christ, there could be no such mysterious subjective inner experience as will enter into the life of mankind during the twentieth century, to be regarded earnestly and from a truly scientific stand-point.

The twentieth century will see the dawn of those conditions necessary to a veritable understanding of the Christ-Impulse. It will be proved how absolute was its reality as a Divine centre of spiritual radiance, shining forth with a light which awakens an inner realization of that great truth reflected in Goethe’s words:—

‘Who overcomes himself, doth conquer that dread power
Which holds all beings closely bound –‘

Now, because of that spiritual bond between man’s latent capacity to overcome self, The Mystery of Golgotha, and the glorious Christ-Impulse, it follows that only by thus conquering can man know his being as it truly is, and knowing, he will henceforth regard his earthly nature as a quality from which he must be wholly freed. Further, he will realize that the attainment of a true standard of conduct and all genuine cognition and discernment can alone come to one who has sought and found redemption. It will be through an understanding of inner salvation that mankind will at last learn the true meaning of the concept of redemption as related to life’s historic evolution.

Finally, we would say, that during the twentieth century there will spread abroad a great illumination which will bring to humanity a clear comprehension of the Christ-Impulse, and this new knowledge will be in complete accord with the significance of Goethe’s fuller message³:—

‘Who overcomes himself, doth conquer that dread power
Which holds all beings closely bound—and he shall rise.
First dawns the glorious truth in that glad hour;
That truth by which, through Christ, mankind shall gain God’s prize.’

Notes for this lecture:

1. See lecture on Moses; footnote 2.

2. What is here implied is that the longing to be at one with the Christ Spirit which came into the world through Jesus of Nazareth, should be so intense that each of His disciples must be ready to sacrifice all ties of human love so that he may devote his life and being to the absolute service of THE CHRIST Who manifests within. Judging from the context the word ‘Hate’ which is in Luke xiv, 26, would appear to be of doubtful origin. [Ed.]

3. Von der Gewalt, die alle Wesen bindet,
Befreit der Mensch sich, der sich überwindet,
Und in dieser Uberwindung sich selber erst in Wahrheit findet,
Wie die ganze Menschheit in Christus sich selber in Wahrheit finden kann.’

In the year 1902, Rudolf Steiner definitely resolved to become the Herald of Spiritual Science, and to proclaim its message to a materialistic world; by so doing he laid himself open to its scorn, ridicule, and enmity. The most gifted and talented man of his time; one who shunned every mark of approbation and willingly renounced every claim to the highest worldly honours, which honours were within his easy reach. This he did, in order that he might devote himself to the consummation of a momentous forward movement, destined to lead mankind to a reasoned and proper conception of spiritual verity. Thus might the impulse given to thought and will, enable humanity to span that dread abyss in which, even yet, Nietzsche (the great apostle of consistent materialistic philosophy) must sink, and with him a countless number of his lesser followers, who can find no way whereby they may save themselves from spiritual dissolution.

To such as these, Rudolf Steiner became at once the saviour and the helper; it was for them and for mankind that he decided upon this altruistic deed, which in itself implied a bold courageous upward sweep in the path of human progress.

This wholly unselfish action, however, called for determination, inflexibility of will, and a moderate and rational apprehension of spiritual reality, permeated throughout with a profound sense of its fundamental substantiality. But here was no worn-out intellectual faculty, no ecstasy, no mystic intoxication with Eastern tinge—austere, resolute and calm, he went his way, ever imparting spiritual enlightenment.

Rudolf Steiner made no concessions when offering spiritual blessings; but on the other hand he never wearied of expounding once again from the beginning, in each city where he lectured, those basic principles upon which he built a solid mental structure, to conform with the demands and claims arising from modern intellectual power and discernment. While insisting upon due and proper consideration, he freely acknowledged the right to challenge and to question. He praised the achievements of Natural Science, and recommended the employment of its methods in the Science of the Spirit. He cursed the ignoramus and the extreme Kantian line of thought, and refused to accede to limits of knowledge already prescribed and confined.

No wonder that the hatred of the spiritual despots of our time, tyrants in many and varied ways, was piled mountain-high—for everywhere he brought that new animating, revivifying life, which would yet become all-potent in the future. He that would bring this life to humanity, must himself endure martyrdom, and stand as if held fast between envy, ill-will, and abuse, on the one hand—and insuperable inertia, or fool-hardy levity, and immaturity on the other. In truth,—a daily torment this bearing up against the ever-breaking waves of an hostile, or an aid-imploring clinging humanity, always in renewed and never ceasing exhausting activity. He who takes that step which anticipates future progress in evolution must bring upon himself such martyrdom; but the power, of love helps enormously in carrying the burden, while the capacity for endurance increases with the measure of the overflowing fullness of work accomplished.

Berlin was the first radiating point from which centre the lecture activities of Rudolf Steiner were spread outwards. The discourses were to serve in opening up a way toward the understanding of all that he purposed to present to the world, under the title of Spiritual Science. That which he gave in less detailed and isolated lectures in other towns in Germany, could be dealt with here in the form of a compact course, having the character of a systematic introduction to Spiritual Science; it was also planned that part of these lectures should periodically recur, even though the public could not be counted upon to respond in large numbers.

I will now give a summary of these discourses which were held at the ‘Architektenhaus’ (Hall of Architecture) in Berlin; as they are of historical interest. We commenced in a small hall, shortly however to pass on to one of intermediate size, and from there to one still larger. During the last year of the War, the Architektenhaus was commandeered by the War Department, and then the lectures had to be held, partly in the ‘Scharwenka-Saal’, and partly in the ‘Oberlicht-Saal’ of the ‘Philharmonie’ (Philharmonic Hall). When we at last came to the large hall of this latter building, the ‘Köthener-Strasse’ (Koethener Street) had to be closed to wheeled traffic, because of the enormous concourse of people. Here we found the opposing factions so well organized, that it seemed as if preparations might be afoot, with the object of bringing Rudolf Steiner's public lecture activities to a premature and violent conclusion.¹

From the very beginning Rudolf Steiner had chosen the word ‘Anthroposophy’, to designate the matter and the theme which was his to impress upon the world; in public, however, he generally used the more simple term, Spiritual Science. After he had decided to give way, under the pressure of Theosophical Circles, and to undertake the leadership of the German Theosophical Society, he did all that lay within his power to win back for the name of Theosophy, that esteem and respect of which it was in danger of being deprived, owing to the want of maturity of that body; and his endeavours in this direction were clearly marked. It is a fact, that the burden thrust upon him due to the misuse of this name, was increased by the regrettable attitude, and the alienation of certain people; albeit these acts were condemned by many friends. Rudolf Steiner shouldered every burden which fate laid upon him, when by so doing he could serve the spirit; he regarded only the task, and the love to labour, and took no heed of the cold indifference of humanity.

As far back as the year 1900 he drew the attention of various literary societies in Berlin to his efforts in furthering the cause of spiritual revival; this he did, in the beginning, through lectures upon Goethe's fairy-tale of The Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily. From October, 1901, to March, 1902, he spoke concerning German Spiritual Life in the Nineteenth Century. The impulse to thought thus created was continued by means of a series of lectures during 1902 to 1903 entitled Zarathustra to Nietzsche, treating of the evolution of man's spiritual life from the oldest times to the present day. It was Zarathustra who gave the initial impulse to that current of thought which urged humanity to call upon the active power of the spirit, that through its aid it might strive to overcome all that is material, and thus cause the physical element to become subservient to its needs.

Rudolf Steiner drew attention to the task allotted to German patriotism in the totality of human spiritual evolution, as the bearer and upholder of the ‘Principle of True Self’ (Ich-Prinzips), so deeply merged in all that is of the spirit. He stated that the true ‘Ich’, the Ego (endowed with the soul's achievements) must be made both the receptacle and the radiating point of the divine essence. He pointed to the hidden choked up stream of German spiritual life, which although predisposed within itself, was thrust aside by a materialistic culture, and the new imperial idea of Might and Power. He recalled with sorrow and anxiety those words of Nietzsche's—‘Extirpation of the Spirit from Germany, in favour of the Empire’, and declared that what Germany awaits, and what it would so gladly welcome, is the beneficence and the blessings of the Spirit. Already at that time Rudolf Steiner spoke quite unequivocally regarding the necessity of clearly differentiating between the Western and the Eastern spiritual paths. Humanity owes, indeed, a great and inestimable debt of gratitude to the Orient, for the gift of that wondrous knowledge which has come to it from the East.

The Mystery of Golgotha forms a ‘Turning-Point’. Mankind with its eyes upon modernity can never hark back to those conditions which were there before that decisive juncture, that divine source of knowledge and of upward progress; the world must learn to understand the need for the transient darkness and the gloom.

It is during that period when, by slow degrees, the personality is striving to cast aside its earthly factors and to detach them from all that is real and of the spirit, that it must learn to know itself, must grasp its essence; it dare not become obdurate, and thus descend to dust and annihilation. The very act of forcing a way through the material quality brings about the moment when it shall realize it is once more upon the further shore. Hence, the personality which has indeed made ready to pass through death's portal and onward to resurrection, finds, at last, that it is again in the true Ego, the veritable ‘I’—a spiritually conscious and individualized member of the cosmos—a part of the whole, and yet ‘I’. Once freed from all earthly nature, the material element falls away, even as an amputated limb from the human organism. When truly at one with the great cosmos it expands beyond all previous limitations, outward into the realms of the spirit. It was in order that such things might come to pass—yes—that man's freedom and self-determination could be won by effort and by travail, that the Mystery of Golgotha—God's own sacrifice—was needful and must be consummated.

No power on earth can ignore this fact nor stem the tide of evolution. Happenings which appear at first sight to be hindrances and restraints, do but serve to aide us in our onward progress. The power to differentiate between good and evil is the first step toward man's freedom; the narrow confines imposed upon him by materialism have placed him in the position of being unable to grasp the meaning of this earthly life, and to realize his true personality; but now he must rise above his limited conceptions and the achievement lies in the province of his conscious will. The Deity has, as it were, relinquished the guidance, and the control. Man must decide whether the Divine Will shall quicken within him or whether he shall give himself over to disavowal and negation. Here, then, humanity comes upon a new ‘Turning-Point’, and its present task is to make ready, so that it may be met with open eyes, and not blindly and in ignorance. Such was the work to which Rudolf Steiner found himself committed.

In the Anglo-Indian theosophical movement there was a certain risk attached to the revival of the Yoga-Exercises by the uninitiated, for these were suited to another period, and a differently constituted human organism. Again, in reviving the mysticism of the Middle Ages lay a danger that there might be a turning away from true life, and an increased egotism in a soul which had yielded itself to selfishness. Both these currents of thought failed to take into consideration the requirements of the times and the laws of evolution. The future and the salvation of humanity lies in the understanding of the real significance of the Mystery of Golgotha, and in extending and strengthening the power of human consciousness in order that it shall advance beyond the narrow limits of man's present intellectual powers, and not in its repression and constraint. Those who opened their hearts to words such as these, were certainly not to be found among the celebrities of science; they were modest, unassuming people, knowing of no course which they might follow that was suited to the times, and who, therefore, gave themselves over to the study of Oriental Wisdom, in that form in which it was presented by the Theosophical Society. These people approached Rudolf Steiner with a request that he should become the teacher and leader of their association; but he definitely declined to consider their appeal. Never, so he said, would he do otherwise than point out the difference between the two paths, and advocate the necessity for the development of Western methods, suitable to modern requirements. No longer can there be a mere reaching back, in order to obtain primeval wisdom; forward progress must be made with true regard to all that has been acquired since those ancient times, through intellectual achievement, and must in future follow that path marked by history, wherein the essentials of development in the unfolding of the human spirit are clearly indicated.

Although the wisdom of the East deserves our warmest feelings of admiration and wonder, nevertheless, the fundamental principle underlying its historical onward progress does not appear as a vital factor; this element must now be introduced by the West, to which task it should regard itself as directly committed. The Mystery of Golgotha is the central point, that mystery which is neither recognized nor understood by the Orientals nor by the New-Theosophists. As far back as the Autumn of 1900, I have heard such words from the lips of Rudolf Steiner, when harassed by the importunity of ardent followers of the Theosophical school of thought. Those who listened with understanding, fully realized that here, indeed, was an inflexible will, and the expression of an urgent historical need. One could not help but wonder that people really existed, who would attempt adverse argument and persuasion. It was, however, on account of this attitude that Rudolf Steiner gave a course of interesting lectures on Mysticism at the Beginning of Modern Spiritual Life, which were followed, in the Autumn of 1901, by others entitled Christianity as a Mystical Fact.

Soon after the commencement of these discourses, I had an opportunity of becoming acquainted with the most distinguished among the Theosophical Leaders. I had joined the Theosophical Society and was requested to undertake some special work at Bologna, the representative of the Anglo-Indian movement having founded a branch in Italy. In the spring of 1902, during a period of three weeks, I translated from English into Italian the lectures of the Indian Theosophist, Jinarajadasa, who has since been nominated as the future President of the Theosophical Society. While thus engaged, I frequently found it difficult to write and to voice the ideas which I had to express, concepts that were oft-times entirely at variance with my own inner reasoned feelings. I stood aghast before the sentences, so material was their essence and their spirit. At such times, my thoughts would hark back to the words of Rudolf Steiner, regarding the vital difference between Western and Eastern mysticism; but I knew that the truth and the solution lay in the Christ-Mystery, of which he had both inner knowledge and understanding. Veritable primeval wisdom contains the heart and principle; while in the ever onward progress of man's evolution are found the metamorphoses—death and resurrection—where, then, is the point of juncture?—IN THE CROSS—and it is Rudolf Steiner who reveals its secret.

About this time a memorable incident occurred, namely, the German Theosophists invited me to go to Berlin, in order to take over the work of their retiring representative. After some hesitation I decided to accede to their request. Shortly after this event came the joyful news that Rudolf Steiner had yielded to the pressure of the Theosophists, and had accepted the directorate of a new section which was about to be formed; this he had done, however, under the specific condition that he should introduce into the movement that current of thought which he himself advocated. There was indeed universal rejoicing; and the General Secretary of the Theosophical Society in England—a good German scholar—who highly esteemed Steiner's two works—Mysticism at the Beginning of Modern Spiritual Life and Christianity as a Mystical Fact—expressed himself as completely in accord with the new programme. This illustrious scholar, Dr. Bertram Keightley, who is Professor at the University of Lucknow, has since that time, become a member of the Anthroposophical Society.

Thus it was that the work began, environed by the activities of the Theosophical Society and undertaken with the greatest loyalty in respect to that body. The subject matter of the public lectures delivered at the Architektenhaus in Berlin in 1903 was as follows:

19 March—Theosophy, and the onward progress of Religion. (The Tower of Babel.)
26 March—The Cardinal Teachings of Theosophy. (Reincarnation and Karma.)
2 April—Theosophy, and the Modern Scientific Spirit.

In the spring of 1904, also in the Architektenhaus, Rudolf Steiner spoke concerning certain subjects which contained within them the germ of his later pioneer work in social and pedagogical spheres; these were included under the title, Psychic Teachings in Theosophy, as follows:

16 March—I. Body and Soul. How can we study the life of the Soul? Religion, Science, and the Soul Question.
23 March—II. The Soul and Human Destiny. What are Desire and Suffering? What is Destiny? Has man earned his fate? Optimism and Pessimism. Genius and Insanity.
30 March—III. Soul and Spirit. Immortality. Hypnotism and Clairvoyance. Spiritual Healing. Education in the light of Spiritual Cosmic Conception.

Another series of lectures took place in Vereins Haus, at 118 William Street (Wilhelmstrasse), Berlin; in these discourses Rudolf Steiner endeavoured to throw light upon that border-land existing between the perceptual and superperceptual worlds; a subject which has claimed the attention of science and in which lie concealed so many dangers for the uninitiated. The dates and titles of these discourses are given below:

Regarding the above, I find among my notes the following entry: ‘The two latter themes were subsequently used as subject matter for lectures which were held in the “Architektenhaus” from April onwards, every second Monday in the month; a further series which took place in the same building during the autumn of 1904, were especially directed towards the development and extension of the scientific rudiments of Theosophy.' The subjects were:

In the spring of 1905 Rudolf Steiner set forth and expounded his views before various Faculties; his introductory lecture held on 4th May, was on Schiller and the Present; those which followed were:

A series of lectures which were started in October, 1905, commenced with ‘Haeckel, “The Riddle of the Universe” and Theosophy’. It was indeed essential that Rudolf Steiner should take Haeckel as the starting-point for these discourses, because he was of opinion that in virtue of the outstanding nature of his achievements in the sphere of natural science, Haeckel was worthy and entitled to become a decisive spiritual power in our present philosophical outlook, [would he but apprehend and acknowledge the divine spirit latent within his works—and at this point lay the parting of their ways (Ed.)]. On the other hand, Steiner repudiated entirely the claims made by the courageous and ingenious Haeckel, who was already venturing to encroach and become active in the domains of Philosophy, and the formation of world opinion. Here must the bolt be shot and the mischief averted. This Rudolf Steiner did with the greatest energy and consistency, but it did not prevent him from expressing himself in words conveying the warmest appreciation whenever he could perceive the positive element in Haeckel's works.

Never have I found this side of Rudolf Steiner's nature rightly understood; people always seemed wilfully to regard it as inconsistent that the same man should at one time praise, and at another find fault; but this he did with whole-hearted enthusiasm on the one hand, or with merciless severity and logic on the other, the while, however, he never allowed his personal feelings to influence either his praise or his censure. He rose above all such bias, and was ever delighted to observe productive and creative capacity in others. He enraptured those who heard him when he expressed his approval through the warmth of his approbation; but, when he made reference to that which was harmful and pernicious, he evoked surprise by the unexpected keenness and rigour of his demonstrations and reasoning. He ever maintained the greatest affection for Ernest Haeckel, and it was a delightful experience to be present when these two met—the youthful freshness of Haeckel, his elasticity of tread—the waving of the broad-brimmed, wide-awake hat—his beaming childlike blue eyes—all in one who judged by years, should have been already numbered with the aged. Haeckel was no mere philosopher, but a man of deeds with a penetrating flashing glance as of one profoundly observant. He was ever moved by an impetuous warmheartedness, his true being filled with loving patience and tolerance; he was a factor in the world's history, and his influence will continue to be felt in days yet to come.

• 1. This is no exaggeration, for about this time, and at Munich, an attempt was actually made upon his life by the Communist Party. [Ed.]

In these six public lectures, delivered in Berlin in 1911 and 1912, Rudolf Steiner presents key turning points in Mankind's spiritual development. His objective, to show how evolving human consciousness can lead to the experience of the Self as the spiritual essence of the human being, is clearly outlined through the five individuals selected. Each one of them brought into the human condition on Earth an added, different awareness of the relation between the human Spirit-Self and its earthly environment.

Having spent a lifetime presenting these past experiences of the human Spirit-Self on its spiritual journey through its various stages and conditions, Steiner concentrated, in his last years, on the new spiritual turning point of the present. His crystal-clear statements as to the nature of the present-day, different, spiritual condition of the human being places him in the same firmament as the five individuals he speaks of in these lectures. The final lecture on Christ in the Twentieth Century, is essentially his own announcement of the present and future human relation to the Christ, as different from, yet in addition to, what the previous five have brought into mankind with respect to the Christ-Being, the central figure in Human Beingness.

The specific, unique, necessary, new, human experience that Steiner is responsible for presenting is, the spiritual foundation of human destiny and the human laws of reincarnation based on the awakening to self-consciousness of the human Spiritual-Soul. This particular experience of self-consciousness requires that the human soul-force of the Will be trained in freedeeds, so that the truly free, individual Self can now consciously create and determine its own destiny, its own environment, its own physical body even while earthbound.

This is a magnificent possibility that is both necessary and doable. Each human being, because of Steiner's achievements, now has the method outlined and the means made available to achieve this condition of the truly free, independent, self-conscious, human, Spiritual Being; the Tenth Hierarchy; the Entity of Love incarnate on Earth and what this awareness means in the total spectrum of the Universe.

I present the following words, selected from among Steiner's last writings, as an indication to the reader of the basis for the remarks made above as to Steiner's spiritual significance, and for placing him with Zarathustra, Hermes, Buddha, Moses and Elijah, the personalities discussed in this book.

"In the evolution of mankind consciousness descends on the ladder of unfolding Thought. There was an earliest stage in consciousness when man experienced the Thoughts in the Ego -- experienced them as real Beings, imbued with Spirit, soul and life. At a second stage he experienced the Thoughts in the astral body; henceforth they only appeared as the images of Spirit-beings -- images, however, still imbued with soul and life. At a third stage he experienced the Thoughts in the etheric body; here they only manifest an inner quickness, like an echo of the quality of soul. At the fourth, which is the present stage, man experiences the Thoughts in the physical body, where they appear as the dead shadows of the Spiritual.

In like measure as the quality of Spirit, soul and life in human Thought recedes, man's own Will comes to life. True freedom becomes possible.

It is the task of the Archangel Michael, to lead man back again, on paths of Will, whence he came down when with his earthly consciousness he descended on the paths of Thought from the living experience of the Supersensible to the experience of the world of sense.

Michael goes upward again along the paths by which mankind descended, stage by stage in the evolution of the Spirit, down to the exercise of the Intelligence. Michael, however, will lead the Will upward, retracing the paths by which the Wisdom descended to the final stage of Intelligence.

From this moment onward in World-evolution, Michael merely shows His way, so that man may follow it in perfect freedom. This distinguishes the present guidance by Michael from all preceding guidances of the Archangels, including even those of Michael Himself. For the former guidances did not only reveal their working. They worked themselves out in man. Hence in the working of his own life man could not be free.

To see and understand that this is so: this is the present task of man. For then he will find, with all the forces of his soul, his spiritual path within the age of Michael.

To become truly conscious of the working of Michael in the spiritual order of the World, is to solve the riddle of human freedom in relation to the Cosmos, in so far as the solution is necessary for man on Earth.

For 'Freedom' as a fact is directly given to every human being who understands himself in the present period of mankind's evolution. No one can say, `Freedom is not,' unless he wishes to deny a patent fact. But we can find a certain contradiction between this fact of our experience and the processes of the Cosmos. In contemplating the mission of Michael within the Cosmos this contradiction is dissolved.

In my book, Philosophy of Spiritual Activity, the 'Freedom' of the human being in the present World-epoch is proved as an essential element of consciousness. In the descriptions here given of the Mission of Michael, the cosmic foundations of the 'coming-into-being' of this Freedom are disclosed."

Bernard J. Garber
February 1987

The six lectures, translated from the German, which appear in this volume, formed part of a series of discourses delivered by Rudolf Steiner in Berlin, during the years 1911 and 1912. Their object was to draw special attention to certain outstanding periods in Spiritual History, epochs which have been of profound significance in the progress and development of mankind, and to throw the light of Spiritual Science upon various questions associated with these so-called 'Turning-Points'. Further, to contrast and compare the results of external investigation with the knowledge born of the spiritual scientific method. The reader will find that this most interesting series of lectures opens up new avenues of thought, and brings a great illumination to bear upon many obscure points occurring in the Bible, and in connection with certain religious concepts.

It is essential, in order to realize the significance and import of the text, to have an understanding of what is implied by the term Spiritual Science, and to know that its methods are true and have been proved of actual positive value, sometimes leading to results which have been found to harmonize with those of subsequent external scientific research. Spiritual Science is not some new fantastic concept, but a logical mode of probing and penetrating the deep secrets of the cosmos and the Spirit-World, and Rudolf Steiner has shown how its methods may be employed to obtain inner illumination and guidance in the conduct of life.

At the commencement of a volume entitled Investigations in Occultism, by Rudolf Steiner, published by G. P. Putnam's Sons, will be found an introduction by H. Collison, the editor of the English translations of Steiner's works. In this introduction the editor sets forth clearly and concisely the main features of Steiner's philosophy and the principles underlying Spiritual Science. Upon this source of information the following brief statement concerning the latter is based.

Rudolf Steiner defined 'Anthroposophy' or 'Spiritual Science' (the terms are synonymous) as 'Knowledge produced by the higher self in man'. The word Anthroposophy is derived from the Greek -- ànthrôpos, man, and sophia, wisdom. In virtue of his great spiritual gifts and profound understanding of the ancient occult teachings, Steiner was enabled to devise and evolve certain methods, whereby it is possible for man, if he will but of his own effort raise the latent powers of his soul and overcome all earthly passions and desires, to enter upon a state in which he experiences simultaneous association with two planes of existence, the material and the spiritual, and while still retaining complete consciousness of all things pertaining to the external world, his eyes are opened and his inner vision reveals to him the presence and the activities of the spirit realms. During this clairvoyant condition, which is unlike that of the customary mediumistic trance familiar to spiritualists, man finds himself in actual contact with things divine; the finer vehicles of his being, namely, the Soul or Astral Body, and the Ego or Body of Consciousness, leave for a time the Etheric and Physical Bodies (see footnote, page 190). The two former, however, still maintain, what might be termed, conscious union with the latter and it is the quality and power of the conscious union which determines the difference between this truly clairvoyant state, and that of mere sleep or ordinary trance. Throughout the whole period of such limited separation, although the soul and Ego have entered and become associated with the Spirit-World, nevertheless actual individual consciousness prevails, the personality remaining in touch with the etheric and physical bodily elements, while conscious of that life which lies beyond man's normal awareness and material vision.

When through the exaltation of the soul's powers this condition has been attained, man finds himself in a new world, the World of Spirit, and he can apprehend its reality and penetrate its secrets; that knowledge and wisdom which comes to him endures, and through it he may bring back comfort and enlightenment to aid and to benefit humanity. During such time as the Ego is directly associated with the spirit realms, man acquires a veritable understanding of truth and illusion, of good and of evil; and by having thus raised himself to the level of the departed, he is enabled to commune with them, not as does the spiritualist by bidding them descend to him, but through exalting himself to that higher sphere of life in which they abide.

Thus Steiner has shown that it is possible for mankind, even in these modern times, to have more than a mere fleeting contact with the Spirit-World, and thereby to gain knowledge and understanding, not alone of spiritual things, but also of matters of moment connected with the proper conduct of man's life in the material world. But the power and the quality necessary to this end, come alone through earnest and unceasing endeavour, so that all feeling, thinking, and willing, may be directed toward spiritual unfoldment, and an ethical development of man's inner being through the uplifting of the soul -- this discipline is essential.

The methods of Spiritual Science, by which the soul may be raised, and man's Ego truly enter upon and apprehend the reality and the activities of the spiritual realms, are known as meditation or concentration exercises. These are described in great detail by Rudolf Steiner in certain of his books, entitled: The Threshold of the Spiritual World, A Road to Self-Knowledge and The Way of Initiation -- the latter is now known as Knowledge of Higher Worlds; all are published by G. P. Putnam's Sons. Further information is obtainable from the various Anthroposophical Centres. The chief object of the exercises is to strengthen and harmonize the three principal components of man's being, namely, body, soul and spirit, in order to bring about close touch and sympathy with those glorious regions wherein lies the source of Divine power, and through the enlightenment thus gained, a clearer understanding of the material world.

The above is a brief outline of the Methods of Spiritual Science, through which Rudolf Steiner acquired his great spiritual discernment and his outstanding intellectual power. Steiner felt that it was his mission and his duty, to expound and develop a Christian interpretation of the Gospels and of the Trinity, and to bring forward a proper and reasonable means of communication between the living and the dead. Further, he was ever ready to utilize the knowledge born of his spiritual experiences for the benefit of humanity, by giving a new impulse in any direction which he deemed worthy, and of real import in the development of mankind.

The inspiring introduction to this volume, by Marie Steiner, is indeed a fitting foreword to the beauty and the spirituality of the remarkable and impressive lectures which follow.

The works of Rudolf Steiner will live on, and as time passes, he will ever be regarded as one of those who has accomplished a great and glorious mission.

The Translator

Translated by Antje Heymanns and Norbert Mulholland

For many years I have attempted to give lectures here during the winter months on a subject I call Spiritual Science. This winter again, as part of the announced lectures, we will focus on the facts of the spiritual world from the perspective of Spiritual Science. We will look at what belongs to the fundamental questions of existence: The relationship between life and death, sleep and wakefulness, human souls and animal souls, the spirit of man and of animals and the spirit in the plant realm. Then we will look at the nature of human development throughout the various stages of life; through childhood, youth and the later life years, and the part that education plays in forming a person’s main character. The life of the spirit will be illuminated by looking at great individualities of human evolution—at Zarathustra, Moses, Galilei, Goethe. An attempt will be made to show the relationship of what we call Spiritual Science to natural science, using examples from astronomy and geology. Subsequently, from the sources of Spiritual Science itself, we will try to tell what it has to say about the riddle of life.

Each year these contemplations were preceded by a kind of general orientation. We want to follow this custom again today by speaking about the significance of Spiritual Science; its nature and relationship, or its task in regard to the various spiritual needs of the present.

In the sense we speak about Spiritual Science here, one might say that it is still quite an unpopular topic today in wide circles of humanity. Indeed, one speaks about Geisteswissenschaft,¹ or ‘humanities’ from standpoints different to those that we must take. So, for example, one understands ‘history’ to be a subject that belongs to the field of humanities—but one also finds history in other scientific fields of the present. Here we want to speak in a different sense than usual about Spiritual Science. Today, when one talks about Spiritual Science’ and applies this to history, then one has to at least acknowledge that, apart from what is accessible to human observation through sensory and intellectual experiences, there are yet other major trends of history which can be considered. These trends show themselves as forces working in the stream of world happenings, and affect, as it were, the fates of individual peoples and individual states. Of course, one speaks about general ideas in history and in human life. One who thinks about what this means will soon realise that abstract ideas are being referred to; to which one appeals when talking about the nature and the strength of what guides human destiny. In a certain respect these are general ideas with which human cognitive faculty can gain an insightful relationship.

Spiritual Science is spoken of here in a different sense, in that the spiritual world is assumed to be a world that is essential, just as the human world is essential within physical existence. It will be shown that if one surmounts with the human faculty of knowledge beyond outer sense observations and intellectual experience, and goes to the guiding forces of human and cosmic existence, then one may not only arrive at abstractions, at sapless and feeble ideas; instead at something essential; at something that is alive, meaningful, spiritually imbued by existence as is the essence of man itself. So, we speak about a spiritual world with real existence here. This is exactly what makes Spiritual Science unpopular from the standpoint of the widest circles of our present-day spiritual movement. And still, the least of what one calls those who pursue such spiritual research is blabberer, dreamer or fantasist. And even today it is quite common to say that everything which presents itself as strictly methodical, or appears or wants to appear to be truly scientific on this basis, is quite dubious.

