The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Pitfalls await those on the path of spiritual knowledge. Dr. Steiner's poignant depiction of self-love can be especially helpful. This love rises like a force of nature in one who follows a spiritual path. He also explores the encounter with the double, the influences of Lucifer and Ahriman, the role of fear, and the polar tendencies toward phenomenology and mysticism.

Lecture 12 of 14 from the volume: Results of Spiritual Investigation The volume of the Complete Edition of the works of Rudolf Steiner containing the original text of the this lecture, among eight others, is entitled: Ergebnisse der Geistesforschung, (No. 62 in the Bibliographical Survey, 1961).

Just as it is of great significance in every realm of human endeavor and investigation to know not only the path of truth but also the sources of error, so it is especially the case in the realm dealt with by our lectures here, the realm of spiritual science, of spiritual investigation. In this realm one has to do not only with sources of error that can be eliminated to a certain extent through judgment and reasoning but with sources of error that accompany every step of the spiritual investigation of truth. One has to do with errors that must be not only refuted but overcome, conquered. Only by knowing them in such a way that one keeps, as it were, a spiritual eye on these experiences in their character as error will it be possible to guard oneself against them. It is not possible in relation to this realm to speak of individual truths or errors, but it is necessary to be clear through which activity of the soul, through which confusion of the soul, man can fall into untruth on the path of spiritual investigation.

It is easy to grasp that one wishing to penetrate to the super-sensible world first needs a healthy organ of perception, just as healthy sense organs are needed for outer sense observation. The second thing one needs, in addition to the organ of perception, is a corresponding development of clarity of consciousness, which can clearly oversee and judge the observations. Even in ordinary sense observation of life it is necessary that we have not only healthy senses but also a healthy consciousness, that is, a consciousness not befogged or confused, not paralyzed in a certain way. Both these qualities of the soul life in a higher stage come to be of even greater significance in the realm of spiritual investigation. A comparison from ordinary sense observation will help us to understand this. Suppose someone has an abnormally developed eye, for example. He will not be in a position to observe objects in as accurate and unprejudiced a way as they should be seen. From hundreds of possible examples let us consider just this one. A very significant natural scientist of our day, who is not in the least inclined to submit willingly to any delusion, had a certain eye condition, and he described in his biographical sketch how this eye condition misled him, particularly at dusk, causing him to see things unclearly and, through this unclear seeing, to arrive at false judgments. He described, for example, how he often walked through darkness and, due to his eye condition, would see a figure that he took to be real but that was nothing other than something called forth by his abnormal eye. He then related how he once went around the corner in a strange city and, because he believed the city to be unsafe, his eye induced him to see someone approaching and wishing to assault him; he even pulled out a weapon to defend himself. He therefore was not in a condition, despite complete knowledge of his organ impairment, to judge the situation correctly, to recognize that what his eye called forth was not there at all. Errors can occur in this way in all our sense organs. I bring this up only as a comparison.

In the recent lectures it was described how the human being, through a certain inner cultivation, evolution, of his soul, can develop into a real spiritual investigator, how he brings into use real organs of spirit through which he can look into the super-sensible world. These spiritual organs must be developed in the right way to make it possible to behold—in an analogy with sense perception—not caricature and untruth but the truth, the reality, of higher spiritual worlds. As we have seen, this development of the higher spiritual organs, which can be brought about by a rightly applied concentration, contemplation, and meditation, depends upon the starting point in ordinary, everyday life. Every human being who wishes to evolve upward to a view of the spiritual world must, and this is quite natural and proper, take his starting point from ordinary soul development, from what is right and normal for everyday life and also for ordinary science. Only from this starting point, by taking into the soul those mental processes (Vorstellungsarten) that we have presented as meditations and as other exercises, can the soul ascend again to an observation of the spiritual world.

The problem now is that at the starting point, that is, before the beginning of a spiritual training, the future spiritual investigator must be in possession of a sound power of judgment, a capacity for judgment proceeding from true conditions. Every starting point that does not result from a sound power of judgment, that surrenders itself to the object, leads to unsound organs of spiritual observation, which can be compared to abnormally developed sense organs. Here we are again at the point that we have often mentioned in previous lectures: the significance of what one can designate as the soul life of the spiritual investigator before he begins his development as a spiritual investigator, his training for spiritual investigation. An unsound power of judgment, lacking ability to observe objects in their reality, leads man to see facts and beings of the spiritual world as distorted or, as we shall see today, in many false ways. This is, as it were, the first important point in all development toward spiritual investigation. Spiritual scientific training makes it necessary to take as one's starting point a sound power of judgment, an interest in the true relationships of existence, even before the path to the super-sensible worlds is embarked upon. Everything that readily surrenders itself to illusion in the soul, that readily judges in an arbitrary way, that represents in the soul a certain unsound logic, leads also to the development of unsound spiritual organs.

The other starting point that is of essential significance is the moral mood of soul. The moral ability, the moral force, is as important as sound logic and intelligence, for if unsound logic, if unsound intelligence, lead to faulty spiritual organs, so will a cowardly (schwachmuetig) or immoral mood at the beginning of the spiritual training lead one ascending into the spiritual world to a certain fogginess, a “stupor”, we could call it. One thus faces the higher world in a state of what one must designate as a kind of paralysis, even a loss of consciousness (Ohnmacht). It must be noted, however, that in the stage of soul development referred to here, that which is called losing consciousness, a stupor, cannot be compared with the loss of consciousness, the paralysis, of ordinary, everyday consciousness. In ordinary consciousness, losing consciousness occurs in relation to the areas of everyday life. Losing consciousness in the spiritual world means a stupor, a fogging; it means the saturation of consciousness with all that can stem from the ordinary sense world or from the ordinary experience of the day. The spiritual investigator who is in error cannot be befogged or unconscious to the same degree as in ordinary consciousness, but he can be unconscious in relation to the spiritual world by being filled in the spiritual field of consciousness with that which has justification only through its properties and way of appearing in ordinary sense and intellectual consciousness.

By taking such elements along into the spiritual world, the spiritual investigator dims his higher consciousness. The matter can be presented in the following way. Dimming of consciousness, impairment of the ordinary behavior of soul in everyday life, is like a penetration of sleep or of the dreams into the clear, everyday consciousness. A stupor, a fogging of the higher, super-sensible consciousness, however, is like a penetration of ordinary, everyday consciousness—the consciousness that we carry around with us in the ordinary world—into that consciousness in which it no longer belongs, into the consciousness that should oversee and judge the facts of the higher, super-sensible worlds purely and clearly. Any kind of immoral or weak moral mood, any kind of moral untruthfulness, leads to such a fogging of super-sensible consciousness. Among the essential and most significant aspects of preparing for a spiritual scientific training, therefore, is a corresponding moral development, and, if you go through my book, Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment, you will find special practices for the soul through which this appropriate moral mood can be established. Of particular damage in this striving is everything that overcomes man in ordinary life in the way of vanity, ambition, the ordinary sense of self, and a particular sympathy for this or that experience. Inner tranquility, impartiality, a loving penetration of things and worlds, an attentive interest in everything life offers, but especially a certain moral courage, a standing up for what one recognizes as true, are proper starting points for a spiritual scientific training.

From what has been said in preceding lectures, it should be clear that all spiritual training consists of an awakening of certain spiritual forces that exist in the soul but that slumber in ordinary life and must be developed. The spiritual organs and the super-sensible consciousness can be developed only when forces lying peacefully in the depths of the soul, forces that are weak or not at all developed in ordinary life, are really brought into consciousness.

The following can be seen from what has been said. Two things appear when man, through appropriate meditation, through concentrating his whole life of soul on individual mental images called into consciousness by his free will, tries to draw forth these forces resting in the depths of his soul. First, a quality that is always present in the soul but that in ordinary life can be kept relatively in check will be intensified, along with the other slumbering qualities in the depths of the soul; spiritual development cannot take place in any other way than by the whole soul life becoming in a certain respect inwardly more active, more infused with energy. This quality that is intensified at the same time as the others that one is trying directly to intensify one can call human self-love, sense of self. One could say that one begins to know this human self-love, this sense of self, only when one goes through a spiritual scientific training; only then does one begin to know how deep within the human soul this self-love slumbers. As has been pointed out already, he who engages in the exercises described in past lectures, thus intensifying his soul forces, notices at a certain moment in his development that another world enters his soul life. He must be able to notice, to have the knowledge to recognize, that the first form (Gestalt) in which the new, super-sensible world appears is nothing other than a projection, a shadow image, of his own inner soul life. These forces that he has developed in his soul life appear to him first in a mirror image. This is the reason that the materialistic thinker easily mistakes what appears in the soul life of the spiritual investigator for what can appear in the unhealthy soul life as illusions, visions, hallucinations, and the like. That objections from this side rest on ignorance of the facts has often been pointed out; this distinction, however, must be alluded to again and again. The unhealthy soul life, which beholds its own essence as in a mirror image, takes its own reflections for a real world and is not in a position to eliminate these reflections through inner choice. By comparison, in a true spiritual training it must be maintained that the spiritual investigator recognizes the first phenomena that appear as reflections of his own being; not only does he recognize them as such, but he is able to eliminate them, to extinguish them from his field of consciousness.

Just as the spiritual investigator is able through his exercises to intensify his soul forces so that a new world is conjured before him, so he must be able to extinguish this whole world in its first form; he must not only recognize it as a reflection of his own being but be able to extinguish it again. If he could not extinguish it, he would be in a situation comparable to something that occurs in sense observation and that would be unbearable, impossible in an actual development of the human soul. Imagine in ordinary sense observation that a person directed his eyes to an object and became so attracted to it that he could not avert his gaze. The person would not be able to look around freely but would be tied to the object. This would be an unbearable situation in relation to the outer world. With a spiritual development, it would mean exactly the same in relation to the super-sensible world if a person were not in the position to turn from his spiritual observation and extinguish what presents itself as image to his spiritual observation. He must pass the test expressed in the words, “You are able to extinguish your image,” overcoming himself in this extinguishing; if the image returns, so that he can know his reality in a corresponding way, then only does he face reality and not his own imaginings (Einbildung). The spiritual investigator therefore must be able not only to create his own spiritual phenomena and to approach them but also to extinguish them again.

What does this mean, however? It means nothing less than the need for an immensely strong force to overcome the sense of self, self-love. Why does the abnormal soul life, which arrives at visions, hallucinations, and crazy notions, see these creations as realities and not as emanations from its own being? Because the human being feels himself so connected, so bound, to what he himself brings forth that he would believe himself destroyed if he could not look at what he himself brings forth as a reality. If a human being leaves the ordinary world with an abnormal soul life, his self-love becomes so intensified that it works like a force of nature. Within the ordinary soul life we can distinguish very clearly between so-called fantasy and what is reality, for within the ordinary soul life we have a certain power over our mental images. Any person is aware of this power whose soul has been capable of eliminating certain mental images when it recognizes their error. We are in a different situation in relation to the outer world when we are confronted with forces of nature; when lightning flashes, when thunder rolls, we have to let the phenomena take their course; we cannot tell the lightning not to flash or the thunder not to roll.

With the same inner force, however, the sense of self appears in us when we leave the ordinary soul life; as little as we can forbid lightning to flash so little can we forbid self-love from appearing, developed into a force of nature, if it is only a reflection of one's own being, that which the soul presents as an image of its own being, perceived as a real outer world. From this one can see, therefore, that the self-education of the spiritual investigator must consist chiefly of overcoming piece by piece self-love, the sense of self. Only if this is accomplished at every stage of spiritual development through a strict self-observation will one come to be able at last to erase a spiritual world when it appears as described. This means to be in the position of allowing that which one has striven for with all one's might to fall into oblivion. Something must be developed through spiritual training (one can find this presented more precisely in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds) that actually does not exist at all in man's free will in ordinary life. If man in ordinary life undertakes to do something, he wants to do it if he neglects to do something, he doesn't want to do it. One must say that in ordinary life man is in the position of applying his will impulses. To extinguish, in the way I described, the spiritual world that appears, the will must not only have the described faculties but must be able, after the spiritual world appears, slowly to weaken itself bit by bit, to the point of utter will-lessness, even to the point of extinguishing itself. Such a cultivation of the will is accomplished only when the exercises for the soul, described in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds, are followed systematically. When we awaken the slumbering forces in our soul, self-love, the sense of self, are intensified. This intensification leads us under certain circumstances to consider as an outer reality that which we actually are ourselves, that which lies only within us.

Another thing that is necessary when the soul undergoes appropriate exercises for a spiritual training is for man, at a certain level of this development, actually to forsake everything in his consciousness, everything that in his life up to now gave him in outer, everyday life and in ordinary science the content of truth, security in truth, everything that gave him the possibility of considering something as reality. As indicated already in previous lectures, all supports that we have for our judgments in ordinary life, all basic reference points given us by the sense world, which teaches us how we must think about reality, must be forsaken. After all, we want through the spiritual training to enter a higher world. The spiritual investigator at an appropriate stage of his development now sees, “You can no longer have a support in the world that you want to enter; you can no longer have the support of outer sense perception, of the intellectual judgment you have acquired, which otherwise guided you correctly through life”; when he has seen this, then comes the all-important, serious moment in the life of the spiritual investigator when he feels as if the ground is gone from under his feet, as if the support that he has had in ordinary life is gone, as if all security that has carried him up to now is gone and that he approaches an abyss into which with every further step he will surely fall. This must in a certain way become an experience in the spiritual training. That this experience not be accompanied by every possible danger is the primary concern of a true spiritual training today.

An attempt has been made to explain this more fully in the book, Knowledge of the Higher Worlds. If one undergoes the exercises offered there, one comes step by step to a point at which one feels what has just been described; one feels oneself as if over an abyss. One has already become so tranquil in one's soul, however, that one beholds the situation with a newly acquired, special faculty of judgment; therefore the fear, terror, and horror that otherwise needs must overtake the human soul in a dangerous way—not an ordinary, everyday fear—do not appear. One learns to know the basis of the fear, terror, and horror, but one has already progressed so as to achieve a mood in which one can endure it without fear.

Here we are again at a point at which it becomes necessary for the soul to recognize the truth and not fall into error, because the support that one has in ordinary life has disappeared, and the soul feels itself as if placed over an abyss. This must occur in order that, out of the emptiness, that which is fully spiritual in the world can approach the soul.

What in ordinary life is called anxiety, fear, will be intensified through such a training, expanded, just as self-love and the sense of self are intensified and expanded, growing into a kind of force of nature. Something must be said here that perhaps sounds paradoxical. In ordinary life if we have not struggled through to a certain courage, if we are cowards, we are frightened by this or that event if we have courage, however, we can endure it. In the region of the soul life we have described, fear, terror, and horror will approach us, but we must be in the position, as it were, not to be afraid of the fear, not to be horrified by the horror, not to become anxious with the anxiety that confronts us. This is the paradox, but it corresponds exactly with an actual soul experience that appears in this realm.

Everything that the human being experiences on entering the spiritual world is designated ordinarily as the experience with the Guardian of the Threshold. I tried to describe something concrete about this experience in my Mystery Drama, The Guardian of the Threshold. Here it only need be mentioned that at a certain stage of spiritual development, man learns to know his inner being as it can love itself with the force of an event of nature, as it can be frightened and horrified on entering the spiritual world. This experience of our own self, of the intensified self of that inner being that otherwise never would come before our soul, is the soul-shaking event called the Meeting with the Guardian of the Threshold. Only by having this meeting will one acquire the faculty to differentiate truth from error in the spiritual world.

Why this experience is called the Meeting with the Guardian of the Threshold is easily comprehensible. It is clear that the spiritual world that man enters is always around us and that man is unaware of it in ordinary life only because he does not have the appropriate organs to perceive it. The spiritual world surrounds us always and is always behind that which the senses perceive. Before man can enter this world, however, he must strengthen his ego, his I. With the strengthening of the ego, however, the aforementioned qualities also appear. He therefore must learn above all else to know himself, so that when he is able to confront a spiritual outer world in the same way as he confronts an objective being he can distinguish himself from what is truth. If he does not learn to delimit himself in this way, he will always confuse that which is only within him, that which is only his subjective experience, with the spiritual world picture; he can never arrive at a real grasp of spiritual reality.

To what extent fear plays a certain role on entering the spiritual world can be observed particularly in the people who deny the existence of such a world. Among such people are also many who have different reasons for denying this spiritual world, but a great portion of those people who are theoretical materialists or materialistically tinged monists have a definite reason for denying this spiritual world, a reason that is clearly visible for one who knows the soul. We must now emphasize that the soul life of the human being is, as it were, twofold. In the soul not only does there exist what man ordinarily knows, but in the depths of the soul life things are happening that cast their shadows—or their lights—into ordinary consciousness. Ordinary consciousness, however, does not reach down to this level. We can find in the hidden depths of soul hatred and love, joy and fear and excitement, without our carrying these effects into conscious soul life. It is therefore entirely correct to say that a phenomenon of hatred directed from one person to another, taking place within consciousness, actually can be rooted, in the depths of soul, in love. There can be a sympathy, a deep sympathy, of one person for another in the depths of the soul, but since this person at the same time has reasons—reasons about which he perhaps knows nothing—he is confused about this love, about the sympathy, deceiving himself with hatred and antipathy. This is something that holds sway in the depths of the soul, so that these depths look quite different from what we call our everyday consciousness. There can be conditions of fear, of anxiety, in the depths of the soul of which one has no conscious idea. Man can have that fear in the depths of his soul, that anxiety in face of the spiritual world—because he must cross the abyss that has been described before entering—and yet be aware of nothing consciously. Actually, all human beings who have not yet entered the spiritual world, but who have acquired an understanding of entering, have to a degree this fear, this terror in face of the spiritual world. Whatever one may think concerning this fear and anxiety that are within the depths of the soul, they are there, though they appear stronger with one person, weaker with another. Because the soul might be injured, man is protected by the wisdom-filled nature of his being from being able to look further into the spiritual world, from being able to have the experience of meeting the Guardian of the Threshold until he is ready for it. Before that he is protected. Therefore one speaks of the experience of the Guardian of the Threshold.

We can note that a materialistically or monistically minded person, although knowing nothing of this experience, does have this fear in face of the spiritual world in the depths of his soul. There lives in such a person a certain antipathy to confronting the abyss that must be crossed; and to help him get past this fear, this anxiety in the soul in face of the spiritual world, the monist or materialist thinks out his theories and denies the spiritual world; this denial is nothing other than a self-induced anesthesia in face of his fear. This is the real explanation for materialism. As unsympathetic as it may sound, for one who knows the soul it is evident that in a meeting of materialistic monists, or those who deny soul and spirit, there prevails only the fear in the face of the spiritual world. One could say mockingly that fear-mongering is the basis of materialism, and although it is mocking it is nevertheless true. In materialistic literature, in the materialistic world conception, the spiritual investigator recognizes everywhere between the lines fear and anxiety in face of the spiritual world. What in ordinary life appears as materialism, however, as the soul condition present when a person is a materialist or a materialistically tinged monist, can also be present when a person arrives through definite measures at a certain spiritual vision. One can go through certain exercises in the soul and develop thereby from a more-or-less unhealthy soul condition to a more-or-less spiritual comprehension, yet one need not come by this means to a real understanding of the nature of the spiritual world. In a certain way one can carry up into the spiritual something of this fear about which one knows nothing, which has already been characterized and which underlies the materialistically minded person in the ordinary world.

If one does not grasp this connection, one can carry up into the spiritual world something that is terribly widespread in ordinary life: the love of ease of thinking, the love of ease of feeling. Fear is closely akin to love of ease, to clinging to habit. Why is man afraid of changing his situation? Because he loves his ease and comfort. This love of ease is closely related to fear. We have already described the basis for hatred; in the same way one can also say that lassitude, love of ease, are closely related to fear. One can, however, carry this love of ease up into the spiritual world. No one ought to object that human beings show no evidence of fear or love of ease, for this is again characteristic; it is characteristic that the ordinary mood of soul knows nothing of these things rooted in the subconscious. If man carries fear into the spiritual world, already having developed to the point of acknowledging the spiritual world, then an error arises in a spiritual region, an error that is extraordinarily important to consider the leaning toward phenomenalism.

People who become subject to this leaning become, rather than spiritual investigators, “specterseers” (to express it crassly), those who see ghosts (Gespensterschauer); they become possessed by a leaning toward phenomenalism. This means that they want to see the spiritual world in the same way as the sense world is to be seen; they do not want to perceive spiritual facts, spiritual beings, but something similar to the beings that the sensory eye can behold. In short, instead of spirits they want to behold specters, ghosts. The error of spiritualism (this is not to say that all spiritualism is unjustified) consists of this leaning toward phenomenalism. Just as the ordinary, everyday materialist wants to see only matter everywhere and not the spirit behind matter, so does he who brings to the spiritual world the same soul condition that actually exists in materialism want to see everywhere only ghostlike, condensed spirits.

This is one dangerous extreme of error that can emerge. One must say that this tendency to carry the ordinary field of consciousness up into the super-sensible field of consciousness exists in the widest circles, even among those who fully recognize a “spiritual world” and want “proof” of a spiritual world. The error here, however, lies in considering a proof valid only if it takes place in the realm of phenomenalism; it lies in considering that everything should be like condensed ghosts. Here something arises that was called in the beginning of our study a stupor, losing consciousness in relation to the spiritual world. While losing consciousness in ordinary life is the penetration of a sleeping or dreaming condition into consciousness, losing consciousness regarding the spiritual world means wanting to give worth only to that which appears in the same way as things in the ordinary world, so that one is unconscious in relation to the spiritual world; it is demanded that proof be supplied that can be taken in the way appropriate only in the ordinary world. Just as one brings sleep into the ordinary world if one falls unconscious, so one falls unconscious in relation to the beings and processes of the spiritual world if one takes into the super-sensible world that which is only an extract of sense reality (das Sinnliche). The true spiritual investigator also knows those realms of the spiritual world that condense into the ghostlike, but he knows that everything arriving at such a condensation is merely the dying, the withering in the spiritual world. When, for example, with the help of a medium, something is brought to life as the thoughts of a deceased person, we are confronted only with what remains behind, as it were, of the deceased. We are not dealing with that which goes through the portal of death, which passes through the spiritual world and appears again in a new earthly life. We are concerned in such a case not with what is present in the individuality of the dead person but with the sheath that is cast off, the wooden part of the tree, or the shell of a shellfish, or the skin of the snake that is cast off. In the same way, such sheaths, such useless remnants, are continuously being cast off from the being of the spiritual world and then, by way of a medium, they can be made perceptible—although as visible unreality. The spiritual investigator knows, to be sure, that he is not confronting an unreality. He does not surrender himself to the error, however, that in encountering the described phenomenon he is confronted with something fertile, with something sprouting and budding; rather he knows it as something dying, withering. At the same time it must be emphasized that in the sense world, when one confronts error, one is dealing with something that must be ignored, that must be eliminated as soon as it is recognized as error, whereas in the spiritual world one cannot cope with error in the same way. There, an error corresponds to the dying, the withering, and the error consists of mistaking the dying and withering in the spiritual world for something fruitful or full of significance. Even in the life of the ordinary human being, error is something one casts off; in the spiritual world error arises when the dead, the dying, is taken for something fruitful, sprouting; one mistakes the dead remnants that have been cast off for immortality.

How deeply the best individuals of our time have been entangled in this kind of phenomenalism, considering only such proof as valid, we can see in an individual who wrote so many excellent things about the world and now has written a book about these phenomena, about these different phenomena of spiritual investigation. I am referring to Maurice Maeterlinck and his book, About Death. We read there that he acknowledges a spiritual world but as proof acknowledges only what appears in phenomenalism. He does not notice that he tries to find in phenomenalism that which can never be found in phenomenalism. Then he criticizes the “phenomena” very acutely, very effectively. He does notice, however, that all this actually has no particular meaning and that the human soul after death does not exhibit a very intense vitality, that it behaves rather awkwardly, as though groping in the dark. Since he wants to admit only this kind of proof, he generally does not acknowledge spiritual investigation but remains stuck.

We see how the possibility of error opens itself to someone who would gladly recognize the spiritual world but is unable to do so, because he does not demand spiritual investigation but rather “specter investigation” and does not make use of what reality can give. His newest book is extraordinarily interesting from this point of view.

In the leaning toward phenomenalism we thus have the one extreme among the possibilities for error in spiritual investigation. The other extreme among the possibilities for error is ecstasy, and between phenomenalism and ecstasy, in knowing both, lies the truth, or at least truth can be reached if one knows both. The path of error, however, lies as much on the side of phenomenalism as on the side of ecstasy. We have seen what soul condition leads into the wish to acknowledge only phenomenalism. It is fear, horror, which man does not admit, which he tries to conceal. Because he is afraid to abandon all sense reality and to make the leap over the abyss, he accepts sense reality, demands the specters, and arrives thereby only at the dying, at that which destroys itself: This is one source of error. The other force of the soul, intensified through the exercises often described here is self-love, sense of self; self-love has as its polarity—one would like to say—the “getting out of oneself.” This “enjoying oneself in oneself” (pardon the expression; it is a radical choice but points exactly to what we are concerned with here) is only one side; the other side consists of “losing oneself in the world,” the surrender and dissolving and self-enjoyment in the other and the corresponding intensification of this self-seeking coming-out-of-one's self is ecstasy in its extreme. It is the cause of a condition in which man in a certain respect can say to himself that he has gotten free of himself. He has become free of himself, however, only by feeling the comfort of his own self in the being outside himself. If the one who knows the soul looks at the evolution of mysticism in the world, he finds that a large part of mysticism consists of the phenomena just characterized. As great, as powerful in soul experiences, as deep and significant as mysticism can be, the possibilities of error in ecstasy are actually rooted in a false cultivation of the mystical faculty of the human being. When man strives always to enter more and more into himself, when he strives through this for what is called the deepening of his soul life, strives, as he says, to find “God in himself” this God that man finds in his inner being is usually nothing other than his own I or ego made into God. With many mystics we find, when they speak of the “God within,” nothing other than the God imprinted with their own egos. Mystical immersion in God is at times nothing but immersing oneself into one's own dear ego, especially into the parts of the ego into which one does not penetrate with full consciousness, so that one surrenders one's self, loses one's self, comes out of one's self, and yet remains only within one's self. Much that confronts us as mysticism shows that with false mystics love of God is often only disguised self-love.

The real spiritual investigator must guard himself on the one hand against carrying the outer sense world into the higher world; he must guard on the other hand against the opposite extreme, against false mysticism, the coming-out-of-oneself. He must never confuse “love for the spiritual being of the world” with self-love. In the moment that he confuses these, the following occurs, as the true spiritual investigator, who has developed himself correctly, can verify. Just as one who is compelled by phenomenalism beholds only the remnants, the dying of the spiritual world, so he who surrenders himself to the other extreme sees only individual parts of the spiritual world, not spiritual facts and beings. In the spiritual world he does not do what one who contemplates the flowers in a meadow does; rather, he does what the one does who takes what grows in the field, chops it up and eats it. This comparison is peculiar but absolutely to the point. Through ecstasy the spiritual facts are not grasped in their wholeness, their totality, but only in that which pleases and benefits one's own soul, that which the soul can consume spiritually. It is actually a consumption of spiritual substance that is cultivated in the human being through ecstasy. Just as little as one learns to know things of this sense world by eating them, so little does one learn to know the forces and beings of the spiritual world through giving oneself to ecstasy in order to warm one's own self with what feels good. One thereby comes to a definite knowledge only of one's own self in relation to the spiritual world. One lives only in a heightened sense of self, a heightened self-love, and because one takes in from the spiritual world only that which can be consumed spiritually, which can be eaten spiritually, one deprives oneself of that which cannot be handled in this way, of that which stands apart from the nourishment gained through ecstasy. What one deprives oneself of, however, is by far the greatest part of the spiritual world, and the mystic who clings to ecstasy is deprived more and more. We find with mystics who ascend to the spiritual world through ecstasy that it is exactly as if they were always indulging themselves through repeating feelings and sensations. Many presentations of such mystics appear not as objective presentations of the conditions of the spiritual world but as though the one who gives the presentation were indulging in what he presents. Many mystics are actually nothing but spiritual gourmets, and the rest of the spiritual world, which does not taste good to them, does not even exist for them.

We see again how concepts change when we ascend from the ordinary world into the higher world. If in the ordinary world we occupy ourselves only with our own concepts, we become poorer and poorer, our logic becomes ever poorer. Finally we find that we can no longer find our orientation, and anyone who knows the facts can set us straight. In the ordinary world we correct this meagerness by widening our concepts. In the spiritual world, that which corresponds to ecstasy leads to something else. By taking into us realities, and not something unreal—but taking in only isolated parts, after picking out what suits us—we receive a view of the spiritual world that is only suited to ourselves. We carry ourselves into the spiritual world just as in the other extreme, in phenomenalism, we carry the sense world into the spiritual world. It can always be shown in the case of one who arrives at a false picture of the world through ecstasy that he began from an unsound force of judgment, from an incomplete factual logic.