Great, tremendous progress has always had a strong suggestive effect on humanity: on all thinking, feeling and emotion. And if we look at the great advances that have been made recently in human life—we could almost say in the last centuries—, these were not in the area of Spiritual Science about which we want to talk here, but rather in the area which humanity is so proud of today—and to emphasise, rightfully so—and where there is still great hope for the future development of humanity. The progress of the last centuries up to the present time, lies in a field that grows out of the natural sciences. When we think about how enormous all of this is that today has been won not only theoretically for human knowledge in the field of natural sciences, but which promises to still be gained on the basis of natural sciences—in addition, when one weighs up the great significance of natural science achievements for external life—then one must say the blessing, the meaningfulness of natural science progress could and must have exerted a suggestive power on the human mind in our time. Even so, this suggestive effect also expressed itself in another direction. If it had solely expressed itself so that the human mind, faced with immense progress, would foremost have felt something like a kind of worldly veneration, who could even say a word against it?

However, this suggestive power has also expressed itself in another direction; namely, not only acknowledging what natural science research, and progress derived from it, signifies for our time; but it also led in a direction where, in the widest circles, the belief arose that all knowledge, all insights of humanity, can only be won on the basis of what is acknowledged today as natural science.

Based on this belief people feel entitled to conclude that Spiritual Science methods are contradictory to natural science methods. And thus, for someone standing on natural scientific ground, it would be impossible to even talk about ‘research’ in relation to the spiritual world. Therefore, a prejudice spread in the widest circles that Spiritual Science must be rejected, as it stands in opposition to the legitimate claims of the natural sciences.

It is noticeable that by raising this objection something extraordinarily difficult to weigh-up has been dropped into the equation. The natural scientific method, it is stated, is one whose research results and findings, can be verified by anyone at any time. Also, that in the process of gaining these insights, nothing of what prevails in the subjective human being as feeling; sympathy or antipathy, longing or desires, can play a role.

The prerequisite that nothing is allowed to interfere includes ‘wanting to achieve a particular result’. The human element must be excluded from research when it comes to the results of natural scientific research and only the pure objectivity of things is allowed to speak.

Spiritual Science cannot make this demand so easily. For someone who is quick to make a judgment about the general validity of this demand, the mere fact that Spiritual Science cannot comply with it will suffice as a reason to reject it. Why is this the case? The objects of natural science which it researches can be found around everyone. It begins with something that can be placed in front of anyone and about which anyone, once confronted by an object, can think about it by applying natural scientific methods. Moreover, the qualifications with which a person approaches something presented to him in the field of vision in his surroundings, do not seem to matter. This is exactly what is expressed by the general demand: Natural scientific knowledge needs to be verifiable by any human being at any given point in time.

True Spiritual Science is not able to proceed in the same way as natural science to obtain its results. First, it is not able to say that its results could be reproduced by any human being at any moment in time. This is because Spiritual Science has to presuppose that its research results will be gained by someone who does not see his inner being as something static, as something complete, who doesn’t see his subjective nature as finished but who says to himself: My subjective nature, the whole sum of my soul existence with which I am able to face this world, is not closed-off, is not finished, it can be developed, the soul-life can be deepened. The soul-life can proceed so that whatever one finds—when focussing the senses on the external world and the intellect on what the senses say—is only, as it were, a foundation for further experiences of the soul. Further soul-experiences come about when a soul immerses itself in itself, works on itself, considers the immediate comprehension of life the starting point, and then, through forces that initially slumber within it but which can be brought out, wrestles through levels of existence. These forces cannot be looked at in such a way that they can be checked by a physical eye.

Thus, what a spiritual researcher has to go through in preparation for his studies is an inner wrestling of the soul, that is completely independent from anything one has within oneself. So, if one demands of science that a human being should not contribute anything to the results that are externally presented to him, then there can be no question of Spiritual Science. But if someone reflects a little and asks himself: which part of the demands made by Spiritual Science is the most important? Then one could say to oneself, that its results should be applicable to all human beings, they should not be subject to personal arbitrariness or to someone’s individuality; and should not only be significant for the inner life of this or that person, but should be significant for all human beings.

This is the importance of all that is scientific: that it is not only valid for someone who studies the scientific topic, but also, once a topic has been researched, this may lead to insights that could be valid for all people.

Now, if it were true that what has been characterised as human development is only subjective and only valid for one or another human being, and is thus only a personal belief, then one could not really speak of Spiritual Science. But it will become apparent to us this winter that this inner life of man—the wrestling of the soul with forces that are at first dormant but are able to awaken—unfolds and develops and then leads him from experience to experience; that this soul-life can rise up to a level where its experiences will have a very specific characteristic.

If we contemplate human life, as it takes place inside the human soul, it is at first a completely personal one—this way for one, that for another. Anyone possessing healthy self-reflection will be clear about this or that arising in his soul as sympathy or antipathy, that it is, as it were, only a personal touch, and that this is the case and how it is so. But the inner experience leads to a certain point, where especially a methodically driven self-realisation, a pure self-knowledge uninfluenced by anything personal, will have to acknowledge to oneself: the ‘personal’ has just been cast off, forms a special area. But then one will reach a certain point where for the inner experience, for the super-sensible experience arbitrariness also stops, exactly the same way it stops if one faces this or that sense perceptible phenomena and one cannot think as one likes but must think according to the object. Thus the human being also comes in his inner soul to a certain sphere, to a certain area, where he becomes clearly aware that his own personal subjectivity no longer speaks. But that now super-sensible beings and forces, who are not perceptible to the physical senses, speak and for whom his individuality has as little importance as for what the external sensory objects say.

This insight must indeed be gained if we want to talk about the right to call what must be said about the spiritual world ‘science’ at all.

Again, these winter lectures are meant to prove that the research of the spiritual world can be called science.

Therefore, one must say Spiritual Science is essentially founded on what can be researched through the human soul, when it has reached a point in its inner struggles and experiences where the personal no longer has a say in the contemplations of the spiritual world, but where the soul allows the spiritual world itself to tell of its own peculiarities.

If one then wants to compare Spiritual Science with natural science, some might say: there is still an important criterion missing from Spiritual Science, namely, the ability to make a convincing impression on all people which natural science can, because one is aware that wherever natural scientific results appear, even if you have not done this research or seen it yourself, one could, if one went to an observatory or into a laboratory and used a telescope or a microscope, recognise things in the same way as the person who has informed you about it.

Furthermore, it could be said: If, on the path of Spiritual Science, a proof is a purely inner matter, and the soul is wrestling with itself until it says, ‘now you will contribute nothing from your personality to what the objects tell you’—it still remains an individual wrestling. And to one who gains certain insights in this way, or with whom the spiritual researcher shares his results, it should be said: ‘For me these results remain an unknown territory, until I myself ascend to the same point!’

As will be shown, this also is an incorrect objection. Certainly, this lonely wrestling of the human soul, this uncovering of dormant soul forces is part of ascending to the spiritual world, where it objectively speaks to us. But the spiritual world is like this: when Spiritual Scientific results are shared, they do not remain ineffective. Communications by a human soul, which are tested through Spiritual Science research, and exchanged with other souls, can, in a certain sense, be verified by every soul—not like in a laboratory where one can see what the other has found—but in such a way that one can gain insight. For in every soul lives an impartial sense of truth, a healthy logic, a healthy rationality. And when the results of Spiritual Science are clothed in healthy logic that appeals to our healthy sense of truth, then in every soul, or at least in every unbiased human soul, a chord can resonate with the communicating soul.

It can be said that every soul is pre-disposed within itself, even if it has not yet devoted itself to the markedly, lonely wrestling, to take into itself the communication from Spiritual Science by way of an unbiased logic and a healthy sense of truth. Quite certainly it has to be admitted that in the widest circles, where this or that of Spiritual Science is carried on today, that the same healthy sense of truth and healthy logic does not prevail everywhere where communications of spiritual research are received—but then, this is an inadequacy of every spiritual movement. In principle, however, what has been said is correct. Yes, in principle one should even pay attention to the fact that it must lead to error upon error when someone accepts light-heartedly and with blind faith what nowadays is often brought to humanity as Spiritual Science. Whoever stands truly grounded in Spiritual Science feels strictly obliged to share logically and rationally what he has to say, so that it actually can be verified by a healthy sense of truth and by applying logic. We have now characterised the nature of Spiritual Science from one side, by showing how its results need to be obtained.

That spirit exists as an objective fact can only be proven by Spiritual Science itself. But it should be pointed out now that this Science will lead to what we call the real, the true content of the spiritual world, a content that is filled in a living way with something essential, just as a human being himself is filled with an inner essence.

Spiritual Science is, from this point of view, clear about the fact that all external, physical-sensory existence, all existence about which the senses and rational experiences speak to us, are ultimately born out of the spiritual world. And human beings, like all other things, are born out of this spiritual world, have developed out of it, so that behind the manifest world, behind what we ordinarily call the physical external existence, the region of the spiritual world extends. Now, when Spiritual Science gradually begins to demonstrate through its observations what it is like in this spiritual world, how the spiritual world is the foundation of our manifest world, then in many circles of our time, an aversion, an antipathy appears, which at the beginning of today’s considerations was characterised as follows: at the present time, in wide circles, Spiritual Science is a rather unpopular matter. And it is not at all difficult to understand, that Spiritual Science still faces enormous resistance today. This is in fact quite obvious and not only because something that is in a certain respect newly assimilated in cultural life—like Spiritual Science and like all small and great achievements of humanity—has always been treated with a certain amount of rejection. It is so because, indeed, there is much in the area of concepts, which man today obtains as a result of natural scientific observations, that necessarily cause someone who beliefs himself to be firmly grounded in natural science, to get entangled in contradictions when he hears what Spiritual Science says. One who is grounded in Spiritual Science has no doubt at all that, with some justification, hundreds upon hundreds of so-called rebuttals of Spiritual Science could be put forward. Only in parentheses, I would like to add that I myself will soon give two lectures at different places (and here also) so that the question raised can be clarified. One of these will be titled, ‘How do you refute Theosophy?’ and the other one ‘How do you justify Theosophy?’² This is an experiment to show how someone who is grounded in Spiritual Science is able to collate absolutely everything that can be brought up against it. Yes, I will go further and say even more than has already been stated against it. The refutations of Spiritual Science, as one usually speaks of refutations today, are not particularly difficult in regard to their conclusions. It is easy to disprove spiritual scientific research.

I do not wish to compare these refutations directly, but, in order to elucidate what I wish to say, I want to take up something that one often notices when reading works by certain philosophers about the philosophy of Hegel. I do not want to speak here about the significance of Hegel’s philosophy, what is true and what is error; we want to leave that aside. Yet among the Hegel experts there will be few who would not admit that with Hegel they have to do with an eminent spirit. Now there is a strange sentence in Hegel’s writings which makes a deep impression, so to speak, on those who light-heartedly want to refute Hegel. This sentence reads; ‘All that is real is rational!’ Now imagine, as it were, the inner laughter such a sentence will trigger in one who likes to refute! A philosopher, who is supposed to be great, talks such nonsense; ‘What is real is rational!’ One only needs to cast a glance at the world to see how irrational such a sentence is! There is a simple method to disprove the truth of this sentence, and that consists in oneself committing an utterly foolish act. Because then one can state concerning this act that it is quite certainly not rational.

Should the fact that refutation is easy also lead to one taking it lightly and easily take it as meaningful? This is a completely different question, which might be answered by considering the following: Would Hegel really have been so stupid—regardless of how one stands in regards to Hegel—that he would not have realised what could be said against this sentence? Would he really have believed that no man would be able to commit an absolutely stupid act? Should one not rather feel compelled to explore what Hegel meant to say with this sentence, and realise that with such a refutation one is unable to undermine what he meant.

This could also be the case with many things regarding Spiritual Science. To take something concrete: Spiritual Science must presuppose—this can only be mentioned today—that what is recognised in the human being as the tools of thinking, of imagination, of feeling and of willing, namely the nervous system with the brain, has been produced out of something spiritual. The brain and the nervous system are instruments of something essential that cannot be demonstrated in the sensory world, but must be investigated using the characteristic methods of Spiritual Science. Spiritual Science must therefore step back from what external science, relying on sensory phenomena, says about the brain and the nervous system, to something that works in the human being as soul-spiritual itself, and which can no longer be researched by means of the senses—it can only be explored on the inner paths of the soul. Now it really is child’s play to refute what spiritual research tells about the supersensible which underlies the human brain. One could say; everything you say is itself only a product of the brain. If you do not recognise this, then observe how abilities increase according to the development phase. In lower animals the mental abilities are quite imperfect. In higher animals, and particularly in higher mammals, they are already more significant and more perfected. In man they appear most perfect, because his brain has reached the greatest perfection. This shows that what appears as spiritual life grows out of the brain. And if you still do not believe this, then approach someone who is able to show you how during certain cases of illness certain parts of the brain become ineffective, and certain abilities, as it were, can no longer be exercised by a person—so that certain parts of the brain are eroded and the spiritual life gets switched off. This shows you, how bit by bit your spiritual life can be eroded through what is evidently an organ!

Why then, do you continue to talk about spiritual beings, that are behind the manifested things? It really is child’s play to make this objection. However, it must seem obvious today that the objection is not based on natural scientific results, but has been derived from a suggestion, which for many people has been constructed out of certain natural scientific theories. This is all related to the fact that our time is under the suggestive power of the idea that truth and knowledge can only be gained by directing the senses outward, and the rational mind lit up by what has been gained. In relation to Spiritual Science, it must be said, that even if these results of natural science must cause refutations of the results of Spiritual Science to just spring forth from everywhere, one can stress that on the other hand, there is a deep need, a deep longing in our present time, to hear something from those lands about which Spiritual Science knows how to report. Simultaneously, a deep longing to hear of these has emerged and is alive and consciously present in a group of people. In a large part of humanity it lies dormant, as it were, beneath the surface of consciousness, but it will become more and more apparent. The need for the results of Spiritual Science will steadily increase. This longing, this need for spiritual scientific results will appear, as it were, as a side-effect of the admiration, of the devotion to natural scientific achievements. Precisely because the achievements of the natural sciences must necessarily turn man's gaze outwards, the longing for the results of the Spiritual Science arises within him as a counterbalance. As it developed in this regard in the nineteenth and in our [20th] century, we have arrived within evolution at a completely different viewpoint from the one which humanity had even a century ago. If one wants to speak about the value of spiritual scientific research for the present, then it is significant to recall before our souls, that even a century ago, great spirits did not feel the need to speak about spiritual scientific results in the same way as is planned to happen in this lecture series. Great individualities only set the tone for humanity. In a certain sense they only express the needs of the entire age, including the needs of lesser individualities. Such a thing can be clearly illustrated to us, if we take a look at these eminent individualities. It can be said rightly that a century ago a person like Goethe did not at all feel the need to speak about spiritual scientific results, as it is done today on the basis of Spiritual Science. When the question arose to talk about something that is beyond the external manifestations, Goethe, like so many other people, has often pleaded that this is a matter of belief and could not be a strict science. And Goethe also often expressed that essentially the communication of generally valid results on this basis could hardly be very fruitful if they were communicated by one person to another.

In the course of one century we have progressed the overall development of humanity, not only in such a way that Goethe lived in a century which neither had telegraphs, telephones, railways, and no such prospects as those offered by aeronautics; but also in relation to spiritual development, we are facing results that are different from those of Goethe’s time. You can see this in a specific example. There is a beautiful talk Goethe had with a certain person, Falk , at the occasion of Wieland’s death. There he spoke about those regions from which a certain insight must be derived of that which transcends birth and death in the human being, which does not decay with the sensory shell, which is immortal as opposed to the mortal part of the human being. The immediate occasion of Wieland’s death, who was so highly regarded by Goethe, urged him to express himself in a popular way to a person like Falk, who showed him understanding for this. What he said there is highly significant when we address the question about the significance of Spiritual Science for the present; “...You have long known that ideas that lack a firm foundation in the sensory world, for all their other value, carry no conviction for me, because I want to know about nature, not merely assume and believe. As far as the personal continuance of our souls after death is concerned, on my path this is my position: it is in no way in contradiction with the observations I have made over many years about the condition of our, and of all beings in nature; on the contrary, it even emerges from them with new conclusiveness. How much or how little this personality deserves a continued existence is a different question and a matter that we have to surrender to God. Preliminarily, I will first remark this: I assume different classes and hierarchical orders of the primordial constituents of all beings, as it were the starting points of all phenomena in nature, that I wish to call souls, because with these an ensouling of everything starts, or, even better call them ‘monads’—let us retain this Leibnizian expression for ever! There is hardly a better term for expressing the simplicity of the simplest being. Now some of these monads or starting points are, as experience shows, so small, so insignificant, that they are at most suitable for some subordinate service and existence; in contrast others are really strong and powerful. The latter therefore tend to pull everything that approaches them into their circle and transform it into something belonging to them, that is, into a body, a plant, an animal, or even higher, into a star. They continue to do this until the small or large world, whose intention lies spiritually within them, also becomes physically visible externally. Actually, only the latter I want to call souls. It follows from this, that there are world-monads, world-souls, like ant-monads, ant-souls, and that both are related in their origin, if not completely one, in their original being. Every sun, every planet carries within itself a higher intention, a higher mission, by virtue of which its developments must come about just as regularly and according to the same law that governs the development of a rosebush through leaf, stem and crown. You might want to call this an idea or a monad, as you like, I have nothing against it: suffice that this intention exists in nature invisibly and prior to the visible development out of it...”³

In a certain sense, Goethe is speaking then about what we will also speak about more often in these lectures: the reincarnation of the human soul. And he remarks, that after everything what he himself formed as conviction about the human world, the animal realm, and so on, this does not contradict what he has established as science. Now it is easy to imagine what such a statement in the mouth of Goethe says, when one remembers that Goethe, in the year 1784 made a discovery that on its own would have been sufficient to make his name famous until the furthest times, even if he would not have done anything else: The discovery of the so-called inter-maxillary bone in the human upper jaw. Man has in the upper jaw, just as animals do, an inter-maxillary bone. Just at the time when Goethe began to undertake natural scientific studies, this was generally denied. To distinguish between humans and animals one searched for differences in the external features only, and thought animals had in their upper jaw an inter-maxillary bone whilst human beings didn’t have one. This would distinguish the human structure from animal structures. Goethe didn’t want to concede, could not believe, that the difference between humans and animals would lie in this subordinate feature. And so he began to use all known means to show that the so-called inter-maxillary bone⁴ is not missing in a human being; although it fuses already shortly after birth, it exists as part of the initial structure. He succeeded to show clearly that the distinction between humans and animals does not lie in such an external criterion. From this starting point Goethe explored all areas of natural science, and was well acquainted with the scientific thinking of his time. Indeed, he was so far ahead of his time, that Darwinians, who wanted to reinterpret Goethe in Darwinian terms, can claim today: Goethe was a precursor of Darwin. Although Goethe was rooted in the science of his time and went beyond it, he could still maintain his views about the immortal part of the human being, which were reminiscent of reincarnation and actually quite compatible with his scientific ideas. What Goethe was then able to say, could basically be said by anyone. Other researchers who sought to acquire the knowledge they needed for life in a scientific manner were also in the same position. Characteristic of this is that, based on Haeckel, people invoked a great deed of Kant, namely his founding of the mechanical world-view, by referring to the “Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens or an attempt to account for the Constitutional and Mechanical Origin of the entire Universe,” written by Kant in 1775. You only need to take the ‘Reclam’⁵ booklet, look at the ending and then ask: How do those who stand on the mere ground of Haeckelianism relate to Kant, when he speaks about the immortality of the human soul; about the great secrets of the human soul; about the prospect of habitability of other celestial bodies; and the continued life of the human soul on other planets? How do such followers of Haeckel relate to the possibility of reincarnation of the human being as it appears in this script by Kant that was published in 1775? Today one quotes things in such a way, that one would have to be astonished if the same people, who refer to Kant, would have really read those things. Things are different today from how they were a century or a century and a half ago.

It was a need of that time that one spoke about the spiritual things of life in a certain way, that did not want to have anything to do with science, because it was felt that this speaking did not contradict what can be claimed by science. Anyone who allows science from the time of the turn of the eighteenth to the nineteenth century to affect them, feels that if they only absorb science through popular descriptions, then they could speak like Goethe: “The convictions I myself have formed about a spiritual life, even if they are only a personal belief, contradict in no way what is offered as science today”.

But things have changed, and today things are getting very complicated in relation to science. It must be remembered that, after Goethe's death, the great discoveries of Schleiden⁶ and Schwann⁷ concerning the human and animal cell were made and that it was only then that an elementary organism presented itself to the senses. What is the need to talk about ‘life on different celestial bodies’ and so on, when in an animal or a plant one can see how bodies are built up through the interaction of purely material visible cells!

Then came other enormous achievements. We only need to ponder the impact on human thinking that was made by the introduction of spectral analysis by Kirchhoff⁸ and Bunsen,⁹ which extended man’s view over distant worlds, and which allowed one to conclude that material existence as we find it here on Earth, is the same as that on the furthest celestial bodies—so that one can talk about a unity of substance within the entire cosmic existence. And each day adds to what we can encounter in this area. I could point to hundreds and hundreds of things that have had a revolutionary effect, not on the world of reality, but on people’s imagination. In this way the conviction had to arise that no one has the right to talk about what natural scientific methods offer in any way other than this: Wait for what natural scientific research can tell you about the foundations of life, about the origin of the spiritual life from the activity of the brain, and do not fantasize by talking about a spiritual world that supposedly underlies everything! All of this is only too easily understood. Thus has changed the persuasiveness of natural sciences in people’s view. In this regard Goethe really is a forerunner of Darwin. But despite of this he rose, in accordance with the spirit of his time, through his natural scientific research from the development of living beings, from imperfection, to perfection; to a purely spiritual worldview that definitely searches for the supersensory, for the spirit behind all sense perception. People who proceed in the same way in our time believe, that the results of natural science urge them to stop short of what these results should be; and that everything that belongs to the realm of the spirit seemingly bursts forth from the manifest background.

Today, a person cannot speak anymore in the same way as he could have spoken a century ago, about what he, through his personal conviction knows or believes to know, or what he has learned about the super-sensory world—that this does not contradict natural scientific research results. Instead, it seems that it must quite strongly contradict them—and not only for the isolated, serious, dignified truth-seeker, and striving human being does it seem so. If this is the case then we have to say: For our present time, the power of conviction, the reasons for conviction which could be brought forward only a century ago, or even later, without contradicting external scientific results—are no longer directly decisive. Today, more weightier impulses are needed to uphold what is said about the super-sensible world against the strictly scientific results of science. What we consider ourselves authorised to believe about the spiritual world, we have to be able to present in the same way, to obtain in the same objective manner as the natural scientific results are obtained—yet on a different foundation. Only a Spiritual Science that works with the same logic, with the same healthy sense of truth as natural science does, will be felt as capable of standing its ground next to a natural science that has progressed enormously. When considering this, one understands in what sense Spiritual Science has become a necessity for the present time. One also understands that this Spiritual Science alone can meet the longings, about which we have talked. These longings are present because what we have just characterised affects many human souls unconsciously—especially among the best truth-seekers, and in a field where one would not have expected it, considering how the human urge for knowledge strives beyond what has previously always been said in the field of science.

Certainly the mathematical field, the field of geometry seems to be one, where what is gained appears to be secure in its application to the sensory world. Who would believe with a light heart, so to speak, that anyone could claim that what the world has to say about mathematics, about geometry, could in any way be questioned. And yet it is characteristic that in the course of the nineteenth century there were minds who brought themselves to invent geometries and mathematics through strictly mathematical research, that were not valid within our sensory world, but would apply to quite different worlds. Thus we know that there were spirits thinking in strictly mathematical terms, who felt they could go beyond what so far existed as mathematics and geometry in the area of our sensory world, and that they could invent a geometry for a completely different sensory world. And there is not one but several such geometries. People who are mathematically trained know something about the names of Riemann,¹⁰ Lobatschewski,¹¹ Bolyai.¹² We do not want to go deeper into it here, because the only point is that something like this was able to be developed out of human knowledge. There are, for example, geometries which do not acknowledge the sentence; ‘The three angles of a triangle add up to 180 degrees.’ For them the triangles have a very different property, namely, for example, the three angles of a triangle are always less than 180 degree. Or another case; for Euclidean geometry one is able to draw only one parallel line through one point to a given line. Geometries have been devised where one can draw an endless amount of parallels through one point to another existing line. This means there were spirits who felt compelled to not only be smitten by other worlds, but to make up geometries for these! This illustrates mightily that even in mathematical heads there is a longing to go beyond what is in the world immediately surrounding us. Only one thing needs to be added to the fact that our time needs something that can be derived from Spiritual Science. It will be shown to us that indeed the human being, in relation to his actual spiritual-soul nature, reappears again and again in renewed lives on our Earth. What is called reincarnation is a similar fact in the spiritual-soul realm as development theory or evolutionary theory is on a subordinate level for the animal kingdom. That the human soul evolves through incarnations that it experienced during the ancient past, and through those that it will live through in the distant future. Certainly, at the present time, the art of refutation will soon be strongly directed against such things.

But one can already state that the present time has a deep longing for such results, which are connected with that by which the human being can orientate himself as to his destiny, and his whole situation in regard to the outer world.

Only recently man began to place himself appropriately as a historical being into world evolution. This has come about through external means of education. Think of mankind’s limited horizon in the 14th or 15th century before the art of printing spread educational materials. Thus, questions like the following would not yet have touched human hearts; ‘How can our soul be satisfied in the face of what we recognise as historical progress?’ Here lies the origin of a question which for many today has become a question of the heart. Historical progress shows us, that ever new achievements are made, which also have value for the inner development of the soul itself, that new and ever new facts enter into the stream of the progressing humanity. So man must ask himself; ‘What is the state of the human being himself in his innermost nature? Have the people of the past been condemned to live their lives in a dull existence, unable to participate in the evolutionary products of later progress? What then is the share of the human being in the successive developments of the human race?’

This may be a question to which many objections could be raised—we only want to say that indeed the question, the riddle, arises out of a deep feeling in the human soul: ‘Is it possible that a human soul living today, whose life is enclosed between birth and death, cannot take part in achievements that will only be imprinted into the stream of human evolution in the future?’

For the confessors of Christianity this question takes on a fundamental importance. One whose faith is based on Reformed Christianity distinguishes between the evolution of humanity in the pre-Christian epoch and the evolution in the post-Christian epoch, and states that from the Christ-event a stream of new spiritual life has emerged which earlier was not available for mankind on Earth. Thus, particularly for such a person the question arises: ‘How is it for the souls who lived prior to the Christ-event, prior to the revelation of what radiated from the Christ-Event?’

Such a question can be asked by man. Spiritual Science answers this for him not only theoretically, but also in a way that is satisfactory for him, by showing that the same people, who took in achievements of the pre-Christian era in the time before the Christ-event will be reincarnated after the stream of Christian development has begun. Therefore whatever happens in civilisation, nobody will need to miss out on. Thus, for Spiritual Science something grows out of history that is not just general abstract ideas that are cold and abstract, that must energise like rigid forces the stream of humanity, but Spiritual Science refers to history as something in which man with his innermost being participates everywhere. And since the human horizon has been broadened by modern means of education, this question is now posed in a completely different sense than about a century ago, when peoples’ horizons were more limited.

A yearning for an answer exists, that can only be quenched through Spiritual Science. If we consider all of this—and we could continue to talk in the same vein and refer to much that confirms that Spiritual Science is important for the present time because it yearns so much for its results—then we gain an idea about the significance of Spiritual Science for the present.

All the lectures, which will be held here in the course of this winter, must serve only one purpose, namely to gather material from the most diverse sides in order to show the results and the significance of Spiritual Science for human life and for the satisfaction of the highest needs of humans in general. Only this needs to be added in conclusion; one of the most common objections against Spiritual Science today, albeit one taken from a catchphrase, is that natural science has happily advanced to be able to explain the world monistically, through a uniform principle given by natural scientific methods. It has almost become a slogan, arousing antipathy in many, that states; ‘Now Spiritual Science is coming back and setting up a dualism opposed to such epistemologically beneficial monism!’ With such slogans many sins are committed.

Has the principle of a unified explanation of the universe been broken simply by the fact that two streams work together in the cosmos, one of which works from the outside and the other from the inside and they meet within the soul? May it not be assumed that what approaches the soul from two sides—namely, from sense perception on the one hand, and from spiritual scientific research on the other—is nevertheless founded in a unified existence and only initially appears for human perception in two currents? Does Monism really have to be taken superficially? If it were the case that the monistic principle were thereby broken, then someone might immediately allege that the monistic principle would also be broken apart if one concedes that water consists of hydrogen and oxygen. Hydrogen and oxygen can nevertheless have a uniform origin, even if they unite in what we call water.

In the same way the sensory and the supersensible worlds can have a unified origin, even if one is forced by facts of natural science and Spiritual Science to say that two streams unite in the human soul, one entering from the side of the senses and the other from the side of the spirit. One cannot immediately show the unity, the ‘monon’, but it does not therefore contradict a monistic worldview. What shows itself in this way from two sides, gains the strength of full reality only when we recognise how it constitutes itself out of these two currents. If we turn our gaze to the external world, we see, through the arrangement of our senses and our intellect, a world view that does not show us what it grows out of: the spirit. But when we follow the paths of spiritual scientific research and experience the uplift in the soul, then we find the spirit. It is within our soul that spirit and matter meet. Only in the fusion of spirit and matter within our soul lies the true spirit- and matter-filled spiritual reality!

Thus, perhaps what has just been said might be summarised in words that express the same but in a poetic form, what all those who tried to gain an unbiased view of spirit and matter have felt at all times. Spiritual Science in its relationship to natural science teaches us to recognise that this is true:

The rich abundance of matter
Presses upon human sense
From World-depths mysteriously.

The clarifying Spirit-Word
Streams into depths of soul
From content filled World-heights.

They meet in the human inner being
To wisdom-filled reality.

• 1. Translator’s comment: Literal translation of Geisteswissenschaft from German is ‘Spiritual Science’, in English called ‘humanities’.
• 2. ‘How do you refute Theosophy? How do you justify Theosophy?’ Rudolf Steiner talked about this topic for the first time on 19 and 25 March 1911 in Prague, and later at various locations in Germany. The Berlin lectures were later published in the series of Architect-House-Lectures.
• 3. Goethe’s conversation with Falk on 25 January 1813: Flodard Freiherr von Biedermann: Goethe’s conversations—except those with Eckermann. Collected works, Leipzig Edition 1909, Volume 2, page 169 ff.
• 4. Translator’s comment: Today called the premaxillary bone.
• 5. Translator’s comment: Reclam is a German publishing house, established in 1828, well-known for its small sized, mainly classic books, and for its favourable prices.
• 6. Matthias Jacob Schleiden, 1805-1881, Botanist, Professor in Jena and Dorpat. ‘The Plant and its Life’, 1848.
• 7. Theodor Schwann, 1810-1882, Anatomist and Physiologist, Professor in Loewen and Luettich; ‘Microscopical researches into the accordance in the Structure and Growth of Animals and Plants’, 1839.
• 8. Gustav Robert Kirchhoff, 1824–1887, Physicist, Professor in Breslau, Heidelberg and Berlin. In 1860 he discovered, together with Bunsen, spectral analysis. Researches on the Solar Spectrum and the Spectra of Chemical Elements.,1861-1863.
• 9. Robert Bunsen, 1811–1899, Chemist, he was, inter alia, Professor in Marburg and Heidelberg, ‘Collected Treatises, 3 Volumes, 1904.
• 10. Bernhard Riemann, 1826-1866, Professor in Goettingen, ‘On the Hypotheses which lie at the foundation of Geometry’, 1854.
• 11. Nikolaus Lobatschewski, 1793-1856, Russia, ‘On the Origin of Geometry’, 1829.
• 12. Johan Bolyai, 1802-1860, Ungarn, Engineering Officer and Mathematician.

If we take note of many an observation which is made on the relation of man to Life and Death to-day, we may be reminded of a sentence which Shakespeare gives to the gloomy Hamlet:

Imperious Caesar, dead, and turned to clay,
Might block a hole to keep the wind away;
O, that the earth, which kept the world in awe,
Should patch a wall to expel the winter's flaw!

Such an utterance might be made by many an one who is subject to the suggestive effect of the many conceptions of the times which are acquired in the field of natural science, and who, might feel himself moved to follow up all the movements after death of the separate substances which compose the human body. He might feel himself justified in asking first of all: “What becomes of the oxygen, nitrogen, carbon, etc., which build up the human body after the death of man?” Quite apart from the fact that there are many people to-day who are influenced by the suggestive phrase “the indestructibility of Matter,” there are, again, others who entirely lose the ability of imagining anything in the whole vast unending space other than matter and its operations.

We can see from many an observation on the nature of death, or one which establishes the idea of an antithesis between life and death, how much depends, in expositions of this kind, on establishing conceptions and ideas in the most exact manner possible. It happens again and again that no account is taken of the fact that “death” and “life” form an antithesis which depends on the nature of that to which it refers, and that, one who makes a closer observation dare not speak in the same way of the death of a plant or an animal as of a man. To what extent this is the case shall be explained in this lecture. How little we understand the expressions used in this sphere may be shown by the fact that in the physiology of the great naturalist, Huxley, for instance, the following is to be found. It is there said, that we must distinguish between the local death and the death of the tissue in an organism, and it is expressly stated that the life of man depends on the brain, lungs and heart, but that this is a threefold condition which we could really reduce into a twofold one; that, in fact, if we could maintain the breathing by artificial means, we might quite well remove the brain of a man and he would continue to live. That means that life would continue, even if the brain were taken away. That is to say, that when a man is no longer able to form a conception of what is around him or of what is taking place within him, and if life could be maintained merely as a life-process in the organism through artificial breathing, the organism would still continue to live in the sense of this definition of natural science, and we could not really speak of death, although no brain were there at all. That is an idea which ought to make clear to anyone who—though he might not care for a life without a brain, at least find such a definition plausible—that this explanation just shows that the definition of life given by natural science is not at all applicable to man in this form. For no one would be able to call the life of an organism—even a human one—the life of man himself, even if in other respects the facts hinted at were quite correct.

Now to-day we are, perhaps, somewhat further advanced even in the field of natural science than ten years ago, when one was almost embarrassed in speaking of life at all, and when all life was traced back to the life of the smallest living creatures. This life in the smallest organisms was looked upon as a complicated chemical process. According to this view, if this definition were extended to a conception of the universe, one could only speak of the smallest parts of life as living on, so that only a conservation of matter could then be spoken of. Now, to-day, on account of the investigations on radium, for instance, the idea of the indestructibility of matter has become a more uncertain one.

I will now only draw your attention to the fact that natural science to-day is already attempting to speak of a sort of independence, at least of the smallest living creatures. It states that the smallest living creatures propagate themselves by fission; one divides itself into two, two into four, and so on. There we could not admit of a death, for the first lives on in the second and when these die they both live on in the next ones.

Now those who wished to speak of the immortality of unicellular beings have sought for a definition of death, and just this definition of the nature of death is extremely characteristic. They have found the main characteristic of death is that it leaves a corpse behind, and as unicellular beings leave no corpse behind, they, therefore, cannot really die. Thus the characteristic of that which has to do with the deepest foundations of life is sought in what life leaves behind. Now it will be clear without further explanation, that what remains behind of life passes over gradually into lifeless matter. So lifeless matter now becomes in death the outer organism of the smallest, most complicated living creature. Yet if we wish to take into account the significance which death has for life, we must not look at what is left, at what becomes lifeless matter; but must seek the cause, the principles of life, in life itself, while it is there.

I said that one cannot speak in the same sense of death in plants, as in animals and man, because an important phenomenon is not taken into consideration there. It is also found in certain of the lower animals, for example, in the ephemera; and consists in the fact that most plants and lower animals have the peculiarity that as soon as the process of fructification is established and the possibility of a new living being is created, the dying off of the old one then begins. In the plant the backward process, the process of dying off, begins the moment it has taken into itself the possibility of forming a new plant. One can therefore say quite certainly of those plants in which this can be observed, that the cause which has taken away life from them lies in the new living being or beings, which have left no life behind in the old being.

Through simple reflections one could convince oneself that this is so. There are certain plants which endure, which blossom again and again and bear fruit; and on which ever new plant-forms, like parasites, are, as it were, planted on to the old stem. But there you can convince yourself that they purchase the possibility of recreating themselves by thrusting certain parts of themselves into the realm of the lifeless, into death,—that is to say, they surround themselves with bark. We are quite justified in saying of a plant which can surround itself with bark, which can bear lifeless matter and yet continue to live, that it has a surplus of life; and because of this superfluity which it will not give up—only giving up what is necessary for the young organism—it must make itself secure by thrusting death outside. Thus it can also be said that every living being which possesses the possibility within itself beyond the bringing forth of a new creation, is confronted with the necessity of continually mastering life within itself, since it takes up inorganic lifeless matter. This can be adequately observed both in the animal and in man.

There we have a separation between life and death in the being itself. We have an exchange between a living member which develops in one direction, and a continual sinking-into itself of another member which is developing in the direction of death. If we now wish to draw near to the inmost being of man from this point of view, we must certainly bear in mind something of what has often been said before, but which is never superfluous, because it does not as yet belong to the ordinary recognised truth.

If we rest on quite ordinary conceptions—as we will to-day in the first half of the lecture—and then proceed to the question of life and death from the point of view of Spiritual Science, we must remember that what is taken into account here is certainly very little recognised to-day, for it has to do with a truth which is just as new to the man of to-day as another truth, which now belongs to the trivialities, was new, and even unknown, to the world of three centuries ago. I have often, pointed out that it is taken for granted to-day by the natural scientist, or by one who builds up his observations on natural-scientific conceptions, that it is an acknowledged fact that “everything living is born from the living.” (Of course, I am speaking here with the limitation which this sentence bears in the world of natural science. We need not embark on the question of primeval generation for instance, for it can be noticed right away that the analogous sentence which is mentioned there is also made use of in the world of Spiritual Science). Not long ago the great natural scientist, Francesco Redi, had to fight for this sentence, “Everything living is born from the living,” with all his energy. For before the appearance of this Naturalist of the 17th century, it. was considered quite possible, not only in lay circles. but even in scientific ones, for new organisms to generate from putrefying river-mud or from decaying organic matter. This was believed of worms and fishes. The idea, that the living can only develop from the living is not yet old, for only a few centuries ago Francesco Redi called forth such a storm of passion that he only just escaped the fate of Giordano Bruno. When we consider how the “fashions of the time” alter, we can judge of the fate of this truth that we must again proclaim here. For this truth, “Life can only originate from life”, called forth at that time a storm of anger. Those who feel themselves impelled to draw from the well of knowledge similar truths in other spheres, are no longer delivered to the flames of the funeral pile to-day. That is no longer the fashion. But they are made fun of and a man who communicates such things is ridiculed; those who are impelled to proclaim such things as relate to spiritual development, are condemned to suffer a Spiritual death. But the fate of the above-mentioned truth also consists in its having become a self-evident fact, a, triviality, for him who is capable of judging.

What error, then, was the cause of this truth, “Life can only originate from life”, not being recognised? A quite simple error in observation! The scientists looked at that which was immediately before them, but did not try to penetrate to the fact that the origin of a living creature lies in a seed left behind by another living creature; so that a new living organism of a certain kind can only originate because a former living organism leaves behind it a seed of a similar kind. That is to say, they looked at the environment of the developing organism, but should really have looked at that which was left behind by another living organism which was developing within this environment. This was done all through the centuries, up to the time of Francesco Redi. Quite interesting details might be gathered from books which had just as much weight in the 7th and 8th centuries as the authoritative writings of the most modern natural scientist of to-day, and in which was noted and classified quite exactly how, for instance, hornets develop from the decaying carcase of an ox; wasps from a donkey's carcase, etc. That was all nicely set out. Exactly in the same way in which mistakes were made in those times, mistakes are being made to-day in regard to the soul and spirit of man. How is this?

A human being enters into existence and his individual development, begun at birth, is observed on into later life. It is seen how the form, the different capacities and talents develop. (We will speak more exactly of this development in a later lecture). But if the scientists wish to know the nature of the human form, the nature of that with which we are dealing, they ask the question: “What are the hereditary relationships? From what sort of environment was the man born?” That is just the same method as when they look at the mud surrounding the worm which is coming forth from it, and not upon the egg. In what is formed as disposition, as different capacities in man, an exact distinction must be made between what is characteristic, what is brought over from parents and grandparents and so on, and a certain kernel which he who observers truly will not fail to recognise. Only he who approaches the spirit and soul-element as did the naturalists before Francesco Redi will be able to deny that there is a kernel in man which presents itself clearly and which cannot be referred back to what is inherited from parents and grandparents, etc. In what is developing in a man we therefore have to distinguish that which comes from the environment from that which can never be produced from that environment.

As regards the exterior of a living plant or animal, we shall always find that the new being coming forth is in reality concerned with developing according to the species of its predecessors. Take the highest animals. How far do they carry that out? As far as is in accordance with the species, and for this they are planned. Certainly many will say: “Has, then, a horse, a dog or a cat no individuality?” And they will suppose that one might just as well describe the individuality of a cat, a horse and so on—perhaps even write their biography—as we could that of a human being. If anyone likes to do this, let him do so, but we should not take it as real, but only as symbolical, as when, for example, a school task is set for pupils, such as was set for myself and my school-fellows, for which we had to write the biography of our pens! One could, then, even speak of the biography of a pen. But where truth is concerned it is not a question of attending to analogies and comparisons, but of laying hold of the essentials. What is individual in man is not that which makes him one of the species, but that which makes of him the quite distinct individual that every man is. Every man is working towards the formation of what is individual in him, just as the plant works towards the formation of the species. Every development, every advance in education or in historical evolution, rests on the fact that man goes a stage further than the mere species, in the development of the individuality.

If there were in each man no individual spirit and soul kernel which develops in a Spiritual way, as the animal develops in his species, there would be no history. One could then only speak of an evolution of the human race, but not of a history or of a cultural development. Therefore, natural science speaks of the development of the species, of a kind of evolution in the horse, but not of a history.

In the development of every man we have to see a spirit and soul kernel which has the same significance as the species for an animal. The species in the animal kingdom corresponds to the individual in man. Now in the animal kingdom every creature which tends towards what is according to species, repeats the species of his ancestors and can only originate on the basis of the physical nature of the seed of his ancestors; so the individual part of each separate man cannot originate from anything which is here in the physical world, but solely from something which is of a Spiritual nature. That is to say that a Spiritual kernel, which enters into being at the birth of man, does not merely refer back to the species “man”, in so far as man goes back to a Spiritual ancestor, to a being who has progressed, who does not belong individually to the species “man”, not, indeed, to any “species”, but to this same human individuality. If then, a man be born, there is born with him an individual kernel which is not attached to anything else than to this individual human substance. As the animal seeks his species so does man seek his own individual human being. That is to say that this individual kernel when it appears at birth has been here before, just as the germ of the species was there for the animal. We must look in the past for the spirit and soul-substance, which is the Spiritual—not physical—kernel of this individuality which is developing Spiritually. Only a man who cannot see that the soul and spirit do not develop from within the general human organism, will deny that the conclusions just drawn are correct.

Every individual human life thus carries within itself the proof that it already existed before. We are, therefore, led back from an individual human life to an individual Spiritual seed and from this again to another Spiritual seed; that is, we are led from our own individual life back to a former individual life—and then, of course, to our next life. An unbiased observation of human life proves this to be just as much a necessity as the truth proclaimed in the sphere of natural science. Suppose anyone with an unprejudiced mind were to say: “Nothing can be known about that”, then if he draws this conclusion again and again he might end by saying: “I cannot do otherwise than accept this conclusion; if I do not I am sinning against all observation and logic.” In spite of this, however, this truth about the repeated earth-lives is still but little recognised; but this truth that the Spiritual can only originate from the Spiritual, will certainly make its mark in human cultural life and will be more quickly accepted than the other truth which has been characterised. The time will come when men will realise that beliefs have changed in this respect, just as we do not now believe that lower animals, fish, etc., could originate from river-mud.

If we follow, in the further course of its life, this individual kernel of the human being which one can see, as it were, come into being at birth, it appears to a certain extent in a two-fold aspect; and this more especially in the growing human being, in youth. It appears there as something which requires a progressive development of the whole man. And he who can truly observe the intimate life of youth, who has learned to observe the child, not only from the outside but also from within, who remembers what he himself experienced in this respect, will admit that what is in him now was not there up to a certain age, but only showed itself later as a feeling of power, as a feeling of life, as a content of life which works in an extremely elevating way. What we carry within us as the individual core of our being works not only on the outer living form, but continues to work even into the most elementary formations and functions of life. When man arrives at a certain maturity and has the opportunity of taking up many things in the outside world, then this individual kernel of his being works so that he enriches himself, adapts himself to the outer world and gathers experiences. When, however, we observe this correlation between the individual core of man's being and what comes to pass in the course of his life—not only through what he learns and hears but also through experiences such as happiness and sorrow, pain and joy, we shall then see in this Spiritual life itself the same correlation on a higher plane, to that between the new embryo of the plant which develops in the blossom of the old one and the old plant whose life is taken away from it by the new seed.

If we extend this observation to the tree, we shall be able to say: “There, also, life is ever taken away, in that the tree turns into wood in the plant kingdom, but in its place certain things in the tree change into dead lifeless products: inorganic bark surrounds the tree.” In the same way we see, when we look at human life more closely, not only a progressive development but one which allows the Spiritual being of man to advance and grow, allows it to unite itself to the outer world; and as it grows ever more and more, we see it coming into conflict with the old condition; that is to say, it comes into conflict with its own self. That happens because it could in its youth build up and form organs according as it required them, while now in the further course of life this process is no longer possible; it must now go on living in a hardened life condition. So we see that when our life enriches itself by development in the course of time, when we take in what is new and thereby enrich the individual core of our being, we come into conflict with what envelops this kernel, with what we have built around it, and which is in process of growing. As long as we grow, and in so far as we thus grow, we do not take up into ourselves any Spiritual process of death. Only when we receive what is exterior to ourselves do we take in the Spiritual process of death. That is really the case throughout the whole of life, though it is less apparent in childhood than in later life. So we can say that in the realm of the spiritual, a Spiritual growing and dying takes place in the inner being of man. But in what does that process which takes place there consist? We can understand it well if we look at it for once in a lower form and take under observation anything from the realm of ordinary life, in order to form, as it were, conceptions and ideas concerning the higher realms of being. Let us take fatigue, for instance. We speak of fatigue both in the animal and human being. We must first gain an idea of the nature of fatigue. I cannot now go into all the ideas which have been collected on the subject, but we will observe the whole process of fatigue in relation to the life process. We can say that man becomes tired because he uses his muscles, and therefore fresh forces must be carried to the muscles. In this case we might say that man tires because he uses up his muses through work of some kind. Such a definition appears very plausible at first sight, only, it is not true. But it is the case to-day that we work with ideas which just merely touch the surface of things lightly, we do not wish to penetrate to the depths. For just think, if the muscles could really become fatigued, how would it be then with the muscles of the heart? They do not tire at all; they work day and night continuously, and the same is the case with other muscles in the human and animal bodies. This gives one the notion that it is not correct to say that in the relationship between work and muscle there is anything which can explain fatigue.

When does an animal or a man become tired? When their work is not occasioned through the organism nor through the life-process, but by the outer world itself; that is to say, by the world with which a living being may come into relationship through its organs. Thus, when a living being carries out work by means of it consciousness, the organs concerned becomes fatigued. In the life-process itself there is nothing which could occasion fatigue. So that the life-process, the whole of the life organs must be brought in contact with something which does not belong to them, if they are to become fatigued.

I can only draw your attention to this important fact. In the development of which some extremely fruitful points of view can be found. Thus, only that which is brought to a living being by way of a conscious process, of an incitement to consciousness, can occasion fatigue. It would consequently be absurd to speak of the fatigue of plants. We can, therefore, say that in everything that can fatigue a living being something which is foreign to it must really be present, something which does not belong to its own nature must be introduced into it.

We, can therefore, say that every disturbance of the life-process which comes about though fatigue, points to the fact, even in a quite inferior realm, that that which we have in our soul-life is not born simply from our physical life, rather does it stand positively in contradiction to the laws of that life. The contradiction between the laws of the life of consciousness and those of life and the life-process alone explains what is present in fatigue—of this you can convince yourselves if you consider it more exactly. For this reason we can say that fatigue is an expression testifying that that which comes to a life-process must be foreign to it, if it is able to disturb it. Now, the life-process can really equalise what is used up through fatigue, by sleep and rest. What is used up is compensated for by something new, which enters in place of the life-processes.

Now, an inner process of exhaustion appears in the individual human life, for the reason that man enters into relationship with the outside world. The old, which was present in the germ, enters into an exchange with the new. The result is expressed in that the individual life-kernel is transformed during individual life, but it must also for this reason throw off what has become wooden, as it were, what it has itself formed from its birth onwards. The cause of death is the calling to a new life within the human soul, just as in the animal organism the disposition to fatigue can only be caused by its entering into exchange-relationship with what is new and foreign to it. We might, therefore, say that the process of death, of gradually dying off, is one which is better understood if one takes its opposite into consideration, in which the soul stands in relationship with the organic, and which expresses itself in fatigue. Hence, we really have the seed of death in our innermost being during the whole of our individual life. We could not develop further, however, we could not possibly carry what we already are at birth a step further, if we did not in ourselves associate death with life. As fatigue is connected with the execution of exterior work, so is the thrusting off, the killing of the outer covering, with enrichment and higher development of the individual life-kernel. The psychic and Spiritual process of life and death—represents with great clarity what we might express thus: “We purchase the higher form, the further development of our life, by the beneficial act of thrusting off from us what we were before. No development would be possible if we could not thrust-off the old, for we advance through, and together with what we have worked into the new of our soul and spirit. What forces are in that? Such forces as are the fruits of our past life!” We certainly can experience the seeds of these fruits, and can experience our observations of life, we can do much else in life, but we cannot organise these into ourselves nor really carry them over into our external covering. For we do not build our covering of what we learn in one life—or at most only to a limited extent—we build it according to what we have become in our last life. We can, therefore, only build up our life by making use of what we have acquired in our past life, and we can continue to develop by thrusting off the old from us—as the tree does its bark—and passing into death. With what we then take with us through death, we are able to build up our next life, for it contains in itself the same forces as have built up our Spiritual growth when we develop freshly and happily in our youth. It is of the same nature as these. We have absorbed it from our life experiences and with it build ourselves a future living organism, a future bodily covering, which will carry within it as the germ of a future blossom, what we have gained in one life. With regard to such things as these the question is always asked, over and over again: “What help is it, after all, to man, to hear about repeated earth-lives, if he is not able to remember his former lives, if the memory of his former lives is not present?”

It lies, indeed, in the nature of the Spiritual culture of to-day that we are not yet in a position to meditate and reflect upon questions of the soul and spirit life as freely as over the things of natural life. But we must make it clear to ourselves that it is possible to develop ideas and conceptions on these questions of the soul and spirit life, in exactly the same way. We can only do this if we really observe it more exactly, if we ask ourselves what must be the position of the human memory in general; what is the nature of the human memory? There is a point of time in the personal human life, which can lead very easily to the gaining of opinions on these questions. It is the following:

We all know that there is a time in the normal life of man to-day, of which there is no memory in later life. It is the time of his earliest childhood. In the normal life of to-day man remembers up to a certain point of his childhood, then memory disappears.

Although it is quite clear to him that it is his own Spiritual I, or ego, which has built up his life, yet he lacks the power of stretching his memory beyond this point. He who examinee many children's lives, will be able to make one observation from them. It can of course only be substantiated in external life, but notwithstanding this, it is correct. From the observation of the soul of a child we discover that remembrance goes back just as far as to the point of time when the idea of “I,” the conception of his own Ego, arises within him. That is an external important fact At the moment when the child, of his own accord, no longer says: “Charles wants this,” or, “Mary wants that,” but says “I want this,” from the point of time when the conscious conception of the Ego begins, remembrance also begins. Whence comes this remarkable fact? It comes because something else is necessary for remembrance, besides the coming into contact, as it were, once or always with an object. We can come into contact with an object ever so often without any recollection of it being necessarily called forth. Remembrance rests, namely, on a quite definite soul-process, a quite definite Spiritual inner life-process, of which we can become aware if we take the following into account.

One must distinguish between the perception of an object or experience, and the conception or idea of this object or experience. In the process of perception we have something that can always recur if we stand before the object again; but in the experience we have something else besides. When we come into contact with something, and have taken in an impression of it through the eye or ear, we have then taken into ourselves something more than an inner impression of it; what we take with us is that which remains in the conception or idea and which can embody itself in the memory. That, however, must first come into being. I know that what I have just said will be very much doubted by valiant followers of Schopenhauer, by those who assert that our conception of the universe is only our idea of it. But that lies in the confusion of perception with idea. Both must be emphatically differentiated. The idea is something which is reproduced. No matter how often the outer experience can arise, if it does not receive the inner impression of the idea, it cannot be incorporated in the memory; when, on the other hand, it is stated that the idea is nothing more than what presents itself to the perception, we need only bring to notice that the idea of a hot piece of steel, no matter how hot, will quite certainly not burn any one; but the sense-experience of it will. There we have the difference between idea and sense-perception. Therefore we can say that the idea is a sense-experience turned inwards. But with this turning inwards, with this outer rebound of the object, which is in reciprocal relationship with the inner being of man, and through which the inner impression is occasioned, something else comes into consideration. Whatever is experienced inwardly in our sense-life is embodied in our Ego by every sense-impression, and by everything that we can experience in the outer world. A sense-perception can even be there without being incorporated in the Ego. In the outer world it is impossible for an idea to be kept in the memory, if it be not received inwardly into the realm of the Ego. So that in every conception we form from a sense-experience and which can be retained in the memory, the Ego stands as the point of departure. An idea which comes into our soul-life from outside, can in no way be separated from the Ego. I know, indeed, that I am speaking figuratively; but all the same these things signify a reality, as we shall see in the course of the next lectures.

We can imagine that the experience of the Ego presents something like the inner surface of a sphere, seen from outside; then the sense-experiences come along and the self-mirroring of these experiences within the sphere give rise to the idea. For that, however, the Ego must be present in every single sense-perception. The Ego-experience is in everything which can be embodied in the memory; it is actually like a mirror which rays back the experiences to us within; but the Ego itself must be there. From this we learn that as long as the child does not receive the perceptions of ideas in such a way that they become conceptions, as long as they only approach the child from the outside as sense-perceptions, and are only experienced externally between the Ego and the outer world without being transformed into an Ego-experience, as long as the child has no conception of the Ego, then no Ego-mirror, as it were, veils from him what is round about him. Just as long as that lasts, one notices that the child imagines into the surroundings many things which adults do not understand. Only through the memory of what is past, can that emerge which the Ego has already taken up, so that it is thereby pressed into the memory. When the Ego-perception appears, the Ego places itself before the ideas as a mirror; but what lies before the time of the Ego-perception can not be called forth into the memory. Therefore man always comes into touch with the outer world in such a way that his Ego experiences all the events with him, his Ego is always there. This does not imply that everything must enter his consciousness, only that his experiences do not remain merely as sense-perceptions but are transformed into ideas.

So we can now say that the inmost kernel of man, from whose centre has developed that which has now been described as passing on from incarnation to incarnation, is veiled by the Ego-conception, as is usually found in man. Man places himself before his memory with his Ego-development of to-day. It is thus quite explicable that his memory only extends as far as the sense world.

Now, can a proof be offered, through experience itself, that this can become other than it is? Can we speak of an “Extension of Memory” back into former incarnations? That is self-evident from the mere definition, if it is grasped, of what lies behind the individual Ego centre, which we ourselves cover over, as it were. If we begin to grasp it we them also perceive our inmost nature and being, we see what man does in human life;—not only what he does in common, but in his own individual life. Is there a possibility of looking behind the Ego, as it were? Yes, certainly there is. This lies in that inner soul-life of which I have already spoken, in the introductory lecture. If a man really undertakes to develop his Soul, by a severe and methodical training, in such a way that the slumbering forces within it begin to germinate, and the soul stretches out beyond itself, he can only do so by appropriating, with a certain inner renunciation, ideas which are not such as those in which the ego-experience is immediately present. The Ego-experience places everything in which it takes part before the kernel of one's being. For the training of the soul man must therefore appropriate ideas in which the Ego-experience is not present. For that, reason the inner soul exercises which a man undertakes must be done in a quite definite way. What he embodies in his soul-life depends on the content of the meditation, and he must embody something that certainly is acceptable to the inner nature of the soul, but which does not, relate to anything external. What is there that is not related to anything external? Only meditation; but meditation is as a rule applied to the outer world, therefore it is not serviceable to him who wishes to rise to the higher worlds. A life of idea must therefore be developed which calls forth, in pictures and symbols which are continually placed before the soul, such an activity in the Ego that it would form ideas it never could have formed before when it wished to acquire the truth of the ordinary sense-world. The soul must therefore incorporate into itself pictures and symbols which do not appear when we survey the external through out Ego-experience.

When we observe this, we have the following experience, about which we can only say something definite by pointing to that condition into which men enters again and again, namely, the condition of sleep. Through falling asleep, all ideas, all pain end sorrow, and so on, which man has experienced during the day, sink into indefinite obscurity, The whole conscious life of man goes down into indefinite obscurity and returns when the man wakes up again in the morning. Compare the life of consciousness in waking-up and in going to sleep. So long as man obtains only conscious impressions from the external life of the senses, he brings back with him in the morning, only what he had in his consciousness in the evening. He wakes up again with the same content in his consciousness; he remembers the same things, thinks the same thoughts, and so on. But when a man undertakes, in the specified manner, an inner training in which the Ego is not present, the position is different. He then notices, certainly, that his first step in progress consists in feeling on awaking, enriched through sleep; he feels that what he had taken up before going to sleep comes back to him with a richer content. So that he can now say: “Now I have looked behind the Spiritual world which the Ego does not cover up and, as a fruit of that, I embody into the life of my consciousness something that I had not gained from the sense-world, for I have brought it with me out of the world of sleep.”

Such are the first steps of progress in one who is leading a Spiritual life of the soul.

Now, the further possibility steps in that he may now, even during the waking-day life, fill himself with a content not permeated by the Ego-experience, although the Ego is there. The Ego-experience must take its place beside this content, just as it does with the content of all physical experiences. If we take this into account we must say that he alone who is able to look behind the Ego can gaze into the Spiritual content of a human being—he who treads such a path will often come near to developing certain feelings. The nature or these feelings will also show the nature of the way. Thus we must learn to be free from desire and especially to overcome fear and anxiety as regards coming events. We must learn to say in a calm and passionless way: “No matter what comes to me, I will accept it.” And we must not only put this to ourselves as a dry abstract conception, but must make it part of our innermost feeling. We need not become fatalists on this account (a fatalist thinks, that everything happens of itself), but we must use this means of intervening in life. If we are able to instil into the Ego this absolute balance as regards feeling and sensation, it drives with such force towards the Spiritual being of man that it separates the Ego from the perceptions which are already in our consciousness. So we remain standing within the Ego-world, yet receive a new world of inner soul-experiences. These make it alone possible for us to see, in its true individual form, the inmost kernel of man's being, which certainly develops from birth onwards as that which springs from a former life, but which could not be recognised before in its true reality. We must first see it as it is, as it really is in the present, and how it works. Now can we remember something towards which we had never turned our eyes? Just as the child has not that in his consciousness which took place before the development of his Ego-perception, so can man not keep in his memory those experiences of his former births which are not based on a knowledge of the inner kernel of man's being, on the feelings and sensations of the soul and spirit kernel, which is in every man.

He who really goes through this, who learns above all to purchase for himself a retrospect into former lives by looking towards the future with equanimity and resignation, will see that the former earth-lives are not merely a logical sequence, but that they prove to be a reality through a newly-born memory, which is really called forth. For that, however, one thing is necessary. The possibility of looking into the past can only be purchased by desirelessness, equanimity and passivity towards the future. To the extent to which we are prepared to experience the future in our feelings and sensations and are able to shut out our Ego with regard to the experience of the future, so far are we in a position to look into the past. The more man develops this equanimity, the more nearly does he approach the point of time when the past earth-lives will become a reality for him. Thus we can give the reason to the objection often made, that for the ordinary human life no remembrance is there. This objection is just as if a child of four were brought to us, with the remark: “This child cannot count”, concluding from this that consequently a man could not count either! To this one could only reply: “Wait till the child is ten years old, he will then be able to count; therefore, man can count.” The recollection of former lives is a question of development! Therefore is it necessary that one should learn to think over what, through the force of logical conclusion, has been taken as the point of the lecture to-day. It will then be found that a living spiritual soul-kernel may be present in man and that we carry it through death into a new life, as we have carried it through birth into this life.