We thus see how the spiritual investigator always must avoid the two extremes that bring him to every possible source of error: phenomenalism on the one hand and ecstasy on the other. In order to avoid the sources of error, nothing will be more helpful than for the spiritual investigator to cultivate one particular mood of soul, through which he is in a position, when he places himself in the spiritual world, to exist in the spiritual world, to be able to observe calmly in that world. One cannot always remain in the spiritual world, however, so long as one is in the physical body; one must also live with the physical world; therefore this mood of soul that the spiritual investigator must cultivate allows him in the physical world to strive as much as possible to grasp the facts of life with common sense, without sentimentality and untruthfulness. It is necessary for the spiritual investigator, to a much higher degree than is ordinarily the case, to have a healthy sense for facts, a genuine feeling for truthfulness. All fanaticism, all inaccuracy, which make it so easy to skirt what is really there, are harmful for the spiritual investigator. One can see already in ordinary life, and it becomes clear immediately in the realm of spiritual training, that lie who lets himself indulge only the least bit in inaccuracy will notice that it is only a tiny step from inaccuracy to lies and untruthfulness. The spiritual investigator, therefore, must strive to feel himself obliged to hold firmly to the truth, to mix nothing with the unconditional truth that exists in ordinary life, for in the spiritual world such a mixing leads from error to error. In those circles wishing to have anything to do with spiritual investigation, the justified opinion should be spread that an outer, distinguishing characteristic of the true spiritual investigator must be his truthfulness; the moment the spiritual investigator demonstrates that he feels little obligation to test what he says, speaking rather of things he cannot know about the physical world, he becomes flawed as a spiritual investigator and no longer can merit a full trust. This is connected with the conditions for spiritual investigation itself.

It must be brought to our attention again and again that, when the realms of spiritual investigation and spiritual science are spoken of today, it is unjustified to claim that only the spiritual investigator can see into the spiritual world and that one who is not yet a spiritual investigator is unable to know and understand and grasp it. You can learn from the descriptions in my book, Knowledge of the Higher Worlds, and from my presentation in An Outline of Occult Science that in our era to a certain degree every person, if only he makes the necessary effort, can become a spiritual investigator, no matter what his position in life is otherwise. Nevertheless, it is also possible for a person to understand the descriptions of the spiritual world without being a spiritual investigator. It is necessary to be a spiritual investigator not in order to understand the communications from the spiritual world but in order to discover them, to investigate what is present in the spiritual world. One must be a painter in order to paint a picture, but one need not be a painter to understand a picture; it is the same with understanding communications from the spiritual world with the sound human intellect. It is in order to investigate the spiritual world that the human being is endowed with the higher organs of observation. If what is investigated, however, is brought into the concepts of the ordinary world, as is often attempted here, the sound human intellect can, if only it is sufficiently unprejudiced and does not create obstructions for itself, grasp what is brought to light through spiritual investigation.

One could say that with spiritual investigation it is the same as it is with what grows under the earth and is found only when one digs into the earth like a miner. Whatever one finds there can originate only as it exists within the earth, developing in those layers of the earth that are covered by layers above it. What is in the depths of the earth cannot develop on the surface of the earth, which is illuminated by the sun during the day. If we then make an opening in the earth, however, and let the sunlight shine in, illuminating what is underneath, everything can appear in the light of the sun. It is the same with what can be gained through spiritual scientific investigation: it can be brought to light only if the soul has transformed itself into an organ of perception for the spiritual world. If it is brought into the concepts and mental images of ordinary life, however, then the human intellect, if only it is sufficiently sound, can understand and illuminate everything as if with spiritual sunlight. All of spiritual science, therefore, can be grasped by the sound human intellect. Just as a painting is not made merely for the painter himself, so the communications about the spiritual world are not only for the spiritual scientific investigator. Nevertheless, paintings are able to originate only through the painter, and the spiritual world can be explored only by the spiritual investigator.

He who believes that what comes from the communications of the spiritual investigator cannot be grasped by means of the ordinary intellect does not perceive at all correctly the nature and essence of the human capacity for thinking. In the human capacity for thinking reside faculties that stand in direct connection with the nature of the higher world. Because man is accustomed to approach only the ordinary sense objects with his concepts, he believes that the ordinary faculty of judgment vanishes in him if super-sensible facts are presented to him. He who develops his capacity for thinking, however, can cultivate this capacity in such a way that it can grasp what is brought to light through spiritual investigation. One must not have some notion beforehand, however, of how one can grasp such matters. This should result from the study itself. If one has a definite notion of how one should grasp these things, one surrenders oneself again to a serious error in relation to spiritual investigation. This is the second aspect that is especially noticeable in Maurice Maeterlinck's new book. He is an individual who wishes to direct his gaze to the spiritual world, who has made some fine observations about various things, and who has also tried to present the mysteries of the spiritual world dramatically; it is especially telling that this individual, in the moment in which he should approach the real science of the spirit, proves himself so inadequate. He demands a certain kind of understanding—not the kind given by the things themselves but the kind he imagines (ertraeumt), which he believes must appear to provide verification. In this way the greatest peculiarity arises: Maeterlinck takes to be merely a belief that which anthroposophy or spiritual science has to say when it speaks today about “repeated earthly lives”—when it speaks with a certain outer justification (not with a merely inner conviction, which would be akin to a certain primitive belief of humanity). He calls it a belief, because he cannot perceive that what we are concerned with here does not have to do with belief but with knowledge. He thus finds that the existence of that which develops further in man, moving from life to life, cannot be proved, because he has a definite idea of what constitutes proof. Maeterlinck can be compared in this realm to certain other people. Until recently, there existed a kind of belief, a certain mathematical-geometrical belief that is summarized in the words, the “squaring of the circle”; that is, one would seek by means of a mathematical-analytical, constructive thinking for that square which equaled the area or the circumference of the circle. This task of transforming the circle into a square was an ideal, as it were, toward which one always strove: the transforming of the circle into a square. Now, no one doubted that there could be a square exactly as large as a circle. In reality, of course, it is entirely possible for such a thing to exist, but it is impossible to show with mathematical constructions or with analytical methods just what the diameter of a circle would have to be to equal a particular square. This means that mathematical thinking does not suffice to prove something that is real, that is physical. There have been countless people who have worked on the solution of squaring the circle, until recent mathematicians proved that it is impossible to solve the problem in this way. Today anyone still trying to solve the problem of squaring the circle is considered not to know mathematics in this realm. Maeterlinck is equivalent to those people trying to square the circle in regard to what he is trying to prove. One can understand the spiritual world, can grasp that what is brought to light through spiritual investigation is real; one cannot prove the existence of this spiritual world, however, if one demands out of prejudice a particular kind of proof; one can prove it in this way as little as one can prove the squaring of a circle mathematically.

One would have to reply to Maeterlinck, therefore, that he tries to square the circle in the spiritual realm, or he would have to be shown how the concepts by which he would like to prove the existence of the spiritual world disappear when man passes through the portal of death. How is one supposed to prove the existence of the spiritual world with concepts such as those taken from the sense world? This, however, is what Maeterlinck is trying to do, and it is extraordinarily interesting that when he gives in to his healthy feeling, he has no choice but to acknowledge repeated lives on earth. It is very interesting how he expresses himself about a knowledge that he calls a belief, and I would like to read to you his own words: ‘Never was there a belief more beautiful, more just, more pure, more morally fruitful, more comforting, and in a certain sense more probable than this. With its teaching of gradual redemption and purification of all bodily and spiritual inequities, of all social injustice, all terrible’ injustices of destiny, it alone gives meaning to life. The goodness of a belief, however, is no proof of its truthfulness. Although six hundred million human beings devote themselves to this religion, although it is closest to the origins that are shrouded in darkness, although it is the only one without hatred, it should have done what the others have not done: bring us indisputable evidence. What it has given us up to now is only the first shadow of the beginning of a proof.” In other words, Maeterlinck is trying in this realm to square the circle.

We see especially clearly in this example how someone who can think that the benefit of spiritual science lies only in an extreme, in phenomenalism (all his writings show this), is totally unable to keep in view the significance and the real nature of spiritual scientific investigation. From such an example as Maeterlinck, we can learn a lot, namely that truth, which must be introduced into the world evolution of humanity, is really, when it first appears, in the position once characterized by Schopenhauer with the words, “In all centuries poor truth had to blush over being paradoxical.” To Maeterlinck, truth appears not just paradoxical but unbelievable, yet it is not the fault of truth. Truth cannot take on the form of the universally reigning error. Thus she looks sighing to her patron god, Time, which promises her victory and glory, but whose vast wings beat so slowly that she dies in the meantime. So it goes with the course of the spiritual evolution of humanity. It is most interesting and instructive that the best individuals today, those human beings who long to have their soul life connected with a spiritual world, are not capable of grasping the core of the actual science of the spirit. Instead, where it involves distinguishing the true path from the two possibilities for error, they stumble, because they do not dare leap over the abyss; they wish either to make use of their dependence on the ordinary world, in phenomenalism, or, if they do not do this, they seek an intensification of the sense of self in ecstasy. We cannot concern ourselves only with recognizing the character of the separate possibilities for error; we must concern ourselves with that which humanity must avoid if one is to recognize and close up the source of spiritual scientific error. From the way in which today's study has been undertaken, one conclusion can be drawn: spiritual investigation must know the sources of error. The temptation is always present in the soul to err in the direction of phenomenalism, and therefore to stand as though spiritually unconscious in relation to the spiritual world, or to err in the direction of ecstasy, which means wanting to enter the spiritual world with inadequate organs of spirit and thus receiving only isolated pieces and not related facts.

The path goes between the two extremes. One must know the possibilities for error. Because they can appear with every step in spiritual life one must not only know them but overcome them. The revelations of spiritual investigation are not only results of investigation but also victories over error, victory by means of a way of looking that has been gained previously, victory over the sense of self and more. He who penetrates more deeply into what we have tried to describe only sketchily today will become aware that—even if everywhere where we embark on the investigation of spiritual life the possibilities for error can lurk frighteningly—we nevertheless must conquer error again and again. He will become aware that spiritual investigation not only satisfies an indomitable yearning for that which man needs for certainty in his life but that its goal must appear, to one who regards this movement with comprehension, as attainable to a sound human sense. To conclude what today's lecture was to offer on the level of feeling, I would like to say that in spite of all obstacles, in spite of all things that can stand in a hostile way on the path of spiritual investigation, those who penetrate with a sound sense into the results of spiritual scientific. investigation feel and sense that these results penetrate—through difficult hindrances of soul, through bewildering darknesses of spirit—to a solemn clarity, to a luminous truth.

This is the 6th of 12 lectures given by Rudolf Steiner at Berlin, in the Autumn of 1913 through the Spring of 1914. The title of the series of lectures is: Spiritual Science as “Lebensgut”. It was published in German as: Geisteswissenschaft als Lebensgut.

This lecture is to deal with a subject taken from the study of culture and art, and my purpose is to show you how Spiritual Science aims to penetrate to the essence of historical evolution and of the human personalities which find themselves within it.

History nowadays has come to be regarded as a science among the sciences. Nevertheless a very notable book recently published disputes the claim of history to be called a science on the grounds that it is only the concatenation of single events and achievements which cannot recur, at least in that particular form, a second or third time. The author argues as follows: If we have a number of facts, say about a raindrop, we can deduce laws which the raindrop obeys—that is, we can make a scientific statement because other raindrops follow the same laws; and this we can also do in the world which does in some way repeat itself. Historical facts on the other hand are unique; we can recount them but we cannot base on them anything that could be truly called a science.—Now if we accept the ideas and concepts which are nowadays regarded as scientific, we shall have to admit that our author is right. But it is very different if we look at history in the light which Lessing in his day tried to do in his “Education of the Human Race”; as an evolution, an upward movement of the whole of humanity in which the effective influences passing from one epoch to another, are the souls of human beings. Sense and meaning come into human history as soon as we cease looking at it just as a series of events occurring in some sort of sequence and never repeating themselves, and begin to believe that the souls of human beings continue their existence in successive earth lives, and that what influenced them in one life is carried over into the spiritual world and there made fruitful in the period between death and a new birth until it appears in a new life: so that a real progress and development is possible in the succession of historical events. In this way we can see a meaning in the study of single epochs; their significance lies in the new experiences which souls were unable to have at the age in which they lived but which they can now experience and carry over once more into later epochs. In this way and thanks to Spiritual Science we can once again regard history as a science.

Perhaps one of the best ways to reach some notion of such an evolution of human history—not in abstract theory but appealing to the feelings—is to study the great epochs of art and the great artists. We shall never be convinced of the reality of man's repeated lives on earth by any abstract argument. But if we seriously observe life and try by every means to understand the secrets of our existence, we shall find ourselves becoming gradually more and more convinced of the fact of repeated earth lives, the more we study reality as a whole. I hope to contribute something towards such a study by trying to show you the place which Michelangelo holds in the spiritual life of the West.

If we look at this spiritual life of the West and indeed of the whole of humanity in the light of this conception of repeated earth lives we shall soon come to see a real significance in such an evolution of man, for each successive epoch differs from the earlier one and human souls have correspondingly different experiences. Unless we take a very shortsighted view of human history, we cannot accept the notion that the human soul has been more or less what it is today since first it rose above the animal. If we look a little more deeply into earlier periods of history and especially if with the help of Spiritual Science we look at pre-Christian times, we shall find that the whole basic tone and quality, the whole constitution of the human soul was different in those earlier periods and has changed considerably in the course of human history, that in fact the structure of the soul has been perpetually changing in the successive epochs of human history. We shall see this particularly significantly if we take an artist like Michelangelo in the Sixteenth Century and study him in relation to artists of earlier ages who worked within the same field. Obviously in such a study we should look at Michelangelo's achievement side by side with that of the Greeks. But as soon as we look beneath the surface we shall see the immense difference there is between the two. In order to recognize this it is necessary to go briefly into the particular way in which Greek sculpture affects us.

It is a pity that a lecture like this cannot be given with lantern slides or other visual aids, though fortunately you can easily get access to first-rate reproductions of the material necessary in any History of Art and see for yourselves in actual detail, what I am describing. When Herman Grimm set about writing his wonderful book on Michelangelo in the 1850's, he could not give any illustrations at all—though the second edition published forty years later was illustrated and thus reveals clearly the secrets of Michelangelo which even Grimm's descriptions in his “Life” could not give. Modern reproductions make it even more possible to reach some insight into the basic ideas and forms which are to be found in the development of art through the ages.

If we let Greek art and especially Greek sculpture work on us, we shall certainly feel that the best of it (much of which may be no longer accessible to us) in the forms in which it appeared, must have spoken to the Greeks like a message from another world. This creation of form was possible to the Greeks because something lived in their souls which did not come to them immediately through their physical senses. They bore within themselves an inner feeling-knowledge of the way in which the human organism is formed. The whole of a Greek's general education contributed to this but it was also important that the Greeks lived at a different epoch of humanity when the soul was more closely interwoven with man's whole organism; for instance, in the movement of the hand they felt the particular angle the hand made with the arm; or they could feel the particular muscle extended by their hand or foot. The Greeks could feel this sort of thing—they could feel and experience how the organic and the soul were related. They had an immediately-felt knowledge of their own organism so that the artist did not need to look at outer nature or external models in order to create his forms. An inner knowledge gave them the understanding of their muscular structure and anatomy, and their inter-relationship. They could permeate their whole organism with their mood of soul which flowered within them. Even what survives to us of Greek sculpture reveals that when the sculptor set his hand to a statue of Zeus, for instance, his soul was permeated with a sort of Zeus feeling. He then knew what inner tensions this feeling could resolve and thus, from within outwards, he could give to matter is appropriate form. He put his soul into matter. It is natural that at the present day we should have no feeling for the very different mode of experience of the Greeks. But, that mode being given, anyone who looks properly at the works of Greek sculpture will perceive that they give expression to what man experienced as the activity of his soul. Greek sculpture in general expresses what lies within the soul. We need not concern ourselves whether this Zeus or this Hera and the rest are gods: that makes artistic study a matter of storytelling. What does matter is the way in which the Greek sculptor worked upon his Zeus or Hera—withdrawn into his life of soul, as we ourselves feel withdrawn when we experience in the organic process of muscular tension the activity of the soul in our organism, and the soul is attuned to their experience. This withdrawing, and this having to go out in order to enter space, to manifest itself in space, is characteristic of the plastic art of Greece. This is a world that strives to reveal itself. This is true also of the larger sculptured groups, at least as late as the “Laocoon”; their purpose is to make us feel something of a world of soul. Around and about us is the rest of the human world, and indeed ourselves; and the work of art has some relation to us only when we direct our soul towards it. Yet this work of art does not belong to the same space, the same world, in which we normally move and hold converse; it remains alien to it.

Suppose now we pass from these Greek sculptures to the “Moses” of Michelangelo. We shall feel compelled to say that no sculptor has ever given expression to the powerful will of Moses as he did. The whole impression is of a leader of his people who fills his people with his own spiritual power and pours his own will over a whole people and remains their leader far beyond his own lifetime. So completely does this Moses diffuse the sense of human power that we are quite ready to accept in it something which is quite unrealistic. The statue as we all know has two horns; but it is by no means sufficient just to say that these are the symbols of Moses' power. If a lesser artist than Michelangelo were to do a sculpture of Moses and give it two horns like this and justify them as symbols of power, we should not admire them because we should not believe in them. Yet Michelangelo sets before us his Moses as representative of his age so completely penetrated with force of will that he can put upon him these extraordinary horns; and we are quite prepared to believe in them. What matters is not what is actually represented but rather that we should believe in all the details of what is represented, even if they are unrealistic.

Now let us turn from Moses to the statue of David; and let us look at him in relation to what we have seen to be true of Greek sculpture. He is shown at that moment when in his heart he becomes fully aware of what lies before him; he is shown grasping his sling at the very moment before he accomplishes his deed. Earlier artists like Donatello (1386–1466) and Verrocchio (1436–1488) who had done a statue of David, had shown him with Goliath's head beneath his feet. Michelangelo chooses the moment when the soul becomes aware of its task, and that moment is given external expression, and we might well believe that the artist had firmly seized hold of some special inner condition of soul. But as with the “Moses,” so with the “David”—that is by no means all, there is something else equally important. Moses might quite easily get up and proceed further: for he exists within our space, and the same space which gives us life gives it to him also. These two statues are removed beyond what is a mere element of soul; they are set within the actual world around us; we should not feel at all surprised if we saw David actually using his sling.

Here is the significant change between the old and the new, and from this point of view Michelangelo is the most significant artist. While the Greeks had created works of art which deny the outer world and produce their effect on our souls as from another world, Michelangelo sets his figures into the same world in which we live; they share our life within that world. With a slight exaggeration we might say that while the statues of the Greek gods breathe only the air of the gods, Michelangelo's breathe the same air as ourselves. This is not just a matter of realism or idealism as we use those clichés: rather we should recognize that Michelangelo is the most important artist who takes his figures away from the realm of the soul and sets them within this earth existence of ours so that they live as real beings among men. Once we have accepted the fact that in the spiritual development of humanity a special task was laid upon Michelangelo, we shall not be surprised to discover that in his earliest youth he displayed the faculties necessary for this task, faculties which he brought with him from the spiritual world. Our scientific geneticists would have difficulty explaining the facts: how he was descended from a family that belonged to citizens of noble extraction but which had fallen on evil days, a family which certainly did not possess any of the qualities needed for the specific task that was to be Michelangelo's. At first it was intended that he should go to school like the others, but he was perpetually drawing and drawing in such a remarkable way that no one could imagine where he got it from. Finally his father sent him to study with Ghirlandaio, but great artist as the latter was the boy could learn nothing from him. Michelangelo's drawing sprang from some self-evident quality of genius. Through having his attention attracted to Michelangelo's drawings Lorenzo de Medici took him into his house and there he spent the three years 1489 to 1492; he had been born in 1475. His first object of search that seemed to him especially important was the relatively insignificant relics of antiquity, of Greek sculpture. But—and this is the characteristic thing—he very soon combined all that he saw, and which made so deep an impression on him, with an energetic and intensive study of anatomy. In his soul he acquired an exact knowledge of the inner structure of the human body. In all his works we can see the effect of these anatomical studies and of the knowledge he had acquired. Before the soul could experience anything or have some particular mood, he found it necessary to know the position of the muscles. So we can see how two currents were flowing together in Michelangelo and were to produce something more than any contemporary talents could create: humanity had now moved forward to a new epoch, and what the Greeks had been able to experience within themselves, by the inner “life sense” which was still active within them, Michelangelo had to acquire through external senses by close observation of outer nature and her structure.

This sort of example can show us how the development of the human soul moves on, how what was impossible for the soul in one epoch becomes possible in another, and how the highest achievement is possible at different times with different means. While he was still quite young, in 1498, Michelangelo attained the wonderful Pieta which we see immediately on our right when we enter St. Peter's. This work still bears traces of the Italian tradition deriving from Cimabue and Giotto it even has still a sort of Byzantine quality. Yet if we note carefully what he actually achieved in the Pieta, we can see how his exact and realistic study of the human body has influenced it. Thus he could create a sculpture which was the equal of the Greek because he had learned to observe externally.

Why had this become necessary? We can see this particularly well in the Pieta if we note how in the progressive development of humanity since the days of the Greeks something quite alien to them had entered in. The natural life sense which the Greeks possessed made it possible for them to reveal almost spontaneously how the human body actually appears in some particular mood. In between the time of the Greeks and the rise of Western Europe we have the world conception which reached its peak in Christianity but which originated in Judaism and still retained to some degree the old command, “Thou shalt not make any graven image of what is spiritual.” I don't know how many people have given much thought to the fact that between the age of the Greeks and the age of Michelangelo there came one in which it really was a fact that no image was to be made. The earliest Christians did not make any pictorial representation of Christ but employed only symbols—the fish symbol, the monogram of Christ. The same had been true of the Jews who had, of course, as one of their Ten Commandments, “Thou shalt not make any image of the Lord Thy God.” Yet when we enter the most important chapel of Christendom, the Sistine Chapel in Rome, we see the command disregarded by Michelangelo when, at the height of his creative powers, he painted the Father God on the ceiling of that chapel.

Michelangelo could achieve these new heights of church art only by disregarding that command. But between his time and that of the Greeks there had to be a period of preparation. And so we shall be able to realize that it is not just a false analogy when we say that successive epochs of humanity are like day and night, and that between the day periods there have to be nights during which human faculties pass into a sort of rest state, to appear again later in strengthened form. The achievements of Greek sculpture had to pass through a sort of formative period in sleep, during which even for that the command had to be heeded: “Thou shalt not make any graven image.” Then, however, there follows the day of wakening, in a new form, in Michelangelo. But whereas in nature things reappear in the same form and one day resembles another and the plant its earlier form, the progress of humanity shows this special characteristic that the souls, who carry over their fruits from one epoch to another, undergo at the same time some upward change and metamorphosis. But this rest period of the human faculties has first to occur in this and every other sphere.

Thus after this period during which sculpture rested, there appeared the Christian ideal: an inner quality of soul, a mood of greater inwardness. This is true, for instance of the Pieta in which the youthful mother holds on her lap her dead son; if we compare it with any Greek work of art, we shall see that it could have been created only in an age when the soul had become more inward. There is a marked difference between Michelangelo and the Greek sculptors; he stands at the beginning of the modern age, the age that is of materialism. Man's senses were beginning to be directed outwards so that they could pass through a period in which these senses could reach their highest and intensest development. But there must always be some counterbalance in human evolution. Thus we see in Michelangelo on the one hand an artist who poured his soul forth into the outer world that he might create his figures. On the other hand, that he should not merely create what the senses can see, he employed to the full everything he could assimilate from a period of evolution during which the soul had become more inward. This inner deepening he expressed by external means; he made himself sensitive to what was inward in outer nature. If we look at the dead body of the Christ we can see at once that this is a beautiful human body such as nature would wish to create—and Michelangelo could recreate that. But there is also something further, and indeed in a double aspect: first, the extraordinary peace in death that streams over this body; and second, if we look at the group as a whole—the countenance of the young mother who bears the adult body of her son Jesus Christ on her lap yet seems too young to be in any external sense that man's mother—we receive from the form of the hard stone the feeling that what lies before us in death is the warrant for the external life of the human soul. The deepest secrets and the greatest inwardness are expressed realistically through the natural means which Michelangelo had studied.

When Michelangelo returned from Rome to Florence we can see a remarkable drama unfolding itself. There was an old block of marble from which some earlier sculptor had unsuccessfully sought to hew some figure and which the Council of Florence handed over to Michelangelo to try and make something of. He happened at the moment to be working on his David, so he decided to use this particular block. Now if we follow this work as it proceeded, we shall be able to see how Michelangelo set about his task. His greatness consists largely in a period which was to depend wholly on sense observation, yet he carried over something from those earlier epochs, the life of which he could share, and could thus still have some immediate feeling of what Goethe called the spirit of outer nature.

Here I should like to refer to something which in general receives too little attention. If through Anthroposophy we make our souls once again sensitive to the weaving of imagination, we shall feel when we see a block of marble before us, that something specific should be made from it. It is not without significance that we find among the inhabitants of mountain districts all those stories about enchanted beings which their folk soul devises: when people see a block of stone before them, there is a plastic imagination which tells them that not much would be needed to convert it into an example of some quality of human or animal nature. Each type of stone calls for its own specific form, and each type has its own secrets which the artist must extract from it.

Michelangelo began work on the block and at first made it a sort of image of his thoughts. This was merely the first expression of his ideas, his feelings; as he looked at the stone he felt that thus the hand must lie and thus the foot, and thus everything else. He could, as it were, listen into the secrets hidden in the stone; that after all is what plastic art means. In the end we feel that the block was presented us with what lay hidden within it when everything had been removed that did not really belong to it. An artist of the quality of Michelangelo would never create in bronze or other materials what he did in stone.

For this purpose, however, Michelangelo, because he no longer had the life sense active within himself, had to fall back on what he could get from his anatomical studies. Thanks to his careful studies, and to the fact that he comprehended artistically what came to him from an earlier period, he stands at the opening of the modern age in the same relation to art and nature as science had led to in its own sphere. It is not just a coincidence that Galileo was born on the day that Michelangelo died. Here is a point of view that we should bear in mind, particularly when we are looking at his David.

This then is the characteristic quality of Michelangelo: that he has penetrated to the heart of nature as she showed herself in his times, from one point of view still closely akin to what had gone before but at the same time a growing point for what is to come. If he created Madonnas or some other Christian motif, the reason for this lay in the culture within which he lived—and that is perhaps truer of him than of most other artists. What he brought through his own soul into his times I have been trying to describe, and what we can see in other ways as well. The fundamental trait about Michelangelo's work is that he sets his creations within the same space in which we ourselves stand. Look at his Madonnas; in the earliest phase the child rests wholly on his mother's lap. But Michelangelo moves beyond that phase and puts himself quite realistically in the same space in which we ourselves live. Thus he releases the child from the repose and inner withdrawal; he cannot leave it as a bare expression; he must bring it into motion so that it may seem to live in our world. And if we look at the wonderful ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, on which he has represented so majestically the creation of the world, the Prophets and the Sibyls, and if we let all this produce its effect upon us, we shall find that what really interests us is not the thing actually expressed but the way in which Michelangelo has represented it. We shall feel, for instance, that the foreshortening of the legs, which brings to expression the very nerve of his art, as I have tried to describe it, interests us much more than the content, the story that is described and that could be expounded in various ways.

We need not be surprised then that Michelangelo sets himself the task, supported to begin with by the Pope, Julius II, to create something which would be directly associated with the life of his time, in a different way, however, from that in which Zeus or Hera or Apollo even in the form of the Apollo Belvedere were related to the Greek world. These, although they were the creation of the Greek world, belong to a space of their own and reveal that space. Michelangelo wanted to create a truly gigantic work but wanted also to pour into it the whole inner development, the basic character and fundamental nature of his times. Now to Michelangelo and many of his contemporaries, Pope Julius II, who loved to compare himself to St. Paul, seemed the mighty incorporation of his age; he was, and seemed to himself to be, the great master of his times. When a man holds such a place in his times, he has some special relation to the soul of others who affect them; and this whole stream of culture, the inmost essence of the times and all they signified, represented in one man, was to flow together and be made immortal in the gigantic monument of Pope Julius II. The monument was to include not only the Pope but Moses and St. Paul, and other figures that influence events and in the truest sense direct the times. The very stone was to carry to later ages the living message so that generations to come might look at this monument and see in it the direct picture on earth of the course and culture of the times of Michelangelo. A truly gigantic task; and we should not be surprised that the man who was bold enough to contemplate it aroused the awe of his contemporaries and was called by Pope Leo X “Il Terribile.”