So Spiritual Science points in no simple way, yet in a way that is substantially correct, to what, is eternal in man as regards “life” and “death.” And we may say that the logical conclusion about death and life in regard to the human being informs right away that in this human individuality the possibility is also present of gaining the memory of past lives. Then people need no longer say that unless we can remember our past lives they are of no use! Is only that which we can remember of use to us? We bear in us the fruits of past lives; we develop in ourselves in the present life without our knowledge, what we have brought over from former lives; and when we begin to look back into former earth-lives, the memory of them is certainly there. We can then say to ourselves what a good thing it was that in former times we were unable to remember back. This memory of the past can only be won in the way I have characterised as regards feelings and sensations towards the future life, but that is not all; it can only be made endurable by an attitude of soul such as has been described. Should it be aroused by artificial means and should man at the same time lead a life of desires and appetites permeated by egotism, then his soul and spirit-life must lose its balance and he must become unhinged. For certain things belong together, and others repel each other.

What is eternal in man, what comes into life through birth, that goes over from life into the Spiritual worlds through death and reappears in new embodiments; and bound up with that is the fact, that we can only evolve higher in new embodiments if we make use of the fruits of the former life. To-day I wished to point out the relations to the kernel of man's being and these two ideas. When we have this in view we shell no longer give as our answer to the question as to the nature of life and death: “The nature of death is to be learnt from the corpse”. Rather shall we say: We sought in the innermost being of man that which must bring forth new life; but in order that new life may come into being, the old must gradually die off and finally be quite extinguished, just as the old plant when it is one year old dies off, so that the new plant may take life from it. He who observes the world of death in this manner will not consider that which remains behind as a corpse, but will look in every being for those characteristics of life which are carried over into a new life. Although Shakespeare may make the gloomy Danish Prince utter that which to many appears evident from the absolute facts of the science of to-day:

Imperious Caesar, dead, and turned to clay,
Might block a hole to keep the wind away;
O, that the earth, which kept the world in awe,
Should patch a wall to expel the winter's flaw!

If such a remark is applied to the process of dying, we will yet turn, while observing man from the point of view of Spiritual Science, to the Spiritual kernel of man's being which goes through birth and death and through ever new life. We then gain the assurance, if we do not follow the ways of Oxygen, Carbon, and Nitrogen, but seek the ways of life by considering what the real kernel of Man's being experiences, that we may place opposite the words of Shakespeare this other point of view.

The humblest man on Earth,
Is a son of Eternity,
And overcomes in ever new life
The ancient death.

Translated by Antje Heymanns

It lies in the nature of current scientific observations that the phenomena we want to dedicate today’s lecture to are basically not much talked about by current natural science. Yet every human being should feel that sleep is something how is placed among the phenomena of our life as if life’s greatest riddles are presented to us through it. Surely people always must have felt the mysteriousness and significance of sleep when they spoke of sleep as the ‘brother of death.’ Today, we have to limit ourselves to speaking of sleep as such, because the coming lectures will repeatedly lead us back to the contemplation of death in many ways.

All that man in a direct sense counts as belonging to his soul experiences, all imaginations that from morning to evening surge up and down, all emotions and feelings which constitute man’s soul drama, all pain and suffering, and the will impulses as well—all of it sinks down, as it were, into an indeterminate darkness when the human being falls asleep.

Some philosophers might doubt themselves, so to speak, when they talk about the nature of the soul, about the nature of the spirit that reveals itself in human nature. Yet, they have to admit that even if it had been firmly nailed down by definitions and ideas and showed itself to be well researched, it basically seems to disappear into nothing within the course of each day.

If we look at the manifestations of our soul life in the way one usually does so scientifically and also amateurishly, then we basically must say that these are extinguished during the state of sleep; they are gone. For someone who only wants to observe the physical expressions of the soul, the human being becomes on deeper reflection, so to say, all the more a riddle. Because the actual bodily functions, the bodily activities, continue during sleep. Only what we usually call the ‘soul’ discontinues.

The question then arises as to whether one is speaking about bodily and soul matters in the right sense when one includes what appears to be extinguished on falling asleep, when actually the soul aspect is included to the full extent. Or, if already the ordinary observation of life, apart from Spiritual Science or anthroposophical observations, could show us that the soul is active and proves to be effective even when it is enveloped by sleep. However, if one wants to gain some clarity about those concepts, or one could say, if one wants to observe the manifestations of life in this field in the right sense, one must place exact terms before one’s soul.

By way of introduction, I would like to mention in advance that on this topic as well, Spiritual Science or Anthroposophy is not in a position to make generalisations of the kind that people love to make today. If today we talk about the nature of sleep, then we will only talk about the nature of human sleep. In the last lecture, with regard to other fields, we have touched on this many times—Spiritual Science knows very well that which outwardly manifests itself in the same way, as this or that other appearance by different beings, can have quite different causes in the respective beings. We have indicated that this applies to death, to the whole spiritual life and to the formation of the spiritual life of animals and human beings. Today, it would go too far to also talk about the sleep of animals. Therefore, we want to say in advance that all we talk about today applies only to the sleep of human beings.

Through our consciousness, we can speak about soul manifestations within ourselves—anyone can feel this—because we are conscious of what we imagine, want, and feel. Now the question must arise—and this is extremely important particularly for today’s observations—whether we may readily combine the definition of consciousness as we use it for the ordinary consciousness of a human being in the present with the concept of the soul or the spirit in a human being? First, to express myself more clearly about these concepts, I like to draw a comparison. A man might walk around in a room and cannot see his own face in any spot in that room. The only place he can see his face is where he can look into a mirror. His own face appears as an image in front of him. Isn’t there an enormous difference for man whether he just walks around in a room and lives within himself or whether he sees what he expresses of this living also in a mirror image? It could probably be so with human consciousness in a somewhat extended way. The human being could, so to speak, experience his soul life—and he would only become knowledgeable or conscious of this soul-life itself, the way he lives it, when it confronts him like a mirror. This could very well be. Thus, we could say, for example, that it is quite possible that the human soul life continues regardless of whether the human being is awake or asleep. But that the waking state consists of the fact that the human being perceives his soul life through a mirroring, let’s say first of all, through a mirroring within his physicality and that he cannot perceive it in the state of sleep because it cannot be mirrored in his physical body.

Although we have not yet proven anything with this, at least we would have gained two concepts. We could differentiate between the soul life as such and becoming conscious of the soul life. We can think that for our consciousness, for our knowledge of the soul life, as we currently stand in our everyday human life, everything depends on us receiving the mirror image of our soul life through our physicality because if we do not receive this, we cannot know anything about it. We would then be wholly in a sleeping state. Now that we have gained these concepts, let us try to place the phenomena of waking and sleeping life a little before our soul.

Someone who is really able to observe life, will feel very clearly, and one would like to say, will ‘behold’ how the moment of falling asleep truly proceeds. He can perceive how the imaginations, the feelings weaken in their brightness, diminish in their intensity. But this is not the most essential. When a human being is awake, he lives in such a way that he creates order through his self-conscious Ego in his whole imaginative life, whereby he summarises, as it were, all ideas with his Ego. For at the moment when we in our waking life would not summarise all our ideas with our Ego, we would not be able to lead a normal soul life. We would have one group of ideas that we would relate to ourselves and call our concepts and another group we would look at as something foreign, like an external world. Only people who experience a split in their Ego, which for people today would be a state of sickness, could have such a tearing apart of their imaginative lives into different areas. For a normal person it is essential that all his ideas are in perspective related to a single point: the self-conscious Ego.

The moment we fall asleep, we feel distinctly that, at first, the Ego will be, so to speak, overwhelmed by imaginations despite these growing dimmer. The ideas assert their independence; they live an independent life. Single clouds of ideas, as it were, form within the horizon of consciousness, and the Ego loses itself in imaginations. Then man feels how the sense perceptions like seeing and hearing and so on become blunter and blunter, and finally, he feels how the will impulses are paralysed. Now, we must point out something clearly observed by just a few people. The human being feels furthermore, as he sees things with defined borders in his daily life, that at the moment of falling asleep, something asserts itself like a feeling of being locked up in a vague fog, which occasionally makes itself felt as cooling, or with other sensations in certain parts of the body: on the hands, on the joints, on the temples, on the spine etc. These are feelings that someone falling asleep can very well observe. They are, one would like to say, the kind of trivial experiences that one can have every evening when falling asleep if one wants to.

Better experiences are had by people who, through a finer developed soul life, more precisely observe the moment of falling asleep. They can then feel something like an awakening despite falling asleep. What I am about to tell you now, can be told by anyone who has acquired certain methods of really observing these things, because it is a common human phenomenon. The moment people feel like an awakening when they are slipping into sleep can really be described as follows: something like an expanding conscience, like morality, wakes up in the soul. This is indeed the case. This is particularly shown when people observe their soul concerning what they have experienced the previous day and with which they are satisfied in their conscience. In the moment of moral awakening, they feel this especially clearly. At the same time, this feeling is quite the opposite of the feeling during the day. While the feeling during the day shows itself by things approaching us, one who falls asleep feels as if his soul is pouring itself out over a world that is now awakening. This mainly includes a relaxation, a pouring out of feeling over that which the soul, through itself can experience in relation to its moral inner being as if through an expanding conscience. Then it is a moment of inner bliss, which appears to be much longer for the one falling asleep, when it is about dwelling on things with which the soul can agree. There is often a deep conflict when the soul has to reproach itself. In short, the moral human being who, during the day, is repressed through the strong sensory impressions, relaxes and feels himself very distinctly when falling asleep.

Everyone who has acquired a particular method, or maybe even only a feeling concerning such observations, knows that at this moment a certain longing awakens, which we could describe like this: One really wants this moment to extend into the indefinite, that it would never end. But then comes something like a ‘jolt’, a kind of inner movement. For most people, this is very difficult to describe. Of course, Spiritual Science can describe this inner movement quite precisely. It is, as it were, like a demand that the soul makes on itself: You must now relax even further; you must pour yourself out further. But by making this demand of itself, the soul loses itself for the moral life in its surroundings. This is like throwing a small drop of colour into water and dissolving it: the colour can still be seen at first. But once the drop distributes itself throughout the water, it pales more and more and finally, the colour display as such stops. So it is when the soul is just beginning to swell and live in its moral mirror image where it can still feel itself, but the feeling stops once the jolt, the inner movement, occurs, as the drop of colour loses itself in the water.

This is not a theory; it can be observed and is accessible to everyone, just like a natural scientific observation is exactly accessible to everyone. If we thus observe the process of falling asleep, we can certainly say that the human being intercepts, as it were, something when falling asleep that, afterwards, he somehow can no longer be conscious of. If I may be allowed to use both of my earlier constructed ideas—the human being has, as it were, a moment of parting from the mirror of the body in which the manifestations of life appear to him as mirror images and because he has no other means to mirror what otherwise is mirrored by the body, the possibility to perceive himself, ceases.

Again, it is possible to perceive in a certain sense the day’s happenings—if one does not want to be altogether stubborn and obstinate regarding what relates to the soul and the effect of what moves into an vague darkness. I have already pointed out in another context that someone forced to memorise this or that, i.e., learn things by heart, can do this much more easily if he sleeps on it more often, and that depriving oneself of sleep is the greatest enemy of memorisation. The possibility and the ability to memorise more easily even returns once we have slept on an issue and not want to learn something by heart in one go. This is also the case with other activities of the soul. However, we could convince ourselves very easily that it would be impossible to learn anything at all, to acquire anything when the soul is involved, if it weren’t for the inclusion of sleep states among our life states. The natural conclusion that has to be drawn from such phenomena is that our soul needs to withdraw from time to time from our physical body, in order to gain strength from an area that is not within our body, because the respective strengths within the body are being worn out. We must imagine that when we wake up in the morning from sleep, that from the state in which we were then, we have brought along strength to develop abilities, that we could not develop if we were constantly shackled to our bodies. This is how the effect of sleep shows itself in our ordinary nature, when one wants to think straight and not be obstinate.

What shows itself in general when one pauses in ordinary life, and for which one needs some good will to hold one’s life phenomena together, is shown very clearly and precisely when man goes through developments that are able to lead him to a real beholding of the spiritual life. Here I would like to elaborate on what occurs when a human being has developed the forces that lie dormant within his soul in order to reach a state in which he can neither perceive with the senses nor comprehend with the mind. This will be followed up in more detail in the lecture How does one Attain Knowledge of the Spiritual World,¹ where the methods will be quite comprehensively covered. Right now though, we will highlight some of the experiences that a person, truly practising such exercises is able to have that endow his soul, as it were, with spiritual eyes and spiritual ears, and through which he can look into the spiritual world, which is not an object of speculation, but for someone who perceives with his senses, it is just as much an object as colours and forms, warmth and coldness, and sounds. How to attain true clairvoyance has already come to light in previous lectures. This spiritual development, these exercises, actually consist of a person bringing out of himself something that he has within himself, gains other organs of perception, jolting upwards, as it were, over the soul, as it is in its ordinary state, and thus perceives a world that is always around him but which cannot be perceived in the normal state. When a person undergoes such exercises, the first thing that changes is his sleep life. Anyone, who has done their own real spiritual research knows this. I would now like to talk about the very first stage of change in the sleep life of a person who is actually clairvoyant and engaged in spiritual research. The first beginnings of this possibility of spiritual research do not make the person appear very different from the normal ordinary state of consciousness because a person who performs these exercises, as we shall discuss later, will at first sleep like any other human being and is just as unconscious as anyone else. But the moment of waking up will show something very special to the one who has performed spiritual exercises. I will now describe to you some very concrete phenomena that are based on facts.

Let’s assume that a person who is practising these exercises is thinking very hard about something that another person could also be thinking about. He tries, maybe because he has a very difficult problem in front of him, to exert all his mental power to get to the bottom of it.

Perhaps he’ll be like a schoolboy: his mental power just isn’t sufficient to solve the problem. This could definitely happen. If he has now already obtained through his exercises more possibilities to experience the inner states of the soul in connection with the physical state, he will certainly feel something quite peculiar when he finds himself incapable to do something. Unlike usual, he perceives a resistance in his physical organs, for example in his brain. He properly senses that the brain puts up resistance against him, just as we feel resistance when we try to drive in a nail with a hammer that is too heavy. The brain then begins to gain a reality. The way man normally uses his brain, he would not feel it as if he were using an instrument, as is the case with a hammer, for example. A spiritual researcher feels his brain, he feels himself independent in relation to his thinking. That is an experience. But if he can’t solve a task, he feels that he is no longer able to carry out certain activities that he must perform when thinking. He feels very clearly that he is losing power over the instrument. This fact can be experienced very precisely.

If the spiritual researcher sleeps on the problem and then awakens, it will often happen that he feels up to the task without any further ado. But at the same time he also feels precisely that prior to waking up he has done something, that he has worked on something. He feels that he had been able to set something within him in motion during his sleep, that he had caused an activity. During the waking state he was forced to use his brain. He knows that. He can do nothing but use his brain when he is awake. But he was no longer able to use it properly, because—as I have described—it resisted him. During sleep, he feels, he is not dependent on using his brain. He was able to create a degree of flexibility without using the brain that was too tired or otherwise too heavily occupied. Now he feels something very peculiar: he perceives the activity that he has performed during sleep, albeit not directly. The Lord gives to his own, but not in their sleep. The spiritual researcher is not saved from having to solve his problem now in the waking state. It may come easily to him, but normally it is not so, and particularly not with things that simply must be solved by the brain.

Hence, the human being feels something that he has not known before in the sensory world—he senses his own activity, which presents itself to him in vivid pictures, in strange pictures that are in motion. It is just as if the thoughts he needs were living beings who would enter into all kinds of relationships with each other. Thus he senses his own, let’s call it, ‘mental activity’ that he undertook during sleep, like a series of pictures. This feeling is difficult to describe, as one is stuck in it in a quite peculiar way and has to tell oneself, ‘This is you yourself!’ But, on the other hand, one can distinguish this feeling very clearly from oneself, in the same way as one is able to distinguish a physical movement one makes from oneself. Thus one has pictures, imaginations of an activity performed before waking up. And now one can notice, if one has learned to watch oneself, that these pictures of an activity that was performed prior to waking up, connect themselves with our brain and turn it into a more flexible, more useful instrument, so that one will be able to complete something, which one could not do before because of a resistance, for example, to think certain thoughts. These are subtle things, but without them one won’t really get behind the secret of sleep. Thus, one feels that one has not performed an activity as in the awake state, but one that served the restoration of certain things in the brain which were worn out. The instrument has been restored in a way that was not possible before. One feels like a master builder of his own instruments.

The feeling during such an activity is significantly different from that during a daytime activity. The feeling one has about the day activities is comparable to copying something from a template or a model. There I am forced to follow the picture in front of me with every stroke or dot of colour. In regard to the things that appear as pictures at the moment of waking and that are, as it were, an illustration of an activity during sleep, one has the feeling of inventing the strokes, of creating the figures out of oneself, without being tied to a model. With such an occurrence one will have, as it were, intercepted what the soul did prior to waking up: one has intercepted the activity of brain regeneration. Because sooner or later one realises that what feels like a kind of coating the brain organs with what one remembers as figures is nothing other than a restoration of what has been damaged in the course of the day. One really has the feeling of being a master builder working on oneself.

Basically the difference between a spiritual researcher who perceives such things and an ordinary person is only that a spiritual researcher just perceives these things, whereas an ordinary person cannot pay attention to them and does not perceive them. The same activity that the spiritual researcher undertakes is performed by every human being, but the normal person doesn’t catch the moment when the organs are restored by the activity that takes place during sleep.

Let’s take such an experience and compare it to what was previously said about an increase in bluntness and dullness, and a reduction in brightness of the daily imaginative life at the moment of falling asleep. This latter phenomenon can only be viewed in the right light if one either frees oneself from today’s highly suggestive concepts of the world view that believes itself to be firmly based on natural science, or by actually accepting the available results of contemporary natural research. For example, in brain research, and according to the results of natural research, people who think more precisely can do nothing but acknowledge the independence of the spiritual from the physical. And it is very interesting that recently a popular book was published in which basically everything that has to do with spiritual life and the sources of spiritual life was presented wrongly and completely without any insight. But in this book, The Brain and the Human Being, by William Hanna Thomson,² a lot of smart things are said. It deals in particular with modern brain research and with many other things that are presented—for example, as I also have more often pointed out—with symptoms of fatigue, which are quite instructive. But I have already explained that muscles and nerves cannot get tired in any other way than through conscious activity. As long as our muscles only serve an organic activity they cannot become tired. It would be bad if, for example, the heart muscle and other muscles needed rest. We only become fatigued when we perform an activity that is not innate to the organism—such as an activity that belongs to the conscious life of the soul. Thus one has to say; if the soul life was born out of the human being like the heart activity, then the immense difference between fatigue and non-fatigue could not be explained. The author of the book therefore feels compelled to acknowledge that the soul relates to the physical no differently than a rider relates to his horse, i.e., that it is completely independent from the physical. This is an enormous concession from a person who thinks like a natural scientist. One could get very strange feelings if, forced by contemporary natural research, one has to confess to oneself that the relationship between the soul life and the body life must be imagined as being roughly the same as that of a rider to a horse. That is, according to the image that people had of a centaur in earlier times, when they still looked deeper into the spiritual realm.

It is not apparent that the author of the book would have thought of this, but again this thought comes to mind from the natural scientific conception, and one gets the feeling that such ideas stem from times when a certain clairvoyance still existed for many people. Today, however, certain imaginations about centaurs seem to be more compatible with what a gentleman once told me: He said:

‘The Greeks watched the Scythes, who came from the North, and other rider clans, perhaps when they emerged from a fog. They could not distinguish the shapes clearly, and so they thought that these had grown out of the horse.’ A materialist might be satisfied with such an explanation. But it is just contemporary natural scientific research that pushes for an acknowledgment of the independence of the soul from the physical.

One thing we can hereby definitely notice, and we can follow such things best if we recall certain occurrences before our soul that are not commonplace, but still exist and cannot be denied. The spiritual researcher knows how that common man in the country, at the hour of his death, suddenly began to speak in Latin, a language he had never really used and which one could prove he had only heard once in Church when he was a little boy. This is not a fable, but a reality. Of course he did not understand anything of it, when he had heard or recited it. And yet it is true. From this, the idea should be formed in every human being that what affects us in our environment contains something in addition to what we absorb into our normal consciousness. Because what we absorb into our ordinary consciousness is often dependent on our education, on what we comprehend and the like. But not only what we can comprehend unites itself with us, but we have in us the possibility to absorb endlessly more than what we take up consciously. We can even observe in every human being how at certain times he has ideas, that were not strongly noticed at the time he experienced them here or there, so that he may not remember them at all. But through certain things they re-appear, and may even place themselves into the centre of his soul life. We really have to acknowledge that what constitutes the extent of our soul life is endlessly more than what we can receive and embrace with our day consciousness. This is extraordinarily important. Because in this way our attention is steered towards something inside of us that can really only make a slight impression on our corporeality because it has hardly been noticed, and then again it lives on in us. In this way, we are pointed to the foundations of our soul life, which should actually exist for every reasonable person. Every rational person should tell himself that, what is in the world around him for his consciousness while he is consciously looking at the world, is basically dependent on the organisation of his sensory organs and on what he can understand. And no one is entitled to want to limit reality by what they can perceive. It would be completely illogical to want to deny the spiritual researcher that behind the physical world a spiritual world exists, simply for the reason that man is only allowed to speak about what he sees and hears and what he can think about, and he is never allowed to judge what he cannot perceive. Because the world of reality is not the world of the perceptible. The world of the perceptible is limited by the sensory organs. For this reason one should never —in the Kantian sense—speak of the limits of knowledge; or about what a human being may or may not know, but only about that what he has before of him in accordance with his organs of perception.

Considering this, one must say to oneself: Behind the colourful carpet of the sensory world, behind that which the warmth sense perceives as warmth or cold and so on, lies an infinite reality. Should therefore only what we perceive, or only the reality we perceive exert an influence on us? If we think that we are only shown a part or a section of the entire reality through our perception, then it is only logically tenable that there lies an infinite reality behind what can be given to us through our perception. However, this is also real for us, as we have been placed in it, so that what surges and lives outside and influences us, lives on for us. But what is our actual waking life like during the day? There really is no other way than to imagine the waking day life in this way, and to say; ‘We open our senses, our capacity to realise something immense and confront this immensity. Because each person has particular eyes, particular ears, and a certain sense of warmth, and so on, we are placing a particular section of reality in front of us. Anything else we reject, almost, as it were, fend it off, exclude it from us. So what does our conscious activity consist of? It consists of a defence against, or an exclusion of something different. And by straining our sensory organs, we are holding back something that we have not perceived. What we perceive is the remainder, are the remains of what is spreading itself around us, and what we, for the most part reject. In this way, we feel actively placed in this world, feel connected with it. Likewise, we defend ourselves through our sensory activity against a multitude of impressions, because, figuratively speaking, we are not able to bear the entire immeasurable infinity and take in only a section of it. If we think like this, then we must imagine quite different relationships between our whole organism, our entire bodily nature and between the external world, than those which we can perceive or comprehend with our intellect. Then it will not seem so unusual to think that the relationships, which we have with the outside world, live in us and that also the invisible, super-sensible or extra-sensible is active within us—and that the extra-sensible by being active in us, uses our senses to fabricate a section out of the entire immeasurable reality. Then our relationship to reality is completely different from how we are able to perceive it through our senses. Then there lies something of relationships with the outside world in our soul that does not exhaust itself through sensory perception, that eludes our waking daytime consciousness. Then it is with us as if we are stepping in front of a mirror with our inner being and have to say to ourselves:

‘Basically you are something completely different. The mirror only shows you the forms, maybe also the colours; but within you you are thinking. You are feeling within you. All of this the mirror cannot show you. It only shows you what is dependent on its laws. As a soul facing its organism, you are something completely different from what your senses show you; they limit you to what is according to their laws. When you face the world, as with a mirror—you are actually facing a world that is only made possible by the organisation of your senses!’

If you think this idea through to the end, then you will not be surprised to find that basically all life of our awake day consciousness depends very much on the organisation of our sensory organs and on our brain, just as what we see in a mirror depends on the quality of the mirror. Anyone who looks into a garden mirror and sees a caricature of their face looking towards them, will happily agree that the picture in the mirror is not dependent on them, but on the mirror. In the same way, what we perceive depends on the set-up of our mirroring apparatus, and our soul activity is limited, as it were, reflected back into itself by mirroring itself in our body life. Then it is no longer astonishing that the detail—and this can also be physiologically proven—is dependent on the physical body, whereby this or that happens one way or another in our consciousness. Because everything that the soul does in order for something to become conscious, to become knowledge for us, depends on the organisation of our body. Observation shows us that the concepts that we initially only constructed, actually correspond to the facts. The only difference is that our corporeality is a living mirror. We let the mirror in which we look be as it is. However, there is one way in which we can influence the reflection: if we breathe on the mirror, then it can no longer reflect properly. But the reflection in our physicality, which experiences the activity of our soul, is connected with the fact that when we reflect ourselves in our corporeality, the reflection itself is an activity, a process within our bodily nature, and that which appears as a reflection, we place as an activity before ourselves.

Thus the bodily life actually presents itself as if, in a certain sense, we would write down what we think and then would have the characters in front of us. This is how we write the activity of our soul into our physicality. What an anatomist can verify are only the characters, the external apparatus, because we do not completely observe our soul life if we only observe it within our physical life. We only observe it completely, if we do this independently from our physical life. This, however, can only be done by the spiritual researcher who observes the soul life as it shows itself mirrored into the waking day life at the moment of awakening. It shows that the soul life is like an architect, who builds something during the night, and acts as a dismantler during the day.

Now we have the soul life in the waking state and in the state of sleep before us. In the state of sleep we have to imagine it as independent from body life, like a rider is independent from the horse. But just like the rider uses the horse and uses up its strength, the soul consumes the activity of the body so that chemical processes run like letters of the soul’s life. With this we reach a point where the physical life, as it is limited in the senses, in the brain, is so diminished by us that we have exhausted it for the time being. Then we must begin the other activity, initiate the reverse process and again build up what has declined. This is the life during sleep—so that we, starting from the soul, perform two opposite activities on our body. So, during the awake state we have around us our world of flowing and ebbing concepts, joy and sorrow, feelings and so on. But while we have them in front of us, we wear out our physical life, we basically destroy it constantly. During sleep, we are the architects, we can restore what we have destroyed during our waking life.

So what does a spiritual researcher perceive? He perceives the architectural activity of rebuilding in curious pictures like a circular movement twisting around itself: a real process, that is the reverse of normal awake day life. It is really no fantasy when one speaks about recognising in these self-entwining movements the mysterious activity that the soul performs during sleep, which consists of reconstituting what we have destroyed during our day life—hence the recuperation through and necessity of the sleep life. So why is the sleep life such that it doesn’t enter into our consciousness? Yes, and why is it that we become conscious of our waking life? The reason for this is that for the processes we perform in our waking day life, we have got something like mirror images. However, when we are performing the other activity of rebuilding what has been worn out, we have nothing wherein this could be reflected. We are lacking a mirror for this. Only a spiritual researcher is able to show the underlying reasons for this. From a certain point onwards, the spiritual researcher experiences not only the soul activity, as I have described it, like a dream memory from sleep, but as if he was not dependent on the instrument of the body, so that he then can perceive an activity which only happens in the spirit. He can then tell himself: ‘Now you are not thinking with your brain, but you are now thinking in a completely different manner; now you are thinking in pictures, independent of your brain.’

The spiritual researcher can only experience something like what has been described earlier, when he experiences that everything that envelops him as something nebulous when he falls asleep does not disappear. Instead, if he is able to limit and withdraw his inner activity, then the mist that is perceptible at his temples, at his joints, at his spine, becomes something that reflects what he is doing—similar to the reflection of what we experience during our physical life.

The whole difference between true clairvoyance and ordinary waking day life consciousness is that the waking day life requires a different mirror for the soul activity to come to consciousness and uses our bodily nature for this purpose. However, the activity of the clairvoyant, when it radiates as an activity of the soul, is so strong that the emitted ray will be withdrawn into itself. In this way, as it were, a mirroring on one’s own inner experience, on a spirit organism, takes place. Basically, our soul is within this spirit organism during the night, even if we are not spiritual researchers. It pours itself into it. And we will not be able to cope with our whole sleep life, when it is not clear to us that indeed our physical processes—all that anatomy, physiology is able to research—cannot bring about anything but a reflection of our soul processes; and that these soul processes always, from falling asleep until waking up, live a spiritual existence. If we think differently we won’t be able to cope at all. We must therefore speak, as it were, of a secret soul life that cannot enter at all into the consciousness conveyed through our body. Thus, when one notices in a person that ideas appear in his consciousness that he has ignored for a long time, one has to say: There is something else in a human being, apart from the conceptions of his conscious soul life, to which he has paid attention when he took them in.

I have already suggested once, that it is child’s play to refute things that are a reality for a spiritual researcher. And yet they are true. Spiritual research has to say that in regard to the human being we have to deal with a human physical body that we can see with eyes, grasp with hands, and that is also known to anatomy and physiology. In addition, we have an inner member of the human being, the astral body, the carrier of everything that the human being consciously absorbs, what he really experiences during the day life, so that he can receive it reflected by the body. Between the astral body and the physical body lies the carrier of ideas that remain ignored for years, and are then brought up into the astral body to be realised. In short, between the astral body, the carrier of consciousness, and the physical body, the etheric body of man is active. This etheric body is not only the carrier of conceptions that have gone unnoticed, but in general the builder of the entire physical body.

What actually happens during sleep? The astral body, the carrier of consciousness, lifts itself together with the Ego out of the physical body and the etheric body, so that a split in the human nature occurs. During day life when man is awake, the astral body and the Ego are within the physical body and the etheric body. And the processes of the physical body work like mirroring processes, through which all that happens in the astral body comes to consciousness. Consciousness is a reflection of the experiences through the physical body, and we should not confuse consciousness with the experiences themselves. When, during sleep, the astral body of an ordinary human being leaves, it is at first not able to perceive anything in the world of the astral. The human being is unconscious there.

What ability does the spiritual researcher now acquire when things during sleep become conscious to him, even though he does not rely on his brain? He attains the ability to perceive and to mirror his soul activity in something that for him weaves and lives between things, so that during the awake day consciousness this something can be perceived in the same way as his own etheric body. The human etheric body is woven from that through which the clairvoyant person perceives; so that for a clairvoyant person the outer world becomes reflective, just as for the soul life of a normal person the physical body becomes reflective.