Thus Michelangelo returned to Rome in 1505 to discuss with Julius II the plans for his tomb, and he soon began on the preliminaries of the work. But petty jealousies brought it to a standstill and the Pope transferred his interests from the tomb to St. Peter's, the architect of which, Bramante, is said to have goaded him on because he feared the artistic greatness of Michelangelo. So Michelangelo had the bitter experience of being forbidden the Pope's presence though the Pope had summoned him to Rome. In fact, he was actually driven out and had to flee from Rome, only returning under a special safe conduct from the Pope.

Back in Rome he had to set about his new task, the painting of the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel; a task for which he had been commissioned as some compensation for the stopping of work on the tomb. Now though he had done a good deal of painting, he did not feel himself really to be a painter; nor did he regard himself as sufficiently prepared for his work. It was therefore with a sorrowing heart at having to give up work on the tomb, even if not with actual dislike, that he tackled the task which, as he said himself, was outside his own sphere but which kept him busy for the four years from 1508 to 1512.

Let us keep in mind what he has to tell us himself out of the depth of a sorrowing heart about this period of his life when he was at work on the ceiling—his head twisted backwards and his eyes distorted upwards to such an extent that months after the work was completed, he could read or study drawings only if he held the paper above his head. In addition, he did not receive the payments due to him and he lived in perpetual anxiety for his family in Florence whom he supported with every penny he could save. Under conditions like this he created one of the greatest works of art the world has seen, the noblest pattern that could be devised by the Christian world of the time. He sought to represent the whole story of man's evolution from the creation of the world to its highest point in the coming of Christ to earth and the Mystery of Golgotha. He successfully transferred from his sculpture to his painting the vital creative principle which informed his whole work. When we turn our gaze upwards to the ceiling, we really do feel as if God the Father were surging through the still chaotic space, and by His Word marvelously creating the world. But this space and this figure in all its details down to its flying hair, its glance and its gesture, all are part of the world in which we ourselves stand. We live together with this God the Father; we feel His creative Word surging through the world.

The way in which traditions from the past still echo in the work of Michelangelo can be seen particularly in his “Creation of Adam.” Michelangelo paints this with God the Father surging through space with hand outstretched, and with this hand touching that of the still-sleeping Adam. We can observe how sleep is gradually receding by the ray of light which passes from the index finger of God to that of Adam, who can be seen waking out of a sort of world existence into that of man. Within his cloudlike raiment which seems to be held aloft by the space-ordering powers, God the Father conceals the figure of a young woman just reaching maturity; she stands forth among the other Angel figures turning her curious glance to the just-waking Adam. According to the Bible Adam was first created and Eve created out of him but, for Michelangelo's Adam, Eve is brought forth from past ages by God the Father who conceals her in His raiment. Michelangelo can see more deeply than tradition could tell him into the secrets of creation; and what he saw is confirmed by the investigations of Spiritual Science into the male and female principles.

Let us now pass to the pictures of the Prophets and Sibyls, those beings who proclaim to man what is to come in the Christ-Impulse and the Mystery of Golgotha. Here again what matters is not the narrative element in the pictures but the purely artistic way in which Michelangelo has shaped these Jewish Prophets. All of them as they are seated there—one of them bending in deep thought over a book, another in meditation, a third perhaps in anger—point in the one direction which will only become clear to us if we turn our gaze towards the Sibyls.¹ These Sibyls are very peculiar figures and modern Christianity will have nothing to do with these heralds of the Mystery of Golgotha. What do they really signify?

In the Sixth Century B.C. philosophy came to birth, and unless we spin fantasies like Deussen we cannot really speak of the philosophy of any earlier times. Philosophy began in Ionia, and it was there that human thinking first tried to comprehend the world through its own powers. There we have the first instance of man reflecting about his own thought which led later to the immense developments in Plato and Aristotle. These Sibyls look like a sort of shadow of Aristotle, the man who raised thinking to the highest level of clarity. The first of them appear in Ionia: subconscious, dreamlike, mediumistic forces of the soul surge through them; they put into words, though often in confused form, what is given to them. Generally it is oracular sayings which they utter; often little more intelligible than we get from modern mediums. But there is something further in their utterances; they are pointers to the Christ Event and we have to take them just as seriously as we do, though from a different point of view, the utterances of the Jewish Prophets. How did the Sibyls come to make these utterances? The investigations of Spiritual Science show that the forces of the Sibyls come actually from the forces of the earth spirits which are directly related to the subconscious depths of the human soul. If we can feel what Goethe called the “spirits of bodies,” we shall be sensitive to the spirit surging in the wind, in the waters, in everything elemental. It was this spirit of bodies, spirit at its lowest level, the spirit nevertheless, which pointed the way to the Mystery of Golgotha, which possessed the Sibyls. The Prophets opposed this spirit. They sought to attain their purposes only by actual thinking by the conscious ego. They rejected everything that was subconscious or Sibyl-like, even if it foretold the highest things. Sibyls and Prophets stand over against each other like the North and South Poles—the Sibyls inspired by the spirit of earth, the Prophets by the cosmic spirit which lives not in the subconscious but in those experiences of the soul which are fully conscious. It was for this reason that the men who have written for us the story of Christ emphasized so strongly how He drove out the demons from those within whom the sibylline forces still worked: that is the after-effect of the Prophets whose aim it was to use their powers of reflection on everything that was higher than the sibylline. For this reason also, Christ Jesus was so insistent that these sibylline forces which showed themselves as demonic beings should be driven out.

Thus we have both the prophetic and the sibylline element proclaiming to us the Christ-impulse; that is the content, the theme of Michelangelo's work. How does he handle it? Let us take note of the Sibyls, and first the Persian. She holds a book immediately before her eyes so that she may foretell the future from what the book says; and she seems to be wholly possessed by lower elemental forces. In the case of the Erythrean Sibyl we can see from her countenance how forces live within her which are related to the spiritual evolution of humanity, but which concern the subconscious, not the fully conscious forces of the soul. A boy with a torch is lighting a lamp; every one of this Sibyl's movements expresses her elemental quality. The Delphic Sibyl stretches her hand towards a scroll; the wind sweeps through her and her raiment and hair flutter; she is directly bound up with the elemental forces of the earth which have gripped her soul so that she can utter her prophecies. In this way Michelangelo places the Sibyls within the realms of actual existence within which we live ourselves, and he expresses all this in external forms. If we then pass to the Cumaean Sybil with her opened lips and finally to the Libyan, we see in them, though transformed, what we must call the pagan proclamation of the Christ Impulse.

In the facial expression of the Prophets, in the movements and emotional turmoil of many of them, in the manner in which their eye reads as though it could never again leave the page—in all this we can see how they seize upon the truths which exist in eternity. We could not conceive of anything represented thus with artistic necessity that could use external forms so directly to express what was wanted as this juxtaposition of Prophets and Sibyls. We can read for ourselves, in these ceiling paintings, how the Christ-impulse was foretold. The whole of pre-Christian history is here put before our eyes—the ancestors of Mary, shown despite their number in majestic variation, and expressing always the character of the epoch through one of them.

How did Christ come into the world? And how did the world develop so that all human history until the coming of Christ could occur within it? The noblest answer that could be given in pictures is here on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.

Michelangelo hoped that after completing his task here he would be able to continue work on the Julius monument. But again nothing came of it for years and he was held up by the multifarious jobs to which in the meantime he had to apply himself. Of them we need not say anything here; but we should note the following—When developments at Rome prevented him from continuing with the monument, once again he was given a task of painting to do. He was to paint the two end walls of the Sistine Chapel. One he did complete, the Last Judgment. But what we can see there today in Rome is by no means what Michelangelo painted. Not only is the wall darkened by the smoke of the hundreds of candles used for the Mass, so that the original freshness of color has long since vanished, but even in his lifetime this mighty work was overpainted and spoiled by inferior artists who used the most appalling mixtures of paints and shading to clothe some of the too many figures which Michelangelo had painted naked. Yet in spite of all, we can see for ourselves how Michelangelo, the artist whose task it was to make the transition to the age of realism, created his figures within the same space in which we live. If we look at the portrait of “Christ as Judge of the World,” He will inevitably remind us much of Jupiter and Apollo. Herman Grimm, who copied this figure at close quarters, repeatedly stressed the likeness between this head and the Apollo Belvedere. We should remember that when Michelangelo came to Rome at the beginning of the sixteenth century the “Laocoon”, the “Hercules Torso” and other statues, had just been dug up (1506) and these survivals of antiquity made a deep impression on him, though he permeated everything that he did with what we can see to be his own creative principle. Thus it comes about that what men in general felt about the fate of the human soul in its earthly body, what they called the destiny of the Blessed and the Damned, can be seen in Michelangelo's painting growing out into space. If we look at it first through half-closed eyes we can see the cloud forms which appear as natural as those of real clouds. The Christ figure and the Angels with trumpets emerge quite naturally, so also do the souls of whom some are led into blessedness, others thrust down into hell. Michelangelo puts before us the deepest secrets of his work and reveals to us the hidden destiny of the human soul growing forth from what we ourselves know and what our senses show us.

Michelangelo was in actual fact deeply rooted in his own age. Those of you who can remember how I tried to represent Leonardo da Vinci and Raphael will have noticed how very differently I spoke of them. Unlike them, Michelangelo was rooted in what I have called the principle of his time.

He was nearly 90 when in 1564 he died. Every period of man's life can be creative; it depends only on what he can extract from it. His personality is closely related to what he has to give to the world. How different was Raphael who died in his middle thirties, just the age when the artist, more than other types, is doing work which will bear his own personal stamp. It is for this reason that we think of Raphael as a sort of revelation of super-sensible powers; there is nothing really personal that flows into his work. That is characteristic of him. Michelangelo is just the opposite; in every fiber of his work we see the color of his personality. Raphael wholly impersonal—Michelangelo wholly personal. If we try to judge by some set pattern as is so common with modern artists we shall never get the individual qualities of individual artists; we shall prefer one of them to the other, whereas both of them and Leonardo as well, have to be judged each by his own measure. Michelangelo's special quality is that in all his works, whether he worked in stone or in color, we find a peculiar artistic quality which was the expression of his time; hence the all-embracing character of his work which gives universal expression to what lives in him.

In order to make clear the way in which the spirit of Michelangelo developed I want to say a word about his work as builder and architect and to refer especially to what is his greatest achievement, that remarkable work of artistic mechanics, the Dome of St. Peter's at Rome, of which the present form is due really to him. He did not live to see it completed and died even before the drum was finished. But we possess sketches and drawings, and also the wooden model of the dome which was made with the greatest care and under his supervision from a clay model of his own construction. This dome was to express what in the end is the truly architectural problem of space; it was to enclose quite naturally the space within which a congregation of believers might meet. His feeling for space, his ability to transfer his artistic idea into the same world in which we live, helped him to think out in this wonderful way the architectural mechanics of space.

In Michelangelo we have a spirit who helped human evolution on its way because he had a maturity of soul which enabled him to imprint on the world of space and matter significant facts from the spiritual world. He stood wholly in the great current of his times yet his own inmost quality was not fully understood. A friend once wrote to him that even the Pope feared him; and yet in his soul there lived all the greatness of Christian impulses which flowed into his work. While he felt himself at one with the great Christian impulses he yet lived at the dawn of a later epoch—closely though it was still connected with earlier ages. The content of older Christian impulses still affected his soul and out of that he created something which in its form and artistic method was already part of the ties in which we ourselves live. Hence comes the mood of the poem which he wrote—probably during his last days as he looked back over his life—and which makes it clear what our relation is to him, and how we should allow his influence over us to work:

Now hath my life across a stormy sea
like a frail barque reached that wide port where all
are hidden, ere the final reckoning fall
of good and evil for eternity.

Now know I well how that fond phantasy,
which made my soul the worshipper and thrall
of earthly art, is vain; how criminal
is that which all men seek unwillingly.

Those amorous thoughts which were so lightly dressed
what are they when the double death is nigh?
The one I know for sure, the other dread.

Painting nor sculpture now can lull to rest
my soul that turns to His great Love on high
Whose arms to clasp us on the cross were spread.

(Translation by J. Addington Symonds)

Michelangelo was a great poet also, and the poems of his which survive show the same spirit which we have found in his sculpture and painting. The last three lines of this sonnet make it clear that he could never be at ease in the world, and that was fundamentally true of him all his life. He was a sort of hybrid, still part of the old but already living within the new. This is particularly evident in that work which he carried out at the instigation of one of the Popes: the tombs of Giuliani and Lorenzo dei Medici. It is not merely that the chief figures show us Michelangelo as we have come to know him—one of the Medici musing, the other vigorous of will, both at each moment ready to carry out what Michelangelo has set within them. There is something else very significant in this chapel: the four allegorical figures, arranged two and two: Day and Night, Dawn and Twilight. I have often gazed at them; in fact they are one of the things which by a sort of spiritual compulsion I always look at longest when I have had the privilege of being in Florence. These figures are not mere allegories without force and without vitality. Use every means that Spiritual Science gives you to look at them and think about them; then if we remember that what anthroposophy calls the ego and the astral body leave the physical and etheric bodies at night, and if we ask ourselves what qualities and gesture of the etheric body we should select to represent plastically the truth which Spiritual Science tells us—how, that is, we should picture the physical body of the sleeping human being if we really feel him to be what Spiritual Science describes him as being—we know that he should be represented in the form which Michelangelo has given to “Night”. It is not just a symbol of night but the true spiritual reality of man as he really is in sleep which we have before us in this female figure. Thus Michelangelo, who knew so well how to set the figures in his works within the same space in which we ourselves stand, was also well aware what it means if the soul and spirit leaves man's physical body but leave it with life still within it. If we also study the other individual members of the human being and then look at the other figures in the tomb, we shall see how closely they run parallel with what I once called spiritual chemistry.

Michelangelo stands at the beginning of the age whose task it was to trace out the inner qualities, especially those that exist within Christianity, if we understand it more inwardly and in the present age see how the human soul is to be found within the human ego as Anthroposophy teaches, in close relation with the soul which moves and surges through the world. We shall be very much moved if we picture Michelangelo shut way by himself in the Medici Chapel, working in the night alone till he was physically exhausted, yet with the strength that enabled him to carry out for many years afterwards all those other great works of his in Rome; and if we also realise that the forces were already active in him which we in our turn seek through spiritual science. That is why we feel him to be so closely akin to us - most closely perhaps if we sink ourselves as deeply as possible into these four realistic figures; for in them he showed how the spiritual in man is as much part of our life and being as he had done in earlier years with the figures of his Moses and David, or with the colour and form of his paintings in the Sistine Chapel.

Spiritual Science is always closely in harmony with the highest striving and hopes of those spirits among humanity who are themselves closest to true spiritual being and working. That is supremely the case with Michelangelo. If we start from this standpoint and try to get as close to his soul as we can, we shall feel that a soul like his cannot help feeling that it enters only once into earthly evolution and cannot carry the fruits of its life over into the future of human evolution. This transition-point had to be passed before the doctrine of reincarnation could be revived, a doctrine which men of today are ripe enough to accept if only they are willing. So let us look, once more at Michelangelo and observe him carefully, and see how although he bears clearly within himself the marks of the age in which we are living, yet he could not master the process of the world's evolution to which he had himself contributed so much.

Now hath my life across a stormy sea
like a frail barque reached that wide port where all
are hidden, ere the final reckoning fall
of good and evil for eternity.

Now know I well how that fond phantasy,
which made my soul the worshipper and thrall
of earthly art, is vain; how criminal
is that which all men seek unwillingly.

Those amorous thoughts which were so lightly dressed
what are they when the double death is nigh?
The one I know for sure, the other dread.

Painting nor sculpture now can lull to rest
my soul that turns to His great Love on high
Whose arms to clasp us on the cross were spread.

And yet we have the assurance which anthroposophy gives us: that nothing can really be destroyed which has been so significantly granted to the development of humanity as happened through Michelangelo, but that the fruits of what has been granted will continue active in further lives of so unique an individual as he was, and that the earth can never lose what has once been imprinted upon it. Even if the present age does not understand the doctrine of repeated earth lives any more than his contemporaries understood Michelangelo's paintings in the Sistine Chapel; even if it thinks the doctrine ridiculous or fantastic, it is just the greatest spirits that teach us most vividly how the meaning of life is to be found when we observe repeated earth lives and transfer into ever new ages what has been experienced in older epochs of mankind. And if Goethe once said that Nature had invented death in order that she might have so much life, spiritual science should add that not only was it to have life but to have it ever more richly and abundantly. This is the only thought we may find worthy to be set side by side with the thoughts which arise naturally in us when we gaze on the works of an artist like Michelangelo.

• 1. See Rudolf Steiner, Christ in the Spiritual World: The Search for the Holy Grail and The Four Sacrifices of Christ.

This single lecture is the 7th of 11 lectures in the lecture series entitled, Spiritual Science as a Treasure for Life, published in German as, Geisteswissenschaft als Lebensgut. It is also known as, The Evil, and, Evil in the Light of Anthroposophy.

Basically, what we have to deal with today is an ancient issue for mankind: the issue of the origin of wickedness and of evil in the world. And though in our time many people are of the view that, fundamentally, this question cannot be defined any further, yet the human soul feels compelled to bring it up time and again. For this question is indeed not one that rises up to our soul just from theoretical or scientific viewpoints; it is far more of a question that human souls are confronted with step after step in life, because their lives are embedded in goodness, in doing good, but also in evil and wickedness. On the one hand, one might say, the whole history of human thinking and reflection unfolds, in order to fully persuade us that our questions have always been issues for the deeper spirits in human development. On the other hand, we can study significant and prominent thinkers of the nineteenth century and of our time, and we will find that even with these prominent thinkers a halt was called to all philosophy, to all striving towards knowledge, precisely when faced with this issue. So today, we wish to try and consider what arose from the lecture cycle this winter about Spiritual Science, as the basis from which perhaps we can approach some way to finding an answer to the riddle of evil and wickedness. I say advisedly “we can approach,” since I have often expressed that this significant question must be addressed in a wholly particular way: Spiritual Science does not only open that existence to our sight which cannot be reached by external science, but in a certain way it also makes it decisive. And we may perhaps be able to feel about such a question, that it is one that easily throws up the highest questions, as they are usually thrown up, when one is at the start of striving for knowledge in a certain way. That leads to real striving for knowledge, and often it only shows the initial steps on the path, through which one can gradually approach a solution to the major riddles of life.

First of all, permit me to raise one point in advance, that should make clear how deeply this question has occupied the hearts and souls of significant thinkers throughout long ages. We can go far back into human development; but first we would like to refer to thinkers in the last centuries before the foundation of Christianity in Greece: to the Stoics, that group of remarkable thinkers which, following the views of Socrates and Plato, tried to answer this question: how should human beings behave, so that their behaviour corresponds to their deepest being, to their previously prescribed and recognisable purpose? This can be designated as the fundamental question for the Stoics. And as an ideal for humanity, that strove to insert its purpose in the universe accordingly, the ideal of the wise surfaced before the soul vision of the Stoics.—It would take us too far, if we were to exhaustively portray the ideals of the Stoics, and how this all is connected with the general stoical world view. But one point at least must be raised, that in Stoicism an awareness came into play, that human development was going towards an ever clearer and clearer self-aware human being, in order to work upon the human consciousness of the I. This was said in the stoic manner: this I, through which humanity is enabled to insert itself in full clarity in the world, this I, can be darkened, and can at the same time deaden itself; and this deadening happens if a human being allows feeling life to enter too strongly into the surging wave-play of imagination and perception. To the Stoics, if a human being were to allow the clarity of the I to be submerged, to be befogged by the being of pain and emotion, this seemed a kind of spiritual impotence. For this reason, for the Stoics, holding back the pain and emotion within the human soul, and striving for peace and equilibrium, led to freedom from the spiritual impotence of the soul.

We can see what must often be raised here, as the first step on the path to knowledge of the spiritual world, which also consists of this: that the wild waves of the being of pain and emotion, that at the same time create a spiritual impotence, are held back, so that the clarity of soul vision is extracted from the full experiences of the soul. What is here set out as the first steps on the path that leads into spiritual vision, all that swirled around before the Stoics. As regards Stoicism, I have tried to bring to the fore precisely this side of Stoic being in the new edition of my “World and Life Views in the Nineteenth Century,” since it is still only little worked upon in the history of philosophy. In the matter just described, conquering pain, conquering sentiment appeared as an ideal before Stoicism. And that which inserts itself as wisdom in the development of the world, recognises in the meaning of Stoicism, that the development of the world was able to take it up. That world development was also shot through with wisdom, so its wisdom must also reach up into the flowing of cosmic wisdom.

Always, when the question surfaces: how does the human self position itself in the whole structure of the cosmic order?—Another question then arises: how does the cosmic order permit wisdom, (which humanity must assume, if it wants to embed itself into the cosmic order) to unite firstly with that which rules as evil in the widths of world experience, and secondly with what wickedness has set up in opposition to human striving for wisdom in the world?

Now, before the soul vision of the Stoics stood what was later called divine providence. How did a Stoic find himself then, with regard to this assumption of evil and wickedness? Something had already surfaced within Stoics, which even today can be put forward as a kind of justification of evil and wickedness, (if we do not want to penetrate into spiritual science itself, but only go up to the doors to the same). This arose before the Stoics as the need for human freedom. And now they could say to themselves: if a human should strive through his/her freedom towards the ideal of wisdom, the possibility must be offered to him/her also not to strive.

Freedom must reside in striving for the ideal of wisdom. But with this it must be allowed, that one can also remain behind with those features, from which one strives upwards; it must be granted that at the same time one can plunge into the being of sentiment and pain. Then, as the Stoics thought, they plunge down into a kingdom that is not their own human kingdom, but really a kingdom below their true humanity. And to want to reject the wise cosmic order, so that a human can plunge down into such a kingdom that is beneath him/her: doing that is so clever, as if one were to reject the wise cosmic order, since under humanity there is a kingdom of animal, plants and minerals. The Stoics knew that there is a kingdom into which a human being can plunge down, from which his wisdom is far removed: but if he/she can drag himself out of it, but it must be from his/her own free choice, his/her wisdom.

We can see: the concept that many people have who stand before the door to the answers laid out by Spiritual Science about the meaning of evil, already resided in ancient Stoic wisdom; and one cannot say that the grasp of evil as such has shown any real progress in later centuries. At the same time this can emphasise for us, how to go out and encounter a spirit, who was otherwise an exceptionally significant spirit, who lived in the time since the foundation of Christianity and who had a major influence on the forming of Western Christianity: to Augustine. Augustine too had to think over and research the meaning of evil in the world; and he came to a singular expression: that evil and real wickedness hardly exist, but they are simply something negative in that they are the negation of good. So Augustine said to himself: goodness is something positive; but in the end a human being in his/her weakness is not always able to perform it, so that goodness is limited. This limited goodness needs to be explained as something positive, as little as the shadows that are cast forth by the light, need to be explained as something positive. If one were to hear the Church Father Augustine speak about evil, so one might perhaps find such an answer naïve compared with what one might imagine is thinking that has progressed for a few centuries. But how things truly stand with regard to the question of the meaning of evil, can be set out before us, through the answer an erudite man gave precisely the same answer in our time: Campbell, who described the so-called “New Theology” and whose works in certain circles had created a great sensation. He too believes, that one cannot enquire about evil and wickedness, because they show nothing positive, but are simply something negative. We do not wish to get involved in hair-splitting philosophical deductions to refute the viewpoint of Augustine—Campbell. Since, for anyone who can think with an open mind free of prejudice, this response about the simple negativity of evil stands on the same ground as the answer someone might make and says: What then is cold? Cold is only something negative, namely the absence of heat. Therefore, one cannot speak of it as something positive. But if one turns around when it is cold, with no furs or winter clothes on, so one will then feel this negative as something very positive! This image should make it fully clear, how little one straightens things out with this answer that truly does not go beneath the surface, and which indeed even major philosophers of the nineteenth century have given: that with regard to evil and wickedness we have nothing to do with anything positive. It may be that in this regard, we have nothing to do with anything positive; but this “not positive” is precisely as negative as cold is compared with heat.

Now we could put forward a whole group of other thinkers, who through the preparation of their own soul life, one would like to say, came close to what Spiritual Science now has to state. For an example of such, one could put forward Plotinus, the Neo-Platonist, who lived in post-Christian times and still followed the principles of Plato; and with him also put forward at the same time a large number of other thinkers who have thought about evil and wickedness in the world. They tried to make the following clear: that a human being is put together from a spiritual and a material-bodily nature. By plunging down into the bodily, a human being shares in the characteristics of matter, which from the outset creates obstacles and limitations in opposition to the activity of the spirit. In this plunging down of the spirit into matter lies the very origin of evil in human life; but therein also lies the origin of evil in the outer world.

That such a view has not just been considered simply in the heads of individual thinkers as a satisfactory answer to this major question about the significance of evil and wickedness in the world, even though it is greatly widespread, can explain a comment that I will not suppress, because maybe it will make our situation more precisely clear. I will refer to a thinker from an entirely different region: to the significant Japanese thinker, who was a pupil of the Chinese thinker Wang Yang Ming: namely Nakae Toju. For him everything that constitutes experience of the world, consists of two things, of two entities on could say. For him, one entity is this, that he looks up to as to the spiritual, and it permits the human soul to take part in the spiritual: this entity he called Ri. Then he looked at what bodily forms a human being, and which permits the bodily to take part in everything through which is it constructed from matter: and that entity he called Ki. And from the particular juxtaposition of Ri and Ki all beings arose, according to him. For this thinker from the East, who lived in the first half of the seventeenth century, mankind is partly made of Ri and of Ki. But, because the human soul must plunge down with its Ri into Ki in its experience, from Ki the will streams out against it—and with will comes desire. Thus, the human soul in its life is involved in willing and desiring, and so it stands before the possibility of evil.

This thinker from the East, who lived a reasonably short time before us, as was said, in the first half of the seventeenth century, is not far removed from what in Western lands, at the time of Neo-Platonism, of Plotinus for example, one tried to set forth as the origin of evil: humanity's involvement in matter. We shall see later that it is important to refer to this in this way, in order to answer the question of the origin of evil with the involvement of humanity in matter. Precisely this comes to meet us in the most remote circles of human thinking. A thinker of the nineteenth century, who truly was one of its most significant ones, tried to examine evil and wickedness, and I would like to briefly portray the main points of his thinking. He saw in the world around him, part evil, part human wickedness, and he stood before evil and wickedness as a philosopher, who had trained himself in depth about the characteristics of human nature in particular: Hermann Lotze, one of the most significant thinkers of the nineteenth century, whose very significant Microcosm for example, amongst others, described meaningful philosophical works for the nineteenth century. Let us try to call up others before our souls, from amongst our most significant contemporaries, who like Hermann Lotze stood before the issue of evil. He said to himself: evil does not try to deny its existence. How have we attempted to answer the question of evil? For example, it has been said, that evil and wickedness must be there in life; since only through learning how the human soul struggles out of evil, can we be educated. Now Lotze was no atheist, but one who assumed God as living and weaving throughout the world, so he said: how should one then put the idea of education about evil and wickedness? One must assume that God has used evil and wickedness, in order to develop humanity and to elevate it to the free use of its soul. That could only happen, if humans were to organise this inner working for themselves, that is organise our working the way out of evil, and only through this, then learn to recognise one's own true being and its true worth.

Against this Lotze objected at the same time: whoever gives such an answer, does not take account of the animal kingdom first of all, into which in truth not only evil but also wickedness have entered comprehensively. How does cruelty rise up to meet us in the animal kingdom, how does everything, that is taken up in human life, and which can become the most fearsome burden, come to meet us everywhere in the animal kingdom! But whoever wants to lead us to the animal kingdom in this field as regards education, can they not also run into the same animal kingdom issues? So Lotze turned away from the idea of education. In particular he drew attention to the fact that omnipotence of God would contradict this idea of education; since it was only possible then, Lotze thought, to extract the best in a being from the worst: once the worst had been given. But that would contradict the omnipotence of God: first we must work our way out of the worst, at the same time as preparing to be able to build goodness thereupon. So Lotze turns around to say: maybe one should consider more like someone who says that whatever is evil, what is bad, is wickedness. This arises not through the omnipotence of God, nor through the will of any conscious being; but evil is connected with that which exists in the world, in the way for example that the three angles of a triangle that add up together to 180º, are related to a triangle. So, if God wanted to create a world, he must conform to that which is true without him. So any world that he wanted to create is perforce connected with wickedness and evil. So, he must, if he wanted to create a world, prepare evil and wickedness along with it.—Against this Lotze objected: but then we limit what we can properly assume is the working and weaving of a divine being through the world. Since, when one observes the world, then one must say: according to general laws, according to which the appearances of the world can be thought through, it is very likely that it could be thought of without evil and wickedness. If we observe the world, we must say at once, that wickedness contravenes real freedom; so it must be from arbitrariness that freedom was called into being by the divine being.

We could add still other matters that Lotze and other thinkers have said on the problem and riddle of evil—Lotze is mentioned here only as being typical. I will only draw your attention to that to which Lotze came to in the end, because that will be important for us later. So Lotze turned against the German Philosopher Leibnitz, who had written a “Theodysee,” that was a justification of God against evil, and had come to the view that this world, even if it also contained much evil, was still the best possible of all worlds. Because if it was not the best one possible, Leibnitz thought, then either God did not know the best possible world—and that conflicts with his all- knowingness; or else he must not have wanted to create it, which conflicts with his all-goodness; or he must not have been able to do so—and that conflicts with his omnipotence. Now, Leibniz says, since in thought one cannot conflict with these three principles of God, one must assume that the world is the best one possible.—Now against this Lotze objected: in any case one cannot speak of an omnipotence of God, since in the world, where evil exists and the wicked reigns, this would be held to be outflowing from God. Therefore, one must say, as Lotze thought, Leibnitz has limited the omnipotence of God and by doing so won for himself the teaching of the best of all possible worlds.

Now, Lotze thought, there is still a way out. One must say: in general, when we observe the cosmos one can see overall order and harmony; evil and wickedness can only be seen in the details. So Lotze said: but what can a viewpoint give, which depends solely from the vision of humanity? Since about a world, where in general and as a whole, order and harmony command, so as to be able to astound us, and where in details evil and wickedness show themselves as black spots, one could also use the expression: what does it say, when in general and as a whole, order and harmony command in a world, and in details everywhere evil and wickedness is to be found? Here Lotze thought—and this was the culmination of his experience to which we wanted to refer-, one should rather say this one thing: evil and wickedness are indeed in the world. It must be wise that wickedness is there alongside excellence, and evil alongside good; it is just that we cannot see this wisdom. And so we are obliged to accept evil and wickedness beyond the boundaries of our knowledge. It must indeed be wisdom, which is not human wisdom Lotze thought: wisdom we cannot reach and which justifies evil. So Lotze transposed the wise concepts of evil and wickedness into an unknown world of wisdom.

At least I have expressly made these arguments, which for many will seem more or less pedantic, because they show us with what weapons humanity tried to approach the concept of evil and wickedness in philosophical thought, and how here we have found this confession time and again: these weapons have proven themselves to be completely blunt against such an enigma, which we come up against step by step in life; and even as Lotze says, they are completely unsuitable.

Now there is also another thinker, who tried to explore even further than Plotinus did into this, that is, in fact into the underground of being, which can only be reached after a certain development of the soul aimed at uplifting it to higher faculties of knowledge. Such a thinker was Jakob Böhme. And if one approaches Jakob Böhme, one approaches certainly a spirit of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, into which not many nowadays even wish to penetrate, since today he is seen more as a kind of curiosity. Jakob Böhme tried to penetrate into the depths of the world and its appearance up to the point where he felt something like a kind of Theosophy rising up in himself, as a kind of vision of God in his own inner being; and he now tried to make clear to himself, how wickedness and evil are to be pursued into the deepest underground of the world, and how evil and wickedness are not something simply negative, but are in a certain way rooted in the underground of the world and of human existence. Jakob Böhme saw the divine being as something, that in him, as he said—we must first of all become accustomed to his way of expressing himself—one must enter “amicably.” A being that allows its activity to flow out into the world at the same time, could never manage to grasp its own self. This activity must, one would like to say, hit up against something. Basically, each morning in waking up we perceive this to a small degree, and that is what Jakob Böhme put into his imagination. When we wake up, we are in a position so to speak, to unfold our soul-spiritual being to an unlimited extent from our soul-spiritual activity. There we hit up against our environment with our soul- spiritual activity. Through this, that we hit up against our surroundings, we become aware of ourselves. In general, a human being is only self-aware in the physical world, in that he hits up against things. The divine being cannot be such that it hits up against others. It must set up its adversary, or as Jakob Böhme stated in several expressions, its “no” against its “yes” for itself. It must limit its endlessly out-flowing activity in itself. That is…it must “amicably” distinguish, it must at the same time at a certain point create its own opposite on the surrounding circle of its activity; so for Jakob Böhme it was necessary for the divine being, in order to become self-aware, for it to create its own adversary. Now through taking part in the being of a creature, Jakob Böhme thought, not only that which streams out of the diving being, but from what the divine being had to create necessarily as its adversary, wickedness arises: evil above all arose in the world. The divine being set itself up against its own adversary, in order to become self- aware. Therefore, we cannot speak of evil and wickedness, but only of the necessary conditions of the divinity for becoming self-aware. But since creatures arose, and those creatures are not simply embedded in out-flowing life, but take part in the adversary, evil and wickedness have arisen.

Certainly, such an answer cannot be satisfactory to those who attempt to penetrate through spiritual science into the secrets of existence. This is set out here solely in order to show to what depths a sensible thinker goes, if he researches the source of evil in the world. And accordingly, I could also add much that could show us more than what we have found shining back from the world as an answer, when we try and draw close to enigmas, amongst which are wickedness and evil. If we now try and relate to what at the same time arises before us as a confession of one of the most prominent thinkers of the nineteenth century, as a confession by Lotze, we can say something like the following. Lotze is of the view, that there must be such wisdom somewhere, which justifies evil and wickedness. But mankind is limited in its capacity for knowledge; it cannot penetrate to that wisdom.—Are we not standing before, what we have often been forced to mention: that it is a beloved prejudice of our own time, to take our capacity for knowledge as it once was, and to hardly to reflect upon the fact that something could come out of the objects which are in our daily lives; something that could rise above itself, in order to have insight into other worlds, more than the simple world of the senses and the understanding related to the senses? Maybe it has already arisen before us, so that we are unable to find the answers to significant questions such as the origin of evil, because with regard to knowledge that turns to the senses and to the understanding that is related to the sense world, it spirals upwards above and away from this knowledge towards another knowledge. Along the path a way must be found, of which I have often spoken here, a way along which the human soul triumphs over that which is our everyday and usual scientific viewpoint. We have often spoken of the possibility that the human soul struggles to release itself from its bodily nature, that it really can perform a spiritual chemistry, that even releases the soul-spiritual element in mankind from the bodily, just as in outer chemistry, hydrogen is released from water. We have spoken of this: when a human being so releases his/her soul-spiritual nature from the bodily-corporeal one, so that it can rise up to the spiritual and that its bodily nature stands over against the soul-spiritual, so when the soul-spiritual is outside the body and is able to perceive in a spiritual world, then it can see into the depths of the world through direct experience, not within but outside of its body, as far as this knowledge is accessible to him/her. Maybe we should ask ourselves here: what then comes to meet us, when we truly try to walk along this path of spiritual research, the path that has often been described here, and which is set out extensively in my book “How does One Achieve Knowledge of the Higher Worlds?” What are the experiences one arrives at, when one really follows this path, in order to become a participant in super-sensible worlds? Now it will specially interest us, how what we usually call evil in everyday life positions itself on this path. We only need to look somewhat into everyday evil, what people call evil in everyday life. There it emerges, when a spirit researcher begins on his/her path, in order to rise up to soul-spiritual worlds, in order to truly come out of the bodily with his/her soul-spiritual being and to perceive free of the body, that everything that he/she must look back upon as evil, yes even upon imperfection in life, sets the hardest obstacles on his/her path. The most difficult hindrances come from that which one must look back upon as something imperfect. With this I do not want to say that the arrogant teaching follows logically: that anyone who achieves vision in the spiritual world as a spiritual researcher must be called a perfect human being. This should not be understood at all through saying this. But it should be repeated, what was once very forcefully emphasised: that the path to spiritual research is martyrdom in a certain sense, and it is so precisely on the basis that in the moment in which one comes out into the soul-spiritual from the bodily and takes part in the spiritual world, one looks back upon one's life with its imperfections and now knows: you bear these imperfections with you as a comet bears its tail. You bore them in yourself in other lives and must compensate for them in later lives. What you have stepped over until now, without having an awareness of it, now you can see.—This tragic insight into that which we are in everyday life depends on how a human being seeks out the way upwards to the spirit world. If it does not depend upon this, then it is not the true path to the spirit world. Of this act one must say: a certain seriousness of life starts, when one steps up into the spirit world. And if man gains nothing else, at least one conquers this one thing: that one can see one's own evil and one's own imperfections with endless clarity. So, one might say: one conquers an experiential knowledge of evil and imperfection with the very first steps that one takes upwards into the spirit world.

Where does this come from? When we look closer to see where it comes from, we find in this the essential feature of all human evil, so to speak. In my last book “The Threshold of the Spiritual World” I tried to refer to precisely this essential feature of evil, as far as it proceeds outwards from mankind. The common essential feature of all evil is none other than selfishness.—If I wanted to prove this in detail, what I will now set out here, I should have to speak for several hours; but I will only set this out and each person may then follow up for themselves with the further run of thoughts that follow as a consequence. They will also be followed up on in the next lectures, where we shall speak of the “Moral Basis of Human Life.” Basically, all human evil comes forth from what we call selfishness. We shall go and follow through from the smallest details, which we regard as human slip-ups, to the strongest crimes, that are human imperfections and human evil, regardless of whether they are portrayed to us as apparently arising more from the soul or apparently more from the bodily: the common essential feature, that comes from selfishness is universally present. We find the true meaning of evil, when we think of it as bound up with human selfishness; and we find all striving outwards and over imperfections and evil, when we see this striving upwards in the struggle against what we call selfishness. A great deal of careful thinking has been done over some ethical principle or another, over some moral basis or another; but the deeper we plunge into ethical principles and moral foundations, precisely this shows us that selfishness is the common root of all human evil. And so we might say: the more a human being works him/herself free of evil here in the physical world, the more he/she overcomes selfishness.

Now this result leads to another one just behind it; and it is so made one might say, that it is almost oppressive in spiritual investigation, truly oppressive. So what should one then develop, when one seeks to find the way up to the spiritual worlds, to those worlds, that one must look at with the soul- spiritual outside of the body?

When you take this all together, with what I have referred to as soul exercises in the run of these lectures, and which must be used in order to penetrate into the spiritual world, you will find that they run on, in order to strengthen certain soul characteristics, which the soul has in the sense-world, that make the soul stronger and more powerful, so it can set itself up more and more independently. Now what comes out in the physical-sense world as selfishness, that must be strengthened, must be made more intensive when a human being steps up and into the spiritual world. Since only in a strengthened soul, which strengthens those powers in itself that are its very own, which are in its Ego, and are rooted in its I, only such a soul can rise up to the spiritual world. Precisely that which a human must set aside, who wants to appropriate moral principles for the physical world, must be strengthened on the way to the spirit world. A significant mystic made the following statement:

When a rose decorates itself,
It also decorates the garden.

This is certainly true up to certain limits. But in human life selfishness also goes forth, if the human soul is only seen as a “rose” that decorates itself. But for the spirit world, that is perfectly valid. In the spirit world what lies in the expression: “When a rose decorates itself, it also decorates the garden” is present to a higher degree. If the soul rises up to the spirit world, and there it is all the more a useful tool, the more it has been strengthened in itself and has worked outwards on what lies in its inner fullness. Just as one cannot use an instrument that is imperfect, so can the soul itself not use what it has not fully driven out: what lies in it from its I, from its ego.

From this comparison, which takes us away from all facile phrases and leads us into the actual facts that should not be concealed, we now see that this spiritual world stands in relation to the physical sense-world: that the latter must make the former its own task completely. If a human being could only live in the spirit world, then he/she would only be able to develop inner faculties because of the law which must be valid: “When a rose decorates itself, It also decorates the garden”; he/she could not develop those faculties that would bring him/her together with other people, and with the whole world as a benefactor. We must find our abode in the physical world that enables us to overcome selfishness. Otherwise we have no duty to be benefactors in the world, except when we fundamentally educate ourselves away from selfishness, if I may use a trivial expression.

Now the same thing that a spiritual researcher finds to be definitive, namely the strengthening of his/her soul in order to rise up to the spiritual world, that same thing is equally definitive when a human being goes through the gate of death in a natural way, and goes into that world that lies between death and a new birth. There we transpose ourselves into a world, which a spiritual researcher has also reached through his/her soul development. There we must bring the characteristics that the soul has allowed to become strong in itself, which make the sentence true within the soul that runs: “When a rose decorates itself, it also decorates the garden.” In the instant in which we go through the gate of death, we enter into a world, in which our I comes to its highest elevation and strengthening. What we have to do in that world, we will hear in the lecture: “Between Human Death and Rebirth.” Now reference should only be made to this, that in this spiritual world, in essence only that which the soul has itself sent in arrives into this spiritual world, in accordance with what it has experienced in previous earthly lives, in order to structure the following. It must, to the extent that it corresponds to its destiny, primarily be concerned with itself, in the spiritual world between death and a new birth.

When we observe the human soul in this way, then the following appears to us from two different viewpoints. The way how selfishness can be transformed into becoming a benefactor appears in its meaning for the physical-sense world, since this is the large training ground, where the one must come out from the other, so that it may be something of value for the larger circles of existence. And the world between death and rebirth appears to us as that in which the soul must live with more power, and for which the soul would immediately be useless, it were to enter into this world weak and not empowered in this way.

What follows thereupon, that the soul has these two characteristics?

It follows from this, that a human must in fact protect him or herself from that which in one field, in one world is excellent, namely the lifting up of the inner soul into another world so as to somehow use it at the highest level to achieve the spiritual world; but that must be stricken by evil and by the worst, if a human permits him or herself be penetrated by what he/she must live out of as his/her being in the physical-sense world: what is useful to him/her as worthy preparation for the kingdom of the spirit. Thus we must precisely be strong in the spirit between death and new birth, in the strengthening and empowering of our I, with which we can prepare for ourselves such a physical sense being, so that in outer existence, in the acts and thoughts of the physical world we can be as unselfish as possible. We must use our selfishness before our birth in the spiritual world to work upon ourselves; we must look upon ourselves in such a way that we can become unselfish in the physical world, that is to say, moral.

Here, at this point lies everything that one could name as the most valuable for a person who wants to penetrate into the spiritual world. In fact, one must be clear, that one sees one's own evil and imperfection not otherwise than as a shadowy outline, when one is in the spiritual world. That is what shows us, that we must remain connected to the sense world, and how our karma, our destiny must bind us to the sense world, until we have broken through into the spiritual worlds so far that we are able to live not only with ourselves alone, but with the whole world. It shows as if on a screen, how things stand with evil, what is essential in spiritual progress, namely self- perfecting: that must be used on the things of outer life. Trying to make spiritual progress is not something we can allow to cease. That is our duty, far more. And that duty is development for humanity, which is the law for all other living beings. But evil is using directly in outer life, that which is fitting for spiritual development. These two, outer physical life with its morality must necessarily place a second adjacent world, next to that towards which the soul strives inwardly, if we wish to approach the spiritual world.

Now there is something present however, that could appear to be a contradiction. But one would like to say, the world lives in such living paradoxes. It must be said: one must strengthen oneself in the soul; precisely the ego, the I must become stronger in order to penetrate into the spiritual world. But if a spiritual step up were only to develop selfishness, then it would not get very far. But what does that mean? It means: one must enter into the spirit world without selfishness; or rather that one cannot enter without selfishness—which each of us who enters into the spiritual world must painfully acknowledge, so one must have all selfishness so objectively before one, that one sees one's own selfishness, to which one is bound in the outer world. One must also consider how to become an unselfish person using the means of the physical life, because one no longer has the opportunity in the spiritual world to become unselfish, because there one arrives at the strengthening of the soul life. That is only an apparent contradiction. Even when we enter the spiritual world, even when we go through the gate of death into the spiritual world, we must live there with what is present as strength in our inner being. But we cannot achieve this, if we cannot achieve this through selfless life in the physical world. Selflessness in the physical worlds is mirrored as the correct selfishness that raises value in the spiritual world. We can see how difficult the concepts become, as we near the spiritual world. But now one sees at the same time, what human life can involve. So now let us assume that a human being comes through birth into physical being. In that case, it means, that if that being that was in the spirit world before birth or conception, between the last death and the present birth, is clothed in the physical body, then the possibility is present that the person with this, which must at the same time be the life force of the spirit world, pulls through to its physical body unjustifiably; that the soul strays into the bodily, in that it brings down into the physical world that which is good in the spirit world. Then, what is good in the spirit world becomes evil, becomes wickedness in the physical world! That is a significant secret of existence, that a human can bring down what it necessarily needs in order to be a spiritual being, what in a certain sense can be portrayed as its highest being for its spiritual being, into the physical world, and that its highest and best spiritual nature can become the deepest error in the physical sense world.

Through what does evil enter life? Through what is so-called crime in the world?

It is present through the fact that a human being permits his/her better nature, not the worse one, to plunge down into the physical-body, which as such cannot be evil, and to develop those features there, which do not belong in the physical and bodily but belong precisely in the spiritual. Why can we humans be evil? Because we should be spiritual beings! Because we must come into the position, as soon as we live our way into the spirit world, to develop those features, which become bad, if we use them in the life of the physical sense world. If you allow those features which are lived out in the physical world as cruelty, malice for its own sake and others, to be taken out of the physical sense world, and let the soul be penetrated by them and live them out in the spirit world instead of the physical sense world, then there they will take us further, towards perfecting characteristics. That a human being uses the spiritual in the opposite way in the sense world, that leads to its evil. And if he/she could not be evil, he/she could not be a spiritual being. Since the characteristics that can make him/her evil, he/she must have; otherwise he/she could never rise up to the spiritual world.

Perfection lies herein, that a human being learns to penetrate himself/herself through and through with the insight: you should not use the features that make you into an evil human being in physical life, not in this physical life; since as much as you use them here, so much you take away from the empowering characteristics of the soul for the spiritual, so much you need to awaken yourself to the spiritual world. There these characteristics are in their correct place. So we see, as spiritual science shows, that evil and wickedness through their own nature indicate that we must assume a soul-spirit world alongside the physical world. Then why do the human faculties of knowledge of someone like Lotze or other thinkers freeze, when they observe the sense world and say: we cannot penetrate into the origin of evil and wickedness? Because of what is present—a capacity for knowledge that cannot penetrate to the spiritual world—, because it cannot enlighten evil starting from the physical world, because it is a misuse of powers that belong in the spirit world! No wonder also, that no philosopher, who has a viewpoint from the spirit world, can find the essence of evil in the physical sense world! And if one has a tendency to penetrate from here into a further world, in order to find the origin of evil, then also does one not come to any knowledge of outer evil, of that which we encounter as badness and imperfect in the outer world, such as for example in the animal world. So, we must be clear, that evil in human behaviour arises from this, that what for a human being is great and perfect in one world, as soon as it is uprooted into another world, it is changed over into its opposite. But when one considers evil independently of humanity in the world, the evil that flows through the animal world, then one has to say: we must then be clear upon this, that not only beings like humans are present, who through their life, bring down what belongs in the spirit world and there is great, and bear them into another world where it is out of place. Other beings must also exist—and a glance onto the animal world shows us also, that apart from humanity other beings must exist, which in the region, where humanity cannot take its evil, now bear their wickedness and so create evil. That means, that we are led by the knowledge of where the source of wickedness lies, at the same time to recognise that not only can humanity insert itself as imperfect in the world, but also that other beings are there, which can bring imperfections into the world. And so we say that it is no longer incomprehensible, when a spiritual researcher says: the world of animals is basically an outer formation of an invisible spirit; but in that spirit world beings are there, which have done before humanity itself, what mankind now does, in that it inserts the spiritual unjustifiably into the physical world. From this all the evil in the animal world has arisen.

It should be stated today, that people are wrong if they believe one can ascribe the impulse for evil to this involvement in matter, based upon material existence, because the soul is involved in a material existence. No, evil arises precisely thought the spiritual characteristics and through the spiritual possibilities of activity of humanity. And we must say to ourselves: where lies the wisdom in the world order, that wished to limit mankind to this, to only unfold goodness in the sense world—and not evil, as we see through it, as we have seen, that it necessarily must take power in order to go forward in the spirit world? Through the fact that we are a being that belongs both to the physical world and to the spiritual world, and that in us not the imperfection, but the perfection of spiritual law lies, we are placed in a position, like a pendulum, that can swing out to one side; and we are placed in the position to swing out to the other side, because we are spirit beings, which can bear the spiritual into the physical world, in order to realize evil there, as others, beings who perhaps higher than mankind are able to realize evil, which they have borne into the sense world, and which should belong solely in the spirit world.

I know very well that in such a portrayal of the origin of wickedness and evil something has been said today, which can only be enlightening to a small number of human beings, but who live ever more and more into the human soul life. For one will find that resolving the problems of the world overall is only possible, when we think of our world as one with a spiritual basis. Humanity may one day finish with the perfection of the sense world—there is also an illusion about such things; but with the imperfections, with wickedness and evil, it will never come to an end, if it does not want to seek, to what extent this wickedness and evil must be in the world. And one has insight, that it must be in this world, if one says to oneself: evil is only displaced into the physical world. If the characteristics which mankind uses unjustifiably in the physical world, and which there establish evil, were used in the spirit world, so mankind would go forward there.

I have no need to say that it would be entire nonsense, if someone were to draw conclusions from what has just been said: that you portray that only villains move forward in the spiritual world. It would be a complete travesty of what has been said. This is because these characteristics only become evil through their being used in the sense world, and they undergo a kind of immediate metamorphosis if they are used in the spirit world. Whoever wishes to raise such an objection, resembles someone who says: so you maintain that it is entirely good, if a human being has the strength to smash a watch? Certainly it is good if he has that strength; but he does not need to use that strength to smash the watch. If it is used to cure humanity, then it is a good power. And in this sense, one must say: the powers that a human being allows to flow into evil, are only evil in that place; used right in the right place, are they good powers.

It must lead us deep into the secrets of human existence, if one can say: through what is mankind evil? Through its using the powers granted to it for its perfection, in the incorrect place! Through what is wickedness, is evil in the world? Through humans using forces that are lent to them in an unsuitable world.

In our present time one could say at once: for the underlying soul there is a distinct tendency present to incline towards the spirit world. A more precise intimate glance onto the nineteenth century and on up to our present time could teach us this. Against this in the nineteenth century amongst the philosophers there also came into play what has been called pessimism, a world view that immediately looks at the wicked and to the evil present in the world, and draws the conclusion some individuals have already drawn it—, that this world cannot be seen as good overall, that something other is required of mankind, than being led to its end. I will only refer to Schopenhauer or to Eduard von Hartmann, who both saw the solution for mankind, in that they said: an individual can only find his/her salvation in the rise of world processes, but not in a personally satisfying conscious purpose. But I would like to refer to something else: that the soul in the age of matter is imprisoned in materialism, and that in this time the strongest hopelessness must arise towards the world's evils, towards the wicked; since materialism rejects a spiritual world, out of which light shines upon us, to give its meaning to evil and to the wicked. If this world is rejected, it is entirely necessary that this world is hopelessly covered in filth by evil and wickedness in their purposelessness.—I will not refer to Nietzsche today, but to another spirit of the nineteenth century. From a certain viewpoint I also wish to refer to a tragic thinker of the nineteenth century: from the viewpoint that a human being must necessarily live with their time, in that he/she is inserted into their own time. That is a property of our being, that our being finds itself together with the being of our time. So it was only natural that in the latest times, that deeply formed spirits, yes, precisely those who had an open heart for what took place in their surroundings, we deeply gripped by that world description, which only wants to see the outermost appearance of the alpha and omega of world existence. But such spirits can often give in to an illusion, that one can go through the world inconsolably, if one must look into that world existence which must be portrayed as evil—and cannot look up to a spiritual world, in which evil is justified, as we have seen.

A spirit who, I would like to say, went through the entire tragedy of materialism, even though he was not a materialist himself, was Philipp Mainländer, born in 1841. One could call him a follower of Schopenhauer, if one observes things outwardly. In a certain sense he was a deep spirit, but a child of his time, so that he could only look upward to what the material world exposes. Now materialism worked indeed, enormously to imprison precisely the very best souls: we should not be deceived about this. Yes, the humans, who are not concerned with what is around them, what the times and their spirit offer, and who live selfishly in a religious confession that they have once found pleasant, the “most religious” people are sometimes in this point the most selfish of all; they reject any rising above the things which they love, and do not concern themselves about anything else, other than what they know. One can find this answer again and again, if one refers to the tragedy of numberless human beings: yes, cannot old Christianity satisfy souls much more than your spiritual science? Such questions are put by spirits who do not go along with the times and intolerantly reject everything that should penetrate into cultural development for the salvation of mankind.

Philipp Mainländer looked around him, at what outer science, what our time was able to tell him from its materialistic viewpoint, and there he could only find a world filled with evil and mankind involved in wickedness. He could not deny it, since the pressure of this new world view was so strong that it hindered the soul from looking up to a spiritual world. So let us not try and conceal from ourselves here: why do so few people come to spiritual science? That is because, since the pressure of the prejudice of materialism, or as it is called more nobly, of monism is so powerful, it darkens the soul and prevents its penetrating into the spirit world. If the soul is left independent and to itself and is not dulled by materialist prejudice, then it will surely come to spiritual science. But the pressure is large, and from our time on, one can say: it is connected to the epoch, in which one can represent spiritual science before humanity with a few perspectives, because the desire of souls has become so strong, that spiritual science must find an echo in souls. In the second and third thirds of the nineteenth century that echo was unable to be present. Then the pressure of materialism was so strong, that even a soul striving towards the spirit such as that of Philipp Mainländer was held back. And so he came to a unique view: to the view that nothing spiritual can be found in the current world. We have in Mainländer in the nineteenth century a spirit before us, who only did not make a major impression on his contemporaries, because the spirit of the nineteenth century, despite its major progress in material areas, was a superficial spirit. But what a soul must feel in the nineteenth century, that Mainländer felt, even when he stood alone, because in a certain way he felt a kind of spiritual impotence regarding the removal of that which must leave one dissatisfied with a materialistic or monistic world view. One does not need to pick up and read the somewhat thick volume of Mainländer's “Philosophy of Salvation,” but only the reasonably small booklet by Max Seiling, in order to make a judgement about what I am saying now.

Philipp Mainländer looked out into the world, and he could only see under the pressure of materialism, what the senses and understanding portray. But he must assume a spirit world. But it is not there, he told himself; the sense world must be illuminated from itself. And now he came to the view that the spirit world of our ancestors was real, that once there was a divine spirit existence, that our soul was within a divine- spiritual existence, and that the divine existence from a former being has gone over into us, and that our world can only be there, because God had died before that spirit world died before us. So Mainländer sees a spirit world, but not in our world; but in our world he only sees a cadaver loaded with evil and wickedness, which can only be there, so that its destruction can be overcome, so that what led to God and his spirit world to die, should not enter into the destruction of the cadaver into nothingness.—Monists or other thinkers may laugh more or less at this; whoever better understands the human soul and knows how a world view can become the inner destiny of a soul, how the entire soul can adopt the nuances of a world view. He/she knows what a human being must experience, who, like Mainländer, was forced to transpose the spirit world into past times and was only able to see the material cadaver of the same left behind in the current world. In order to resolve the evils of this world, Mainländer had taken up this kind of world view. That he was more deeply involved in his world view than Schopenhauer or Nietzsche, than Bahnsen or Eduard von Hartmann, we can see from that fact that, at the time of finishing his “Philosophy of Salvation” in his fifty-third year, the thought came to him: your strength has been used lovelessly, since you more quickly offer what appears as your salvation of humanity, than when you still used it after the middle of the life in the body. That Mainländer thought with his world view with the deepest sincerity is shown from the fact that he, when he came to this thought: you now use more strength, when you pour out your power into the world and do not concentrate on the body. He really drew the conclusion, which Schopenhauer and the others did not draw, and died through suicide, and that is, a suicide through conviction.