Now there are intermediate states between waking and sleeping. One such intermediate state is the dream. With regard to its origin, spiritual research shows that indeed dreaming is based on something similar to clairvoyance, whereby the latter is something trained, while dreaming is always imaginary. When a person leaves with the astral body, he loses the ability to obtain a reflection of his soul life through the physical body. However, under certain abnormal circumstances, which occur for everyone, he can obtain the capability to receive his soul experiences reflected through the etheric body. Indeed we must consider not only the physical body as a mirroring device, but also the etheric body. As long as the outer world makes an impression on us, it is indeed the physical body which acts as mirroring device. However, if we become still within ourselves and digest the impressions the outer world has made on us, then we work within ourselves and yet our thoughts are still real. We live our thoughts, and also feel that we are dependent on something more subtle than our physical body, namely on the etheric body. Then the etheric body is that what reflects itself in us in solitary pondering, which is not initially based on external impressions. But we are within our etheric body during our awake day consciousness; we perceive what is mirrored, but we do not perceive directly the activity of the astral body. In the intermediate state between waking and sleeping, we do not have the ability to receive external sensory impressions. But because we can still receive something that is connected to our etheric body in some way, the etheric body can mirror what we experience in our soul with our astral body. This then are the dreams that show irregularity because the human being is in a completely unusual situation during this process.

If we contemplate this, then much in our dream-world will become clear that would otherwise remain mysterious about it. We must therefore imagine the foundations of the soul life as being closely connected with the dream life. While the physical body is the mirror of the soul life and our daily interests have an impact on this, we are often connected in the remotest way through the etheric body to experiences, which we have long since left behind, and of which we become only dimly aware because the day life has a strong impact on us. Thus they remain something extremely unknown to us. However, if we are examine dreams that are based on really good observation, many peculiar things can be shown to us. For example, a good composer experiences an image, where a somewhat diabolical figure plays a sonata to him. He wakes up and is able to write down the sonata. Something became active in him that has worked like something foreign. And this was possible, because there was something in him for which the composer’s soul was ready, but which could not become effective during the awake day life, because physical life was only an obstruction and not suited as a mirror. Here we can see that the bodily life is an inhibitor and in this lies its significance. In our daily life we are only able to experience that for which the bodily life, figuratively speaking, is ‘oiled like a machine.’

The physical life is always a hindrance to us, but we manage to use it to a certain extent. After all, one does need ‘inhibitions’ everywhere. When a locomotive rides over the tracks, it is the hampering, the friction, through which it can drive, because the wheels could not turn without friction. In reality, our bodily processes are what confronts our soul life in a hampering way, and these frictional processes are at the same time mirroring processes. When we are ready in our soul for something but have not yet managed to oil our machine well, then the awake day life is a good ‘brake shoe’. But when we leave our physical body, then our etheric body is able to bring what lives in our soul life to expression—and this will appear to us as something quite foreign as it is of a more subtle nature. Then, once it is strong enough, it forces itself into the dream life, as was the case with the composer. This has less to do with the daily interests than with the hidden interests, that lie more remote in the subtle foundations. For example, in the following—note, that I am just telling you something that has actually been observed—A woman dreams, and although she has children whom she loves very much, and a husband, who loves her extraordinarily, she experiences with great joy that she gets engaged for a second time and all related events she goes through. What does she dream? She dreams experiences that are very far from her current life, that she has once gone through but cannot recognise, because the normal interests of the day are only connected with the physical body. And, what has continued to live on in her etheric body will now, perhaps because a joyful emotion has triggered the dream, be mirrored by the etheric body through another event.

A man dreams that he goes through childhood experiences, and these childhood experiences are wonderfully mirrored. One of these, especially important to him because it went close to his heart, causes him to wake up. At first the dream is very dear to him, but soon he falls asleep again and dreams on. A whole sum of unpleasant experiences now pass through his soul, and a particularly painful event wakes him up. All of this is extremely far from his present experiences. He gets up, and because he feels very shaken by the dream, walks around in the room for a while, but then he lies down again and now he has dream experiences, which he has not yet had. All events that he went through get muddled up, and he now experiences something completely new. The whole turns into a poem, which he can even write down and set to music afterwards. That is a very real fact. Now it shouldn’t be too difficult, with the concepts we have already gained, to imagine what has happened there. For a spiritual researcher it is thus; at a very specific moment in his life the man suffered a kind of break in his development—he had to give up something that lay in his soul. But even if he had to give it up, it did not disappear from his etheric body as a result of that. It was just that his ordinary interests were so strong that they pushed it back. And, where it was strong enough through inner elasticity, it forced itself out through the dream, because there the human being is freed from the hindrances of the awake day life. This means, that the respective man was truly once very close to reach what was expressed in the poem; but then it had been deadened.

Thus we can see illustrated in our dreams the independence of our soul life from our outer bodily life. We must realise that this is proof that the idea of the mirroring of the soul life in the physical life is entirely justified. In particular, the circumstance that the interests in which we are involved do not engrave themselves in a straight line in our direct experience, shows us that apart from the life, as it is lived on a daily basis, there is another life running alongside, that I have called, for a more conscious, finer observation, a kind of awakening. In it lives everything that for our spiritual life is already abstract, immaterial like our conscience that is independent of physical life—everyone can feel this. Yet during our day life this other life turns out to be very limited by our daily interests. During sleep, our soul also reveals itself as being completely filled with its moral quality. There is a real living into the spiritual, what we can describe as a jolt, as an inner movement. What we call Spiritual Science research will result in something for us through which we can consciously settle into the world that the normal human being unconsciously settles into every time he falls asleep.

People must gradually familiarise themselves with the fact that the world is far wider than what we can grasp with our senses and follow with our intellect; and that the sleep life is an area that we need because just our noblest organs, which serve our imaginative life, are worn out by our daily life. During sleep we restore them, so that they can face the world strong and vigorously and are able to mirror our soul life for us in the waking day life. Everything that is characteristic of the soul life could become clear to us through this. Who wouldn’t know that one feels wearied and tired after a good, deep sleep? People often complain about this; but it is not a symptom of an illness at all and is actually quite understandable. After all, the complete recovery through sleep only occurs an hour or an hour and a half later. Why? Because we have worked well on our organs, so that they are not only able to cope for a few more hours but for the whole day. And immediately after waking up we are not yet ready to use them, we first have to “grind them in.” Only after a while we can use them well. One should speak about a particular type of weariness in a certain way, saying that one could be happy that one can settle back into the reconditioned organs in an hour and a half. Because from sleep comes to us what we need—the architectural forces for the organs that have been worn out and used up during the day.

So we may now say that our soul life is a life of independence, a life of which we have something like a reflection through our consciousness during our waking day life. Consciousness is a reflection of the interactions of the soul with its environment. During the waking day life we are lost to our surroundings, to something foreign, are devoted to something that is not ourselves. But during sleep—and this is the nature of sleep—we withdraw from all outer activity to work on ourselves. The comparison is apt; the ship which has served shipping while it was at sea will be rebuilt and repaired when it arrives in port.

Someone who believes that during sleep nothing happens to us, could also think, that nothing needs to be done to the ship when it returns to port from a voyage. But when the ship sails again, he will see what happens, if it has not been repaired. This is how it would be if our soul did not work on us during sleep. We are brought back to ourselves when we sleep, while during the day life we are lost to the outside world. A normal human being is just not able to perceive what the soul is doing during sleep in the same way as he perceives the outside world during the day.

In the lecture How to attain Knowledge of the Higher World? we will see that also in the spirit a mirror image can be attained as a realisation, through which man can then come to perception in the higher worlds. All this illustrates that the soul, just when it is not conscious of itself and knows nothing of its own activity, but is busy with itself, works on itself, and independently of the physicality, obtains those forces which serve precisely to build up the body.

Thus we may summarise what we have said, and characterise the nature of the soul with words that from the knowledge of the nature of sleep can build a kind of foundation for many things in Spiritual Science:

The soul itself restores
Enveloped still in sleep
Flees into spirit worlds
When senses constrictions
Oppress it! ³

• 1. GA 60 Lecture 7. How Does one Attain Knowledge of the Spiritual World?, 15 December 1910, Berlin.
• 2. William Hanna Thomson, Brain and Personality, 1907, published in Germany under the title Das Gehirn und der Mensch, Verlag K R Langewiesche, Düsseldorf, 1910.
• 3. Poem translated by Norbert Mulholland.

These lectures were published under the title Spiritual Science's Answer to the Large Questions of the Present Time. In German: ‘Der Geist im Pflanzenreich,’ in Antworten der Geisteswissenschaft auf die Grossen Fragen des Daseins.

How spiritual science must recognize the living and weaving spirit in all beings surrounding us by proceeding from the principle that the knowing human being should understand himself in his knowing has been touched upon in the lectures about The Human Soul and the Animal Soul and The Human Spirit and the Animal Spirit.¹ It was said that the person knowing himself could never think of taking into his own spirit—as spiritual content—ideas, concepts, and mental images of things and beings if these concepts and ideas, this spiritual content through which the human being wants to make comprehensible what resides in the objects, were not first present in these objects, were not placed into them. All drawing forth of the spiritual from things and beings would be pure fantasy, would be a self-made fantasy, if we were not to presuppose that wherever we gaze and are able to discover the spirit, there this spirit is actually present.

Although still only in small circles, this general presupposition of the spiritual content of the world is made rather frequently. Even those who speak of the spirit in objects, however, usually remain with speaking about the spirit in general, i.e., they speak about the existence of spiritual weaving, of spiritual life lying at the basis of the mineral, plant, and animal realms, etc. To enter into the means by which the spirit individualizes itself for us, how it manifests itself particularly in this or that form of existence, is not yet given much thought in the wider circles of our educated contemporaries. Offense is usually taken to those who speak not only of the spirit generally but of its particular forms, its particular ways, how it makes itself felt behind this or that phenomenon. Nevertheless, in our spiritual science, we should not speak about the spirit in the vague and general way indicated today; rather, we should speak in such a way that we recognize how the spirit weaves behind the mineral or plant existence, how it is active in the animal and human existence. Our task today is to say some thing about the nature of the spirit in the realm of plants.

It must be admitted that if we do not begin with abstract philosophy, or with abstract theosophy, but if we begin with unbiased observations of reality and at the same time—as it must be on the healthy ground of spiritual science—we stand firm on the ground of natural science and then want to speak about ‘the spirit in the realm of plants,’ we not only collide with unjustified prejudices of our scientists or other educated contemporaries but also come into conflict with more-or-less justified concepts that have, and must have, the power of strong suggestion.

Especially in this contemplation, which is to concern itself with the spirit that finds its expression, its physiognomy, as it were, in the realm confronting us in the gigantic trees of the primeval forest, or those growing on Teneriffa thousands of years ago, as well as in the small, unassuming violet hiding in the quiet woods or elsewhere—especially in such a contemplation a person may feel himself in a rather difficult position, if the natural scientific concepts of the nineteenth century have been absorbed. Yes, a person feels himself in a rather difficult position if he has worked through to what should be said about the spirit in this area, for how could it be denied that great and wonderful discoveries in the realm of material research—even in the realm of the nature of plants—were made in the nineteenth century, thoroughly illuminating the nature of plants from a certain standpoint.

Again and again we should be reminded that in the second third of the nineteenth century the great botanist, Schleiden, discovered the plant cell. He was the first to place before humanity the truth that every plant body is built up out of small—they are called ‘elementary organisms’—independent entities, ‘cells,’ which appear like the building blocks of this plant body. While previously plants were able to be considered only in relation to their crude parts and organs, now attention was directed to how every leaf of the higher plants consisted of innumerable, tiny microscopic formations—the plant cells. No wonder such a discovery had a powerful influence on all thinking and feeling in relation to the plant world! It is entirely natural that the person who first discerned how the plant is built up out of these building blocks would arrive at the thought that by investigating these small formations, these building blocks, the secret of the nature of plants could be revealed.

The ingenious Gustav Theodor Fechner must already have experienced this idea when, around the middle of the nineteenth century, he actually tried to take into his thought sequences something like a ‘plant soul,’ although it could be said that his excessively fantastic elaboration of the nature of plants may have appeared somewhat too early. Fechner spoke comprehensively about a soul of plants (e.g., in his book Nanna), and he spoke not only as one who merely fantasizes but as one thoroughly and deeply acquainted with the natural scientific advances of the nineteenth century. He was unable, however, to think that plants are merely built up out of cells; rather, when he looked at the forms, the structures, of individual plants, he was led to assume that sense reality is the expression of an underlying soul element.

Now, you must admit that in contrast to what spiritual science has to say today about the life of the spirit in the realm of plants, Fechner's explanations appear rather fantastic, but his thoughts were actually an advance. In spite of this, Fechner had to experience the resistance that can come especially through the thinking into which the human spirit had penetrated by the discoveries of the nineteenth century. It must simply be understood that even the greatest individuals were fascinated by what they beheld when, under the microscope, the plant body revealed itself as a structure of small cells. They could in no way conceive how someone could still come up with the idea of a ‘plant soul’ after the material aspects had shown themselves in such a grandiose way to the searching human spirit. It is therefore easy to understand that even the discoverer of the plant cell became the greatest and most vehement opponent of what Fechner wished to say concerning the soul nature of plants. And it is rather interesting to see the fine and subtle mind of Fechner in battle with Schleiden, who became famous through his epoch-making discovery for botany but who did away, in a materialistically crude way, with everything that Fechner wanted to say about plants out of his intimate contemplations.

In a battle such as the one between Fechner and Schleiden in the nineteenth century, something basically took place that must be experienced by every soul who penetrates into the science of our time, working through the doubts and riddles that arise nevertheless, especially when one enters into the achievements of natural science. He will have grave doubts if he is able to work himself out of the frequently quite compelling concepts in such a realm. Whoever is not acquainted with this compelling quality of the materialistic natural scientific concepts of the nineteenth century may find trivial, possibly even narrow-minded, what is said out of the world view that wishes to place itself on the firm ground of natural science. One who approaches matters with a healthy sense for truth and a serious concern for solving life's riddles, however, and is at the same time armed with the botanical concepts of the nineteenth century, can have quite tragic inner soul experiences. Something about this need only be suggested here.

Thus we can learn, for example, what the botany of the nineteenth century has brought. There is much in this botany that is actually magnificent and truly astounding. A person who approaches the natural scientific concepts with a healthy sense for truth reaches the point where these concepts affect him like suggestion, with a tremendous power; they do not let him loose but whisper in his ears again and again, ‘You are doing something stupid if you leave the sure path on which one studies how cell relates to cell, how cell is nourished by cell,’ and so on. Finally it becomes necessary to tear oneself loose from the materialistic concepts in this realm. There is no other choice, no matter how firmly one wishes to be held by the suggestive power of the world views that are merely a consequence of outer materialistic concepts. After a certain point it no longer works. Not many people today experience that point. The suggestive power is experienced by most people who feel fascinated by the natural scientific results, and they do not dare take even a single step beyond what the microscope shows. The next step is taken only by very few. It is clear, however, to whoever maintains a healthy sense for truth, especially regarding the natural sciences—and this is necessary if one wishes to approach the spirit in the realm of plants—that first a person must occupy himself with a certain mental image, for otherwise he will always succumb to error, will always enter a labyrinth such as happened to Fechner despite his serious attempts to examine the symbolic, the physiognomic aspects of individual plant forms and structures.

I would like to suggest to you what is significant here first by means of a comparison. Imagine that someone found a piece of matter, some kind of tissue, on a path. If he examines this piece of tissue, in certain cases it may happen that he doesn't get anywhere. Why not? If this piece of tissue is a piece of bone from a human arm, the examiner will not get anywhere if he wants to look merely at this piece of bone and to explain it out of itself, for it would be impossible for this piece of tissue to come into existence without the prior existence of a human arm.

One cannot speak about the tissue at all if it is not considered in connection with a complete human organism. It is impossible, therefore, to speak about such a formation other than in connection with an entire being. Consider the following comparison. We find an object somewhere, a human hair. If we wanted to explain how it may have originated there, we would be led completely astray, because we can explain this only by considering it in connection with an entire human organism. By itself it is nothing; by itself it cannot be explained.

This is something that the spiritual investigator must consider in relation to the whole scope of our observations, of our explanations. He must direct his attention to the question of whether any object confronting him can be considered by itself or whether it remains inexplicable by itself, whether it belongs to something else or can be examined better as an isolated entity.

Curiously enough, the spiritual investigator becomes aware that it is generally impossible to consider the world of plants, this wonderful covering of the earth, as something existing by itself. When confronted with the plant he feels just as he does regarding a finger, which he can consider only as belonging to a complete human organism. The plant world cannot be considered in isolation, because to the view of the spiritual investigator the plant world at once relates itself to the entire planet earth and forms a whole with the earth, just as the finger or piece of bone or the brain forms a whole with our organism. And whoever merely looks at plants by themselves, remaining with the particular, does the same as one who wishes to explain a hand or a piece of human bone by itself. The common nature of plants simply cannot be considered in any other way than as a member of our common planet earth.

Here, however, we come to a matter that may annoy many today, though it is valid nevertheless for the spiritual scientific view. We come to look differently at our whole planet earth than is done customarily by today's science, for our contemporary science—be it astronomy, geology, or mineralogy—basically speaks about the earth only in so far as this earthly sphere consists of rocks, of the mineral element, of lifeless matter. Spiritual science may not speak in this way. It can only speak in such a way that everything found on our earth—that which a being coming from outer space, as it were, would find in human beings, animals, plants, and stones—belongs to the whole of our earth, just as the stones themselves belong to our earth. This means that we may not look at the earth planet as a dead rock formation but rather as something that is in itself a living whole, bringing forth the nature of plants out of itself, just as the human being brings forth the structures of his skin, of his sense organs, and the like. In other words, we may not consider the earth without the plant covering that belongs to it.

An outer circumstance might already suggest to us that, just as every stone has a certain relationship to the earth, so also everything plant-like belongs to it. Just as every stone, every lifeless body, shows its relationship to the earth by being able to fall onto the earth, where it finds a resistance, so every plant shows its relationship to the earth by the direction of its stem, which is always such that it passes through the center of the earth. All stems of plants would cross at the earth's center if we extended them to that point. This means that the earth is able to draw out of its center all those force radiations that allow the plants to arise. If we look at the mineral realm without also adding the plant covering, we are looking only at an abstraction, at something thought out. We must also add that the natural science that proceeds purely out of the outer material likes to speak about how the origins of all life—including plant-life—must lie in the lifeless, the mineral element.

This issue does not exist at all for the spiritual investigator, because the lower is never a precondition for the higher; rather the higher, the living, is always the precondition for the lower, the nonliving. We will see later, in the lecture, What Has Geology to Say About the Origin of the World,² that spiritual research shows how everything rock-like, mineral—from granite to the crumb of soil in the field—originated in a manner similar to what natural science says today about the origin of coal. Today coal is a mineral, we dig it out of the earth. What was it millions of years ago according to natural scientific concepts? Extensive, mighty forests—so says natural science—covered large portions of the earth's surface at that time; later they sank into the earth during shifts of the earth's crust and were then transformed chemically in regard to their material composition, and what we dig up today out of the depths of the earth are the plants that have become stone. If this is admitted today in relation to coal, it should not be considered too ridiculous if spiritual science, by its methods, comes to the conclusion that all rocks found on our earth have in the final analysis originated from the plant. The plant first had to become stone, as it were. Thus the mineral is not the precondition for the plant-like, but rather the reverse is the case, the plant-like is the precondition for the mineral. Everything of a mineral nature is first something plant-like that hardens and then turns to stone.

Thus in the earth planet we have something before us concerning which we must presuppose the following: it was once, with respect to its densest quality, of a plant nature, was a structure of plant-like being, and only developed the lifeless out of what was living, progressively hardening, turning to wood, turning to stone. Just as our skeleton first separates itself out of the organism, so we have to look at the earth's rock formations as the great skeleton of the earth being, of the earth organism.

Now, if we are able to consider this earth organism from a spiritual scientific viewpoint, we can go still further. Today I can give only the first outlines of this, because this is a cycle of lectures in which one thing must lead to the next. We can ask ourselves, what is the situation with the earth organism as such?

In studying an organism we know that alternations of different conditions are revealed. The human and animal organ isms reveal a waking and a sleeping condition alternating in time. Can we, from a spiritual scientific viewpoint, find something similar regarding the body of the earth, the earth organism? To outer consideration, what follows may appear to be a mere comparison, but for spiritual research it is not a comparison but a fact. If we study the curious lawfulness of summer and winter, how it is summer on one half of the earth and winter on the other half, how this relationship alternates, and if we pay attention to how this lawfulness—as wintertime and summertime—is to be discerned in relation to all earthly life, then it will no longer appear absurd if spiritual science tells us that winter and summer in the earth organism correspond to waking and sleeping in the organisms around us. It is simply that the earth does not sleep in time in the same way as other organisms but is always awake somewhere and al ways asleep at some other portion of its being. Waking and sleeping move around spatially: the earth sleeps in the part where there is summer, and it is awake in the part of its being where there is winter. Thus the whole earth organism con fronts us spiritually with conditions like waking and sleeping in other organisms.

The summer condition of the earth organism consists of a very specific relationship of the earth to the sun, and because we are dealing with a living, spirit-filled organism we may say that it surrenders itself to an activity that proceeds spiritually from the sun. In the winter condition the earth organism closes itself off from this sun activity, drawing itself together into itself. Now let us compare this condition with human sleep. I will now speak of what appears to be a mere analogy; spiritual science, however, provides the evidence for these observations.

If we study the human being in the evening, when he is tired, as his consciousness is diminishing, we find that all thoughts and feelings that enter our soul during the day from the outside, all pleasure and suffering, joy and pain, sink into an indefinite darkness. During this time, the human spirit being—as we have shown in the lecture about the nature of sleep³—passes out of the human physical body and enters the spiritual world, surrendering itself to the spiritual world. In this sleep condition it is a curious fact that the human being becomes unconscious. For the spiritual investigator (we will see how he comes to know this) it is revealed that the inner aspect of the human being, the astral body and ego, actually draw themselves out of the physical and etheric bodies, but they do not simply draw themselves out and float over him like a cloud formation; rather this whole inner aspect of the human being spreads itself out, pours itself out over the whole planetary world around us. As incredible as it may seem, it is nevertheless revealed that the human soul pours itself out in a unified way over the astral realm. The investigators who were acquainted with this realm knew well why they called what departs from the physical the ‘astral body.’ The reason was that this inner element draws out of heavenly space, with which it forms a unity, the forces it needs in order to replace what the day's efforts and work used up from the physical body. Thus the human being in sleep passes into the great world and in the morning draws himself back within the limits of his skin, into the small human world, into the microcosm. There, because his body offers him resistance, he again feels his ego, his self-consciousness.

This breathing out and breathing in of the soul is a wonderful alternation in human life. Of all those who have not spoken directly from an occult, spiritual scientific point of view, I have actually found only one individual who made so fitting a remark about the alternation of waking and sleeping that it can be taken directly over into spiritual science, be cause it corresponds with spiritual scientific facts. It was a thoroughly mathematical thinker, a deeply thoughtful man, who was able to encompass nature magnificently with his spirit: Novalis. He says in his Fragments:

Sleep is a mixed condition of body and soul. In sleep, body and soul are chemically united. In sleep the soul is evenly distributed throughout the body—the human being is neutralized. Waking is a divided, a polar condition; in waking the soul is pointed, localized. Sleep is soul-digestion; the body digests the soul (removal of the soul stimulus). Waking is the condition of the soul stimulus influence: the body partakes of the soul. In sleep the bonds of this system are loosened; in waking they are tightened.

Thus sleep for Novalis means the digestion of the soul by the body. Novalis is always conscious that in sleep the soul becomes one with the universe and is digested, so that the human being can be further helped in the physical world.

With respect to his inner being, then, the human being alternates in such a way that in the daytime he draws himself together into the small world, into the limits of his skin, and then expands into the great world during the night, drawing forth through surrender forces from that world in which he is then imbedded. We will not understand the human being unless we understand him as formed out of the entire macrocosm.

For that part of the earth where it is summer, there is something similar to what goes on in the human being in the condition of sleep. The earth gives itself to everything that comes down from the sun and forms itself as it should form itself under the influence of the sun activity. In that part of the earth where it is winter, it closes itself off from the influence of the sun, lives within itself. There it is the same as when the human being has drawn together into the small, inner world, living in himself, while for the part of the earth where it is summer it is the same as when the human being is surrendered to the whole outer world.

There is a law in the spiritual world: if we direct our attention to spiritual entities far removed from one another—such as, for example, the human being here on one side and the earth organism on the other—the states of consciousness must be pictured as reversed in a certain sense. With the human being, stepping out into the great world is the sleep condition. For the earth, the summer (which one would be inclined to consider a waking condition) is something that can only be compared with the human being falling asleep. The human being steps out into the great world when he falls asleep; in summer the earth with all its forces enters the realm of sun activity, only we must be able to think of the earth and the sun as spirit-filled organisms.

In wintertime, when the earth rests within itself, we must be able to think of its condition as corresponding to the waking condition of the human being, although it may be tempting to consider winter as the earth's sleep. When we consider entities as different from one another as the human being and the earth, however, the states of consciousness appear re versed in a certain way. Now, what does the earth accomplish when it is under the influence of surrender to the sun being, to the sun spirit? To have an easier comparison, we would do well to turn the concepts around now. The earth's surrender to the sun being is simply something that may be compared spiritually with the condition of the human being when he awakens in the morning and emerges out of the dark womb of existence, out of the night, into his joys and sorrows. When the earth enters the realm of sun activity—although this could be compared with the sleep condition of the human being—all the forces that sprout forth from the earth allow the resting winter condition of the earth to pass over into the active, the living, summer condition.

What, then, are the plants in this whole web of existence? We could say that when spring approaches, the earth organ ism begins to think and to feel, because the sun with its being lures out the thoughts and feelings. The plants are nothing but a kind of sense organ for the earth organism, awakening anew every spring, so that the earth organism with its thinking and feeling can be in the realm of the sun activity. Just as in the human organism light creates the eye for itself in order to be able to manifest through the eye as ‘light,’ so every spring the sun organism creates for itself the plant covering in order to look at itself, to feel, to sense, to think by means of this plant covering. The plants cannot directly be considered the thoughts of the earth, but they are the organs through which the awakening organization of the earth in spring, together with the sun, develops its thoughts and feelings. Just as we can see our nerves emanating from the brain, developing our feeling and conceptual life through the eyes and ears together with the nerves, so the spiritual investigator sees in what transpires between earth and sun with the help of the plants the marvelous weaving of a cosmic world of thoughts, feelings, and sensations. The spiritual investigator finds that the earth is surrounded not merely by the mineral air of the earth, by the purely physical earth atmosphere, but by an aura of thoughts and feelings. For spiritual research the earth is a spiritual being whose thoughts and feelings awaken every spring, and throughout the summer they pass through the soul of our entire earth.

The plant world, however, which is a part of our entire earth organism, provides the organs through which our earth can think and feel. Woven into the spirit of the earth are the plants, just as our eyes and ears are woven into the activities of our spirit.

In spring a living, spirit-filled organism awakens, and in the plants we can see something that is pushed out of the countenance of our earth in some realm where it wants to begin to feel and think. Just as everything in the human being tends toward a self-conscious ego, so it is also in the realm of plants. The whole plant world belongs to the earth. I have already said that a person would be close to insanity if he did not think of how all feelings, sensations, and mental images are directed toward our ego. Similarly, everything the plants mediate during summertime is directed toward the earth's center, which is the earth ego. This should not be said merely symbolically! As the human being has his ego, so the earth has its self-conscious ego. That is why all plants strive toward the earth's center. That is why we may not consider plants by themselves but rather must consider them in interaction with the self-conscious ego of the earth. What unfolds itself as thoughts and sensations of the earth is similar to the thoughts and sensations that live in us, similar to whatever arises and disappears in us during our waking state, what lives in us astrally, if we speak from the viewpoint of spiritual science.

Thus we cannot picture the earth only as a physical structure, for the physical structure is for us something like our own physical body, which can be seen with the outer eyes and touched with the hands, and which is observed by outer science. This is the earth body that present-day astronomy or geology studies. Then we have to direct our attention to what in the human being we have come to know as the etheric body or life body. The earth also has such an etheric body, and it also has an astral body. This is what awakens every spring as the thoughts and feelings of the earth, which recede when winter approaches so that the earth rests in its own ego, closed off within itself, retaining only what it needs in order, through memory, to carry over the preceding into the following, retaining in the plant's seed forces what it has conquered for itself. Just as the human being, when he falls asleep, does not lose his thoughts and sensations but finds them again the next morning, so the earth, awakening again from sleep in the spring, finds the seed forces of the plants in order to permit what has been conquered in an earlier time to emerge again from the living memory of the seed forces.

When regarded in this way, the plants can be compared with our eyes and ears. What our senses are for us, the plants are for the earth organism. But what perceives, what achieves consciousness, is the spiritual world streaming down from the sun to the earth. This spiritual world would not be able to achieve consciousness if it did not have its sense organs in the plants, mediating a self-consciousness just as our eyes and ears and nerves mediate our self-consciousness. This makes us aware that we speak correctly only if we say that those beings who stream from the sun down to the earth, unfolding their spiritual activity, encounter from spring through summertime the being that belongs to the earth itself. In this exchange the organs are formed through which the earth perceives those beings, for the plants do not perceive. It is a superstition, shared also by natural science, when it is said that the plant perceives. The spiritual entities that belong to the earth activity and the sun activity perceive through the plant organs, and these entities direct toward the center of the earth all organs they need in order to unite them with the center of the earth. Thus what we have to see behind the plant covering are the spiritual entities that weave around the earth and have their organs in the plants.

It is remarkable that in our time natural science is actually moving toward a recognition of such spiritual scientific findings, for it is nothing less than full recognition of the situation to say that our physical earth is only a part of the whole earth, that the gaseous sun ball is only a part of the whole sun, and that our sun, as it appears to us physically, is only a part of the soul-spiritual entities who interact with the soul-spiritual entities of the earth. Just as the human world is connected with its environment, and just as human beings have their organs in order to live and to develop themselves, so these entities, which are real, create for themselves in the plant covering an organ in order to perceive themselves. As I said, it is superstitious to believe that the plant as such perceives or that the single plant has a kind of soul. This is just as superstitious as speaking of the soul of an eye. Although a remark able linking of facts, self-evident to spiritual science, impelled outer science throughout the nineteenth century to recognize what has just been said, it is nevertheless a fact that outer science does not know its way around very well in this realm; this is still so today, for what science has brought together so far about the sense life of plants completely sup ports what I have just said about the spirit and its activity in the realm of plants, but in outer science it cannot be comprehended as such. We can see this in the following example. In 1804 Sydenham Edward discovered the unusual plant called the Venus fly-trap, which has bristles on its leaves. When an insect comes near this plant so that contact with the bristles occurs, the insect is trapped by the leaf and then seemingly devoured and digested. It was remarkable when man discovered that plants can eat, can even take in animals, are meat eaters! But it was not known quite what to do with this, and this is interesting, because this discovery has repeatedly been forgotten and then rediscovered, in 1818 by Nuttal, in 1834 by Curtis, in 1848 by Lindley, and in 1859 by Oudemans. Five people in succession discovered the same thing! And science could not do much more with this discovery than for Schleiden, who made such a contribution to research of the plant world, to say that one should be on guard and not succumb to all kinds of mystical speculations attributing a soul to plants! Today, however, science is again prepared to attribute a soul to the individual plant, for example the Venus fly trap. This would be as superstitious as attributing a soul to the eye, however. Especially people such as Raoul France, for example, have immediately interpreted these things in an outer sense, saying, ‘There the soul element is evident, manifesting in a way analogous to the soul element of the animal!’