Philosophers and others may look away from such a human destiny: for our time however, such a human destiny is endlessly significant, because it shows us how the soul must live, which can really pierce down into its depths, to that which as longing can resurrect in our time—how the soul can live and confront the problem of wickedness and evil in the world, and have not any vision into the world where spiritual light spreads out and illuminates the sense of wickedness and of evil. It was necessary that the human soul should develop the materialistic capacities for a period. One can also position in a certain future of spiritual life, I would like to say, under a “psycho-biological viewpoint,” a point of view of the soul life, and make clear to oneself, that only when lifted up to the spiritual, does what appears in a physical image, for example in animal beings, become valid for human beings. Certain animals can go hungry for a long time and also are hungry for a long time. Tadpoles for example, can bring about their rapid transformation into frogs through long hunger. Similar behaviour is also shown in certain fishes with long hunger, because back-bone building processes come into play, that make it possible to perform what they have to perform; they are hungry because they hold back the forces, they otherwise take in through taking in nourishment, in order to force a way into another form. That is an image that is suitable for use for the human soul: through centuries it has lived through people constantly talking about the “boundaries of human knowledge”; and even many who believe that they think spiritually, are nonetheless entirely devoted to materialistic imaginations—which are willingly called monistic today because people are ashamed of them—, and even philosophers are devoted to the maxim: human knowledge can do no more than make a halt, when it stands before the greatest riddles. The capacities that led them to everything, had to be trained for a period: that is to say that humanity must undergo a period of spiritual starvation. This was the time of the arising of materialism. But the powers that were held back in souls through this, they will now lead human souls to seek for the way into the spirit world in accordance with a psycho- biological law. Certainly one will find that human pondering had to take the form that we meet up with in Mainländer, who could no longer find the spirit world in the physical world, because materialism had taken him. He was forced to remain before the physical world: there he only had the power to visualise errors, and not that which underlies our world, that indeed gives us the possibility in find something out in our souls, that refers to the future just as the outer world refers to the past. It cannot be denied, that in a certain sense Mainländer was correct: what our world sets out all around us, are the remains of original development. Even present-day geologists have to admit today, that we, in that we wander across the earth, are walking away a cadaver. But what Mainländer could not show, that is, that we, to the extent that we are walking over a dead body, at the same time are developing something in our inner being, which is precisely a seed for the future, as that which is all around us is a bequest from the past. And to the extent that we look into this, what spiritual science is for individual souls, it can resurrect in us, that which Mainländer was not yet able to see, and therefore was forced to doubt.

So we stand at the watershed between two epochs: the epoch of materialism and that of spiritual science. And maybe nothing can prove it to us in such a popular form, as when we, if we correctly understand our soul, must live up against the spiritual epoch, as considering evil and wickedness, when we are able to lift up our sight to the illuminated heights of the spirit world. I have often said, that with such considerations one feels oneself in harmony with the best spirits of all ages, who have longed, as mankind must live in an ever-clearer manner as against the future. If one such spirit, with whom one feels in full harmony, made a remark about the outer sense world, that is like a call for spiritual knowledge, so we should also put together what today has been able to enter into our souls, and this should spark off a kind of transformation of such a remark.

Goethe let something be said in his Faust, that shows how a human being can lose their way away from the spirit. Mankind's distance from the spirit world is set out paradigmatically in a beautiful sentence with the words:

Whoever wants to know and describe the living,
Tries first of all to drive out the spirit,
Then he has the parts in his hand,
Except, sadly! only their spiritual bond is missing.

So, this is how things lie in a certain way for all knowledge of the world. It was the destiny of mankind, to devote itself to parts for a few centuries. But ever more and more one will perceive the absence of the spiritual bond as not only a theoretical deficiency, but as a tragedy of the soul. Therefore, spiritual researchers must today look into the soul overall, which the majority of souls do not know how to do themselves: and catch sight of the longing for the spirit world. And if we set our eyes upon something, such as illuminating the nature of evil and of wickedness, then perhaps we may extend Goethe's remark, in that we take the following as a summary of what was said.

Goethe thought that whoever wants to strive for a world view, should not stop at parts alone, but must see the spiritual bond above all. But whoever approaches as significant a life question as the riddle of evil and wickedness, he should say based on spiritual-scientific foundations, as a summary of his/her persuasion in accordance with his findings:

Whoever does not solve the soul riddle,
Remains in the simple light of the senses;
Whoever wants to understand life
Must strive towards spirit heights!

As now already since a number of years, I will also try in this winter to hold some talks from the fields of spiritual science. I will also try in this winter to light up different fields of life and knowledge from this spiritual-scientific point of view. Hence, I may ask you today like during the past years again to consider the today's talk not so much as a single one, but to look at the whole cycle of these talks as a more or less unified whole, although I will possibly try to round any single talk, too.

I would like to touch the fields of the spiritual, the moral, and the artistic life in this course of lectures to show how spiritual science can become an enlightening cultural factor for the most different questions that the soul of the present must realise justifiably. It is by no means an approved or popular viewpoint in the present from which I hold these talks. On the contrary, the viewpoint of spiritual science is treated in adversary way and is often misunderstood. Immediately from the start, I may say that about this view of spiritual-science someone is surprised least of all, who stands on this point of view. Since how much is brought forward from the mental pictures and the habitual ways of thinking of the present against this spiritual science—with supposed right—even today; someone understands that best of all who has penetrated just into this spiritual science thoroughly. Contradiction, opposition, and misunderstanding are quite comprehensible to me. One can find misunderstandings in different fields. There on side one believes that this spiritual science establishes on some old, Oriental or other confessions because one believes to recognise a certain resemblance of single points with that what such confessions have represented. The fact that it behaves with such resemblances quite different, one can recognise only in the course of spiritual science. However, I do this indication only.

I want to say as a prologue that spiritual science has nothing to do with any traditions, but that it is based on immediate research results that one can attain without any tradition. From another side one misunderstands spiritual science in as much as one regards it as a kind of new confession, as a kind of sectarian religion. However, it is just as little a confession like any other science of the present. Just as little as one is allowed to say of the chemists that they are a sect of chemistry, one can call spiritual science a sectarian religion. However, the opposition against spiritual science comes from quite different requirements. The different denominations believe that they have to fear any new denomination that it endangers the religious life generally. One will convince himself gradually that the same applies to this spiritual science as it applied to the natural sciences when they began their modern development in the age of Copernicus.

As one believed at that time that the Copernican worldview would endanger the religious life of humanity, as the different confessions exiled Copernicanism for centuries, which may also apply to spiritual science that has a similar task concerning the spirit as Copernicus had a particular task in natural sciences. In the end, one will realise that a similar relation exists between spiritual science and the religious science, like between Copernicanism and religious confessions. One will also realise that one cannot achieve anything against that what culture demands just as little in the fields of the spirit as one was able to do so in the fields of scientific knowledge. I want only to touch these matters at first and then expand on them in the course of the talks.

However, another weighty objection comes from the side that should consider spiritual science as a kind of continuation of its own attempts, which believes to stand on the firm ground of scientific research and thinking. I want today to draw your attention only figuratively to the relation of the modern spiritual science to the current of scientific knowledge. Nobody can acknowledge the high value and great cultural power of the modern scientific way of thinking more than just someone who stands on the ground of spiritual science. Who could let a spiritual current flow in the civilisation that would oppose the scientific thinking? Such a man would not understand how deeply not only in the contents, but also in the whole way of the questions and riddles of knowledge the natural sciences have intervened. I will indeed argue nothing against the entitled demands of science in the course of these talks. Humanity saw this science emerging, saw it entering in our technology, in our traffic, it saw it transforming the outer material world civilisation and conquering the social life of the nations.

However, just because the modern spiritual science understands that, it draws the knowledge from that which natural sciences can perform. If natural sciences are grasped vividly, not abstractly, not theoretically or dogmatically, something can result from natural sciences and their habitual ways of thinking that informs the human soul not only about the outer laws of the sensory world but also about the soul life. This encloses the questions of death and immortality and the whole extent of spiritual life. Since I want to emphasise this from the start that spiritual science (German: Geisteswissenschaft) is meant here not as a summary of various cultural sciences for which today one also often uses the name “Geisteswissenschaften” (humanities)—for history, sociology, art history, legal history and the like. However, that spiritual science is meant as knowledge of a real spiritual life which is as truthful as the physical life round us, and to which the human being belongs with his mind and soul.

However, with it one stands straight away on a field where many spirits of the modern time cannot yet go along because for them the whole way how this spiritual science approaches the spirit and the riddles of life is something quite fantastic and dreamy as basically also the Copernican world view was fantastic and dreamy to the contemporaries. Nevertheless, natural sciences and spiritual science relate to each other possibly in the following way: if a farmer harvests his fruits in the autumn, the biggest part of these fruits is used as human food.

However, a part of these fruits must be sowed again if life should go on. Thus, the biggest part of that what natural sciences have performed as great achievements is determined to go over to the technical, the social, and the traffic life, it is determined to fertilise the material civilisation and to develop the progress of humanity. But in it something is also included that can be handed over again to the human soul without going over to the material life that can be processed in this human soul in the way as I suggest it immediately later, and that appears then in the soul like the seminal grain that has been put in the earth. What the human soul can take up that way is transformed in it and becomes that clairvoyant force—far from any superstition—which can glance at the spiritual world. Since this distinguishes spiritual science from other branches of knowledge: the fact that it requires a development of the human soul beyond the viewpoint which counts, otherwise, in the modern scientificity. In this scientificity one takes the human being in such a way as he observes the world around us and the principles of nature—equipped with his power of cognition, with the sensory observation and his intellectuality—and forms science that way. One takes, I say, the human being as he is, and the human being takes himself, as he is to penetrate into this scientificity.

This does not apply to spiritual science. The spiritual world is for the human being a concealed world at first, it does not exist for the senses and the usual reason. It lies behind the world of the senses, although that what the human being is in his deepest nature belongs to this supersensible world. The human being with his power of cognition if he understands himself in such a way, as he is, belongs to this sensory world and this world of reason. In the deeper sense, he belongs to the spiritual world; but he must develop this deeper sense first. To put it another way: as true it is that the human being takes himself for the usual science as he is, it is also true that he only must transform himself for spiritual science, for the knowledge of the spirit, so that he can penetrate into the spiritual world. One has to develop the cognitive forces for the spiritual world only; the human being must transform himself only, so that the slumbering cognitive faculties awake in him. However, these slumbering cognitive faculties are in him, and he can wake them. However, this is a viewpoint which is rather comfortable, but is incomprehensible in many a respect for the present. Since this present is inclined so much if it concerns questions of higher life to put the question first: what can the human being recognise?—And then some people who live in the habitual ways of thinking of the present rightly say: the human cognitive faculties are limited and he cannot penetrate into a spiritual world. On one side, there are many people saying that there may be such a spiritual world, but the human cognitive faculties are not able to penetrate into it. Others are more radical and say that a spiritual world appears to nobody, consequently, there is none. This is the view of materialism or as one calls it nobler today, of monism.

One cannot argue about that at all that the human being, as well as he is, cannot penetrate into the spiritual world if he wants to grasp it scientifically if he does not only want to believe in it. However, such a mere belief is no longer sufficient for humanity today—and will be less and less adequate for it, because the scientific education has taken place during the last centuries. However, one has to develop the conditions by which the human being can penetrate into the spiritual world.

One normally imagines if one assumes that such a thing is possible that particularly abnormal forces are necessary. These must be forces that are caused by abnormal conditions. This is a misunderstanding, too. What it concerns is that the knowledge, those soul forces by which the human being penetrates into the spiritual world exist in the human soul that they control the soul in our usual life. However, they are subconscious in our everyday life, they control subordinated fields of life, or if they control more important fields, they control them in such a way that one does not notice these forces and their influence. What always exists in the soul what is absent in no soul what exists, however, in the everyday life only to a minor degree must give—developed to a certain height and strength—cognitive forces for spiritual science. I want to draw your attention to a soul quality—because I want to talk not abstractly, but immediately concretely—to a quality that everybody knows that plays a role that gives, however, a basic strength for spiritual science, brought only from its low level to a certain intensity. Every human being knows what one calls directing the attention of the soul to something.

We must turn our attention, our interest to the most various objects; since we need to make mental pictures of these most various objects that remain in our memory and influence our soul perpetually. Which role attention or interest play in the human life, someone will notice who has already reflected once about the good or bad memory. He knows that a good memory is a result of the possibility in many a respect to turn his attention to the things, to pursue them with interest. Something that we are intensively attentive to, something that we were involved with our full interest imprints itself in our soul; this you keep in your soul life. Who passes the things briefly has to complain of a bad memory. Still in other respect attention, interest is important in this human life. Since the inner integrity of our soul life depends on the fact that we keep the things as mental pictures with which we were once connected. Everybody knows that it is necessary for the healthy soul life that the human being keeps the coherence between the present and the experiences. Someone who would not know in a great measure how his self-consciousness, his ego has behaved during the past years, so that he, looking back, would not recognise that he has experienced it, for someone to whom the ego would always be a new experience would have no healthy soul life. In the end, our healthy soul life goes back to the fact that we are able to turn our attention to the things of life. This basic soul force plays a role in life that is always there.

Somebody could say now: hence, you tell to us reporting about spiritual science somethingevery day and you assert that this attention must be further developed. Nevertheless, it is in such a way! This attention may be weak in life, may be weak compared with the intensity that it assumes with the spiritual researcher. Since the increase of attention is something that the spiritual researcher must practice over and over again that he must bring to such an intensity compared with which the level of attention is low in the usual life. One could say that it could be apparently easy to reach the ground of the spiritual-scientific research because it only concerns the development of something that always exists in the usual life. However, the words in Goethe's Faust(verse 4928) also apply: “it's easy, to be sure, but easy tasks take effort.” Many years' exercises spent in perseverance of the soul are necessary to develop the soul strength, and we call this increased life in attention concentration of the spiritual life in spiritual science. We call it concentration of the spiritual life because the human mind or the human soul, as well as they are, spread out their forces in the everyday life about a wide area, about an area that embraces everything that the outer sensory world offers and that the reason forms in this outer sensory perception. In the usual life, the soul forces spread about everything that the human being wants; briefly, the soul life is diffuse at first.

What the spiritual researcher has to form as the spiritual-scientific apparatus he must prepare to himself in the spiritual area as the chemist prepares his apparatuses in the laboratory. It is necessary to collect these soul forces, otherwise dispersed, in one point as it were, to turn the attention to one point. To which point? To a self-chosen point in the inner experience of the soul. That means that: the spiritual researcher has to form any mental picture, any soul impulse, and to put it in the centre of his soul life. A mental picture that has to do nothing with any outside world at first is the best: an image, a symbol.

I take a simple example: if we take a sentence, which has no outer truth at first, but it does not depend on that: I imagine light—light of a star, light of the sun—touching me. This light is wisdom flowing through the world. A symbol. Now I concentrate my complete attention to this symbol. Not that is the point that something true is in it, but that all soul forces are concentrated in this one point. Hence, it is necessary that you choose that as preparation what you can read in the book How Does One Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds? where the different methods are given. Here I want only to point to the principle. It is necessary for it that you develop the strong will to concentrate your whole soul life onto this one point. That means, however, that you are able to cause artificially what happens, otherwise, in sleep naturally. In sleep our senses grow tired; the world stops being sense-perceptible for us. Colours, tones, and smells stop making impressions on us. However, besides, at the same time our consciousness dwindles there. With the spiritual researcher, it must be just the consciousness that quietens all outer impressions arbitrarily, and, nevertheless, you have to keep it completely at the same time.

In the same way, one has to stop what immediately stops after falling asleep: all intentions must become completely quiet. Everything that, otherwise, the human being spends to stand vigorously in the world must become completely quiet for the spiritual researcher. He must divert his consciousness from everything that it is otherwise directed to, and concentrate the whole soul only upon one point that he has chosen himself. Then just those soul forces gain strength that remain hidden, otherwise, in the everyday life, and now something happens gradually that I would like to compare with that what takes place in the area of the outer material life if the chemist investigates, for example, the composition of water. The spiritual researcher stands before the human being in the world, as the chemist stands before the water. The human being is for the spiritual researcher an intimate compound of mind and soul with the bodily as for the chemist the water is a compound of oxygen and hydrogen. Just as little the chemist could get the idea what the water is if he investigated the hydrogen only, just as little one can get an idea what the human being is in his mind or soul if one looks at the physical human life only. In this field the spiritual researcher must be frightened just as little to be considered as a dualist as the chemist may be frightened in his field, if he separates water in hydrogen and oxygen. One is not more right to call the spiritual researcher a dualist because he practices “spiritual chemistry” in his field than the chemist, because he does not accept that the water is a unity but consists of hydrogen and oxygen, and that he must separate the hydrogen from the oxygen to get to know the nature of water.

The spiritual researcher works with the same means, only in his fields. What I have just indicated: the concentration, the increased attention wakes the forces slumbering in the human soul during the everyday life, but by which soul and spirit, which are, otherwise, in unseparated connection with the physical-bodily, are separated from this bodily as the material hydrogen is separated from the water with the chemical experiment. The spiritual researcher experiences this if he exercises this increase of attention vigorously, often for many years. It is fact for him that the mental-spiritual that one can easily doubt, otherwise, becomes an immediate experience. Therefore, he can say because of immediate experience, I experience myself independent of my body in the spiritual-mental; now I know only what the spiritual-mental is because I experience myself in the spiritual-mental!—It does not concern so much that the spiritual researcher would have to add knowledge of the same kind, as the scientific ones. However,, although his way of research is completely in accordance with the scientific spirit, his research method is, nevertheless, quite different; and just because it wants to remain loyal to the scientific laws, it must take on a form different from the scientific methods which are immediately directed to the material field.

Thus, the spiritual researcher attains a consciousness of the following. In our present one will ask with a certain right: have natural sciences delivered even if not proofs, but the hypothetical authorisation of the view at least that the human thinking is a function or a result of the brain? Here in this point everything starts mostly that opponents of natural sciences or followers of spiritual science bring forward in a not quite modern sense, namely not in the sense that is meant here as the modern one. Many people say who would like to acknowledge the spirit and, hence, oppose such statements from the start: the human thinking is bound to the central nervous system; it is an outflow of the central nervous system. One polemicizesa lot against that what natural sciences have not proved, indeed, but have put up as a hypothesis that the human thinking is a function of the brain.

Many people immediately consider spiritual science as threatened if one admits that the human thinking is bound to the brain that one cannot think without the central nervous system. In this point spiritual science has not even to contradict the justified requirements of natural sciences; since it is true that thinking, as we develop it in the usual life, is bound to the central nervous system and to the remaining nervous system. However, true spiritual science teaches us to recognise that that form of the brain, of the central nervous system that is necessary for thinking in the everyday life has flowed out of the spirit that the spirit builds up our body only in such a way that this body can become the tool of thinking. Spiritual science does not descend only in the thinking, it does not assert that thinking, as it appears in the everyday life, is everlasting and immortal, but it teaches us to recognise that our spirit and soul build up our mental apparatus, that what is behind our mental apparatus what generally lives behind our physical nature. The spiritual-scientific methods, as I have suggested them, lead to these active, creative forces that stand behind all material.

Thus, the spiritual-scientific method advances, because it must be in the inside at the same time what it separates from the body, to another way of experience and to a soul condition different from the way of the experience and the mental condition of the usual life and the usual science. I would like to emphasise one thing from the start because I want to speak about concrete facts. What expresses itself, otherwise, in our thinking and imagining, and what is bound to the brain in the everyday life really separates from the bodily by concentration as I have indicated. The spiritual researcher experiences that he is strengthened that he is beyond his central nervous system and that he faces the own corporeality in this mental-spiritual experience. In other words, as you experience yourself in the usual life within your body, you experience yourself beyond your body if you apply the spiritual-scientific methods to yourself. You experience yourself beyond your brain if you apply these methods of concentration. You know only then how the cerebral tools are. Since I tell no fairy tales but something that the spiritual researcher experiences. He feels like in the vicinity of his brain. He knows what it means to think not in such a way as one thinks in the usual life, but to think only in the spiritual-mental element and to feel the brain beyond this element—nay, to feel it even like something that offers resistance against which one stumbles as one stumbles against an outer object. I have described this increase of such experiences to a more ample experience already here once; I have also described it in my little writing A Way to Human Self-knowledge.

If the spiritual researcher continues his exercises and has the devotion to concentrate his whole soul life not upon one picture, but upon hundreds and hundreds of pictures, so that the forces increase more and more, then that experience takes place that I have called a stupefying event in the just mentioned writing. It takes place for the one in one form, for the other in another form; however, it has always something typical. It will appear to everybody as I describe it. The human being can advance so far, even in the middle of the everyday life if he has done exercises for a long time that he says to himself: what wants to reveal itself to you from the everyday imagination?—It is something that wants to penetrate you like something that ascends, otherwise, only from your own soul. However, it can also penetrate as for example a dream if you awake from sleep what is, however, again endlessly more than a dream about which you say to yourself: what happens now?—Something happens that appears possibly like a lightning striking in the space that you feel penetrating yourself. You can say to yourself, it is, as if your body drops from you and is destroyed. Now you know: you can be in yourself inside without being in your body!

Then you know if you experience for the first time what the spiritual researchers have meant who said: someone who experiences the everlasting in the human being, the mental-spiritual must approach the gate of death. You experience the death in yourself pictorially. You experience in the real, not imagined Imagination what it means: the mental-spiritual separates from the body and continues existing if it separates when the human being goes through the gate of death. We still speak about that; today I want to indicate like in a preface only the nature of the spiritual life and the spiritual science connected with it.

A sum of inner experiences appears that bring to mind at first what it means to do “spiritual chemistry,” to “separate the mental-spiritual from the bodily,” to investigate the destinies of the mental-spiritual and to know that there is a real separation of the spiritual from the bodily and an independent life of the spirit compared with the body.

This is the fruit of the increased attention, the increased concentration. You already notice this on relatively elementary stages, this standing beyond the body, in particular concerning the central nervous system. If you feel thinking and imagining attracted by the spiritual world beyond your brain, beyond your body, you are urged repeatedly because you stand as an earthly human being in the usual life to return to the usual imagination and to think as you just think in the normal life. However, you experience the moment when you must say to yourself: now you were beyond your body. You must return in your body and you have to form what you have experienced beyond the body in such a way that you let your brain be grasped by the fact that the thoughts that you have had beyond the body become cerebral thoughts!

This experience of entering the brain is connected with something that must be well prepared that can be well prepared if you have gone through the exercises which are described in the book How Does One Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds?. Then you know, while you immerse yourself with your thinking in the brain that the brain offers resistance, and that, indeed, the process of thinking in the usual life is a destruction of the central nervous system that sleep, however, repairs. However, if you advance in spiritual practising, you experience yourself immersing in a process of disintegration; and this expresses itself—if you have not developed the right feelings during the preparation—in the fact that you are frightened to submerge again in the organism. The human being stands now beyond his earthly body. He feels submerged in an abyss. Hence, you must do such exercises that give you serenity for that which may appear, otherwise, as fear. A certain soul condition expresses itself in that power of cognition, in those research methods for the higher worlds.

One has to add something else if real revelation shall come from the spiritual worlds into the human soul. You have to increase another quality up to the highest intensity: devotion, love of that what meets you. You need this devotion up to a certain degree in the usual life. However, you have to increase this devotion so far that the human being learns to renounce completely down to his deepest organism, to suppress any activity. Practice gradually increased suppresses the voluntary movements that come from the egoity of the human being and causes that you are completely given away to the current of existence, so to speak. Not only this has to occur, but you have also to feel involuntary movements as something external up to a certain degree. Up to the vascular organs, the human being learns to feel himself with these exercises. Then he can say about the spiritual world: you experience it beyond your body; you experience it as a structured world in which beings appear as in nature physical beings appear. By concentration and meditation, that is by an increased devotion, the human being finds the way into the spiritual world as he finds the way into nature if he looks at it with the outer eyes and with his reason. However, if the human being has separated the mental-spiritual from the bodily by a process of spiritual chemistry, he grasps himself also in his infinity; then he grasps himself in the existence that lies beyond birth or conception and death.

Then he recognises himself in this everlasting being in such a way that he grasps that idea of development about which I still speak in these talks. This idea corresponds in the area of the human spiritual life to that theory of evolution to which natural sciences owe so much in their fields. Then the human being grasps the idea of the repeated lives on earth, the fact that the complete human life consists of repeated earth-lives between which lives are in wholly spiritual worlds. The idea of reincarnation distinguishes the life in the body between birth and death and the life between death and new birth in a wholly spiritual existence.

Those who believe to stand firmly in the scientific habitual ways of thinking very easily regard all these matters as daydreams and fantasies. One shows by the researches about dream, hypnosis, suggestion, autosuggestion and so on how from the depths of the subconscious soul life a number of things can appear that can cause a deceptive consciousness in the human being. You experience something that has significance beyond your bodily life. All these things are theoretical objections. Someone who penetrates deeper into spiritual science will no longer do them. Since we will make many objections in the course of these talks and will show how spiritual science has to position itself to them. I would like to draw your attention to something fundamental only.

One can easily say the following. If the spiritual researcher has experienced his spiritual-mental in its independence and believes then to look back as in an enlarged memory at former lives on earth or at his last life on earth. This is nothing else than his transformed wishes that exist in the subconscious and shine from below into the day consciousness whereby he abandons himself to delusions, hallucinations and so on.

It is comprehensible that the uneducated thinking speaks in such a case about self-formed wishes, illusions, and hallucinations and so on; but one does not know what it concerns. Someone who has separated his spiritual-mental life from the bodily by spiritual chemistry notices if he really experiences such a retrospect into a former life on earth that it is not a transformed wish or something that can appear from his sub-consciousness. Since one may say, what one experiences in the spiritual is usually very different from that what one would have dreamt. You can find a lot of nonsense in the field of spiritual science. In no other field charlatanism is so widespread as in the field of spiritual science; and one can hear someone speaking who has looked at spiritual science who has absorbed some of its teachings and is convinced that these teachings are true: this or that human being has experienced this or that in a former life. Now, one can experience a lot of nonsense in this field. Normally one can notice that the statements that are done in this field correspond to certain human wishes. Since what the people want to have been, this takes on mysterious shapes sometimes. Mostly these incarnations are rather famous, excellent persons whom one can get to know not by spiritual-scientific research but by history! However, to someone who penetrates into the spiritual worlds really the things are represented quite different. Hence, the following example: somebody casts a glance, after he has applied the spiritual-scientific methods to his soul, at a former life on earth, as it is possible and even natural if the spiritual-scientific methods have become effective up to a certain degree; then the picture of experiences of a former life on earth appear.

However, one will notice that these experiences are in such a way that one has no use for them at the present moment when one sees them in the enlarged retrospect; except that they enrich the knowledge one has no use for them in the usual life. One realises that one had certain skills, certain knowledge and so on in a former life. Now they appear pictorially. However, one is too old in the present life to attain these skills and knowledge again. As a rule this will happen what one would not have dreamt what no imagination can invent; as a rule the real life is completely different from the fantastic picture which one imagines about a former life on earth. It can also be that one notices: in the past life, you had a relationship to this or that person. However, if one wants to draw the conclusions in the age when one discovers this for the present life, the living conditions do not permit it, and then one is urged to this what one calls the spiritual principle of causality. One recognises,—but one cannot apply the knowledge to the present life. You must also develop a devoted soul life and say to yourself, what you have developed once as relation to persons will enjoy life; but you must wait, until the spiritual connections bring the causes of former lives on earth to effect in the present one. What one wants to dream in spiritual field does not happen if the knowledge is a real one.

If you look at that existence which passes between death and a new birth where you are in a wholly spiritual life, any conceptual thinking does not help to get mental pictures of your life in that time. What you have to consider as the next form of your life-tasks, of your interests at first of which kind your surroundings are in which you have grown up in the outer material world what you have developed as wishes, desires, and emotions which character your mindscape has, all this is mostly completely contrary to that what you have experienced in the spiritual world before you have descended to the present embodiment. What you have desired there does not correspond to the wishes in the earthly life.

We take an example. In the earth-life, you can be affected very easily by a stroke of fate painfully. Then you may easily believe if you feel anything as painful and if this painful feeling does not correspond to any wish, not even in the sub-consciousness, that in the spiritual world where you were before your whole life of desires, your position to the spiritual world was similar as now your position is towards life. However, this is not the case. The feeling in the spiritual world before your embodiment is drastically different.

Hence, you have to imagine that you yourself caused everything to experience this pain. What you do not want in the life on earth you get to know that you have wished it before your life on earth. Since you can attain perfection of your soul life experiencing and overcoming this pain. Since the fateful question becomes a question of perfection by the spiritual-scientific knowledge.

If we imagine the spiritual life this way, indeed, a spiritual environment appears to the increased inner life as the natural environment appears to the senses and the reason. The spiritual researcher has to overcome many things to put as science what he can observe. Since you can imagine that the experiences which the spiritual researcher must have must be attained first. They are attained in such a way that they appear weak that the weakest memory pictures of the usual life are strong compared to these manifestations of the spiritual world, and that these pale recollections of the spiritual must be strengthened. They are strengthened only gradually while one settles down more and more in the spiritual conditions. This strengthening of the soul life is the basic condition of the spiritual research. Then, however, something else must be added.

We see in the course of the talks that it is unfounded to say, what is attained by concentration and meditation this way does not differ at all from the illusions and hallucinations of a morbid soul life. One may say if one considers the matters externally that the experiences of the spiritual researcher do not differ from them. One may even say, if the spiritual researcher describes these matters, it is real in such a way, as if a dreamer describes his dreams. In the dreams, memories of the outer world express themselves. Hence, one can say in a certain sense, what the spiritual researcher separates as his mental-spiritual from the bodily and puts as beings of an imagery before his soul is taken from the qualities of the pictures of the beings of the outer world.

Someone who reads my Occult Science. An Outline may say if he absolutely wants to do so: the matters which you describe and which are to be attained only in the supersensible worlds for spiritual science are matters that one also finds in the outer world, even if not arranged that way. One may say this in certain way, although the objections that are raised today from some side against what spiritual science says are somewhat naive. Somebody says, for example, what one can read in such a writing as Occult Science is arranged like by a kind of pressed inner experience, and it is such a representation, actually, speculative fiction and no reality. That just shows what kind of logic it is. Since if one dwells on it, one notices that it is the same logic, as if a child that has only seen a wooden lion up to now says if it sees a real lion: this is no real lion, because the real one is wooden. The opponents of spiritual science often do so. Because they know the matters not properly, they accuse the spiritual scientist that the matters are not in such a way, as they know them from the usual life. Nevertheless, one can object that the portrayals of the spiritual researcher's memories are from the usual life. However, this objection is as valuable as for example the objection of that child.

What one attains and beholds so directly must not go over from the observation of the spiritual world to the sensory world; but it is necessary that you learn to read in that what you behold. Since that what you have beheld you have to read correctly. However, you learn this reading with the exercises at the same time by which you familiarise yourself with the spiritual world. If anybody regards the portrayals of spiritual science only as memories of the usual world and says: these are only concepts if there is spoken about former lives on earth, which are also found, otherwise, in life only not arranged that way, then such a human being resembles someone who looks at a letter and says to another: do you want to experience anything new from it? I already know everything that you can read in it; because there are only letters in it which I already know, there is nothing new at all! The same applies if one says: what the spiritual researcher describes, nevertheless, is only memories of the sensory world! But that is the point with these portrayals what is behind as something essential that reveals itself there.

Hence,spiritual science is the result of the spiritual researcher's experience. It is hard that spiritual science complies so little with the life goals of today that the spiritual researcher must always be involved with that what becomes experience, observation for him that he does not put his body on the market, as it were, but his soul if he speaks about the conditions in the spiritual world. While the usual world separates the human being if he should recognise something “objective,” the spiritual-scientific researcher must submerge in that which his science refers to, must become one with it. However, one regards that as “subjective” experience only. One does not notice that the indicated methods make the mental-spiritual independent of everything that we experience subjectively. Since if we experience it ever so much, and if it is called “mysticism” ever so much: what we experience subjectively is experienced in the body. However, what the spiritual researcher experiences is experienced beyond the body, but can be understood in the body with the usual reason.

Since also that objection is not justified that someone who wants to get knowledge of the spiritual worlds must be himself a spiritual researcher. In order to find and investigate the spiritual facts and beings one must be a spiritual researcher but not to understand the spiritual-scientific communications. It is sufficient that one absorbs them with common sense as one absorbs what the chemists or physicists find with their methods.

If one considers spiritual research this way, it appears as that which natural sciences must lead into as it were. As natural sciences have shown material goals to humanity, spiritual science will transform the mental-spiritual experience of humanity in such a way, as it is commensurate to the goals of the present and of the future of humanity. About these goals, one may say what a man of the present said, namely what Wilson (Woodrow W., 1856-1924, The New Freedom (1912)), the president of the United States of America, said concerning something external that applies, however, to the goals of spiritual science generally. Wilson speaks in the book that recently appeared about the reforms that he has experienced. He says that the outer material life has changed completely that instead of the old patriarchal relation of employers and employees quite different relations have taken place. Trade unions of employees face the employers, and the former conditions have changed completely.

The fact that it has happened that way is a result of modern life; this is, above all, for someone who realises the matter properly a result of the knowledge of nature of the present humanity. Now Wilson says, what one has as forms of the legitimate living together still often corresponds to that what one considered as right in former times when the single worker faced his employer in a patriarchal relation. Wilson now demands that one creates harmony between the legitimate living together of modern human beings and that what civilisation has created. Many things culminate in the exceptionally interesting literature of the American president. What he says about external conditions one can say about the complete mental human experience today. One would like to mention thinkers—if one considers such a thing in connection with the spiritual goals—who belonged to quite different times of human development: Archimedes, the founder of mechanics, and Plato, the great Greek philosopher. They were of the opinion that the application of science to the technology of life weakens the human mind. One can understand that excellent spirits of other times had this opinion; but according to such opinions, the course of the world complies just as little as with that what one believes today, indeed, less what, however, people believed when the first railway should be built in Germany. At that time, the Bavarian Medical Board had to deliver an expertise whether one should build railways or not. This board meant that one should not build railways, because if one built them, the nervous systems of persons who would drive in them would be injured very much. However, if railways were still built, one should build high wooden walls on the left and on the right at least, so that the persons living nearby would not be injured by the sight or noise of the trains.

One may smile at this medical board. However, even if one smiles at it, one can find it still reasonable. Since one can oppose or stand up for it even if the Bavarian Medical Board very much exaggerated the issue, nevertheless, it has become true for someone who knows history not only externally, but internally what it had assumed. One can say that this board had a good view. However, one does not need to oppose it. Why not? Because history stands up for it! It is indifferent what the single human beings may think about the fact that the course of the global development goes on, and that the human being has to adapt himself to the course of development. This is also the demand that Wilson puts up: the course of development has brought certain cultural processes, and the human being has to adapt himself to them.

If one extends this to the soul conditions, one can say that in that what the souls have received in the course of time, the goals came about which are infinitely more complex than those of the past times have been. For the outside world, one can imagine this reversal easily; but also that life has changed concerning the needs of the soul daily. Someone who would believe that one could do this with the soul forces in the same way even today that directed the human being into the spiritual worlds once does not regard what takes place in the world development. He does not regard that we have not only four centuries of natural sciences behind ourselves, but what is more important that we have four centuries of scientific education behind ourselves, and that it has become necessary today to bring the results of spiritual science to the hearts and souls. Even if it may also correspond to the details that the course of world history does not always permit this, nevertheless, one must say:

If today anybody opposed anything against that what spiritual science wants to be, then it could be that he would resemble the Bavarian Medical Board that wanted to erect wooden walls beside the railways, so that people living nearby would not be injured: the course of worlddevelopment passes over him. However, the human being is must not position himself to the goals of the global development in such a way that he leaves it to its own devices, but he got the strength to contribute to the conditions. However, that what approaches the human soul as demands in the outer life and from the outer life what appears as outer goals demands inner goals of the soul. The inner goals of the soul are the goals of spiritual science; natural sciences have changed the outer worldview, the body of civilisation. However, civilisation needs a soul. This soul should be the creation of spiritual science. It is the goal of spiritual science to penetrate the body of civilisation with soul and spirit. Then one can easily realise that the spiritual researcher can calmly consider everything that spiritual science experiences as contradiction and misunderstanding. The living conditions demand such a kind of knowledge of the spiritual world in which the soul feels so strong that it attracts forces for its being not only from the sensory world but from that what a knowledge of the spiritual world can give. More and more one will recognise that the soul needs forces for the modern life that flow not only from the knowledge of the sensory existence, but also from the knowledge of the spiritual existence. With these strong forces, the soul will penetrate itself like with an elixir of life, will feel the sense of its being exceeding birth and death, experiences that quality in itself that one calls “immortality,” and will cope with the tasks that the present and future of human history must set to it.

I wanted to outline the present and future of the human soul with some words only. I give all other explanations in the following talks. In this preface, I wanted to cause a feeling of that only what the spiritual researcher bears in himself. To speak from the spiritual-scientific point of view in such a way, as I like to do it in these talks, can happen only on two conditions. What the spiritual researcher has to inform of the real spiritual research differs at first from that what one often thinks and considers as correct, so that someone who asserts this spiritual-scientific is a charlatan, a blatherer or a frivolous human being—or that he can know in himself that truth is what he has to say. There may be the most different nuances of these two extremes; but intermediate stages do almost not exist. With the consciousness that one can be considered as the one or the other, one speaks anyway as a spiritual researcher. Someone who stands in this spiritual science can develop the consciousness and the strength to speak about this spiritual research only because he also knows how to estimate its power of cognition and its strength of truth and that he can withstand the misunderstandings and consciously wrong accusations because of this consciousness of truth and knowledge on one side. However, on the other side spiritual science also leads into the immediate spiritual life, as well as into the spiritual life of our time and teaches the spiritual researcher that the representation of spiritual science is a necessity now.

Even if the contemporaries do not clearly express this necessity of spiritual knowledge, it exists as a dark need of spiritual knowledge. In the depths of the souls, one perceives the cry for spiritual knowledge, even if this cry itself is not often audible to the conscious thinking of our fellow men. Since our time needs the knowledge of the spirit. All other science that is commensurate with our time would lower this spirit, would extinguish it from the souls as it also works from other currents of the spiritual life if spiritual science does not stir up it. The spiritual researcher knows that the human soul needs the spirit, and, hence, he hopes that it will belong to the goals of human development in the future to maintain this spirit.

We have realised that the human soul must transform itself if it wants to attain the spirit. From that, it is evident that it is more comfortable to leave the spirit where it is and not to care for it, than to enterprise in the soul what leads to the spirit. It is more comfortable, however, also with that what arises to common sense and to a healthy feeling of truth to realise the material connections of nature simply, than to develop a sharper reason and to use it to realise what spiritual science says. One lives more comfortable without spirit. Nevertheless, the spirit has the quality that it brings damage if one wants to live without it as it brings benefit if one wants to live with it. If one wants to live with it, it animates the soul; it penetrates it with all skills that we want for life. If one denies it, it withdraws and kills the soul life to the same degree, as this does not want to know anything of it. If one denies it, it takes much optimism gradually and gives desperation and timidity.

Indeed, one can deny the spirit; however, one cannot destroy it. If one denies it, it appears in its counter-image inside the soul—and asks in the human soul for itself. The spiritual researcher who speaks of spiritual science as a goal of the present feels this. Therefore, he relies on it: it will settle down because humanity can close the eyes before the spirit, but it cannot prevent it. However, in the end this impact changes into the demand to look at this spirit. I would like to express that in the following way. One can deny the spirit, because it is more comfortable to understand the world and to live in it without spirit than with spirit. However, one cannot resist the demands of spirit denying it. Hence, that what spiritual science wants to incorporate as an elixir of life in the civilisation it incorporated by its own strength. Since the human soul often denies the spirit; however, it will demand it always out of its innermost nature, out of its deepest goals!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No created mind penetrates

Into the being of nature.

Blissful is that to whom

She shows her appearance only.

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

Indeed

To the Physicist

“No created mind penetrates

Into the being of nature.”

O you Philistine!

Do not remind me

And my brothers and sisters

Of such a word.

We think: everywhere we are inside.

“Blissful is that to whom she shows

Her appearance only!”

I hear that repeatedly for sixty years,

I grumble about it, but covertly,

I say to myself thousand and thousand times:

She gives everything plenty and with pleasure;

Nature has neither kernel nor shell,

She is everything at the same time.

Examine yourself above all,

Whether you are kernel or shell.

Before I change over to the single results of spiritual science in this series of talks, I want to contemplate on one of many misunderstandings that this spiritual science experiences.

You can repeatedly hear that objection among others that spiritual science allures the human being from his denomination, from his religious life. Why one should not fear that in the present, just if spiritual science wants in the real sense to be the continuator of natural sciences as they have developed for three to four centuries in our intellectual life. How should one not fear this, because wide circles of our present educated people just hold the view that a worldview that is built on the firm ground of natural sciences cannot be concerned with those requirements of the religious life? Many people hold the view that someone who works his way up in the present to that height which gives the human beings the “true science,” must free himself from that what one has called religious confession for long times. In many circles, one thinks that religious mental pictures, religious feeling, and religious thinking correspond to a level of childish development of humanity, whereas we have now entered into the mature age of human intellectual development that is called to remove the old religious preconceptions and to change over to purely scientific ideas and a worldview based on them.

Considering the present human beings, one finds such a mood, as I have just characterised, with many people. A historical overview of the latest phase of the cultural life, of the last times of the nineteenth century can also cause the impression that I would like to characterise in the following way. The religious human beings who worried about the religious sense felt constrained from a certain viewpoint to save the field of religious life from the attack of the modern scientific life. This continues until our days. Numerous writings set themselves the task to explain the necessity of the religious life for the human soul from philosophical or other points of view with respect to the scientific way of thinking and worldviews. However, I would have to explain a lot if I should point to the bases that entitle to such statements as they have been made. For example, I could point to the attempts of the theological school of Ritschl (Albrecht R., 1822-1889) and Herrmann (Wilhelm H., 1846-1922) showing that with single thinkers something lived that slumbered in the hearts of many people. I point to this school not to characterise it or that at which Ritschl and his followers aimed. To a lesser extent, I would like to give the contents of the view of Ritschl and Hermann but rather the mood from which it developed.

One recognises Ritschl as a deeply religious thinker who felt called to protect the religion against the attack of scientific knowledge. How did he try to accomplish this? He tried to accomplish it, saying that science as it has developed during the last three to four centuries shows how the human intellect has penetrated into the mysteries of the material outside world. Looking at this, Ritschl said to himself, one can squeeze nothing out of all that what the human soul should squeeze out as religious truth and religious confession. Hence, Ritschl and his followers look for another source of the religious confession. They say to themselves, religion is always endangered if one wants to support it with that knowledge, as it is standard in natural sciences, and always one faces the impossibility to squeeze out anything from the scientific way of thinking that could inspire and penetrate the human soul. Hence, one must refuse finally to add something to the religion that is an object of science. But for it there is an original religious life in the human soul which has to keep itself completely separate from any invasion of science and that it may come—if it develops and revives internally—to autonomic experiences, to internal facts which connect the human soul with the contents of the religious confession.

Thus, this school tries to save the religious confession, purifying it from any invasion of the scientific. If the soul renounces to have something in the religious life that could look similar even at a distance to that what is achieved scientifically and unfolds this self-purified life in itself, then that appears internally what signifies its connection with the divine primal ground of existence. Then it feels that it carries internally, as a mental fact, its connection with the divine in itself.

However, if one goes deeper into such attempts that control many, in particular theological thinkers even today, one sees immediately: concerning the human soul life one can get a somewhat often-distilled mysticism out of his soul in a way. But if it concerns of getting really religious truth, then such a school of thought feels constrained to fill the soul from anywhere with contents because the soul must be, otherwise, completely doomed to a narrow mystic life. Therefore, this Ritschl school takes up the Gospel again on the other side, takes up the truth which is provided by the Gospel and leaves a deep abyss between its demand to develop the religious truth only from the soul and that what the soul takes from the outside by the revelations of the Gospels. Yes, an even deeper abyss can arise, and the followers of this school themselves noted this saying: every human being is able to come in a certain connection with the divine if he abandons himself impartially to that what lives in his soul, and speaks to his soul. Your soul is connected with something divine-spiritual. However, the single souls cannot come to such internal experiences as Paul or Augustine had them. Hence, one has to receive such experiences also from the outside. Briefly, at the moment when such a direction which wants to attain the religious confession only by the religious feeling intends to pronounce as thought how the soul is connected with the divine, then it is forced to annihilate its own principle! We would be led to the same inconsistent views if we let the religious-philosophical views of the nineteenth century pass by, as they have developed until our time.

However, it is typical that many serious thinkers in the fields of religious research struggled only for a concept, for an idea, for a definition of religion, and that one cannot even find an adequate concept from what a religion emerges as religion in the human soul, from which impulses of the human soul it originates. This is something that is enmeshed in a wide net of polemic with the serious religious researches of the nineteenth century, and until our time. There some people speak of the fact that the human beings advanced from a certain kind of revering nature to suppose something divine behind the natural phenomena and then to revere this divine in nature. Other researchers think that the religious need originated from that what one may call soul cult. The human being saw, for example, the human beings dying who were dear to him, and he could not imagine that their innermost essence had passed; thus, he transported them into a world in which he revered them. Such researchers mean that ancestor worship, soul cult is the origin of the religious feeling.

Then the human beings advanced further, transferred what they felt and revered also to nature, so that the apotheosis of the natural forces originated from the fact that one assumed the souls of ancestors only as living on, but one raised such revered ancestor souls to the divine and made them rulers of natural forces and worlds.—The third current whose opinion in particular the religious researcher Leopold von Schroeder (1851-1920, German Indologist) pronounced clearly that an impulse manifests in the human nature. Just the investigation of the most primitive peoples confirm to assume that behind all phenomena a good being lives who watches over the good in the world: One sees the development of this impulse in the different religions and religious confessions.

One can argue against any such view that it does not go well with anything that one—if one simply has an understanding of the religious life and the religious confession—has to call religion according to this understanding, because spiritual science wants to introduce itself as something new in the human development. It would be less useful if I discussed all these views of the bases, of the origin and being of the religious confession. For I have to say if one looks at all these discussions one question is not satisfactorily answered: what about the religious confession within the entirety of the human nature, the human personality? Hence, I will also proceed this time in similar way as I have proceeded last time with the consideration of “antisophy.” I tried just from the spiritual-scientific point of view to show first how antisophy is founded in the human nature, and that one has not to be surprised, if it appears there or there. I try also to describe the reason of religion in the human nature in order to show how spiritual science that goes into the entirety of the human nature or at least wants to go, places itself in life that wants to be carried by a religious confession.

Spiritual science is less destined because of its whole predisposition and nature to get itself into controversial discussions; it is destined above all to describe how the matters are and to leave everybody free which relation this spiritual science can have to the single branches and currents of the human soul life. Hence, it should also not be my task today to discuss the religious confession as such spiritual-scientifically, but to show what spiritual science wants to be, and what a religious confession can be and then to leave it to everybody to draw conclusions concerning the relation of both.

Spiritual science is based on the fact that the human soul is able to transform itself and outgrow the usual looking of the everyday life and also the usual views of the outer science and to soar a particular kind of knowledge. Spiritual science requires that investigations form the basis that come from a soul that has become independent concerning its experiences of the physical body. If such a soul experiences itself and the world, it gets observations that do not concern the sensory world but the spiritual world. The spiritual researcher transports himself by the specified exercises, which I discuss in the following talks, with his soul into the spiritual world. Then he is in the spiritual world and talks about the beings and processes of the spiritual world. One attains this projection into the spiritual world in different stages, as I have described them in my bookHow Does One Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds?. We have to characterise these stages somewhat just for this consideration.

If by such an increase of attention, as I have suggested it in both previous talks, the human soul becomes able to experience independently from the physical-bodily, it experiences first that one can call the whole soul contents which the soul attains an Imaginative world. It is an Imaginative world not because this world is mere imagination, but because that what the soul experiences in itself appears like from the sea of the inside being and is at first a completely saturated spiritual imagery. It would be wrong if anybody regarded this imagery as a manifestation of the spiritual world; for this imagery, this Imaginative world testifies at first nothing else than that the inner mental has increased so that it can experience ideas, sensations, inner impulses not only referring to external sense impressions but that an imagery comes forth from its own laps. This imagery that one experiences in particular by an increase of attention is, so to speak, at first only a means to penetrate into the real spiritual world. Since as this imagery appears one can never say whether a picture corresponds to a spiritual reality or not; but there something else must be added that is attained again by an increase of devotion, so that now from another side, namely from the spiritual world, contents flow in these pictures.

Because of his further development, the spiritual researcher can say about such a picture: spiritual contents flow in; by this picture, which has arisen in your soul, a being or a process of the spiritual world reveals itself. As you look at the outer colours as expression of the outer sensory processes and beings, you can look at this world because the spiritual world soaks up in it as a picture of the spiritual world. You must reject other things.—One learns to experience this imagery with reference to the spiritual world as the letters in the usual life. As the letters express something only if one joins them to words that are meaningful, the pictures of the spiritual world are manifestations of a spiritual world when they become means of expression for a world in which the soul of the spiritual researcher is able to transport itself. Indeed, a complete erasing of the Imaginative world takes place. Since the pictures transform themselves, combine themselves in various way. As the compositor takes the letters from the letter case and forms words, the imaginations are confused as it were in the spiritual percipience and become means of expression of a spiritual world if the spiritual researcher rises to the second stage of higher knowledge that one can call the inspired knowledge, the knowledge by Inspiration. Within this inspired knowledge, the objective spiritual world fits into these pictures. Nevertheless, in this Inspiration you attain the outside of the spiritual processes and beings only. You have to submerge in the things, so to speak, to come really into the spiritual world, must become one with the things of the spiritual world. This happens in the stage of Intuition, the third stage of spiritual knowledge.

Thus, the spiritual researcher rises by Imagination, Inspiration, and Intuition in the spiritual world. With Intuition, he stands in the spiritual world in such a way that his own spiritual self has become independent of all bodily and is immersed in the spiritual beings of the world, as far as he is able of it. With it, I have characterised the relation of spiritual research to the spiritual, a life in the spiritual world, feeling one with the beings and processes of the spiritual world and an experience of the spiritual. One has to understand this as the characteristic feature of spiritual science.

Now it concerns the following: if such spiritual science originates, how can one imagine its relation to the religious confession?

This will arise as a result if we consider the human soul and the human personality in its entirety. There something appears to us that one could call the climax of soul development, I would like to speak of this climax of soul development today.

Indeed, the human soul develops in the real life inside; one would like to say, in four stages. So that no misunderstanding emerges, so that the belief could not originate, as if the word climax means that the one or other stage is nobler or higher, I want only to say that one can distinguish four different stages of the soul about the value of which I state nothing. There we have the stage of the sensory experience of the outside world at first. Indeed, in the sensory experience of the outside world, the human being is in the whole world process, and one cannot consider the human being different from being in the middle of the material world.

Concerning this view one experiences quite odd things today. When those who are now beyond their first half of life were young and perhaps pursued philosophical studies, the proposition by Kant and Schopenhauer was a given that “the world is my representation.” I have already drawn your attention to the fact that the quite usual experience, as trivial as it sounds, must upset this sentence. Since one has to say, if you want to place yourself into reality, in spite of all explanations that one has done in this field and which are based on nothing but on misunderstanding: the healthily experiencing human being must make a distinction between his idea and his perception. If there is no difference between idea and perception, if the whole tableau of the outside world is my idea or representation, the human being must feel a piece of hot iron of 500° C which he only imagines also if he puts it on his face as a real piece of iron of 500° C. The human being must stand while he perceives with his senses, within the current of the outside world. Now one can experience that philosophers try to restore—as for example Bergson (Henri B., 1859-1941)—what one called naivety in our youth. One called it “naive realism” if one saw the human being immediately standing in the stream of the material world. Bergson tries to show again, exactly the same way, as if philosophy begins with him that this view is the right one that one must imagine the human being as a sensorily perceiving being in the world of sensory laws.

There one stands sensorily perceiving in the world, and the typical is that the single senses perceive separate worlds, a world of colours and light, a world of tones, a world of the differentiations of heat, a world of hardness and softness and so on. The single senses are on this first stage of the human world experience in the stream of the world process. There we get a worldview on the way of perception. This worldview accompanies us through life; with this worldview, we are active, we act under its impression, it controls us, and we control again a piece of the world from this worldview. Thus the human being himself is as it were a piece of this world process, feels, experiences himself, and gets his worldview this way.

One can call the second stage of this world experience the stage of aesthetic experience, no matter whether it appears in the artistic creating or in the artistic feeling and looking. If one wants to realise only cursorily what aesthetic experience is, one must say that primarily the aesthetic feeling is an inner experience compared with the mere sensory one.

If one perceives light and colours, one is given away by the eye to light and colours; if one perceives tones, one is given away by the ear to the world of tones; you are given away as it were partially to the outside world and stand with a piece of your being in the world. However, everybody who has reflected about the artistic creating or about the enjoyment of art, about the aesthetic feeling knows that the aesthetic feeling is substantially more internal than the mere sense-perception; and secondly it is more extensive, while it originates from the uniform of the human nature. Hence, it is not sufficient for the aesthetic feeling that we see a sum of colours or hear a sum of tones; enthusiasm, the inner joy of the aesthetic experience must be added. If I only perceive, I perceive colours and I try to get a picture of the sensorily given things; if I look aesthetically, my whole personality lives with it. What goes over into me from a picture that has artistic contents seizes me completely. Joy, sympathy or antipathy, desire, exaltation flow through me; however, these seize the whole person. We hear in the course of the talk that to such an experience that is internalised even if it is attached to things of the outside world, to pieces of art or the nice nature the second member of the human nature is necessary. Even if one regards such an assumption as unacceptable in our present cultural life, the assumption justifies itself. If the human being faces the outside world with his senses, if he lets the stream of the outer events approach him, then he witnesses as an aesthetic looking person something that is internally connected much more with him, with his being. He experiences with that what we call the aesthetic human body or the aesthetic human being that is not bound to a single organ, but penetrates the whole human being as a unity.

The human being frees himself in the aesthetic enjoyment from this sensory world. The epoch of Goethe had more an idea of this relief than our time has. Our time is the time of materialism, of naturalism. It feels it already as something wrongful if the human being looking at pieces of art wants to separate himself from the outer sense-perception; hence, one forbids as it were such artistic creating in the modern naturalism that gets free from the outer sensory looking.

However, the Goethean epoch, in particular Goethe and Schiller themselves, did not accept as real art what is only an imitation of nature what puts something before us that is already in nature, but it demanded that that what art should be the human being has to seize deeply and to transform internally. However, it still has another idea. Goethe pronounces it especially nicely when he walks through Italy where his ideal to study the old art came true. After he had studied Spinoza's God at home with Herder (Johann Gottfried H., 1744-1803, theologian, philosopher) and others, he wrote home: “The lofty pieces of art were produced at the same time as the highest natural works by human beings according to the true and natural laws. Everything arbitrary collapses: there is necessity, there is God.” It is the same attitude when Goethe says once, art is a manifestation of secret physical laws that could not become obvious without it.

He says elsewhere that the artist does not deal with speculative fiction, but he comes almost by looking at the outer bodily into the artistic field. Hence, Goethe and Schiller talk of truth in art and connect the experience of the artist with the experience of the recognising human being. They feel that the artist separates himself from the outer nature that he is closer, however, in his experiences to that what works spiritually behind all natural phenomena. Hence, such human beings speak about something true in this aesthetic experience. Goethe says once very nicely when he discusses an aesthete, whom he admired, Winckelmann (Johann Joachim W., 1717-1768) that art is a continuation and human conclusion of nature, “because—while the human being is put on the summit of nature—he regards himself as a complete nature again which has to produce a summit once more in itself. Therefore he increases penetrating himself with all perfection and virtues, invoking choice, order, harmony and meaning and he finally ascends to the production of a piece of art.”

  It would lead too far if I wanted to show now again how the human being, separating himself from the outer view of nature in the aesthetic view, internally squeezes something true, how, indeed, for someone who can experience aesthetically it has a deep meaning once to say facing a picture, a drama, a sculpture or a piece of music: this has inner truth—or the other time: it is untruthful without meaning that it imitates nature. It is something that is deeply founded in the human nature to speak about artistic truth in aesthetics. There is truth and fallacy in this field that only does not consist in the fact that one imitates the outer nature badly.

Nevertheless, one comes—if one advances to the aesthetic looking—from the field of that view which is called real in the usual sense to the field of fantasy, to an imagery. The imaginative world of art compared to the Imaginative world of the spiritual researcher presents itself in such a way that the world of fantasy looks like a real silhouette, indeed, but like a silhouette. However, the Imaginative world of the spiritual researcher is saturated with new reality. The imaginative world of art is that what withdraws from the immediate sensory view and keeps a connection with the human soul, a connection that is not identical to that with the sensory world. Hence, art is that what lifts the human being in free way out of servile absorbing the views of the sensory world.

Art is that what detaches the human being from the sensory world and gives him the consciousness for the first time: you experience, even if you do not let flow the sensory world into yourself; you stand in the world, even if you detach yourself from the world in which your body is put sensorily.—This attitude gives the human being a feeling of his determination that he is not bound only to the physical world in his development. However, it is really in such a way, as if in art the imaginative life appears like in a silhouette. The imaginative life is much more saturated with life than the life of mere fantasy. This would be the second stage in the climax of the human soul development.

Now the third stage of this climax can be characterised by the fact that the human being internalises himself even more. In art he has moved from the outside inwards, has gone adrift from the outward appearance. Now it is conceivable that the human being refrains of the outer experience completely, lives wholly internally, does not let in what he imagines like in art, impregnates it with that what he has perceived but does not let any perception in himself. There he would be still farther away from the sensory world with his completely isolated, completely emptied inner life. The outer world would be dark and silent round him. There is a longing for anything in his soul, however, nothing is there if not from another side anything could come into this soul. Even as the material world approaches us from the outside if we offer our senses to it, the spiritual world is coming up to meet us internally if we let nothing into our soul in the described way and are there, nevertheless, waiting in the wake condition. What we can experience there can only convince us of our true human being; this shows us only in our true independence, in our true inwardness.