This shows how necessary it is, especially in the realm of spiritual science, not to succumb to all kinds of fantasies, for here outer science has succumbed to the fantasy that by attributing a soul nature to the Venus fly-trap, it can be thrown together with the human or animal soul nature. If this is done, a soul should also be attributed to other entities that attract small animals and, when these animals have come near, surround them with their tentacles so that they remain caught within. If one speaks of a soul in the Venus fly-trap, a soul can also be attributed to a mouse trap! We should not speak like this, however. As soon as there is the wish to penetrate into the spirit, things must be understood accurately and exactly, and one must not conclude from apparently similar outer qualities that the inner qualities work in the same way.

I have already directed attention to the fact that some animals exhibit something similar to memory. When an elephant is led to the drinking trough and on the way there someone irritates him, it can happen that when the elephant returns he has retained water in his trunk and sprays the person who irritated him earlier. It is said that here we can see that the elephant has a memory, that he remembered the person who irritated him and resolved: ‘On the way back I will spray him with water!’ But this is not the case. With the soul life it is important for us to follow the inner process exactly and not immediately to speak of memory when a later event occurs as an effect of an earlier cause. Only when a being truly looks back to something that took place at an earlier time do we have to do with memory; in every other case we are dealing only with cause and effect. This means that we would have to look exactly into the structure of the elephant's soul if we wished to see how the stimulus applied results in something that calls forth an effect after a certain time.

Therefore we must not interpret things such as what we encounter in the Venus fly-trap by thinking that the entire arrangement of the plant is there in order to determine an inner soul nature of the plant, but rather that what goes on there is brought about from outside. The plant serves as organ of the entire earth organism even in such a case. How the plants on the one hand pertain to the ego of the earth and on the other hand to the aura of the earth—the astral body, the earth's world of sensations and feelings—was shown particularly by this research in the nineteenth century. One can actually be grateful to those natural scientists—such as Gottlieb Haberlandt—who simply presented the facts they discovered in their research, and did not—like Raoul France or others—draw from these results purely outer conclusions. If the natural scientist were to present things as they really are, then one could be grateful to him; if he draws from them conclusions regarding the soul life of a single plant, however, then he should also immediately conclude something about the soul life of the single hair or tooth.

If we now study grain-producing plants, we discover remarkable little organs present in all these plants. Small structures in the starch cells are discovered. These cells are constructed in quite a remarkable way, so that within them there is something like a loose kernel. These structures have the unique property that the cell wall remains insensitive to the kernel at only one spot. If the kernel slips to another spot, it touches the cell wall, leading the plant to return to its earlier position. Such starch cells are found in all plants whose main orientation is toward the center of the earth, so that the plant has an organ within that always makes it possible for it to direct itself in its main orientation toward the center of the earth. This discovery, made during the nineteenth century by various scientists, is certainly wonderful, and it is most remarkable if it is simply presented as it is. Even if Haberlandt, for example, believes that this is a matter of a kind of sense perception by plants, he nevertheless presents the facts so clearly that one must be especially grateful for his dry and sober presentation.

But now let us turn to something else. If the leaf of a plant is studied, it is discovered that the outer surface is actually always a composite of many small, lens-like structures, similar to the lens in our eye. These ‘lenses’ are arranged in such a way that the light is effective only if it falls onto the surface of the leaf from a very specific direction. If it falls from another direction, the leaf instinctively begins to turn in such a way that the light can fall into the center of the lens, because when it falls to the side it works in another way. Thus there are organs for light on the surface of the leaves of plants. These light organs, which actually can be compared with a kind of eye, are spread out over the plants, but the plant does not see by means of them; rather the sun being looks through them to the earth being. These light organs bring it about that the leaves of the plant always have the tendency to place themselves perpendicularly to the sunlight.

In this—in the way the plant surrenders itself to the sun's activity in spring and summertime—we have the plant's second main orientation. The first orientation is that of the stem, through which the plants reveal themselves as belonging to the earth's self-consciousness; the second orientation is the one through which the plants express the earth's surrender to the activity of the sun beings.

If we now wished to go still further, we would have to find, if the previous considerations are correct, that through this surrender of the earth to the sun, the plants somehow ex press how the earth, through what it brings forth, really lives in the great macrocosm. We would have to perceive some thing in the plants, so to speak, which would indicate to us that something works into the plant world that is brought about outside especially by the sun being. Linnaeus pointed out that certain plants open their blossoms at 5 a.m. and at no other time. This means that the earth surrenders itself to the sun, which is expressed in the fact that certain plants are able to open their blossoms only at very specific times of the day; for example, Hemerocallis fulva, the day lily, blossoms only at 5 a.m.; Nymphaea alba, the water lily, only at 7 a.m., and Calendula, the marigold, only at 9 a.m. In this way we see a marvelous expression of the earth's relationship to the sun, a relationship that Linnaeus termed the ‘sun clock.’ The plant's falling asleep, the folding together of the petals, is also limited to very specific times of the day. A wonderful lawfulness and regularity is evident in the life of plants.

All of this shows us how the earth is surrendered—like the human being in sleep—to the great world, living within it. Just as it allows the plants to bloom and wilt, it shows us the spiritual weaving between sun and earth. Looking at matters in this way, however, we would have to say that we gaze there into deep, deep mysteries of our environment. For the serious seeker after truth, this puts a stop to the possibility—regardless of how fascinating the results of purely material research are—to think of the sun merely as a ball of gas racing through space; it puts a stop to the possibility that the earth can be considered as it is by astronomy and geology today. There are compelling reasons that must lead the conscientious natural scientist to admit the following: ‘In what natural science reveals, you may no longer see anything but an expression of the spiritual life lying at the foundation of everything!’ Then we regard the plants as a physiognomic expression of the earth, as the expression of the features of our earth. Thus what we call our aesthetic feeling in relation to the plant world deepens especially through spiritual science. We stand before the gigantic trees in the primeval forest, before the quiet violet or lily of the valley, and we look at them as single individualities, yes, but in such a way that we say, there the spirit that lives throughout space expresses it self to us—sun spirit! earth spirit! Just as we recognize in a human being the piety or impiety of his soul, so we can come to an impression, from what looks at us out of the plants, of what lives as earth spirit, as sun spirit, of how they battle with one another or are in harmony. There we feel ourselves as living and weaving within the spirit.

Just as an illustration of how spiritual science can be verified by the natural science of the nineteenth century, I will relate to you the following. Listeners who have heard lectures here in the past will recall how I have indicated that there are plants in the earthly world that are misplaced, that do not belong in our world. One such plant is mistletoe, which plays such a remarkable role in legends and myths, because it be longs to an earlier planetary condition of our earth and has remained behind as a remnant of a pre-earthly evolution. This is why it cannot grow on the earth but must take root in other plants. Natural science shows us that mistletoe does not have those curious starch cells that orient the plant toward the center of the earth. I could now begin briefly to take apart the entire botany of the nineteenth century bit by bit, and you will find little by little how the plant covering of our earth is the sense organ through which earth spirit and sun spirit behold each other.

If we pay heed to this, we receive a science—as seems appropriate for the plant world that we love and that gives us so much joy—a science that can at the same time raise our soul, bring it close to this plant world. With our soul and spirit we feel ourselves belonging to the earth and to the sun; we feel as if we had to look up to the plant world, as it were, we feel that it belongs to our great mother earth. We must do this. Everything that as animal or human being seems to be independent of the immediate effect of the sun is actually, through the plant world and its dependence on the plant world, indirectly dependent on the sun. The human being does not undergo the kinds of transformations that plants go through in winter and summer, but it is the plant that gives him the possibility of having such a constancy within himself. The substances that the plant develops can be developed only under the influence of the sun, through the interrelationship of sun spirit and earth spirit. The carbohydrates can arise only if the sun spirit and the earth spirit kiss through the plant being. The substances developed here yield what the higher organisms must take into themselves in order to develop warmth. The higher organisms can only thrive through the warmth developed by taking up the substances prepared by the sun via the plants.

Thus we must look to mother earth as to our great nourishing mother. We have seen, however, that in the plant covering we have the physiognomy of the plant spirit, and through this we feel as though standing in soul and spirit. We gaze, as it were—just as we gaze into the eyes of another person—into the soul of the earth, if we understand how it manifests its soul in the blossoms and leaves of the plant world.

This is what led Goethe to occupy himself with the plant world, which led him to an activity that consisted fundamentally of showing how the spirit is active in the plant world and how in the plant the leaf is formed out of the spirit in the most diverse forms. Goethe was delighted that the spirit in the plant forms the leaves, rounds them, and also leads them to wind around the stem. And it was remarkable when a man who truly recognized the spirit—Schiller, who met Goethe after a botanical lecture in Jena—when Schiller, who was not satisfied by the lecture, said, “That was just an observation of plants as they are in isolation!” whereupon Goethe took out a sheet of paper and sketched in his way, with a few lines, how for him the spirit is active in the plant. Schiller, who was un able to understand such a concrete presentation of the spirit of the plant, said in reply, “What you are drawing there is only an idea!” to which Goethe could only say, “Isn't it nice that I can have ideas without knowing it and can even see them with my own eyes!”

Especially in the way in which a man like Goethe studied the plant world on his journey over the Brenner—when he looked at the coltsfoot with completely different eyes—the way in which he saw in this how the spirit is active on the earth and forms the leaves, shows us how we can speak of a common spirit of the earth that brings itself to expression only in the manifold plant being as in his own special organ. What is physical is spirit; we simply have the task of pursuing the spirit always in the right way. Whoever pursues the plant as it grows out of the common spirit of the earth will find the earth spirit that Goethe already had in view when he let his Faust address the spirit active in the earth, who says of him self:

In Lebensfluten, in Tatensturm
Wall' ich auf and ab,
Webe hin and her!
Geburt and Grab,
Ein ewiges Meer,
Ein wechselnd Weben,
Ein gluhend Leben,
So Schaff ich am sausenden Webstuhl der Zeit
Und wirke der Gottheit lebendiges Kleid.

In the tides of life, in action's storm,
Up and down I wave,
To and fro weave free,
Birth and the grave,
An infinite sea,
A varied weaving,
A radiant living,
Thus at Time's humming loom it's my hand that prepares
The robe ever-living the Deity wears.

The person who beholds in this way the spirit in the plant life of the earth feels himself strengthened by seeing what he must consider his inner being poured out over the whole environment he is allowed to inhabit. And he must say to himself, “If I study what encircles my space, I find it confirmed that the origin of all things is to be found in the domain of the spirit.” And an expression of the relationship of human spirit and human soul, and also the relationship of plant soul and plant spirit, we can encompass in these words:

Die Dinge in den Raumesweiten,
Sie wandeln sich im Zeitenlauf.
Erkennend lebt die Menschenseele
Durch Raumesweiten unbegrenzt
Und unversehrt durch Zeitenlauf.
Sie findet in dem Geistgebiet
Des eignen Wesens tiefsten Grund.

To the sense of man there speak
The things in breadths of space
Transforming themselves in course of time.
Knowing lives the human soul
Unbounded by the breadths of space,
Unaltered by the course of time;
It finds in the realm of spirit
Its own being's deepest ground!

• 1. Berlin, November 10 and 17, 1910
• 2. Berlin, February 9, 1911.
• 3. Berlin, November 24, 1910.

Before I start with today’s topic, I would like to make you aware that today’s discussions are the beginning of a whole series of such discussions, and that basically all subsequent topics this winter could have precisely the same title as today’s topic. The path a human being must take if he wants to attain knowledge of the spiritual world will be explored in the course of the next lectures in relation to the most diverse phenomena of human and scientific life in general and to various cultural personalities of mankind.

Allow me to start with something personal, although this topic, this contemplation, must head, so to speak, in the direction of the most impersonal, most objective Spiritual Science. Yet the path into the spiritual world is such that it must lead through the most personal to the impersonal. Thus in spite of the impersonal, the personal will often be a symbolic feature of this path, and one gains the opportunity to point out many important things just by starting, so to speak, from the more intimate immediate experience. To the observer of the spiritual world many things in life will be symbolically more important than they initially seem to be. Much that might otherwise pass by the human eye, without particularly attracting attention, can appear to be deeply important to someone who wants to study intensely an observation such as the one that forms the basis for today’s examinations. And I can say that the following—which may at first seem like a trifle of life to you—belongs for me to the many unforgettable things on my path of life that on the one hand marked the longing of today’s human beings to truly ascend to the spiritual world. Yet on the other hand, they marked a more or less admitted impossibility of somehow gaining access to the spiritual world by means, that were not only provided by the present, but were also available in the past centuries, insofar as they were externally accessible to man.

I once sat in the cosy home of Herman Grimm. Those of you who are somewhat familiar with German intellectual life will associate much with the name of Herman Grimm. Perhaps you will know the spirited, important biographer of Michaelangelo and Raffael, and might also know, as it were, that the sum of education of our time, or at least of Central Europe, or let’s say it even more narrowly, of Germany, was united in the soul of Herman Grimm. During a conversation with him about Goethe, who was so close to his heart, and about Goethe’s view of the world, a small thing happened that belongs to the most unforgettable things on my path of life. In response to a remark I made—and we will see later how exactly this remark can be of importance in relation to the ascent of man into the spiritual world—Herman Grimm answered with a dismissive movement of his left hand. What lay in that gesture is what I consider, as it were, to be one of the unforgettable experiences on the path of my life. It was supposed to be in relation to Goethe, how Goethe wanted to find the way into the spiritual world in his own way.

In the course of these lectures we will have another talk about Goethe’s path into the spiritual world. Herman Grimm willingly followed Goethe’s pathways into the spiritual world, but in his own manner.

It was far from his mind to enter into a conversation about Goethe, in which Goethe would be seen as the representative of a human being who had really brought down spiritual realities—also as an artist— from the spiritual world and then undertook to embody them in his works of art. For Herman Grimm, it was much more obvious to say to himself: Alas, with the means that we as human beings have nowadays, we can only ascend to this spiritual world by way of fantasy. Although fantasy offers things that are beautiful, great and magnificent and are able to fill the human heart with warmth; but Knowledge, well-founded knowledge was not something that Herman Grimm, the intimate observer of Goethe, wanted to find in Goethe either. And when I said that Goethe’s whole fundamental nature is based on his willingness to embody the true in the beautiful, in the art, and then attempted to show that there are ways outside of fantasy, ways into the spiritual world that will lead you on more solid and firmer ground than fantasy—then it was not the rejection by someone who would not have liked to follow such a path. Herman Grimm did not use this gesture to express his rejection of such a path, but—in a way only those who knew him better would understand—he laid in it roughly the following: There may well be such a path, but we human beings cannot feel a calling to find out anything about it!

As I said, I do not wish to present this here as a personal matter in an importune way, yet it seems to me that just in such a gesture the position of the best human beings of our age towards the spiritual world is epitomised. Because later I had a long conversation with the same Hermann Grimm on a journey that led us both from Weimar to Tiefurt. There he explained how he had freed himself entirely of a purely materialistic view on world events, from the opinion that the human spirit, in the successive epochs, would produce out of itself that which constitutes the real soul-wealth of man. At that earlier time Herman Grimm talked about a great plan that was part of a piece of work that was never realised. Those of you who have occupied themselves with Herman Grimm will know that he intended to write a ‘History of the German fantasy’. He had envisaged the forces of fantasy to be like those of a goddess in the spiritual world who brings forth out of herself that which human beings create for the benefit of world progress. I would like to say: In that lovely region between Weimar and Tiefurt, when I heard these words from a man, whom I, after all, acknowledge as one of the greatest minds of our time, I had a feeling that I would like to express in these words; ‘Today, many people say to themselves: One must be deeply dissatisfied with everything that external science is able to say about the sources of life, about the secret of existence, about world riddles—but the possibility to step powerfully into another world is missing.’

There is a lack of intensity of willingness to realise that this world of spiritual life is different from what man imagines in his fantasy. Many enjoy going into the realm of fantasy, because for them it is the only spiritual realm that exists. About 17 years ago, on the journey to Tiefurt, I met Herman Grimm, who already through his scriptures and many, many other things, had made an impression on me. Facing this personality I remembered just then that, 30 years ago, I had glanced at just the passage in one of Grimm’s Goethe lectures,¹ which he had held in the winter of 1874/75 in Berlin, and where, with reference to Goethe, he spoke of the kind of impression that a purely external study of nature, devoid of spirit, must make on a spirit like his own. Already 30 years earlier Herman Grimm appeared to me to be the kind of human being whom all feelings and emotions urge upwards into the spiritual world, but who, unable to find the spiritual world as a reality, can only perceive it in its weaving and workings as a fantasy. And on the other hand—just because he was like this—he did not want to acknowledge that Goethe himself searched for the sources and riddles of existence in a different realm, not just in the realm of fantasy, but in the realm of spiritual reality.

There is a passage where Herman Grimm speaks about something that must affect our souls today, at the beginning of our contemplations. This passage refers to something which, as I have already indicated, and although its importance cannot be denied by Spiritual Science, is regarded as an impossibility by natural science—or by a worldview that claims to stand on the firm ground of natural science. It is an impossibility not only for feeling and emotion but also for a realisation that truly understands itself. What I mean is the Kant-Laplace theory that explains our solar system as if it were made up only of lifeless, inorganic substances and forces, and as if it had clenched itself out of a giant gas ball. I would like to read to you the passage from Herman Grimm’s Goethe lectures that shows you what this world-view, which is so fascinating, so deeply impressive today, meant for a spirit like Herman Grimm’s:

As much as Goethe here prohibits reason to accept as truth more than one can indeed grasp with the five fingers of a hand, the more he grants license to the poet’s fantasy, to create out of an unconscious, dreaming force pictures of what the spirit wishes to behold. However, he sharply upholds the boundaries between both of these activities. A long time ago, already in his youth, the great Kant-Laplace fantasy about the origin and the future downfall of the globe, had gained ground. Out of the primeval, cosmic, in itself rotating world-nebula—the children learn this at school already—the central drop of gaseous matter forms itself, which later becomes the Earth and, as a solidifying ball in incomprehensible periods of time, goes through all phases including the episode of mankind’s habitation. This ball will finally crash back into the sun as burnt out slag: This is a long, but completely comprehensible process for the audience, that does not require any further external intervention for its implementation apart from the endeavour by some outside power to maintain a constant heating temperature on the Sun.

There cannot be imagined a more futile perspective for the future than the one that is being imposed on us today in this expectation as a scientific necessity. A carrion bone, around which a hungry dog made a detour, would be a more refreshing appetising piece in comparison to this latests excrement of creation—the form in which our Earth would finally pass to the Sun again. The inquisitiveness with which our generation embraces such things and thinks it believes them, is a sign of a sick imagination. Scientists of future epochs will use a lot of astuteness to explain it as a historical phenomenon of the time.

I felt it was necessary to point out such a quote, as basically it is rarely done these days. Today, when the concepts of these world-views have such a fascinating effect, and when they seem to be based so solidly on natural science, little reference is made to the fact that there are, after all, spirits who are deeply connected to the cultural life of our time, and yet relate in such a way out of their whole soul make-up to something about which countless people now say: It is obvious that things are like that, and anyone who does not concede that they are like that is really a simpleton! Yes, already today we see many people who feel the deepest longing to forge links between the soul of man and the spiritual world. But on the other side, we see only a few outside of those circles that are more deeply engaged with what we call Spiritual Science, who are busying themselves with means that could lead the human soul to what could after all be called the land of its longings.

Therefore, when we speak today about ways that are to lead man into the spiritual world, and speak so that what we say applies not only to a tight circle, but is addressed to all those who are equipped with a contemporary education, we still encounter strong resistance in a certain respect. Not only is it possible that what will be presented is regarded as daydreaming and fantasy, but it may also easily annoy many people of the present. It can actually be an annoyance to them because it deviates so much from those ideas that are currently considered valid in the widest circles, and which are the suggestive and fascinating imaginations of people who consider themselves to be the most educated.

In the first lecture it was already hinted at that the ascent into the spiritual world is basically an intimate affair of the soul and is in stark contrast to what is common for the imaginative and emotional life both in popular and scientific circles. Namely a scientist easily makes the demand that to be valid as science today, something has to be verifiable at any time and for anyone. And he will then also refer to his external experiment that can be proven anytime to anyone. It goes without saying that this demand can not be met by Spiritual Science. We are about to see why not. Spiritual Science here means a science that does not speak about the spirit as a sum of abstract terms and concepts, but as something real and of real entities. Spiritual Science therefore must contravene the methodical demands that are currently so easily established by science and world-views: to be verifiable anywhere and at all times by anyone. Spiritual Science very often encounters resistance in popular circles for the reason that in our time, even where there is an inner longing to ascend to the spiritual world, feelings and emotions are penetrated and permeated by a materialistic view.

Even with the best intentions, even if one yearns for the spiritual world, one cannot help but imagine the spirit as in some way material again, or at least imagine the ascent into the spiritual world as somehow connected to something material. That is why most people may prefer that you talk to them about purely external matters, like what they should eat or drink or shouldn’t eat and drink, or what else they should undertake purely externally in the material world. They would much rather do this than be asked to introduce intimate moments of development into their souls. But that is exactly what ascending into the spiritual world is all about.

We now want to try to map out—entirely in line with Spiritual Science’s own view—how this ascent of a human soul into the spiritual world can happen. The starting point must always be a person’s current life situation. A human being, as he is placed in our present world, lives completely and firmly in the external sensory world. Let’s try to become clear about how much would remain in a human soul, if one would disregard the concepts that the outer sense perceptions of the physical world have ignited within us, and that which has entered into us through the outer physical experiences, through eyes and ears and the other senses. And disregard that which is stimulated of sufferings and joys, of pleasure and pain within us through our eyes and ears, and what our rational mind has then combined from these impressions of the sensory world. Try to eliminate all of this from the soul, imagine it away, and then ponder what would be left behind. People who honestly undertake this simple self-observation will find that extremely little will remain, especially in the souls of people of the present time. And it is just so that initially the ascent into the spiritual world cannot proceed from something that is given to us by the external sensory world—it has to be undertaken so that a human being develops forces within his soul, which ordinarily lie dormant in it. It is, so to speak, a basic element for all possibilities of ascent into the Spiritual world, that a person becomes aware that he is capable of inner development, that there is something else in him than what he is initially able to survey with his consciousness.

Today, this is actually an annoying concept for many people. Let’s take a very special person with a contemporary education, for example, what does a philosopher nowadays do, when he wants to establish the full meaning and the nature of Knowledge? Someone like this will say: ‘I will try to establish how far in general we can get with our thinking, with our human soul forces, what we can comprehend of this world.’ He is attempting in his own way—depending on what is momentarily possible for him—to comprehend a world view and to place it before him, and usually he will then say, ‘We simply cannot know anything else, because it is beyond the limits of human knowledge.’ Really this is the most widespread phrase that can be found in today’s literature: ‘We cannot know this!’

However, there is a another standpoint that works in a completely different way from the one just described, by saying: ‘Certainly, with the forces I have now in my soul, which are now probably the normal human soul forces, I can recognise this or that, but here in this soul is a being capable of development. This soul may have forces within it that I first have to extrapolate. I first have to lead it along certain pathways, must lead it beyond its current point of view, and then I will see whether it could have been my fault when I said that this or that is beyond the limit of our knowledge. Perhaps I just need to go a little further in the development of my soul, and then the boundaries will expand and I will be able to penetrate more deeply into things.

In making judgments, one does not always take logic seriously, otherwise one would say: ‘What we can recognise depends on our organs.’ For this reason, someone who is born blind cannot judge colours. He would only be able to do so, if through a fortunate operation he were to become capable of seeing colours.

Likewise it may be possible—I do not wish to speak of a sixth sense here, but of something that can be brought forth from the soul in a purely spiritual way—that spirit eyes and spirit ears can be brought forth from our soul. Then the great event could happen for us—which occurs at a lower level when the one born blind is so lucky to be operated on—so that then for us the initial assumption could become a truth: Around us is a spiritual world, but to be able to look into it, we first have to awaken the organs within us. This would be the only logical thing to do. But, as I said, we do not always take logic very seriously, because people in our time have very different needs than finding their way into the spiritual world when they hear about it. I have already told you that once, when I had to give a lecture in a city in southern Germany, a courageous person, who wrote feature articles, opened his article with the words; ‘The most obvious thing about theosophy is its incomprehensibility.’ We like to believe this man that for him theosophy’s most outstanding characteristic is its incomprehensibility. But is this in any way a criterion? Let’s apply this example to mathematics about which someone would say: ‘What I notice most about mathematics is its incomprehensibility.’ Then everyone would say: ‘Quite certainly, this is possible, but then, if he wants to write feature articles, he should be so good and learn something first!’ Often it would be better to transfer what is valid for one particular subject and apply it correctly to another.

So people have nothing left to do than either to deny that there is a development of the soul—and they can only do this by speaking a word of power—namely, when they refuse to go through such a development, or, alternatively they can immerse themselves into the development of their soul. Then the spiritual world becomes for them an observation, reality, truth. But in order to ascend into the spiritual world, the soul must become capable—not for physical life, but for the realisation of the spiritual world—of completely transforming itself in a certain relation to the form it initially has, and in a certain way becoming a different being.

This could already make us aware of something that has been emphasised repeatedly here, namely, that someone who feels the urge to ascend into the spiritual world, must first and foremost make it clear for himself time and again whether he has gained a firm foothold in this world of physical reality and whether he is able to stand firm here. We have to maintain certainty, volition and sentience in all circumstances that take place in the physical world. We must not lose the ground beneath our feet if we want to ascend from this world into the spiritual one. Doing anything that can lead our character to stand firm in the physical world is a preliminary stage. Then it is a matter of bringing the soul to a different kind of feeling and willing for the spiritual world, than the feeling and willing in the soul normally are. The soul must become, as it were, inwardly a different feeling and willing organism than it is in normal life. This brings us to that which can, on the one hand, initially really place Spiritual Science in a kind of opposition to what is recognised as ‘science’ today. On the other hand, it places Spiritual Science yet again directly next to this science with the same validity that external science has. When it is said that everything that is supposed to be science, needs to be at any time and by anyone verifiable, then, what is meant by this is that what is deemed to be science must not be dependent on our subjectivity, on our subjective feelings, on any decisions of will, will impulses, feelings and emotions that we only carry individually within ourselves. Now, someone who wants to ascend into the spiritual world, must first take a detour through his innermost soul, must reorganise his soul; at first he must completely turn his gaze away from what is outside in the physical world. Normally, a human being only turns away from looking at what is within the physical world when he is asleep. Then he does not let anything enter into his soul through his eyes, his ears, nor through the entire organisation of his senses. But for that he also becomes unconscious and is not able to live consciously in a spiritual world.

It has now been said that it is one of the basic elements of spiritual realisation for a human being to find within oneself the possibility to go beyond oneself. However, this means nothing else than to first let the spirit become effective within oneself. In today’s ordinary human life we all know only one kind of turning away from the physical world, namely when we enter into the unconsciousness of sleep. The contemplation of The Nature of Sleep ² has shown us that a human being is in a real spiritual world during sleep, even if he knows nothing about it. For it would be absurd to believe that a person’s soul-centre and spirit-centre disappears in the evening and newly comes into being in the morning. No, in reality, it outlasts the stages from falling asleep to awakening. However, what for a normal person today is the inner strength to be conscious—even if there is no stimulation of consciousness through sense impressions or through the work of the rational mind —is missing in sleep. The soul life is so turned down during sleep, that the person is unable to kindle or awaken what allows the soul to experience itself inwardly. When the human being wakes up again, events from the outside enter. And because a soul content is gifted to the human being in this way, he becomes conscious of himself by means of this soul content. He is not able to become conscious of himself if he is not stimulated externally, because his human strength is too weak for this, when he is left to himself in his sleep.

Hence the ascent into the spiritual world means an arousal of such forces within our soul that enable it, as it were, to truly live consciously within itself, when it becomes, in relation to the external world like a human being who is asleep. Basically, the ascent into the spiritual worlds demands a spurring on of internal energies, an extraction of forces that are otherwise asleep, that are, as it were, paralysed within the soul, so that man cannot handle them at all. All those intimate experiences that a spiritual researcher must experience in his soul, ultimately aim at what has just been characterised. And today, I would like to summarise something for you about the path that leads upwards into the spiritual world. This has been presented in detail by element, so to speak, by their rudiments, in my book published under the title: How to attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds? ³ But today, I do not want to repeat myself by just presenting you an excerpt from this book. Instead, I wish to approach the issue from a different side, that is what the soul must do with itself to rise up to the spiritual world. One who is interested in this more deeply, can read the details in the book mentioned above. However, no one should think that what was presented in detail there can be summarised here in the same words and sentences. Those who are familiar with the book will not find that it is a summary of what has been said there, but a description of the topic from a different angle.

For a spiritual researcher who wants to direct his steps into the spiritual world, it is extremely important that much of what would lead other people directly to a realisation and a goal becomes for him simply a means of education, an intimate means of education of the soul. Let me illustrate this with an example. Many years ago I wrote a book, The Philosophy of Freedom. As it is out of stock since years, it is currently not available, but hopefully a second edition will appear in the near future.⁴ This Philosophy of Freedom was conceived in such a way that it is quite different from other philosophical books of the present time, which more or less aim by what is written to share something about how things are in the world or how they must be according to the ideas of the authors. However, this is not the immediate aim of this book. Rather, it is intended to give someone who engages with the thoughts presented there a kind of workout for his thoughts, so that the kind of thinking, the special way to devoting oneself to these thoughts is one in which the emotions and feelings of the soul are set in motion—just as in gymnastics the limbs are exercised, if I may use this comparison. What is otherwise only a method of gaining insight, is in this book at the same time a means of spiritual-soul self-education. This is extraordinarily important. Of course this is annoying for many philosophers of the present time, who associate something quite different with philosophy than that which may help a human being to progress a little further—because, if possible, he should remain as he is, with his normal innate capacity to gain knowledge. Therefore, in regard to this book it is not so important to be able to argue about this or that, or if something can be understood one way or another, but what really matters is that the thoughts which are connected as one organism, are able to school our soul and help it to make a bit of progress.