Religious ideas of all times testify that something comes from the outside. If the human being moves from sense perception to the aesthetic view, he moves as it were in the normal life to a stream of oblivion. He swims over this stream into his inwardness. If contents are added to his inwardness by another world, these contents are the religious contents. By these contents, the human being can know that there is a world after the sensory world. It can be reached by no outer senses, also not by such a processing of the sensory impressions, as it happens by fantasy, but lets flow in—excluding the whole life of fantasy—purely inner devotion from the invisible what carries now the soul spiritually from the inside. It goes without saying that the human being feels as a part of the extrasensory, spiritual world, as it is a given to him that the percipience of outer colours require objects if he perceives such colours.

I have now to draw your attention to something very important at this point. There were times in which it would have appeared as absurd to say: I feel something, but this feeling is not stimulated by a divine-spiritual world as it appears to the modern human being absurd that he feels warmth putting out his hand and does not say: there is an object which burns me. For the complete human soul life, it is healthy if one feels such a thing to say that a spiritual world projects in us as it is healthy if anything burns us to point to a burning object.

Here is now something that becomes clear to us if we consider views that have not completely become known but these views live already on the ground of the souls. The view spreads more and more by natural sciences that everything that the human being experiences is only his mental pictures. I have already pointed to that. It is already commonplace among the physical scholars: what I perceive as colours exists only in my eye; what I hear as tones is only in my ear; everywhere outdoors only moved atoms exist.

How often one can read that—if I perceive a colour—ether waves vibrate outdoors with that and that velocity; there is outdoors moved matter only! It is of course an inconsistency if one denies colours and yet to assume matter! Today, hence, there are already the so-called immanence philosophers who say that everything that we perceive is only a subjective world. It would be conceivable, but this still lies in the future that one says: the fact that I perceive light and colours with my eyes, is certain. However, it is impossible to know about something that induces light and colours. The fact that I perceive tones with my ears is certain; but it is impossible to know something about that what produces the tones. What those say in this field who want to be the scholars, many people advancing to the materialistic view already say since centuries about the inner experiences. As today the biased philosopher says, I have the colour which I perceive only in my eye; I do not know what induces it, humanity says to itself in general, I have my feeling in myself; in which way it is caused, however, by the spiritual world, about that one can know nothing.

Since centuries, since millennia one no longer refers the inner experiences because of a prejudice to something objective that would be something spiritual in this case as certain philosophers do not want to refer the impressions of the outside world to real processes of the outer life. However, a healthy human soul life feels with its feelings in the world of the spiritual as it feels its colour sensations in the sensory world. As it is absurd for the healthy soul life to believe that the colour speaks only from the eye, it is absurd for a healthy soul life to state that the feeling speaks only from the soul that a divine-spiritual world outside us does not stimulate. This healthy feeling of the soul corresponds to the third member of the human nature that leaves—as we will show—the physical body in sleep and is inside during the waking state: We called this member the astral body of the human being. Our etheric body provides the aesthetic views for us; our astral body experiences itself religiously. This part of our nature must experience itself religiously. It is no miracle that the human organism can deny the religious truth very easily; since the usual human experience is so organised that this astral body if it leaves the physical body in sleep becomes unaware. It has no experiences then for itself, but again when it submerges in the physical body when it perceives with the physical organs. Hence, own experiences of the astral body can only appear in the physical life like from dark, unknown undergrounds.

Thus, the religious experiences appear like from dark, unknown undergrounds in the usual human life that proceeds in the sensory world in the waking state. However, if the spiritual researcher strengthens his soul in such a way that it experiences itself consciously and independently from the physical body with that what remains unaware in the normal life during sleep, then this soul settles in that what lights up as religious contents and experience like from dark, unknown undergrounds of the soul. The religious experiences thereby justify themselves just in the spiritual-scientific view. What remains unknown to the human being if he returns in sleep into the bosom of spiritual life, and what he would experience there if he were conscious during sleep, this appears, stimulated by the outer life, in the religious feeling. In the spiritual-scientific research, however, it appears as an immediate view. Hence, the religious feeling of the everyday life becomes the spiritual view in the spiritual-scientific knowledge. Except in the world of the sensory in which we live with our physical body, we also live in the world of the spiritual. This world of the spiritual remains invisible at first for the outer human organisation. Nevertheless, the human being still lives in this world of the spiritual, and it would be absurd to believe that only that existed what the human being can see in the physical life. If he strengthens his soul life in such a way that he can behold the spiritual round himself, he just beholds the beings and processes of the spiritual world that stimulate, otherwise, only what ascends like from unknown depths as religious life. In his spiritual experience, the spiritual researcher attains the view of those beings and processes of the spiritual which remain usually unknown to the religious life but which have to send their impulses into the religious life and penetrate the human being with the feeling of his connection with the spiritual world. However, there we also realise that we must go into the human nature concerning the religious life. We come, so to speak, into the subjective of the human nature.

If we take this into account we also realise—because this subjective is much more manifold than the outer bodily—how in a higher measure that what comes from the spiritual world is dependent on the subjective nature of the human being as the outer physical reality is dependent on his outer nature. Indeed, we know that our worldview changes if our eyes see better or worse; we also know that there is, for example, colour blindness; but the outer bodily nature is more monotonous with all human beings than the inner individual nature. Hence, that will even more differ what becomes internally discernible, and it cannot appear as religious confession that is spread over the whole world if one only figures the matter out. The spiritual world, which is everywhere the same, appears in such a way that it is coloured according to the predisposition, the particular states of the human organisation. The human beings differ especially in their confessions according to the differences of climate, race, and the like.

Thus, we survey the earth, and in the course of the historical development, the different religions appear gradated according to the different individual of the soul life. If we consider the religious confessions as nuanced by the human nature but being rooted in the same spiritual world in which all human beings are rooted with their astral bodies, we do not have the right to attribute “truth” only to one religion. On the contrary, we have to say that these different religions are that what can ascend like from unknown undergrounds in the human soul. They are due to a particular manifestation of the spiritual world by the human astral bodies.

Now here one finds that the spiritual researcher ascends in the climax of the human soul development to the fourth stage where Intuition takes place. On this stage, the real experience of the full human inwardness appears only, but in such a way, that the human being is with his inwardness now really beyond his physical senses and lives in the spiritual world. He experiences the uniform spiritual world there, no matter how he is organised as a human individual on earth. The fact that we are this or that particular human being with feelings coloured this or that way is due to the fact that the mental-spiritual lives together with the physical. Thereby that individualises itself what we are. As a spiritual researcher, however, we become independent of the physical body. If we completely perceive beyond the physical body, we perceive the uniform spiritual world in which the human being is every night if he sleeps but unconsciously. The spiritual researcher has strengthened his soul life so that the still low forces that let the human beings be unaware in the spiritual world have gained strength with him, so that he is aware in that world in which the human being is unaware during sleep. Then he experiences the spiritual beings and processes, which send their impulses in the human astral body, which one can experience, however, in their true being only if the human ego has become completely independent. Then one experiences what those human beings have indicated as the greatest who tried to penetrate from their point of view into these depths of the human being. Goethe for example tried to show this in the marvellous poem The Mysteries where the different experiences, which the human being can have with the religions spread over the globe, are represented in twelve persons. They have joined in a cloister-like building to experience together what they have brought with them as individual confessions from the most different areas of the earth, from the different climates, races, and epochs, and what they now want to bring into mutual effect.

This happens under the guidance of a thirteenth who shows us that a uniform spiritual forms the basis of the different religious confessions. Goethe explains that a miraculous organism is poured out over the earth in the religious confessions which nuance themselves according to races and epochs, and that with the ascent to the real spiritual world one beholds that what lives in the single religious confessions in a great united whole. Thus, he anticipates as it were what just spiritual science should perform concerning the religious confessions: the fact that they should be recognised in their inner essence. Since spiritual science experiences the spiritual directly in spirit.

If one wanted to speak, for example, about the Christian religion from the viewpoint of spiritual science, one would have to show how the contents of the Christian religion are recognised by spiritual science, could even be recognised, even if there is no tradition nor any document—I state this now hypothetically. We assume for a moment that nothing that is included in the Gospels would exist. The spiritual-scientific researcher positions himself beyond all these documents at first; then he would perceive if he observed the historical course on the spiritual field how humanity experiences a descending development of the inner experiences from the primeval times up to a point which lies in the Greek-Roman epoch, and how for an ascending development an impulse had to come. We call it the Christ impulse, which positioned itself in the human development, which is a unique impulse, as there can only be one centre of mass of a balance. From the spiritual knowledge, the whole position and function of the Christ being in the world would arise. Then one would approach the Gospels with such knowledge, would find these or those sayings in them as Christ appeared like out of uncertain depths, and positioned himself in the human development. However, one can recognise him if one advances to Inspiration and Intuition in the spiritual-scientific research. The religious life becomes visible from a uniform primary source before the spiritual-scientific view where it rises to Intuition.

Thus, in the climax of the human soul development it becomes obvious that Intuition is the life in the ego as the religious life is the life in the astral body as the artistic view is the life in the etheric body, and as the sensory percipience is the life in the physical body. As true in this climax expresses itself how the human nature is, as true it belongs to the whole human life that the human being unfolds a religious life; and as true this climax, this four-membered human soul development exists, as true the spiritual-scientific experience attains that directly what is experienced in the religious life from unknown depths. Hence, for an impartial judgement spiritual science can never be an enemy of a religious confession. Since it shows the primal source, the basic nature of the religious confessions. It shows also how these confessions originate from a uniform spiritual primordial ground,—even if the attention must be drawn repeatedly to the fact that this view is poles apart from those abstractions and dilettantism which speaks of the equality of all religions and the equivalence of all religious confessions. Since these stand on no other point of view concerning their logic, as if one only always wanted to emphasise: the snail is an animal, and the deer is also an animal, and one must always look for the “same” everywhere.

It is only religious-philosophical dilettantism to speak about an abstract equality of all religions; since the world is developing. Someone who surveys the development from the spiritual world also realises that the single religious confessions tend in their different manifestations to subsume all religious confessions in Christianity. Christianity loses—by its unique position arising from the Jewish monotheism—nothing of its cultural task in the world by the fact that these things are considered spiritually.

However, I have still to say one thing if one wants to have some completeness representing the relation of the human being to the religious confessions. If we face the outside world, we face it with our physical body. We as human beings can only take a rather indirect share of the relation of the physical body to the whole physical-material outside world. Without our complete witness, the relation of our body to the whole universe is regulated. How much can the human being do if this relation is confused to recover it by means of a remedy and the like? How much is in the relation of the human being to the cosmic outside world that the senses can provide for us in which he does not share immediately? When, however, the human being begins positioning himself with his inside in the spiritual universe, everything in him witnesses what flows from this spiritual universe into him. Hence, the inner experiences assert themselves immediately if the human being becomes aware of his relation to the spiritual universe. He feels supported by this spiritual universe, and he feels his relation to it in such a way that he says to himself, there I am, I stand in the spiritual universe, and I want to feel the existence in this universe in my consciousness! The religious life becomes with it an inner experience in a sense quite different from the experience of the material universe by the physical body. The religious experience becomes inner experience. It expresses itself as admiration, adoration, feeling that one gets the spiritual as grace. This is the reason why this religious life expresses itself preferably in the feeling of the human being. There we get the reason why one can say: the religious confession is rooted in the feeling first of all. However, one must ascend to the knowledge why it appears in feeling. Spiritual science reveals what is felt what is there as spiritual processes and beings. Hence, we enter, while we penetrate religiously into the spiritual life, the emotional life of the human being, we enter into a region where he searches his hopes for his humanity in order to stand firmly in the world. Hence, the entry into the spiritual world on the detour of the religious is nothing else than that one arrives at it on the way of feeling. This becomes clear in particular to someone who learns to recognise how necessary it is that the human being, although he rises in spiritual science to knowledge that is valid for all, has to go as a preparation for the objective spiritual experience through his subjective emotional life. He has to experience it with all its joys and sufferings, its disappointments and hopes, its fear and anxiety.

I believe that anybody may say that my explanations have lacked what forms just the emotional element in the religious confession that warms up and fulfils the human soul. Nevertheless, someone who considers the whole attitude that is generated by spiritual science inevitably understands that the spiritual researcher simply puts the things, and the things themselves may produce the feeling. He would feel it as something unchaste if he captivated the feeling by his word like suggestively. Every soul should feel in freedom. Spiritual science has to put the things as they arise from the spiritual research.

I wanted today to discuss on basis of the four-membered human nature and of the climax of the soul development to which extent spiritual science can just illuminate and light up the reasons of the religious confession. The religious confession is rooted in the human nature. True spiritual science will never be an enemy of the true religious experience necessary to the human being. The fact that the human being experiences everything that he experiences spiritually in the same way as spiritual research experiences it with its methods will become apparent by various explanations in the following talks; and the fact that the objections against spiritual science, which are done from scientific side or from religious confessions, are unfounded. One will realise this if one considers the single results of spiritual science. Today, however, I wanted to show, notpolemicizing against a single religious confession, how the religious confessions relate to the wealth, to the entirety of the human nature. As spiritual scientist one feels just in harmony with all those who have expressed their conviction in the course of the human development as it is revealed in spiritual science. I want to remind of Goethe once again.

Even if spiritual science did not yet exist as science at Goethe's time, his whole mood was, nevertheless, a spiritual-scientific, theosophical one. He intended and felt what originated from it in the spiritual-scientific sense. Hence, he felt that that science which dives in the things must find the spiritual and, hence, cannot be strange to religion. Therefore, he also felt that the human being if he frees himself in the art from the outer nature does not free himself, nevertheless, from that what forms the spiritual basis of nature. Goethe was convinced that one experiences the phenomena of the world with science and art in such a way as the religious human being must also experience them who feels his inside being rooted in the spiritual world. Hence, Goethe means, nobody can be irreligious who possesses science and art. If one faces the world with true science, one learns to recognise it wholly spiritually and can experience himself as positioned only in the spiritual world. If one finds the truth by art, the soul must experience this truth and become devout gradually, that means it experiences religiously what forms the basis of the world as spirituality. That is why, he also realised that area of the outer life where it cannot be different for someone who understands the things really than that in this area of the outer experience the divine can be felt immediately. Kant (Immanuel K., 1724-1804, German philosopher) still supposed that the so-called “categorical imperative” is necessary for the moral life: if the categorical imperative can speak in the soul, duty can settle in the human life. This is in such a way, as if from a world in which the human being does not live this imperative speaks to the soul. Goethe did not feel this way. However, he realised that someone who experiences his duty, experiences God who settles in his soul in the duty. Goethe's view was that someone experiencing the duty lovingly experiences God immediately in the moral life. Morality is an immediate experience of the divine in the world.

However, if one can feel God pulsating in moral through his soul, one is not far away from the point where he can experience Him in other regions. For Kant it was still a risky “adventure of reason” to experience the divine immediately. However, Goethe answered to him: “If we rise to a higher field of moral by faith in God, virtue and immortality and approach the first being, then it may be the same case in the intellectual that we make ourselves worthy—looking at the perpetually creative nature—of the spiritual participation of her productions. I had striven only unconsciously and out of an inner desire tirelessly for that archetypal, typical, I was even successful in constructing a natural representation, nothing could hinder me to pass the adventure of reason courageously, as the old man from King's Mountain (= Königsberg, place of Kant's birth and death) calls it.” Kant called the immediate experience of a spiritual world an “adventure of reason.” Goethe already stands at the point where he wants to pass the “adventure of reason” courageously. However, he is convinced that one cannot enter the spiritual world different from revering, adoring—that is with religious mood. True religion opens the gates of the spiritual world. Hence, Goethe thinks that someone who already experiences quite scientifically or artistically brings religious mood with him and can experience the spiritual world. Therefore, spiritual science feels in harmony with Goethe. To sum up, we can also apply the confession that he pronounced with few words to the today's consideration what one can call “spiritual-scientific creed:” who possesses real science who has real art stands in life in such a way that he has the best preparation for the experience of a spiritual world. However, someone who has neither science nor art should try to arouse that longing in his soul by which he can attain religious adoration, and then he can enter the spiritual world by the detour via the religious mood. Goethe expressed this exactly with the words:

After I have spoken about the nature and attitude of spiritual science in general in the first three talks, I would now like to discuss special objects. I note from the start that this talk and that of the next week form a whole as it were. They deal with the questions of the human soul life which are connected with death and with that what follows for the human being from death, and what I would like to call the sense of human immortality.

It is not easy in general to speak just about the topic of this evening in our time; for there are many outer and inner obstacles against a consideration of death in the present time. Above all I have to draw your attention—in order to avoid any misunderstanding today—to the fact that spiritual science has it not so good as some other scientific fields. Spiritual science depends on considering the fields about which it speaks in the strictest sense logically distinguished from adjoining fields.

I must say this because the discussions that should be done today and next time have only a meaning for the human experience, and because a more naturalistic science of the present is inclined to expand that which one understands by death to everything living. Now just spiritual science shows that that what is externally the same for the different beings can be very different concerning its inner nature, and I will probably have the opportunity in the course of the talks to draw your attention to the significance of death in the plant and animal realms. I intend to speak about death of the human being today only.—However, there are some other obstacles. I would like to show the nature of these obstacles—without going into a general characteristic—just from the attitude of spiritual science based on single facts.

 These obstacles are based on a fear of the death problem not clearly arising in the human consciousness. One needs only to consider this fear just with the most enlightened spirits of the present. One could point to many enlightened persons; one would find the same thing. I want to do it relating to the great religious researcher and orientalist Max Müller (Friedrich Max Müller, 1823-1900). ders what he wrote about death here or there that attracts attention above all which faces us also with numerous persons of the present: the timidity to imagine the possibility of investigating anything about death. Even the great Max Müller managed to say that all human thoughts that exceed the human life between birth and death even if they originate from a poet like Dante in his Divine Comedy are only childish poetry. Nevertheless, Max Müller says, if an angel descended from heavenlies onto earth and wanted to say anything to the human being about the conditions of the human life after death, the human being would understand these statements as little as a just born child would understand if one held a talk to it about the conditions of the present life in any human language. Some aversion exists even with the most enlightened spirits of the present to refer to these matters. Besides, Max Müller is not a negative mind in relation to the matters of human immortality; he himself is ensouled by a certain religious security concerning a postmortal life. He does only not want to award the possibility to the human being to attain any knowledge of the postmortal life. He emphasises repeatedly that the human being cannot know anything about the fields that are beyond death.

This fact shows symptomatically which difficulties exist in the present concerning our topic. However, one can also say that the modern scientific view mentioned in the previous talks repeatedly is so significant that it distracts the human being from the idea to gain any knowledge of the postmortal life.

I have spoken in the preceding talks so appreciatively about this scientific way of thinking and so approvingly about that what it has brought to light that today I am not misunderstood if I say briefly why it is difficult with the scientific way of thinking to admit that one can penetrate into the fields beyond death. What is this scientific way of thinking based on? Why has it become great? Because it established the principle of the human sensory observation and the application of the intellectual activity to this sensory observation in the strictest sense of the word.

You can now realise one matter easily. If one makes the principle of sensory observation and the application of the intellect to the sensory observation the exclusive principle of research, one wants, quite certainly, to investigate what the human being receives with his body by his birth and develops in his physical life. That what one could broach as anything “immortal” that has a spiritual life beyond birth, or conception, and death and one cannot enclose it in the field of sensory observation and intellectual research bound to the senses. With his body, the human being most certainly receives what surrounds his being what organises his senses and his reason that binds itself to the senses. The human being certainly acquires that in the area of temporality which research does in the most remarkable sense in the modern scientific way. This belongs to the area in which our being disintegrates if we go through the gate of death. Hence, without any doubt natural sciences completely work with tools, which pass away at death as they originate with birth. One is not surprised if one makes the work with these tools the exclusive principle of research that one cannot investigate what these tools cannot reach.

Therefore, nothing seems to be more foolish than to suppose that one could penetrate with the means of natural sciences into the mysterious fields one day that are beyond death. Hence, it has also happened that not the worst spirits of the nineteenth century finally denied the life after death from the scientific point of view. Since among many extraordinary praises of the scientific way of thinking which controls the general education and thinking more than one believes certainly also that is justified that it has educated the human being so that his preconceptions, his wishes and desires—his subjectivity—do not have a say if it concerns the scientific investigation of anything. One just gets big respect if one sees the efforts of this way of thinking really and works in the experiment with it: operating in the observation strictly objectively in such a way that anything subjective of the human being plays no role. Why should this not be concerning the question of death? However, have not always the human emotions, wishes, and desires played the biggest role if the human being answered to this question? While one has given up in the scientific research that these things play a role, just the ethically not worst persons of the nineteenth century refused the life after death.

If one looks for the reasons why these spirits refused a life after death, one finds noble motives. One has to admit this without further ado. Some materialistic thinkers of the last century said that it belongs to the human egoism to wish that one reached with his little ego beyond death. It is nobler, they said, that the human being should merge that what he works what he acquires between birth and death in the general human life, in the stream of historical development, and that he should know that this ego does not survive, but sacrifices itself on the altar of general humanity. Some moral and academically educated people regarded such a sacrifice, such merging of that what one has acquired in life as that what one can say about the death of the human being.

There are many things indeed which rebel within the human emotions and wishes against such a merging in the general stream of humanity. All that must not have a say answering our question based on real cognition. However, there is one thing that can lead the human being, even if not to an answer, nevertheless, to a correct question at least concerning death and the life after death. Even if one refrains from all wishes, from any fear of death if one refrains from all what he likes as an answer about the life after death, and if one looks, actually, only at that what he is entitled to look, namely at the economy in the universe, then one has to answer possibly as follows. If one considers what the human being acquires in life internally as valuable what revives there in the soul as our innermost possession and as possession concerning that what we can do for love, devotion and other impulses for ourselves and our surroundings, and one asks himself: what is the most valuable?—It is something intimate and individual for any human soul, so that one cannot give away it to the stream of general existence because of its intimate character. Really; so much we can also give away to the general stream of existence—the most valuable is connected so tightly with our soul that we would not give away it that it would absolutely have to sink into the general nothing if we did not go as something through the gate of death. For the most valuable would be lost without doubt for the world economy that the human soul has attained and worked for if the human life were over with death. However, this would contradict what we notice, otherwise, everywhere in the universe. We realise that nowhere in the universe forces develop up to an extreme height that they can develop at first and dissolve then into nothing; but everywhere forces are generated in such a way only that they change, that they keep on working in the world. Should the human being be condemned solely to acquire something that would not be processed further in the universe, but would have to dissolve into nothing?

This is by no means an answer at first, but means putting the following question that is quite independent of human wishes and preferences: how would it be possible for the purposes of a general world economy that that dissolves into nothing what the human being acquires in his soul during life? However, one cannot advance farther than to put this question, actually, with the means of outer research. Since undoubtedly one has to search the immortal of the human being beyond the outer experience. The outer experience approaches us by the senses, and a slight experience shows that also everything that can result from reason belongs to the outer experience, and that that all can only develop within the physical body which we get by birth or conception, and which dissolves at death. However, with it we have no tools that enable us to investigate the problem of death.

In the introductory talks I have already spoken of the fact that the human being is able to develop his soul by the spiritual-scientific methods, indeed, in such a way that it is detached from the bodily experience like by a spiritual chemistry. Thereby it really attains a point of view on which it cannot only express itself as a phrase, but as an immediate inner experience: I know what it means to develop a spiritual-mental activity in myself which does not have the body as its tool. Can we hope that anything can be stated about death by anything else than by investigating it with the means of the described cognitional forces instead of means of the outer experience? Just if one thinks scientifically, one must say that one has to experience what one should investigate. However, with no outer tool one can experience death that just takes away the outer tools from us.

Thus, one can investigate death only under the premise that it is possible with tools that do not exist within the bodily life. I have drawn your attention to the fact that the human being can strengthen his soul life by certain inner intimate exercises, so that really his spiritual-mental is detached from the bodily, like while decomposing water oxygen is detached from hydrogen. Thus, these exercises detach the spiritual-mental of the human being from the bodily and with it, the human can experience internally in the spiritual-mental. If he experiences internally in the spiritual-mental this way, if he gets around to having his own bodily as an object like an outer object beside himself, then he becomes aware of that what the spiritual researchers of all times meant when they moved two experiences closer together: the experience of the so-called initiation and the experience of death.

We must only keep in mind that spiritual research existed at all times. Spiritual research was done already in the oldest times of humanity in the so-called mysteries. Someone who would like to inform himself more exactly about it can read up in my book Christianity as Mystical Fact and the Mysteries of Antiquity. However, at that time spiritual research could not be done as today. The human beings change in the course of evolution quite substantially; and before I go further into it, I would like to draw your attention to the fact that in ancient times one had to develop quite different forces in the soul. This is why in sites, which were, so to speak, halfway of art, science, and religion, the human being concerned was brought to the point where by the development of his soul forces the spiritual world appeared to him.

One has to develop soul forces in our times that are different from those of former times, after the souls have been educated during the last centuries scientifically. Therefore, spiritual science must be different in our time where it must be a continuation of natural sciences. However, it always brought those two experiences: the development of the soul capacities, which allow experiencing the spiritual world regardless of the bodily, and the experience of death. Repeatedly we find in the different writings expressed that the human being who was brought to the experience of the spiritual world, its processes, and beings approached the “gate of death” in the mysteries. That means that he experiences something about which he knows immediately that it resembles the experience of death, or that it is something with which one can also know the relevance of death if one recognises it. The initiand knew that he had to approach the border of death. One always said this. In my writing A Way to Human Self-Knowledge, I describe an experience that I have already mentioned here which the human being attains if he opens himself to meditation and concentration for many years. I have said there that if the human being carries out that development of his soul by which it grows out of the body for short times to a body-free experience, he arrives at an infinitely meaningful moment that shakes the soul when it appears for the first time. The spiritual researcher must often repeat it later; but when it appears for the first time, it is a deeply intervening experience. If one increases that soul activity limitlessly which one else calls attention, devotion, the body-free soul forces gain strength in such a way that a particular moment appears in the soul life.

It may appear in the turmoil of the everyday life; it does not even disturb if one ascends to such an experience by a development as I have described it in the book How Does One Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds? and the usual everyday experience can go on apart from that. This moment can appear also in sleep. Then one feels it suddenly, or one feels an Inspiration or Intuition during the day life flowing into the general life. Typically, I want to describe what one experiences that way. It can be different a hundred and a hundred times with the human being, but always it has something of that what I would like to describe now. I try to express it in words; but doing this, I am aware that I can express it with words only imperfectly. One feels, as if one is rudely awakened, and one has the feeling that something asks: what happens with me? It is, as if a flash goes through the room where I am and as if it smashes the vessel of the outer physical body. At such a moment of increased knowledge you do not only feel something sneaking that destroys the outer physical body, but you feel almost filled with that what destroys the physical body. You feel that you can only maintain yourself with this experience by means of the strengthened inner soul forces, and you say to yourself now, I know what can exist in the outer world to detach the physical body from me in which I am. From this moment on you know that something spiritual-mental is in the human being that is independent of the physical body. The physical body relates to the spiritual-mental like an outer vessel and tool. From this moment on you know figuratively what death is.

Indeed, it is an uncertain knowledge, an uncertain experience at first; but it gives the soul that mood and inner seizing of a spiritual reality by which it can get into that what enables the soul to penetrate into the regions of spiritual life. It is an intimate experience; but it is an experience of humanly quite general kind because it is so serious that it separates you from that what is connected in the narrower sense with the personal wishes and intentions and familiarises you with that what is, actually, always only behind life. However, it shows something else quite clearly: the difference between achieving the real spiritual-scientific knowledge and that outer knowledge. You obtain outer science, outer knowledge learning this or that, you get yourself into this or that striving; then you have what you desire to learn. You gain for yourself by working what you should know.

It is not the same case with the spiritual-scientific knowledge. Indeed, it is not in such a way that somebody should believe that one gains spiritual-scientific knowledge in such a way that once enlightenment comes over the soul which then surveys the spiritual world. Indeed, some people imagine that one attains spiritual-scientific knowledge without any effort. However, that does not apply. If anybody said that on the part of spiritual research many a thing is said that the historian can bring to light only with efforts in a years-long work from the documents and sources, and then the spiritual-scientific researcher comes and says something without anticipating that one can say such a thing only after years-long research; then this is presumptuousness. One has to answer that the spiritual researcher must not only spend the work that one needs to such years-long investigation of documents or experimentation; but he must carry out the whole work that is necessary for years in himself. However, this work has another aim, another character in a way.

That which one can perform as a spiritual-scientific researcher does not really lead to knowledge but is only its preparation. All that I have said in my writing How Does One Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds? characterises that only what the soul has to do to prepare for that moment when the spiritual world reveals itself. Preparation—not elaboration as in the outer science—is that what the spiritual researcher has to carry out at first. Indeed, one learns to recognise this if one can connect sense with the words: I experience myself as a spiritual-mental being within the spiritual world.