This is also the case with my book Truth and Science. And so it is with many things that are initially supposed to be basic elements to train the soul to rise up into the spiritual world. Mathematics and geometry teach man knowledge of triangles, quadrangles and other figures. But why do they teach all this? So that man can gain knowledge about how things are within space, which laws they are subject to and so on. Essentially, the spiritual ascent to the higher worlds works with similar figures as symbols. For instance, it places the symbol of a triangle, a quadrangle or another symbolic figure before a student, but not so that he will win immediate insights through them, as he can acquire these also by other means. Instead, with the symbols he receives the opportunity to train his spiritual abilities so that the spirit, supported by the impression he gains from the symbolic pictures, ascends into a Higher World. Thus it is about mental training, or, do not misunderstand me, it is about mental gymnastics. Therefore, much of what is dry external science, dry external philosophy, what is mathematics or geometry, becomes a living symbol for the spiritual training that leads us upwards into the spiritual world. If we have let this affect our soul, then we will learn to understand what basically no external science understands, that the ancient Pythagoreans, under the influence of their great teacher Pythagoras, spoke of the universe being made up of numbers because they focussed on the inner laws of numbers. Now let us look at how we encounter numbers everywhere in the world. Nothing is easier than to refute Spiritual Science or Anthroposophy, because from a standpoint, imagined to be superior, one can easily say: There are these Spiritual Scientists again, coming out of their mystic ⁵ darkness with numerical symbolism and say that there is an inner regularity of numbers, and, for example, one has to consider the true foundation of human nature according to the number seven. But something similar was meant also by Pythagoras and his students, when they talked about the inner regularity of numbers. If we allow those marvellous connections, which lie in the relationships between numbers, to affect our spirit then we can train it in such a way that it wakes up when it would otherwise be asleep and develops stronger forces within itself to penetrate into the spiritual world.

Thus it is a schooling through another kind of science. It is also what is actually called the study of someone, who wants to enter deeply into the spiritual world. And for someone like this, gradually everything that for other people is a harsh reality, becomes more or less an external allegory, a symbol. If a human being is able to let these symbols have an effect on him, then he is not only freeing his spirit from the outer physical world, but also imbues his spirit with strong forces, so that the soul can be conscious of itself, even when there is no external stimulation. I have already mentioned that if someone lets a symbol like the Rosy Cross affect him, he can feel an impulse to ascend into the spiritual world. We imagine a Rosy Cross as a simple black cross with seven red roses attached in a circle at the crossing of the beams.

What should it tell us? One who allows it to have an effect on his soul in the right way will imagine: For example, I look at a plant; I say of this plant that it is an imperfect being. Next to it I place a human being, who in his nature is a more perfect being, but even only in his nature. For if I look at the plant, I have to say: In it I encounter a material being which is not permeated by passions, desires, instincts, that bring it down from the height where it otherwise could stand. The plant has its innate laws, which it follows from leaf to flower to fruit; it stands there without desires, chaste.

Beside him lives the human being, who certainly by his nature is a higher being, but who is permeated by desires, instincts, passions through which he can stray from his strict regularity. He first has to overcome something within himself, if he wants to follow his own inner laws as a plant follows its innate laws. Now the human being can say to himself; The expression of desires, of instincts in me is the red blood. In a certain way, I can compare it with chlorophyll, the chaste plant sap in the red rose, and can say: If man becomes so strong within himself that the red blood is no longer an expression of what pushes him down below himself, but of what lifts him above himself—when it becomes the expression of such a chaste being like the plant sap, which has turned into the red of a rose, or in other words; when the red of the rose expresses the pure inwardness, the purified nature of a human being in his blood, then I have before me the ideal of what man, by overcoming the outer nature, can achieve and which presents itself to me under the symbol of the black cross, the charred wood. And the red of the rose symbolises the higher life that awakens when the red blood has become the chaste expression of the purified, instinctive nature of man, which has overcome itself.

If one does not let what is depicted be an abstract concept, then it becomes a vividly felt evolutionary idea. Then a whole world of feelings and emotions comes to life within us; we will feel within ourselves a development from an imperfect to a more perfect state. We sense that development is something quite different from the abstract thing that external science provides us with in the sense of a purely external Darwinism. Here, development becomes something that cuts deep into our heart, that pervades us with warmth, with soul-warmth—it becomes a force within us that carries and holds us. It is only through such inner experiences that the soul becomes capable of developing strong forces within itself, so that it can illuminate itself with consciousness in its innermost being—in the being that otherwise becomes unconscious when it withdraws from the external world.

It is of course child’s play to say; ‘Then you recommend an idea of something completely imaginary, of something entirely made up. But only those concepts which are reproductions of external ideas are valuable, and an idea of the Rose Cross has no external counter-image.’ But the point is not that the concepts we use to school our souls are reflections of an external reality, instead it is about concepts that are strength-awakening for our soul and that draw out of the soul what lies hidden within it.

When the human soul is dedicated to such pictorial ideas, when, so to speak, everything that it normally values as reality now becomes a cause for pictures that are not arbitrarily retrieved from fantasy, but are inspired by reality, just like the symbol of the Rosy Cross, then we say: The human being makes an effort to move upwards to the first stage of knowledge of the spiritual world. This is the stage of ‘Imaginative Knowledge’ that leads us above and beyond what is immediately concerned with the physical world only.

Hence, a human being who wishes to ascend into the spiritual world works in his soul with very particular concepts in a precisely determined way, to let the otherwise external reality affect him. He works in this soul itself. When the human being has worked in this way for some time, then it will be so that the external scientists can tell him: This has only a subjective, only an individual value for you. But this external scientist does not know that when the soul undergoes such a serious, regular training, there exists a stage of inner development when the possibility for the soul to express subjective feelings and emotions ceases completely. Then the soul arrives at a point where it must tell itself: Now concepts arise within me that I encounter like I normally meet trees and rock, rivers and mountains, plants and animals of the outer world that are as real as otherwise only external physical things are, and to which my subjectivity can neither add anything to them nor can it take anything away from them.

So there actually exists an intermediate state for everyone who wants to ascend into the spiritual world, where man is subject to the danger of carrying his subjectivity, which is only valid for himself, into the spiritual world. But man must pass through this intermediate state, for then he reaches a stage where what the soul is experiencing becomes as objectively verifiable—to anyone with the ability to do so—as all things in the outer physical reality. Because, after all, the principle that applies to external science—for something to be regarded as scientifically valid it must be verifiable at any time by anyone—also applies only to one who is sufficiently prepared for this. Or do you believe that you would be able to teach ‘the law of corresponding boiling temperatures’ to an eight-year-old child? I doubt it. You will not even be able to teach him the theorem of Pythagoras. Thus it is already bound to the basic principle that the human soul must be appropriately prepared if one wants to prove something to it.

And just as one must be prepared to understand the theorem of Pythagoras—even though it is possible for everyone to understand it—one must be prepared through a certain soul exercise if one wants to experience or realise this or that in the spiritual world. However, what can be realised, can then be experienced and observed in the same way by anyone who is appropriately prepared. Or, when messages are conveyed from observations of Spiritual Science by those who have prepared their soul for this, such as, that a particular man is able to look back on repeated Earth lives so that these become a fact for him, then it is likely that people will come and say; ‘There he brings us some dogmas again and demands that we should believe in these!’ Yet a spiritual researcher does not approach his contemporaries with his realisations so that people should believe them.

People who believe that we speak about dogmas, should ask themselves, is the fact that a whale exists a dogma for someone who has never seen one? Certainly, it is explainable in this way: A whale is a dogma for someone who has never seen one. Yet spiritual research does not approach the world with messages alone. Neither does it do so when it understands itself; instead it clothes what it brings down from the higher worlds in logical forms. These are exactly the same logical forms with which the other sciences are permeated. Then anyone will be able to verify, by applying a healthy sense of truth and unbiased logic, whether what the spiritual researcher has said is right. It has always been said that a schooling of the soul is necessary for someone wanting to explore spiritual facts by self-searching, whereby the soul must have gone through what is now being described here. But to understand what is being communicated, all you need is a healthy sense of truth and unbiased logic.

Now, if the spiritual researcher has allowed such symbolic terms and pictures to affect his soul for a while, he will notice that his feeling and emotional life becomes completely different from what it was before.

What is the feeling and emotional life of man in the ordinary world like? Nowadays it actually has become somewhat trivial to use the expression ‘egoistic’ everywhere, and to say that people in their normal life are egoistic. I do not want to express it in this way, but prefer to say: In their normal lives people are at first closely tied to their human personality, for example, when something pleases us, yes, especially in relation to things which we enjoy of the noblest spiritual creations, things of art and beauty. The saying, there is no accounting for taste, already expresses that much is connected to our personality and depends upon our subjective stance towards things. Check how everything that can please you is related to your upbringing, in which place in the world, in which profession your personality is placed, and so on, in order to see how feelings and emotions are closely connected to our personality. But when one does exercises of the soul, like the ones described, one notices how feelings and emotions will become completely impersonal. It is a great and tremendous experience when the moment arrives in which our feeling and our emotional life becomes, so to speak, impersonal. This moment comes, it certainly comes, when a human being on his spiritual path, inspired by those who undertake his spiritual guidance, allows the following things to really affect his soul. I will now list some of these things that will affect our whole feeling and emotional life in an educational way if someone allows them to work on his soul for weeks, or months.

The following can be considered. We focus our attention on what we find at the centre of philosophical observations, on the spiritual centre of the human being, the Ego—if we have learned to rise to the concept of Ego—which accompanies all our ideas, the mysterious centre of all experience. And if we continue to further the respect, this reverence and this devotion, which can connect to the fact, that for many is certainly not a fact but a figment of the imagination,—that there is an Ego living within us!—if this becomes the greatest, the most momentous experience to keep telling yourself that this ‘I am’ is the most essential of the human soul, then mighty, strong feelings develop in relation to the ‘I am’, which are impersonal. These lead directly to an insight into how all of the world’s secrets and mysteries that float around us are concentrated, as it were, in a single point—the Ego-point— to comprehend the human being from this Ego-point. For example, the poet Jean Paul ⁶ talks about becoming conscious of the Ego in his biography:

“I will never forget what manifested in me, which I have never told anyone about, whereby I stood at the birth of my self-consciousness, and of which I can tell at which place and at what time it happened. One morning, when I was a very young child, I stood under the front entrance and looked left at the woodshed, when suddenly the inner vision—I am an I—flashed before me like a bolt of lightning from the sky and since then has remained shining; there my Ego had seen itself for the first time and forever. Memory errors are hardly imaginable here, and since there was no extraneous retelling, nothing could be added and mixed into the narrative about an occurrence which took place only within the veiled inner sanctum of a human being—only the novelty lent permanence to these everyday, incidental circumstances.

It is already quite a lot to feel the devotion for the concentrated crowdedness of the world-being at one point, with all the shivers of awe and with all the feelings for the greatness of this fact. Yet, when a human being feels this time after time and allows it to affect him—although it will not enlighten him in regard to all the riddles of the world—it can give him a direction entirely focussed on the impersonal and the innermost human nature.

Thus we educate our emotional and our feeling life by relating it to our Ego-beingness. And when we have done this for a while, then we can focus our feelings and emotions in a different direction and can tell ourselves; this Ego within us is connected to everything we think, feel and perceive, with our entire soul life, it glows and shines through our soul life. We can then study human nature with the Ego as the centre point of thinking, feeling and willing, without taking ourselves into consideration or getting personal. The human being becomes a mystery to us, not we to ourselves, and our feelings expand from the Ego across to the soul. We can then transition to a different kind of feeling. In particular, we can acquire this beautiful feeling without which we are not able to lead our soul further into spiritual knowledge—this is what one would like to call it: The feeling that in each thing we encounter, as it were, an access to something infinite opens up for us. If we let this appear before our soul again and again, then it is the most wonderful feeling. It can be there when we go outside and look at a wonderful nature spectacle: cloud-covered mountains with thunder and lightning. This works greatly and forcefully on our soul. But then we must learn not only to see what is great and powerful there, but we may take a single leaf, look at it carefully with all its ribs and all the wonderful things that are part of it, and we will be able to perceive the greatness and might that reveals itself as something infinite in the smallest leaf, and we will hear and feel as if we were at the greatest spectacle of nature. It may appear to be strange, yet there is something to it, and afterwards one must express oneself grotesquely; it may make a great impression when a human being witnesses a glowing lava flow ejected from the Earth. But then, let us imagine someone looks at warm milk or the most ordinary coffee, and sees there how small crater-like structures form and a similar scenario unfolds on a small scale. Everywhere, in the smallest and in the greatest is access to an infinity.

And if we steadily keep researching, even if so much has been revealed to us, there is still something more under the cover, which perhaps we may have explored on the surface. So right now we are sensing what may result in a revelation of something intensely infinite at any point in the universe.

This imbues our soul with feelings and emotions that are necessary for us, if we want to attain what Goethe has called ‘spirit eyes’ and ‘spirit ears’.⁷ In short, it is a realisation of our feeling life, which is usually the most subjective to the point where we feel ourselves as if we were merely a setting where something is happening—where we no longer consider our feelings to be part of us. Our personality has been silenced. It is almost as if we were painters and stretching a canvas and painting a picture on it. Hence, when we train ourselves in this way, we stretch our soul and allow the spiritual world to paint on it. One feels this from a certain point in time onwards. Then it is only necessary to understand oneself, and in order to recognise what the world essentially is, it is necessary to consider a particular stage in the life of the soul as solely and only decisive.

So indeed what a human being acquires in ardent soul striving becomes the deciding of truth. It is in the soul itself where the decision must be made if something is true or not. Nothing external can decide, but the human being, by going beyond himself, must find within himself the authority to behold or discover the truth. Yes, basically we can say; in this regard we cannot be entirely different from all other human beings. Other people search for objective criteria, for something that provides us with a confirmation of truth from the outside. Yet a spiritual researcher searches within for confirmation of the truth. Thus he does the opposite. If this were the case, one could say in pretence; ‘Things are not looking too good when Spiritual Scientists in their confusion want to turn the world on its head.’ Yet in reality natural scientists and philosophers don’t do anything different from what spiritual researchers are doing, they only do not know that they are doing it. I will provide you with proof of this, taken from the immediate present.

At the last conference of natural scientists, Oswald Külpe ⁸ gave a talk about the relationship of natural science to philosophy. There he came up with the idea that the human being, by looking into the sensory world and perceiving it as sound, colour, warmth and so forth, only has subjective qualities. This is only a slightly different slant from what Schopenhauer said; ‘The world is our conception.’ But Oswald Külpe points out that what we perceive with our external senses, in short, everything that appears to be pictorial is subjective. And in contrast to this, what physics and chemistry say—pressure, the forces of attraction and repulsion, resistance and so on—must be characterised as objective. So in this way we partly have to deal with something purely subjective in our world-views, and partly with something that is objective such as pressure, forces of attraction and repulsion.

I do not want to go further into the criticism that has been voiced, but only want to address the mindset. It seems so terribly easy for a contemporary epistemologist to prove that because we cannot see without our eyes, light could only be something produced by our eyes. But what happens in the external world, it is said, when one ball hits another, those forces which cause resistance, pressure and so on, must be shifted into the outer world, into space. Why do people think that? At a particular point Oswald Külpe gives this away very clearly when he speaks about sensory perceptions—because he regards these as pictures, he says; ‘They cannot push or attract each other, neither can they pressure nor warm each other. They cannot have such and such large distance in space that would allow them to send light through space at such and such speed, nor can they be arranged as a chemist would arrange elements. Why does he say this of sensory perceptions? Because he sees sensory perceptions as pictures that are brought about solely by our senses.

Now I want to present a simple thought to you, to illustrate that the pictorial nature does not change anything. Things do push against or attract one another. When Mr Külpe now observes the sensory perceptions, this world—which supposedly could neither attract nor repel—simply does not face Mr Oswald Külpe as reality, but as a mirror image. Then he really has pictures in front of him. But push, pressure, resistance and anything that is placed into this world as different from sensory perceptions, will in no other way be objectively explained than through the pictorial nature of the sense perceptions. Why is this so? Because when the human being perceives pressure, push and so on, he turns what lives within the things, into sensations of the things. Man should study, for example, that when he says that one billiard ball hits another, what he experiences as the impact force is what he himself puts into these things! And someone who is standing on the ground of Spiritual Science, is not doing anything else. He makes what lives in the soul the criterion for expressing the world. There is no other principle of knowledge than that which can be found through the development of the soul itself. So the others do the same as the spiritual research. But only spiritual research is aware of this. The others do it unconsciously, they have no idea that they do the same at an elementary level. They just remain standing on the very first level and deny what they themselves are doing. Therefore we are allowed to say, Spiritual Science is in no way contrary to other research on the truth: the other researchers do the same, yet they take the first step without knowing about it, while spiritual research consciously takes the steps as far as a particular human soul can take according to its level of development.

Once it has been achieved that our feelings have, in a certain way, become objective, then, what I have already indicated will even more certainly come about, as it is a necessary pre-requisite for progress into the spiritual worlds. This is that man learns to comprehend how to live in the world in such a way that the weaving and living of an all-encompassing spiritual regularity within the spiritual world is presupposed. In daily life man is far removed from such a way of thinking. He gets angry when something happens to him that he doesn’t like. This is quite understandable as a different standpoint must be hard won. This other standpoint consists in saying; we have come from a former life, we have placed ourselves into the situation in which we are now, and have led ourselves to what is now facing us out of the lap of the future. What approaches us there corresponds to a strictly objective spiritual regularity. We accept it, because it would be an absurdity not to accept it. What approaches us from the lap of the spiritual worlds, whether the world admonishes us or praises us, whether joyful or tragic things happen to us, we will accept it as wisdom-filled experience and interweaving of the world. This is something that slowly and gradually must become once more the whole basic principle of our being. When it does, our will begins to be schooled. Whereas prior to this our feelings needed to be reorganised, now our will is transformed, becomes independent of our personality and thereby turns into an organ of perception of spiritual facts.

After the stage of ‘Imaginative Knowledge’, there occurs for man what can genuinely and truly be called inspiration, the fulfilment through spiritual facts. We must always be clear that man can attain the training of his will at a particular stage only, when his feelings are in a certain way already purified. Then his will can connect with the lawfulness of the world and he will exist as a human being only so that those facts and entities which want to appear to him, can erect a wall before him in his will, on which they can depict themselves for him, so that they can exist for him.

I could only describe for you some of what the soul must go through in silent, patient devotion, if it wants to ascend into the higher worlds. In the following lectures I will have much to describe of the evolution of the world history that the soul must experience to rise up into the spiritual worlds. So consider what has been said today as an introduction only, so that through such schooling our feeling and willing life and our complete imaginative life will develop to become bearers of new worlds, so that we will actually step into a world that we recognise as reality, just as we recognise the physical world as a reality of its own kind.

At a different occasion I have already mentioned that when people say,‘You only imagine what you believe to see,’ then it must be replied, that only the experience, the observation can yield the difference between reality and appearance, between reality and fantasy, just as this is also the case in the physical world. You must win the difference by relating to reality. For example, someone who approaches reality with a healthy thinking can distinguish a red-hot iron in reality from one that only exists in imagination—and no matter how many ‘Schopenhauerians’ may come—he will be able to tell both apart, he will know what is truth and what is imagination. Hence, man can orientate himself on reality. Even about the spiritual world he can only orientate himself on reality. Someone once said that if a person only thought about drinking a lemonade, he could also perceive the lemon taste on his tongue. I answered him, ‘imagination can be so strong that someone who has no lemonade in front of him, could perhaps feel the taste on his tongue through the lively imagination of a lemonade. But I would like to see, if someone has ever quenched his thirst with an imaginary lemonade only. Then the criterion begins to become more real. Thus it is also with the inner development of a human being. Not only does he learn to know a new soul-life, new concepts, but in his soul he collides with another world and knows: you are now facing a world that you can describe just as you can describe the outside world. This is not mere speculation, which could be compared with a thought development only, instead it is about the forming of new organs of perception and the unlocking of new worlds that truly stand before us just as real as our external, physical world.

What has been hinted at today is that contemporary circumstances made it necessary to point out that spiritual research is possible. This is not to say that everyone should immediately become a spiritual researcher. For it must always be emphasised that when a human being with a healthy sense of truth and unprejudiced logic allows the information from Spiritual Science to approach him—even if he himself is not able to look into the spiritual worlds—yet all that which arises from such messages can turn into energy and feelings of strength for his soul, even if he at first believes in Haeckelianism or Darwinism. What the spiritual researcher has to say, is suitable to speak more and more to man’s healthy sense of truth, all the more so, as it is connected to the deepest interests of every human being. There may be people who do not consider it necessary for their salvation to know how amphibians and mammals relate to each other, or something like this. But all people must warm up to what can be said on the sure basis of spiritual research: that the soul belongs to the sphere of eternity—insofar as it belongs to the spiritual world, descends at birth into the sensory existence and enters again into the spiritual realm through the gate of death. It has to be for all human beings of profound interest, that the strength, which sinks more and more into the soul, is of a quality that the soul can gain certainty from it to stand in its place in life. A soul that does not know what it is and what it wants, what the essence of its nature is, can become hopeless, can ultimately despair and feel dreary and desolate. Yet a soul that allows itself to be filled by the spiritual achievements of Spiritual Science cannot remain empty and desolate if only it does not accept the messages of Spiritual Science as dogmas, but as a living life that streams through our soul and warms it. This provides comfort for all the suffering in life, when we are being led upwards from all temporal suffering to that which can become comfort for the soul from the share of the temporal in the eternal. In short: Spiritual Science can give man what he needs today in the loneliest and most work-intensive hours of his life due to the intensified circumstances of our time —or, if the strength would want to leave him, Spiritual Science can give him what he needs to look into the future and go energetically towards it.

Hence, Spiritual Science—as it arises from spiritual research, from those who want to undertake steps into the spiritual world—can forever confirm what we want to summarise in a few words that express with sensitivity the characteristics of the path into the spiritual world and its significance for the people of the present. What we want to summarise in this way is not supposed to be a contemplation on the theories of life, but one on remedies, means of strengths, tonics for life:

The Spirit World remains shut to you
Unaware of the spirit in yourself
That shines in your soul
And can uphold light for you
In world depths, on world heights! ⁹

• 1. Herman Grimm: Goethe-Lectures, Berlin 1877, 23rd Lecture, Pages 215 et seq.
• 2. Lecture GA 60 #5, The Nature of Sleep, Berlin, 24 November 1910
• 3. Now published under the title - How to Know Higher Worlds, GA 10.
• 4. The Second Edition of the The Philosophy of Freedom was published not until 1918. At this occasion Rudolf Steiner gave a lecture about the genesis of this book, which is featuring as the sixth lecture of the cycle Historical Symptomatology, Dornach 1942. Newly published in Rudolf Steiner's Letters, Volume 2, Dornach 1953
• 5. This was mentioned in the earlier lecture What is Mysticism?, given on 10 February 1910, as part of The Architect House Lecture Series, 1909/1910, and was printed as part of Paths of Soul Experiences, GA59
• 6. The Works of Jean Paul, Berlin 1865, Volume 16, Page 26 et seq.
• 7. For example in Goethe’s Colour Theory, Goethean Science, edited by Rudolf Steiner, Volume 1, Bern 1947, Pages 107 and 262.
• 8. Oswald Külpe, 1862-1915, Philosopher and Psychologist, Epistemology and Natural Sciences, Lecture given on 19 September 1910 at the 82nd Assembly of German Natural Scientists and Medical Doctors, Leipzig 1910.
• 9. Poem translated by Norbert Mulholland.

Translated by Antje Heymanns

When we look at what seems to have run like a kind of Leitmotif through this winter’s lecture cycle, when we focus on what lives within man as his nature and which we observe not only once between birth and death, but which we presuppose to exist in repeated Earth lives—then the question about the foundation of man’s development in his one life, in one earthly incarnation, appears to become quite essential for us, especially in our present time. Because the human being of the present certainly questions and searches when he encounters the peculiar manifestations of predisposition, talent and education of human beings. However, as he is not much inclined to look away from what appears to be manifesting itself in a life, and to focus his gaze instead on the real builder, the actual creator within a human being, then even the questions of this contemporary will easily assume the character of a half-measure, of vagueness. You see, when one presumes that something exists in human nature that like the actual inner enlivening force runs through many lives, then one encounters the completely enigmatic nature of this human being that is worthy of exploration. Then one will want to see questions about predispositions, talents and education in a completely new light, in a very different light from how they can be seen, when one’s gaze focuses only on what is presently so often emphasised: heredity, predispositions inherited from one’s ancestors. It is not as if Spiritual Science wants to turn the eyes away from that what is expressed in inherited characteristics—it is not so that it ignores all careful observations of all that what the outer senses and the intellect focussed on these could say. However, Spiritual Science knows that all this relates to the very essence of man like something that man uses by taking it in, just as in physical life the outer matter is absorbed by the small germ of a living being who determines its own form out of itself; yet what is supposed to enable it to express this form in its external life—the substantial, the material—it acquires from its environment. By and large, we must recognise the way a human being lives as a confluence of everything that comes into being at birth, with that in which man’s essence and individuality will be embedded and from which it draws its spiritual and soul nourishment.

For example, if we as educators have tasks concerned with a human soul who steps into existence and from hour to hour, from week to week reveals more and more of its inner abilities; if we face a human being who is growing up like a holy riddle that we have to solve, that has come to us from infinity so that we provide it with an opportunity to unfold itself and to develop, then a whole sum of new tasks, new views, new possibilities will indeed arise for all human relationships in existence. Thus we see a human being step into existence at birth and presuppose that, in a certain way, he brings the core of his being at birth into existence. If we do not look at catchwords and theories but at facts, then external natural science also shows us how this spirit and soul core of a human being continues to work on a child even after its birth, and how what we encounter as bodily organisation changes, and is plastically shaped under the influence of spirit and soul. External science, for example, can also illustrate how what we must first see as a tool for external activities, how this brain, when it is stepping into existence at birth, is a still an undefined, yet still quite plastically malleable matter in a human being; and how, what he endeavours to absorb of spiritual treasures of his environment, penetrates forming and shaping the plastic matter of our brains like an artist and works on it.

If we make the assumption—and this is a fact and has been mentioned several times already in different contexts—that a human being, who, after birth, would helplessly be placed on a lonely island, cannot acquire the ability to speak, then we must say: The spirit and soul content that we meet wrapped up in language from birth onwards is not something that emerges from man’s inner being, it is not merely attached to his disposition, or something that he receives, as it were, without the influences of his spirit and soul environment—like he receives his second set of teeth at age seven due to inner predisposition—instead speech is something that works on a human being. Speech works like an actual sculptor, who, as it were, forms the brain. We can well follow, also externally, scientifically, this sculpturing of the brain throughout the early times, yes, even for years. If it will then anatomically and physiologically be proven that human language ability, memory for certain language concepts, is bound to one or another organ and each word is, as it were, kept like a book in a library, then we are allowed to ask: What has shaped the brain for this initially? And we can answer: The same that existed as spirit and soul in the language vocabulary in a human being’s environment.

This shows us, that in regard to a human being’s entire soul-development, we have to differentiate everything he experiences in his thoughts, imaginations and feelings—also in his will impulses and emotions—everything, so to speak, that is merely inner experience, from something else that remains an inner experience so that it intervenes in the outer physical organisation, plastically sculptures it, and thus shapes it into a tool for future mental capabilities or future spirit and soul life. This can be illustrated best by tracking one ability of a human being throughout his life, that shows quite different sides, although these different sides have been repeatedly thrown together by external psychology: when we follow our memory.

When we acquire something through our memory, by memorising, then we do this by way of tools, of which one of the main ones is repetition. We have then made it our own, and are able to repeat it. Yet everyone knows the awkward thing—forgetting; because things are forgotten again, disappear from our memory, so that we are unable to reproduce them at a later date. Or aren’t you able to remember how much you had to learn and recite by heart in your youth, and how much of it you are no longer able to recite by heart? But does really everything disappear that we have memorised?

We will now only consider that of which man will say later: I have forgotten it —namely that which he is unable to retrieve so that he can reproduce it. Is it really completely gone? It is present in a similar way to what has already been mentioned, which in normal human life is always forgotten: like the wonderful, rich, first experiences of childhood are forgotten. In our normal human life, we can only remember back to a certain point in time. Yet prior to this point in time we have gained infinitely many impressions. Who would not acknowledge this, if he would observe the development of a child in its first life years in a really unbiased way.

But is it forgotten in the sense we normally speak about forgetting? Is it really not there at all? Does it no longer play a role in the human soul? Yes, it does play an important role in the human soul. Because what our first childhood impressions are like, whether we experience joyful or sad things, love or indifference, these or other outer impressions, on these depends infinitely more than what is usually thought—such as what someone is capable of doing later in life—depends on the overall mood and the entire constitution of his soul.

What is forgotten in the early years is more important than is generally acknowledged, as it forms and shapes us in our soul being. This is also the case with what we learn later—we forget the wording, the thought, but it remains in us as a certain mood of soul. If a person learnt at a certain age, for example, ballads or other literary works about great heroes with very specific tasks, with quite defined characteristics, then he might forget the thoughts and occurrences and so on, and will not be able to reproduce them; but what he has learnt remains within the structure of his own character, maybe as soul strength, or as a way to face life and allow joy and sorrow to approach him.

What we forget turns into moods, sentimental values, yes, into will impulses; it becomes what rests more or less unconscious within our soul life, yet it still works and forms within us. Only sometimes, through very particular processes later in life, it is revealed that those forgotten things are actually not quite forgotten. Because, if one takes relevant measures and places something familiar in front of someone’s soul, then that person will remember something that was seemingly forgotten. Thus one can prove that the memory is still present within him, but something like a blanket has been put over it in the unconscious layers of his soul life. In this way we can really see how what we forget, what disappears from our memory works formative and creative on our soul, and then often reveals itself in the mood with which we face joy and suffering, in our courage, in our bravery or cowardice; or also in our fearfulness and anxiety towards life. What we see sinking down, as it were, out of the treasure trove of memory into our more subconscious, works creatively on our soul itself. Basically, we ourselves are what the things we have forgotten have made of us. Because what else is a human being actually, than the way how he enjoys, how he can be brave, and so on! If we look at a human being not in an abstract but in a concrete way, then we have to say:

The human being is the harmonic interweaving and inter-play of his characteristics, so that he himself is limited by what flows down into deeper levels of his consciousness. We observe this in the course of life.

From all that has been taken into account so far, and from what is still to be added, it can follow that the soul-spiritual that sinks into deeper layers, sinks even deeper when a human being crosses the threshold of death. Because every time when someone, through what he absorbs, wants to work formative on his external physical organisation during his life, he finds that in this life a particular organisation already exists. This is shaped one way or another, he enters life with these or other dispositions. That what is creative in our souls must storm against this. Let's assume that through what we absorb courage could be build up within us as a trait. But if we have an organisation that is more suited to being chicken-hearted than to be a courageous human being, then we must more or less fight against something that we have got in our life from our structure. When we go through the time between death and a new birth, the essence of this human development lies in us creating in advance the archetype, the original shape of our new physical body, for our new physical earthly structure.

There we do not meet any limits and resistances such as are presented to us between birth and death. We build plastically with what we have obtained during life, the basis, the basic strengths for a new corporeality within wider limits than it is the case between birth and death. Hence we may say: Those forgotten concepts, which only affect our soul during our life between birth and death, work to shape our next physical organisation when we step through the portal of death, until the time of our re-incarnation, and work themselves into what is connected with our new bodily structure. In this way, we will stride through birth into our new existence with such dispositions that reach down into even deeper levels of our being than those ideas that were forgotten in the life between birth and death.

From all of this it becomes quite understandable that the human being, because he brought forth from life, from his immediate environment, the causes for the organisation of a new corporeality, that he indeed needs in a certain way the same conditions again.

It is different with animals, where, as we have seen from observations on the ‘human soul and animal soul’ and ‘human spirit and animal spirit’, the organisation is determined by line of heredity. There the animal appears with wholly defined tendencies that want to express themselves plastically, because these tendencies were not derived from the animal’s environment. Let us consider how little an animal acquires from the external world through education or conditioning, and how little it therefore needs a stage, located in the outer world, to bring out again what has been absorbed of educational principles. The human being, however, needs such a stage. Therefore he steps clumsily into this world, steps into the world so that we once again only have to put the finishing touches to the finer formation of his organisation. This explains the living and weaving of man’s individuality, of his true essential beingness, in the early years of his existence. Therefore his spirit organ, his brain, steps plastically determinable, malleable into existence, and basically, only after birth the last decisive pathways, lines and directions are added, that determine how the predispositions must be realised.

This illustrates, how what matters in regard to development needs to be viewed as something that came across from earlier developmental stages, and therefore it is less important to have defined, stubborn educational principles, than to look at each individual human being, at each individuality as a problem, as a holy riddle that needs to be solved, and that it is up to us to create opportunities, so that this riddle is solved in the best possible way.

An education is uncomfortable if it cannot establish any firm educational principles at all, but instead has to appeal to a principle that is related to the artistic within the educator, to observe what emerges from the essential nature of a human being. It is even more inconvenient than someone saying in a regimented way: these or those abilities are to be expressed in this way or that way. But we only have the right attitude towards the growing human being if we regard him in each case as an individuality, as something special in itself.

Although if one insists on seeing things trivially, and some people have a talent for seeing everything trivially, you could say: Individuality does not only show in a human being, but also in each single animal. Of course it shows. No one speaking from the basis of Spiritual Science will deny this. I have often said, that if one speaks about individuality in this sense, then one must be more precise, must be conscious, that if one wants to see things trivially, you can also speak about the biography and individuality of a quill. I knew a man, who—because in his days nibs were still cut from goose quills—was able to distinguish between the quills, because everyone cut their own quills, each one developed a personal relationship with him. And because the latter had an excellent fantasy, he would have been able to write a detailed biography of every single quill. However, as far human beings are concerned, it is not about applying the standard of triviality, but a standard drawn from the depths of realisation.

It is just through such observations that we can see the way and manner in which a human being forms and shapes his actual being, plastically forms his outward appearance, his outer organisation and lives out his actual being in it. From this, in turn, we can see how life happens in the early years and how it reshapes and remodels itself with the development of man, and what it utilises of what it can absorb from its environment. In the first years of a human being’s life we find that it is of very special importance to preserve for him his abilities, so to speak, to intervene plastically, malleably in his physical or body and soul organisation, and that we do not block the opportunity for him to intervene plastically.

We block someone’s opportunity most of all, if we stuff him too early with concepts and ideas that relate only to the external sensory nature and which have the strictest contours, or if he is pinned down to an activity that is theoretically confined to very specific forms. Then there is no variability, no modification, and no opportunity to develop the spirit and soul capabilities, in the way the soul is active from day to day, from hour to hour. Let us assume a father would be a terribly obstinate man, who has adopted the following principle:

My boy must become like I was! Throughout my whole life I have made shoes for my customers in this way, and my boy must make his shoes in the same way. My boy must think like me! Thus, into the environment of this boy a spirit and soul structure is brought, that works on his spirit and soul organisation just like it has worked on the father. Through this, the boy will be pressed into very specific forms, although this should be about exploring the individuality that steps into existence, and then, based on insight gained from this, shaping the spirit and soul organisation.

The educational instinct of humanity has already created a wonderful tool through general consciousness by which the human being in the early years of life is given the possibility to work on the changeable, the modifiable, the flexible of his spirit and soul, so that there is free scope for the forming of the human being. That is ‘play’. This is also the best way to keep a child occupied without giving it concepts that are bound into fixed contours, but such that give the thoughts room for manoeuvre, so that it can wander off here or there.

Only then one will find the course of thought that is predetermined by the inner predisposition. If I tell a fairy tale in such a way that it stimulates the inner activity of the child, without concepts being formed in pre-determined contours, but so that the outlines of the concepts remain flexible, then the child works like someone who tries and by trying attempts to find out what is right. The child works on finding out how its spirituality needs to move so that it can best sculpt its organisation in the way it is internally pre-formed. And it is the same with playing. Play differs from activity that is pressed into solid forms in that when playing one is to a certain extent able to do what one wants—so that one does not have sharp contours in thoughts and mobilities of organs from the outset. Hence, the soul-spiritual organisation of a human being will have an effect again in a free, determinable way. Play and the activity of the spirit and soul of the child in the first years of life, as just described, arise from a deep awareness of what the nature and essence of a human being really are.

Whoever who wants to become a real educator, will, also for the later years, definitely be conscious that indeed each single ability, as it were, must first be studied, recognised and determined in an evolving human being. Yet there is an opportunity to observe certain great principles. Such principles then lead us to the way in which the essential core of a human being, which stretches from birth to birth, utilises the external that lies in the line of heredity.

It is most interesting to focus on the way in which the spirit and soul core of a human being utilises the qualities, characteristics, virtues and so on, of father and mother, of paternal and maternal ancestors in completely different ways to build something new. And indeed: the paternal and maternal qualities are not equally used by the individual core of a human being, instead this is based on a very specific law. Just this law is infinitely instructive. If we attempt to grasp it in its completeness to fully see through it, then we must look at how two things assert themselves in the human soul. One of these is the rationality, to which we now want to add the ability to think in pictures, in concepts, faster or slower, cleverer or dumber. The other is the general direction of will and feeling, of the emotions, the interest that we take in our surroundings. The whole manner of how we are able to perform something, depends on whether we have a spirit that is agile or slow, or dull, or one that penetrates into things; if we are astute or not. What a human being is able to achieve for his fellow human beings and how we achieve it depends on us understanding of how to connect our interests in the right way to what goes on in our surroundings. Some people have good pre-conditions, but they have little interest in their fellow men and the environment. In this case the interest does not draw the abilities out. Hence it is necessary to pay as much attention to the interest within us, as to whether the flexibility of our rationality allows us to achieve this or that for our contemporaries.

Now, we can imagine that the whole kind of interest is linked to the way a human being’s desires are shaped, how the external approach to the entire life is organised, how a human being develops as being clever or clumsy. In short, the whole nature of the soul life—which is connected to our interactions with the external world and our greater or lesser interest and our skilfulness for this outer world—the most important elements for this are inherited by a human being from the father. Our interests and that which from these interests makes us skilful and capable to use our organs and our entire being, is as a rule an inheritance from the father. Thus the soul takes the appropriate elements from the father, so that it can form those characteristics within itself. In contrast, the intellectual agility, with which imaginative activity, pictorial imagination and inventiveness are connected, are received by our individuality when we come into existence at birth as heirloom from the mother’s characteristics. You will find that Schopenhauer has in a certain way hinted at this extraordinarily interesting chapter; he had an inkling of it, however, he was not in a position to also point out the deeper things.

On the other hand we are allowed to also say something else. In a certain way the following is borrowed from the father; how, what lives in the father as his manner of relating to objects, what his interests are, the desires towards objects, how he demands, wants, wills, if he is a brave man who courageously intervenes in life conditions or withdraws faint-heartedly, if he is pedantic or generous, also his characteristics that are connected to the will-impulses. By contrast, all that is flexibility of the soul, of the rationality, we find is passed on from the mother. Now, however, an interesting difference comes to light, which can only be observed when looking at the whole scope of life. Then you will find evidence of this everywhere; namely with regard to sex, there is a immense difference. It can be said that the relationship of a son to his father and mother is wonderfully described in Goethe’s words : “I’ve got my stature from my father, to lead a serious life,” this includes all that is related to the interactions of a human being with the external world. “From my mama I’ve got the cheerful nature, the joy to fabulate,” —this includes the entire nature of the spiritual life.

Yet when we now look at the daughter, it becomes apparent that in a peculiar way, the father’s qualities appear in the daughter so that they are now lifted one level above the nature of the will-impulses, from the nature that expresses itself more in the communications with the environment—into the soul.

Hence we can find a father’s qualities—of course this applies only in the same circumstances—who always courageously steps in, who has a lively interest in this or that, and therefore lives out a certain seriousness in his communications with his environment—are being adopted by the individuality of the daughter in such a way that they are lifted up into the soul, so that a daughter exists with a serious soul life, with the character life of the father translated into the soul which makes, what was probably viscous in the father, more flexible, so that the most important qualities that we encounter in the father as more external, show themselves as more internalised by the daughter.

Therefore we can say: the character traits of the father live on in the soul of the daughter; the soul characteristics of the mother, the alertness of the spirit as well as the talents and abilities that can be developed, live on in the son. Goethe’s mother, the old ‘Mrs Councillor’, was a women who was able to fabulate, in whom the fantasy functioned in the most wonderful way. This went down one level in the son, became an aptitude, an organisation, so that the son Goethe had the ability to give to humanity what lived in the mother. We can see, how the maternal qualities are lowered by one level in the sons, so that they are transformed into organ abilities; whilst the father’s characteristics are lifted up one level by the daughters, so that we encounter them as internalised and spiritualised.

Perhaps nothing is more characteristic than the beautiful contrast between Goethe and his sister Cornelia, who was just like the old Councillor, internalised, spiritualised a quiet, serious nature and thus was able to be for the poet, already in his boyhood, what he needed: an exceptionally good companion. Now take this into account and consider how Goethe, according to his description, felt unable to develop a favourable relationship with his father. This was because the paternal characteristics were externalised in the old Mr Councillor. What Goethe needed were these characteristics, but he could not understand them as they existed in his father, whom they fitted. Spiritualised they lived in his sister, who could thus be such a good comrade to him.

Now walk with me through history and you will see how each step confirms what has been said and how wherever you find hints, you could provide historical confirmation of such a matter. The most beautiful confirmation in this regard we got from the mother of the Maccabees , who with heroic greatness lets her sons face death for what she believes and what her fathers believed, with these great, beautiful words: “I have given you the outer corporeality; but the one who has created the world and human beings, has given you what I could not give you, and he will take care that you will get it back again, if you lose it for the sake of your faith!”

How often will just the maternal element be held up to us in history: from Alexander’s mother and the mother of the Gracchen to our present time, when we see characteristics appear in a person that show that someone is able to affect his surroundings, that he has the strength and talents and also the body and soul organisation for this. We could open the history of great man everywhere, wherever we wanted to: everywhere we will find the maternal characteristics translated in such a way that they have descended one level, and have become abilities placed into life. Let us take the example of Bürger's mother and his father, from whom he has also inherited the willpower characteristic. Basically, he did not have much in common with his father: his father was glad when he did not need to concern himself with the development of the little boy. Yet the mother had a wonderfully agile spirit; it was she who possessed the right grammatical and stylistic expression. This in turn was necessary for the poet, he inherited those traits from his mother, and they just came about because he belonged to the next generation. Or, let us think of Hebbel and the relationship he had with his father. Anyone who knows the poet Hebbel better will sense that in all the rough idiosyncrasies and stubbornness of interests there is a distant echo of his father’s legacy. In this respect, the old master bricklayer Hebbel has bequeathed much to his son. But the son and his mother understood each other. It was the mother who protected her son from becoming a master bricklayer in his birthplace, instead of later giving his dramas to mankind. It is quite touching to read how Hebbel himself tells in his wonderful diaries, what connected him with his mother.

These examples could be multiplied ad infinitum. Yet we should definitely not conclude that things are wrong, just because we believe to be observing life and encounter something different here and there. This would be like someone saying: The physicists verify for us the law of gravity; I will now, by way of installing many contraptions, prove to them, that this law can be impaired. Laws are not there for us to consider every single circumstance, but to focus on what is probable. This it how we must do it in natural science and how we must do it in Spiritual Science. Yet Spiritual Science is not at present advanced enough to proceed in a similar way. If one takes this into account, one finds confirmation of the above law of paternal and maternal heredity everywhere. Yet when looking at a whole human being, one must be clear, that what we call the human soul, and which expresses itself in the entire body and soul structure of man, is nothing simple. Again, one could have an unreserved will for trivialities and ask: ‘Why do you Anthroposophists have the quirk to distinguish three soul-members in the soul, and even multiple members in human nature? You are talking about a sentient soul, an intellectual soul and a consciousness soul. It would be much easier to talk of the soul as of a unitary entity in which one thinks, feels and wills.’ Yes, it is certainly more simple, more convenient—and also trivial. At the same time, this is something that scientific observation of a human being cannot in truth promote. Not out of a desire to divide and to make many words has the structure of the human soul into a sentient soul arisen—which means into the part, that initially establishes contact with the environment and receives perceptions and feelings from outside, and in which desires and instincts also develop. This then is to be separated from the part in which, in a certain sense, what has been gained has already been processed. We activate our sentient soul when we face the outer world, receive from it impressions of colours and sounds, but also by allowing that to come to the surface what we as normal human beings initially cannot control: our drives, desires and passions. But when we withdraw and process within what we have absorbed by way of perceptions and so on, so that what has been stimulated in us by the external world transforms itself into feelings, then we live in our second soul-limb, the intellectual or mind soul. And insofar as we direct and guide our thoughts and are not being kept on a leash, we live in the consciousness soul.

In ‘Occult Science’ or in ‘Theosophy’ you will see, that the three sheaths of the soul have even more relationships—of a different kind—to that what is in the external world. This is so not because we enjoy to categorise, but because what is called the sentient soul is related to the cosmos in a completely different way from what we call the consciousness soul.

It is the consciousness soul that isolates man, that leads him to perceive himself quite rightly as an internally self-contained being. What we call the intellectual soul, is what brings him into a relationship with his environment and the entire cosmos, hence he is a being that appears to be like an extract, like a confluence of the whole world. Through the consciousness soul man lives within himself, isolates himself. The main, most important thing that one experiences in the consciousness soul is that what amongst a man’s aptitudes is the latest one to be developed: The ability to think logically, so that we can form opinions, thoughts and so on. This rests within the consciousness soul. In relation to these characteristics, the individual core of a human being that comes into existence at birth is in fact the most inclined to isolation. This innermost core of a human being is the last to reveal itself. While its sheathing, its bodily organisation is the earliest to emerge, its actual individuality emerges last. But the way a human being currently is—he has been different in the past and will be different in the future—he actually develops his opinions, terms, concepts in the most isolated part of his being. These therefore exert the least influence on the overall construction and detailing of his entire personality and only emerge as aptitudes when the entire personality is already firmly established and plastically shaped.

There we see how the talents of man develop in a particular sequence. Firstly, we see what lives in the least isolated, separated element of the human being, in the sentient- or emotional soul. This has therefore the most strength to intervene in the entire human organisation. Hence we can see that getting close to a child with opinions, theories and ideas is least likely, when this sentient soul wants to shape these most intensely from within. We will only get close to a child when we affect its sentient soul—as I have presented in my essay ‘The Education of the Child from the perspective of Spiritual Science.’ Especially during the first life years one has to ensure not to develop theories or teachings, but that the child is instead encouraged to imitate, that one sets living examples for it to copy. This is of infinite importance, because this urge to imitate appears as one of the very first predispositions that one can influence. Admonitions and teachings are least effective during this time.

The child imitates what it sees, because it must form itself in accordance with its relationship to the external world. We lay the first foundation for the whole personal nature of the child, when during the first seven years we are living examples of what the child is allowed to imitate, when we can guess how we must behave in the presence of the child. However, this is for many a most peculiar educational principle. Most people will ask how the child should behave, and there comes Spiritual Science with its demands: the people should learn from the child how they must behave in its environment—down to words, attitudes and thoughts! Because the child is much more receptive in its soul than is generally believed, especially more receptive than an adult human being.

There are people with a certain sensitivity, who, for example, immediately recognise when a person comes in who is going to spoil the good mood. Even though little attention is paid to this nowadays, it happens incredibly often with children. And what you do in detail is much less important than the kind of person one endeavours to be, what kind of thoughts, of concepts one nurtures. It is not enough, that one keeps silent in front of the child about something, but allows oneself to think thoughts that are not meant to be for the child. But instead our thoughts need to be lived out in such a way that we have the feeling: this may live on in the child and should live on. This is inconvenient, but it is still right!

When the change of teeth has occurred, consideration will be given to what we may call ‘building on authority’—not building on what someone might do, but what he holds within himself as personality. It is most important that a child in the first years of life must be able to imitate what we speak, do and think, and in the second epoch perceives us as a human being on whom it can rely, so that it can say: What he does, is good! It is not so that we are admonishing the child from the seventh to the fourteenth, sixteenth year of life, based on the principle to develop a moral theory to show it that this must be done, that must be stopped—but rather we pass on to the child the best treasure, when its rational or intellectual soul can have the perception: What this human being next to me does, is good! I must refrain from doing, what he refrains from doing! — This is of infinite importance.

Only from the age of about fourteen to sixteen, does the possibility arise for a human being to build upon the most isolated part of his being, on the consciousness-soul, i.e. on that which forms in his consciousness soul: on his opinions, concepts and ideas. However, these must first have a solid foundation, and this must be created. If we do not create this by providing the opportunity through education, as the individuality allows us to recognise, and if we do not thereby clear the way for free development, then the human being will be seized by a different element: by the firmness of his hull nature. Then he externalises himself; his individuality, which goes from life to life, does not intervene, but he becomes a slave to his bodily organisation, which comes from the outside into the human being and subjugates him. Man shows this by not being master of his spiritual and soul part, but by being completely dependent on his body and soul organisation and showing rigid characteristics that are unchangeable. On the other hand, a human being in whom we took care to ensure that his predispositions are realised as far as possible, retains a certain flexibility throughout his whole life, and is also able to cope with new situations in later life. In comparison, in another person the organisation is externalised and takes on rigid forms, and that person retains them throughout his whole life. We live in an epoch, where the individuality of someone is little appreciated and hence there are few opportunities to convince oneself that the individuality is still agile and vigorous and able to cope with new situations and truths. We now arrive at a chapter in which we can gain insight into how some people simply must face life.

How many people, when they have looked into a world view and are convinced of it, try to convince others of it as well. They believe it is a very commendable effort when they say: Since I am seeing it so clearly, I should actually be able to convince everyone else of this! However, this is naivety. Our opinions are not dependent on something being logically proven to us. This is possible in the fewest cases. Because opinions and convictions of a person are formed out of completely different substrata of his soul—out of his will nature, his mind and emotional nature, so that a person can understand your logical arguments quite well, can follow your astute conclusions and then afterwards does not take them in at all, simply because what a person believes and what he professes does not flow from his logic or his understanding, but from the whole personality, namely from those limbs where will and mind arise. However, our thinking is the last of all our dispositions to emerge, when the bodily organisation has long since been completed. This is the most isolated field. This is where we find the least access to other people. We can reach more people, when we seize them in those parts that lie deeper: their mind and will. Here, intervention in bodily organisation still happens. However, if a human being grows up in a very materialistic sphere, lets say, where only material substance is deemed valid, then, during the time of his growing up, a sum of mind and will-impulses are formed that plastically shape his physicality and his brain. Later he can then acquire quite good logical thinking, but this no longer intervenes in the plasticity of his brain. Logical thoughts are the most powerless within the human soul. Therefore it is especially important to also find access to other people in the soul, not just in logic. If someone has already trained his brain in a certain way, then this brain, which only reflects the old concepts over and over again, cannot realise logic anymore because it has become physical. Hence, in regard to such world views, which are build on the purest, the sharpest of logic, as is the case with Spiritual Science, one cannot hope to be effective by going from person to person to convince someone. If someone, who understands the spiritual scientific impulse, would like to believe that he could convince people by persuasion or by way of logic—if for instance someone wants to believe that a spiritual scientist indulges in such illusion—then he is very much mistaken! Because in our era there is a large number of such people who, due to their overall personality, their will nature and emotional nature do not look out for what the spiritual world and spiritual research are. Out of the great mass of people who live around us, those who have a disposition for Spiritual Science will self-select, will go to what they dimly foresee, what they already have within their souls. A selection, a choice can only be made with regard to a worldview based on what is capable to purely encompass logic, human consciousness. Hence the Spiritual Scientist approaches human beings and knows how to differentiate between them: There is someone to whom you can preach for years, he is unable to grasp your thoughts. You first would have to make him conscious of this; would have to speak to his soul, but he himself is not able to reflect from out of his whole soul-toolkit, out of his brain. Another man is built in such a way that he can understand what Spiritual Science shows in its logically developed way, and he therefore also finds his way into what is basically already living in his soul.

In this way and manner we have to face the great cultural tasks of the present or the future. We need to recognise how the total personality of a human being relates to what a person, in the course of his development and education, is able to absorb incrementally of new truths, of such things that really must be united with his personality. When we have once again understood, that basically the soul-spiritual is the shaper, the sculptor, the artist for body and soul, then one will place greater importance on conducting the development of the spirit and soul in a human being in such a way that he can get a handle on it—especially in the years when he is open for education—and is powerful in regard to the way in which he can affect his body and soul. We have to be clear that a lot can be sinned against in this regard. We can see from our presentations, how human preference and so on, contributes much more to the formation of views than pure logic. One could only let pure logic alone speak when desires and instincts are completely silent. Prior to that we must be clear, that if we believe we have one-sidedly shaped a person’s aptitudes in a particular area, then what we have not considered will come to light in a peculiar manner.

Let us assume that we educate a man in such a way that we only bring to expression his abstract talents, as it is often done at school. Then the pure concepts and abstract ideas cannot intervene in the whole soul- and emotional life. This then remains undeveloped, uneducated and will confront us later in all kinds of trivial lifestyles. Later in life, two natures often become apparent. Even in people of high standing—if they have not been able to integrate within themselves what is located in the depth of personality—preferences, inclinations, likings, which are more deeply rooted assert themselves in other ways. Which examinee would not have experienced, that no matter how clever the examiner is who confronts him, who is able to maintain an overview over much of his science—the one-sidedness will come to expression by him having a preference for how the answers he wants to hear have to be worded. And woe betide many an examinee, if he doesn’t know how to put what he has to say into the words the examiner wants to to hear.

In this regard, in a book about psychology by Moriz Benedict, a lot of correct things were said about mistakes in human education. Also this, which is true: When two candidates were tested by two different examiners the misfortune happened that one candidate gave Examiner A answers shaped as if the Examiner B had asked the questions. If he would have given the answers to the other examiner, he would have passed the exam splendidly. And with the other candidate it was the other way round! Hence both failed the exams!

This can illustrate to us how what is indisputable can very well be clothed in logical forms. Yet as soon as we are not able to immerse our ideas in thought-education during our upbringing, no suitable field can be found to work from here formatively on man. How then must we behave towards the human being? In the time in which a person is preferably still being modelled plastically, and in which abstract concepts and ideas are least effective, we must behave in such away that we confront him with as few concepts and ideas as possible, and only with ideas that are as pictorial as possible. For this reason I have stressed that the pictorial, the illustrative—which is as little removed as possible from the actual picture, the form and contour—is taken up conceptually. Because what is absorbed in this way as a picture, as a form or as a figure of fantasy, has great strength to intervene in our bodily organisation. That the pictorial we encounter in the design intervenes in the physical organisation can already be deduced from seeing how little it helps to try and convince someone who is sick, who is in a particular situation, that he should be doing this, and refrain from doing that. This is of little help. But if you set up an apparatus, something like an electrifying machine , so that the sick person can form a picture for himself, and then give him two handles that do not let any current go through—as long as he has the picture in front of his eyes, he will feel the current, and that will help! But wherever it is so beautifully declaimed that imaginative power plays a major role, we must be clear, that this is not about any kind of imaginative power but only about visual imagination.

We live in an age in which it has become customary, to pay very little homage to the following principle of Spiritual Science—that a human being only becomes able to form concepts and ideas between the age of fourteen or sixteen and age twenty-one, twenty-two; that one then picks up concepts that are only to be shaped later. Instead, before this age, people nowadays become mature enough to write newspaper articles, which are either above the line or not up to standard, that are printed and then accepted by people. This then makes it difficult to keep abstract concepts away until the characterised age and to put the pictorial, the illustrative in front of a person’s eyes. Because the illustrative has the power to intervene in the organisation of body and soul.

You can always find confirmation of what I am saying now, however, one does not always pay attention to it. Moriz Benedikt , for example, complains that many college students are often quite clumsy in later life. Why is this so? Because the whole education is so nondescript, so little concerned with the illustrative and adheres only to abstract ideas even when languages are taught. In contrast, we can feel the illustrative that we encounter, right into our hand, because the objects themselves step in front of us as pictures.

It could be said, that if you want to imagine an object, you must move in such a way that you feel with your hand in a circle or in an elliptic shape the growing together with the object in pictures. It is not only imitating the manual dexterity, but also feeling and learning to love objects, that show us how a pictorial, an illustrative imagination twitches in our limbs, makes our limbs agile and mobile. Today we can find many people, who, if a button is torn off, are not able to sew on a new one. This is a great disadvantage. The most important things is, that we are able to intervene in the external world with everything we have. Of course, we cannot learn everything. But we can learn about how the spirit and soul slide down out of the spiritual into body and soul and make our limbs agile. And no one, whom we have instructed in his youth to try and copy the feeling of what is outside of him, will be a clumsy person later in life. Because what already lies below the threshold of our consciousness, can work most essentially on our organisation. This also applies to language. One learns a language best at a time when one is not able to understand the language grammatically, for at that time one learns with the part of the soul-being that belongs to deeper layers.

This is how humanity developed—and this is how the individual human being must develop. Elsewhere I have pointed out how Lorenz Müllner , in a school-director’s speech, drew attention to the St. Peter’s Church in Rome—how magnificent it stands there, how secretly the spatial laws are embedded within the mechanics of the cupola construction, so that one can see the spatial mechanics expressed in the most wonderful way. Now he pointed out though, that only through the laws which Michaelangelo expressed therein, and which Galilei subsequently by way of his high-flying spirit discovered, did Galileo give mechanical science to us. I have also pointed out, that the date of Michaelangelo’s death almost coincides with the birthdate of Galilei, so that the abstract laws of mechanics—which live in the consciousness soul of a human being—appeared later than that, what Michaelangelo had built into the space out of his deeper soul-members. Just as the higher members of the soul develop on the foundation of the lower ones, just as we have to develop our limbs based on our predispositions, so that we can look back on them and gain an understanding of them—so it works in every single life. In each individual life, too, man must be surrounded by human company, must place himself into that which immerses him in a kind of atmosphere, into the spirit and soul of our surroundings. Then, what a human being brings with him into existence, is shaped and built. But the human being does not only bring along what is given to him from the hereditary line, but something that will be determined in the most diverse way by a third, namely by the eternal individuality of the human being. This human individuality needs the inherited characteristics, must acquire and develop them. This also stands higher than that which comes into existence with our individuality. We step into existence at birth: A creative, productive spirituality acquires—when we cannot yet build any concepts—the plastic substances from the hereditary line. Only later the consciousness-soul is added. So we look at something individual within human nature, which plastically forms the capabilities and talents. When we become educators, it is our task to solve, what we consider to be a spiritual riddle, for each human being anew.

This all points us to a mood. When Goethe, at the excavation of Schiller’s bones found his skull and saw the distinctive forms, saw how the human individuality had worked on this, he saw: into this form the liquid spirit of Schiller had to pour itself, so that he could become what he did become, which Goethe was able to express thus:

What greater gain in life can man e'er know
Than when God-Nature will to him explain
How into Spirit steadfastness may flow,
How steadfast, too, the Spirit-Born remain.^*

Such an expression by Goethe needs to be understood in the context of the situation. If one takes it without looking at what it is that as spirit-made in firm shape is sculptured, misunderstands him. Nor does anyone understand him, who is unaware of the depth of Goethe’s insight into the eternal weaving of an individuality, who goes from birth to birth and always newly reincarnates, and who is the true architect of the human being. How we have received our organs from the spirit, which in turn are organs of spirit, basically could be said by simply using a childish comparison: the clock shows us time, but we could not use it, if it had not first been formed by the human spirit. — We need our brain for thinking in the physical world, but we could not use it for thinking, if the cosmic spirit would not have formed it. And we would not have sculptured it with such an individuality, if not our individuality had poured itself as a spiritual product into our brain, which was formed out of suitable human species substance. Then we understand more deeply, what we were able to say today, and what Goethe meant when he pointed towards that in a human being, which in his nature is determinative for all his talents and capabilities—as if the stars themselves would be perceived like any situation in the world, and how that which effects man’s inner being as something eternal, passes through the threshold of death only to advance to new forms of development. In short, we may summarise what we have observed today, in the mood of Goethe’s thoughts, which he expressed in the “Orphic Primal Words”:

As stood the sun to the salute of planets
Upon the day that gave you to the earth,
You grew forthwith, and prospered, in your growing
Heeded the law presiding at your birth.
Sibyls and prophets told it: You must be
None but yourself, from self you cannot flee.
No time there is, no power, can decompose
The minted form that lives and living grows. ^*

• *. Translator Unknown *
• *. Translator Unknown *