Then one still connects sense with something else, namely with that what does not seem so important, indeed, as the question of death because the usual consciousness is accustomed to it, namely with sleep. One learns to recognise the nature of sleep. One recognises that and in which way the human spiritual-mental being leaves the physical body every time with falling asleep as the hydrogen leaves the oxygen if water is decomposed. However, the human soul is not strong enough in sleep to maintain its consciousness. In the normal life, the human being can maintain his consciousness only if he submerges with his spiritual-mental being in the physical body and this reflects his mental experiences to him like in a mirror. He can have this experience only like in a reflection in his mental consciousness. It is in such a way, as if the human being maintained his consciousness only because he would pass by mirrors as it were and while looking in the mirrors he would sense and feel his self. However, if the human being sees himself in the mirror, he knows that not the mirror is the cause of the picture, but he who is standing in front of it.

The human being who experiences a spiritual-scientific development starts knowing that that what he thinks, feels, and perceives in the usual life is like a reflection, and that he is in the spiritual experience a being that perceives itself like in a reflection if it submerges in the body. The body makes the soul strong enough that it can perceive itself; if it is, however, beyond the body, it is not strong enough to know of itself. If the human being comes to the point that he senses and feels his independent spiritual-mental existence as it were, he knows that that is behind the mirror of the usual consciousness in reality. Then he starts knowing, not only as a phrase, but by immediate experience that he is from falling asleep up to awakening in his real spiritual-mental being and experiences that in it from which he can only not get any consciousness in the normal human experience.

The spiritual researcher learns to experience as one experiences in sleep, but only with the big difference that one is unaware in the normal sleep, while the spiritual researcher consciously experiences in his inside preparing his soul and gaining strength compared with the bodily-physical experience. Then the spiritual researcher completely experiences his spiritual-mental essence. Besides, one experience is of particular significance. One would like to call it the “change of the ego-experience.” The ego that we must have in life if life should normally pass lights up from a certain point of childhood. This is the point up to which we remember in life. If we can remember, we know how everything that we have experienced is connected with the ego. We sit down as it were beside our ego and feel united with all our conscious experiences. Our egoity is warranted only because we feel united with the ego with all mental experiences. If the spiritual researcher reaches that point, where he can scrape out his spiritual-mental core from the physical body, then a big transformation of his ego-experience takes place. For that transformation one has to be prepared, so that one does not become upset. A great deal of that what I have described in my writing How Does One Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds? is intended to prepare the soul for this experience.

What happens at a certain moment when the soul becomes free of the body? What happens there, what becomes an immediate experience can be shown approximately, and I would like to take the following way.

If we took the human body as the outer science investigates it with its outer tools, one would already get clear by outer logical reasons about the fact that this human body must be penetrated by something, so that it does not follow its own laws and its own inner necessities. Which laws and necessities are these? They appear at death when the physical body disintegrates. Then it is left to its own resources, to its very own laws. One can conclude by a certain logic, which I have also already explained here, that in the human being something higher must exist than this physical body. However, a certain rest must always remain there with such logical considerations that make objections possible if from the start a healthy sense of truth does not exist for that which spiritual science can investigate from the primal grounds of existence. What is it, however, if really the initiation takes place by which the spiritual researcher experiences himself internally independently from his physical-body? There he really has his physical body beside himself, knows himself beyond this physical body, does not have it around himself; and how does it appear to him? One must not believe that it is so nice and cute that one hovers over his body and has his body lying in the bed.

That is not the case. Nevertheless, you perceive something very strange after a suitable preparation. You do not perceive the vital forces of the body but the lethal forces that already exist during the whole life as the dissolving forces. If you want to express yourself scholarly, you may say that you get to know the latent death in the body. Everywhere you get to know the trends of the body to fit into the elements of earth and to disintegrate. One can express this by a comparison; but I do not only mean a mere picture with it, but I use it in order to express inner experiences that one has to do.

Look at a candle flame. The candle burns low. The fuel is destroyed. As long as fuel is there, the flame can be there. Why is the flame there? Solely because the fuel burns gradually and dissolves. If you want to avoid that the fuel dissolves, you must extinguish the flame. You cannot demand that the candle remains intact and the flame still burns. You can only have the sight and use of the flame, while the fuel consumes itself.

Like such a flame the own physical body appears to you in the supersensible sight while it is used up. The body appears like the candle that burns low. You know what takes place in the body because in the body always the tendency exists to consume itself. As the flame of the candle originates by consuming the fuel, the human ego emerges from the forces of death. You would never experience this ego if you did not carry death in your body. That applies to the human being. Put yourself hypothetically in a human body that would be inserted in the world so that it could not die that it would not have the forces that consume it. Its ego would be extinguished; the ego would no longer be there! This is the impressive knowledge that you attain as a spiritual researcher, which one must summarise with the following words. We carry not only the vital forces, but we also carry the forces of death in ourselves. It gives us the possibility of ego-consciousness for the life between birth and death.

Indeed, you feel a transformation taking place by an inner process if you are now as a spiritual researcher out of the physical body. The ego becomes something that one does not like. From a thought, which accompanies you, otherwise, always in life without which you are not there while awake, the ego becomes something that you do not have in yourself that you face like a flame emerging from the picture of the physical death: the ego becomes memory. This is the significant transition to spiritual cognition that you have the ego as a mere memory in yourself about which you know that it is there at which you can look like at a memory, but you cannot have it in yourself now.—You get to know death spiritual-scientifically and its connection with the ego in the normal human life.

Now spiritual investigation can go on. You can divide what we experience in the soul in three groups. I would like to point two groups out as significant, namely the imagining thinking and the will. We must accompany the everyday life with our thoughts. What would we be as human beings if we did not walk thinking through the world if we could not form thoughts of the things? What would we be as human beings if we did not have the impulses to do this or that, to accomplish this or that? Will and thinking are the soul forces that always accompany the human being through his everyday life.

If you advance in spiritual research to the body-free experience, you realise that you are not able to take the thinking into the body-free experience. You have to leave the everyday thoughts outside, also those of the usual science, which follow the experience of the outer senses; they die away, while you enter the body-free cognition. The spiritual researcher understands completely if anybody who wants to count generally only on the life of thoughts as for example Professor Forel (Auguste-Henri F., 1848-1931, Swiss psychiatrist, brain researcher, myrmecologist), says: consciousness falls asleep very soon if it has nothing to imagine from the outside. This is comprehensible. For you cannot take the impressions that come from the outside world with you neither into sleep nor into the spiritual-scientific experience. For someone who wants to become a spiritual researcher this causes something extremely depressing by which he feels apart from everything to which he is attached in the outer life, that he considers as the most valuable about which you can even say to yourself, in the normal life, you fall asleep if you do not have it.

You have to go as spiritual researcher in a life where you cannot have this where you must lay down everything that you were used to think about in the usual life. What do you experience then concerning that which expresses itself in the normal life as thinking if the thoughts, which you normally do no longer have, have died away if they have remained before the threshold of the spiritual world? You experience at first what sleep makes. This is a quite significant experience to know how sleep makes it. Now you learn to agree even in rather modest way with the materialistic thinker who says that the brain is necessary for thinking, and certain movements must form the basis of a thought in our brain. Quite true, very true! One has to dismiss any objection against materialism that the thoughts can also be there without brain. Since thinking is not that, by which we settle in the spiritual world. We do not find them there. Nevertheless, we find that from which the thought in the brain only originates. What sets the brain in particular motions, so that it becomes the mirror of thoughts? These are only the spiritual-mental forces. Behind the thinking—not in the thinking—the spiritual-mental forces work which the spiritual researcher finds. Hence, he agrees with that what the materialistic researcher—if he remains in the borders of his field—can say that the everyday thoughts are results of the brain. However, what takes action in the brain that always makes the physical body the mirror of thinking is the work of the spiritual-mental behind it. We come as spiritual researchers really behind the everyday life into the creative realm of the world. Hence, we also learn to understand sleep and experience how that what is behind sleep mends the worn-out parts of our brain at night.

We look at this regeneration of the body; we get to know the activity of sleep. As spiritual researchers, we get to know the thoughts, which face us by day from the one side, from the other side. Whenever a thought can appear and appears in the mirror of the brain, we get to know it from the other side if the body sleeps if it lives within the brain and stimulates the brain to its activity by day. One gets to know thinking from the other side this way. This is the one part how you get to know thinking.

Now the other part, how one gets to know thinking, is something of spiritual research that you do not like from the start if you have not well prepared yourself. You get to know the inner work, the inner feeling, the inner self-experience of the soul. You get to know the soul as something internally mobile; you get to know an activity of the soul from which one can ask: what does this activity want? It wants to form thoughts. However, in such a way as it appears it cannot form thoughts. You get to know a part of the soul activity that is used to mend the exhausted brain in sleep; you may be content with that. You get to know another part of the soul activity with which you touch the whole physical brain like from the inside from which you may say to yourself: you have it now. While you start investigating more exactly, you realise that you have it by what you have experienced from birth and have processed it in your soul; but it has thereby become something that touches your brain; and this does not let it come about as usual thoughts of the everyday life. The spiritual researcher settles in a condition that way where he feels imprisoned in his body, his wondrous tool of thinking. He feels so touched with it that he says to himself, now you could form thoughts from your inner activity if your brain did not lie there like a heavy mass and cannot be roused to that what the soul wants.

One often speaks of the fact that the methods, which the spiritual researcher has to go through, lead to a certain suffering. Suffering always consists of the fact that something that one would like to carry out in the soul is prevented. Even physical pains consist of it; however, I want to speak about the latter another time. Suffering seizes the spiritual researcher in his development and that which wants to become a thought but cannot become a thought. Since the brain is good only for the thoughts which are obtained in the normal life. Maybe you understand just at this point that the investigation of the death problem becomes, nevertheless, an inner martyrdom of the soul. You can do it only because the human being has the necessary thirst for knowledge in himself to discover the mysteries of life. Yes, you also understand that this investigation is not carried out so often because one makes progress, indeed, generally only if one can be way beyond everything that one likes, otherwise, in life. Hence, one speaks only with a certain melancholy and deep seriousness about what I have indicated just now. Then you are able more and more to look not only at the lack in the spiritual-mental experience, but you learn to renounce to form thoughts from that what you experience with the body. This learning to renounce one can easily express; however, this renunciation belongs to the serious problems of life. This renunciation is connected with bitterness, which justifies itself only because it just leads to knowledge.—If you have experienced to be unable to find an expression in thought of that what you have attained, then you experience it only internally. What do you experience then? You experience what is fit to intervene, indeed, not in the body because the body prevents it but in that what forms the origin of a new physical body that we build for the next life on earth if we have gone through a life after death in a wholly spiritual world.—I speak later about the experiences in the time between death and the next birth.

I have tried to show by means of inner experiences, which the spiritual researcher has, how he experiences his inner, spiritual-mental essence that must emerge because of its own peculiarities in the next life on earth. That is as certain as a sprout evolves into a new plant. Since you do not get to know that of the human being which outgrows death, while you speculate on it, but while you recognise what prepares itself for the life beyond death, if you look for that what you cannot see with the senses and cannot think with the reason engaged in the senses. Spiritual science does not speculate or philosophise on immortality; but it wants to prepare the human soul in such a way that its immortal essence lies there, I would like to say, “spiritually prepared” as one also investigates something in natural sciences, while one extracts it surgically from the surroundings in which it cannot be investigated in its peculiarity. So far about thinking.

The matters of will are different. Here you experience a transformation, too. Then you realise how much the will that one expresses in the outside world depends on the constitution of the body, how a strong will in the usual life is connected intensely with the whole constitution of our body. With any impulse of will we bring our body into the field, so to speak. However, as spiritual researchers we must now have the will without the body. There the will asserts itself straight away in a way, as you are not used to it, otherwise. Otherwise, you are used if you have an impulse of will to bring your body into the field; if the body lies idly in the bed, no impulse of will stirs. We feel impulses of will always connected with the body. Now, however, the soul which wants to penetrate into the spiritual world is beyond the body; the body plays a part in the will impulse. This causes a certain inner tension, as if the will is limited from all sides, as if it is in an impenetrable eggshell, as if you are hindered from thinking, imagining, feeling and perceiving, from walking, from standing, from everything.

You feel the will as self-contained, but as stumbling at the walls everywhere through which it cannot go. You have to do the inner spiritual exercises again so far that you perceive not only this negative of the will, but that you can experience the inside like pressed in the will. Then you realise that you want something again that you do not like to experience. If you apply the will in the outer world, you have the will impulses on the one side, the moral-social order on the other side. You impose duties upon yourself in life, or the moral-social order imposes them upon you. One makes a difference between good will and bad will, between right and wrong; one distinguishes the moral rules from the will impulses in the outer world. This is correct. Now when you have withdrawn from the outer world, the will remains to you in a quite similar way as the ego has just now remained. What you have wanted remains like a memory. I describe how the experiences arise. I have to describe the Imaginative view in this case; this seems maybe fantastic, but I have to show the matters in such a way.

Then you experience something in your pressed will like morality contained in this will. You experience an action that must considered as bad with the outer sensory consciousness in this will in such a way that you have to compensate it. You experience the will in memory in such a way that the compensating force of that what must happen because the immoral action demands this is included in the will. I cannot help saying, if you have done anything bad, it must place itself beside you like a ghostlike enemy who stands beside you, until you have got rid of him by compensating actions. Someone who experiences the will in himself and in his memory what he himself has wanted faces the bad without fail which has an effect, until he has got rid of it by compensating will impulses. You experience what one often calls the inner work of karma.

Then you know for sure: if you experience an act of volition that you have wanted, you experience it in such a way that you recognise that it is done. Since every act of volition belongs, like thinking, to memory. Then you know that it is done, at the same time it has contributed that we advance in our development. Something also spreads over our consciousness that one can call an enlightening purification of that what is done. However, any action has an effect in such a way that you realise how the moral and the mechanical that are separated in the physical life are combined. You realise that something bad or immoral is effective, until you endeavour to extinguish it to a certain degree in the outside life, until we have gained the power to extinguish the bad; that means to make it good. We know if we experience the will in the body-free cognition that this has its inner moral impulses at any price; we know that karma is an active force continuing to have an effect in the world. We experience painfully now recognising that there are many, too many actions in our present life that we cannot compensate. We know about them, because we behold their reality that they go along in our next life on earth and contribute there to our destiny.

You can call investigation of death what I tried to suggest in such a way, because it means to experience what strides through the gate of death as the immortal of the human being. You recognise from all that that the true investigation of death is an intimate, inner research that it is, however, the more a generally human one because it aims at that what one can find in all human beings. For it is due to the outer body and the outer world that we are these particular human beings in the life between birth and death; this does not go with us through the gate of death. That goes with us through the gate of death, which lies behind the physical-sensory realm. That causes the physical-sensory realm and our outer experience between birth and death.

Now we put the following question. Why do we notice nothing of our immortal soul in the usual life? Why does that what can reveal the mystery of death drape itself in such darkness? Because we live on this darkness in the usual soul life between birth and death. We must extinguish our immortal in the usual consciousness, so that we live in the body in the outer physical sensory world, we become fond of it and accomplish our mission on it. If we want to penetrate to our immortal, we must extinguish our everyday life.

If we must extinguish our immortal in our usual consciousness to have the usual physical-sensory everyday life, we are not surprised that we do not find that what can inform us about death within the everyday life for which just the mystery of death must be covered. The spiritual researcher can also show, why one cannot find the mystery of death in the usual life. For while we descend with our spiritual-mental part from spiritual heights to that what is given us by the line of heredity by father and mother, while we combine with the bodily-physical substances and submerge in them, the limited consciousness must extinguish the infinite consciousness. At death where the infinite consciousness lights up again, the limited consciousness is extinguished, and that what can be maintained of it exists as memory. However, the life after death is guaranteed by the spiritual-scientific development of the human soul if it exercises those methods by which it already penetrates into the spiritual world in the usual life and passes the gate of death fully consciously.

Next time, however, I would like to describe the immediate result of that what we tried to discuss spiritual-scientifically today as the mystery of death which is there already during life, and which enables our usual consciousness. Yes, an aversion exists against these matters in the present; one does not like to investigate them. Even good, brilliant thinkers shy away from penetrating into those regions to which I have today pointed related to the death problem.

So it happens that such an excellent person like Maurice Maeterlinck (1862-1949, Belgian playwright, Nobel Prize in 1911) puts the [most] wrong views of the death problem forward in his recently appeared booklet On Death—which you should read because he has written it so excellently. He who is able to speak about all the other fields of life very brilliantly had to fail with this matter because he has a particular way to approach the matters; namely to describe death with the same cognitive means as the outer matters. He is no spiritual researcher. He does not know that one has to leave these means if the areas should be investigated which are considered with the death problem. Maeterlinck is in the same situation, as once the mathematicians were towards the problem that one called the square of the circle. There were certain times when one sent solutions to mathematical circles how one could transform a circle into a square using a compass. However, all the solutions were dissatisfying, and today everybody is a dilettante who still deals with this problem because it is strictly proved that the problem cannot be solved this way. While one had the opportunity once to count as a genius if one wanted to solve the square of the circle, today someone is a dilettante who still attempts this. Concerning immortality the view of the human beings will also change as the views of those mathematicians changed. For somebody still attempts a solution of the square of the circle in another field today; but one would have to say to him, you demand that one proves the mysteries of death with the means of the usual life. However, it matters, above all, that one realises the proofs. One must also realise that the proofs that want to prove the mystery of death and immortality with means of the usual life are impossible because we have covered the forces of the immortal just in our everyday life, so that we become ego-conscious human beings in the transience.

However, a particular feature still appears with Maurice Maeterlinck. After he has talked at cross-purposes everywhere, he finally concludes—somewhat more brilliantly, belletristically than Max Müller, who did it somewhat more professorially—that the soul should get used to the fact that it cannot really investigate the mysteries of existence in this and not in that life. Then he adds, it is probably good that one cannot investigate them. He would not wish on his worst enemy that he could investigate the real mysteries. He is afraid that the world becomes free of mysteries if they are investigated that it would lose any shine of the mysterious if one penetrated into the mystery of death. He considers it as valuable that a mystery remains a mystery, so that one does not destroy the surprise in the soul if one comes behind such a mystery.

I have already mentioned in another context that the mysteries do not become inferior if one faces them as spiritual science can speak about them. Since just that which we investigate in the mysteries does not make life more superficial, but deeper and deeper. It is still in such a way that if we behold in something of our previous life on earth, this does not solve the riddle of life superficially and does really not deprive the mystery of life of its shine but it makes it even greater, even more brilliant. Spiritual research does not penetrate into the matters so that it deprives the mysteries of existence of their admirable character, but so that our admiration can still increase because one can investigate the reasons behind the matters.

Therefore, one has to answer to someone who speaks about death as Maeterlinck does and says, he does not wish on his worst enemy that the mysteries are investigated, that the mysterious is not taken away from life, while one attempts to investigate it. However, with a trivial word—it is not trivial, but it is meant quite seriously-, one could express what one would like to say to a person who wants to maintain life while he wants to accept it as “unfathomable.” One could ask him, would you want if anybody has been born blind to advise that he should not be operated so that that what is round him remains a mystery to him, and that the shine of the world should not illuminate his inside? Would you like to argue that you did not wish even on your worst enemy that the mystery of the world would be divested of its wonders because he would be operated?—Someone who answers yes could also answer with the question, which Maeterlinck expresses at the end of his book: the world would lose its shine if one investigated its mystery. Spiritual-scientific research shows that this is not the case if one investigates the mysteries of the world. While investigating death our emotional life will just get the view that death forms a necessary link in the whole life, and that not only Goethe's word is true that nature invented death to have a lot of life, but that for the human life the word is true: nature needs death to let perpetually arise always new marvellous things from the origin of life.

Today I would like to speak about the meaning of immortality of the human soul taking up the preceding talk. In case of such a spiritual-scientific consideration, I do not speak using conceptual definitions or theoretical discussions. I would rather like to give some indications from the field of spiritual-scientific research that can shed light on this subject.

It became obvious from the last talk here that spiritual research just wants to penetrate to the immortal essence of the human being. I have said that that research is able to penetrate into the area of human knowledge where this immortal essence is to be found which arises from the development of the human soul that is the only instrument by which we can really penetrate into the spiritual world. I have suggested many a time that everything depends in spiritual research on the fact that single persons are able by means of the mentioned exercises to carry out an inner spiritual-mental activity, detached from the physical body, detached from the tool by which any remaining human soul activity is carried out in the course of the everyday life. By intimate developing processes of the soul, it is possible to free it from the body. I have also indicated that for the spiritual researcher who has really learnt to connect meaning with the words “experiencing beyond the body,” this human soul also arises with its qualities that prove by themselves that the life of this soul outreaches birth and death.

We realise in the course of the today's considerations that such a consideration—attained by initiation of the human soul—gives a meaning to the word immortality. However, I would like to stress first, that we really live in a time in which the deeper human thinking and the more serious consideration of the human life may have the effect that they discharge gradually into the way which spiritual science expounds for the problem of the human immortal soul life. I would like to point only to one matter just from the point of view to gain a meaning of human immortality. I would like to point to that spirit who counts as one of the leading guides of Enlightenment, to Lessing (Gotthold Ephraim L., 1729-1781, German writer, dramatist, art critic), who tried to get a meaning out of the idea of immortality.

In that writing in which Lessing gave his spiritual testament to humanity, he renewed the ancient idea of reincarnation, as he believed; and he undertook this, because he felt forced to understand the complete historical life of humanity on earth as education. One can dismiss easily this testament that he gave as the completion of his striving saying: also great spirits grow old and proclaim many a pipe dream.

However, someone who has learnt to have respect for spiritual life and pursuit cannot dismiss Lessing's Education of the Human Race (1780), his ripest work, in such a way. I cannot go into the details of his writing. I can point only to the fact that to Lessing history appears in such a way that humanity ascends from more primitive conditions of life and views to more and more developed ones. Lessing understands this evolution of the human race as a mysterious education that the spiritual world bestows on the human race. He distinguishes single epochs of the advancing humanity, and from these considerations, the question arises to him who could not yet stand on the ground of our modern spiritual science: how can one position the single soul life of the human being in the historical evolution of humanity?

He says to himself that the single soul life can position itself in the course of the historical development only if one assumes that the human soul lives repeatedly on earth. If one imagines that the soul which lives today has lived repeatedly in preceding epochs in which it has absorbed what these epochs could give the souls. Thus, the question is solved for Lessing in a satisfying way: what about the souls that have lived in ancient epochs and have not taken part of the development of higher soul forces? The answer arises for Lessing that these were the same souls which have lived in former times which have carried over the fruits of the past epochs to their present existence and which gain additional fruits for themselves now which the present can give them. They go with these fruits after death through a wholly spiritual life and they carry them over to future epochs to participate in the progress of humanity. Thus, the whole meaning of the historical development lightens up for Lessing with the sense of the immortality of the human soul at the same time. Thus, this meaning arises for him, and thus the possibility arises for him straight away to remember that the life of the single person is greater and more comprehensive than what can be expressed in the life between birth and death.

As one considers the single life, which this single human soul lives from birth up to death, fits into that what this life can give. It, walks then through the gate of death, casts off the physical body, and penetrates into a spiritual world to look for its further development. One can imagine the complete historical development of humanity and of the earth in the sense of Lessing. What humanity experiences on earth is the “soul” of the earth and everything that geology, biology and other sciences investigate is the “physical body” of the earth which once falls off from the united human souls as the human body falls off from the single human soul at death. Then, however, the earth, after the body has fallen off from it, advances to a future embodiment in the universe to ascend to future spiritual and material heights. One realises that the sense of human existence and of the whole earth evolution arises from this thought of Lessing. Lessing could not be discouraged from this thought by the fact that one can argue that this was a thought which humanity had in the most primitive conditions of the soul development; then, however, it has disappeared from the cultural development. On the contrary, Lessing says at the end of his treatise on The Education of the Human Race, “Is this idea less valuable because it is the oldest, because it lighted up in the human soul before the sophistries of the school paralysed and weakened it?” Lessing imagines without doubt that a future spiritual development brings that to the souls again what they have lost in the interim.

Thus, one attains real forces that carry over the results of ancient times into the present. Thus, one overcomes that impossible point of view where one speaks that “ideas” are effective in the history of humanity, as if “ideas” could be realities one day! However, ideas cannot be effective in history, because mere ideas are abstractions, are nothing real. For Lessing imagines that the real life on earth proceeds because the realities of the human souls carry over what is created in one epoch from epoch to epoch. There we stand on the ground of spiritual realities that hold together the historical epochs of humanity.

You can now ask yourself, what has our spiritual research to say to this thought gained by Lessing on basis of certain historical necessities? Spiritual research finds its way to look at that what exceeds birth and death. Proving this I have to point once again with a few words to what presents itself to the spiritual researcher in the real mental experience. He opens himself to the exercises informed in the previous talk and lives emotionally in such way, after the soul itself has drawn itself out of the physical and has come to an experience in the spiritual. Then this soul has the physical body beside or before itself and experiences it in such a way that it is subjected to death as something external. While the everyday life proceeds, otherwise, in such a way that the human being only develops consciousness if he is, so to speak, within his physical body and uses this as tool to make his surroundings the object of his consciousness, namely the physical-sensory world.

Let us imagine the experience of the spiritual researcher lively that he lifts his soul out of his body that he strengthens the inner soul forces so that he does not depend on perceiving only with the help of the bodily tools, but can control them without bodily forces. Then the spiritual researcher comes to a particular knowledge: where from it comes, actually, that one has a consciousness in the everyday sensory life.

If the spiritual researcher has really freed his soul experience from the physical body, and has this body beside or before him, then he learns to recognise how actually this everyday soul life comes about. I would like to use a comparison. The spiritual researcher does not change the soul life as it is already. What he attains is only that he can behold spiritually what happens, otherwise, in the everyday life. There the spiritual researcher recognises that the activity of the spiritual-mental works on the body in such a way that at first the nervous organs of the human being are treated that one can compare this work to the writing of letters on paper. I ask you to consider what the spiritual researcher recognises at first as spiritual-mental activity is not the thinking, not the feeling, not the will, also not that what one knows in the everyday life as soul activity. However, it is that what works at first in his bodily organs and processes them so plastically that they get those movements only of which the materialistic worldview speaks. These movements in the brain, in the nervous system et cetera are there actually, and in this sense, one has to agree with the materialistic worldview completely. These movements, these oscillations in the brain exist as I write down the letters on paper. As my activity is that of writing, the first activity of the human being that he develops is that he causes movements, oscillations in his nervous system as “letters” at which his soul looks that it is comparable with the sight of my own letters that I have written.

The difference is only that I write the letters consciously on the paper and can consciously read them again. However, if I relate to the outside world, I write the physical activities that are to be carried out in the nervous system unconsciously with the spiritual-mental. If I have written them, they run off, I look at them, and this looking is the conscious soul life.

Thus, we realise that the spiritual-mental in the true sense of the word stands behind that which develops as spiritual-mental in the everyday life, and that between the true spiritual-mental in which the spiritual researcher lives if he has learnt to experience independently of his body and between the spiritual-mental in the everyday soul life the complete bodily experience exists. Between our true spiritual-mental and the everyday conscious life is our body. However, that which this body experiences, how this body puts itself in perpetual organic activity, so that consciousness can originate as a mirror reflects a picture is the result of the spiritual-mental. Behind our body, we stand with our spiritual-mental, and in this spiritual-mental the immortal essence of the human being exists.

If one distinguishes in such a way, one no longer searches the meaning of immortality in the continued existence of those soul contents that one experiences between birth and death; but one has to search the real basic origin of immortality in that what is behind the everyday life. Now we must get a concept of that what is behind this everyday life. However, one can do this while glancing at the real nature of the spiritual investigation.

From that which I have just discussed arises that the everyday consciousness is from the body as comparatively our own picture is reflected by a mirror. Somebody who does not search the spiritual-mental behind the picture but believes that the spiritual-mental originates from the body as the function, as the effect of the body who thinks materialistically resembles a person who says; I see a mirror before myself; it is strange that it lets my picture emerge from its substance. However, it does not let it emerge from its substance, and it is nonsense to believe that the mirror produces the picture; but the mirror reflects the picture.

Thus, the body reflects our own spiritual-mental activity. You can compare your body to a mirror which reflects our spiritual-mental activity, only with the difference that we face the mirror quite passively but treat the body with the spiritual-mental activity first, we write this activity in it which manifests to our consciousness then. The comparison would be correct only if I carried out an activity from my body. This activity would cause a process in the glass which caused the reflection when I stand actively before the mirror and would emit certain radiations et cetera which cause intersections or the like which cause the content of the everyday consciousness and make it possible that the human being appears before himself. However, from that ensues that the human being needs a counterfort for the life between birth and death in which he can reflect his spiritual-mental activity. If you had to develop such content of consciousness without body, you would not be able to do this in the life between birth and death. If the body did not carry out its duty as tool, you would have no counterfort; you would have nothing to reflect the spiritual-mental activity.

If now the spiritual researcher becomes able by the mentioned exercises to lift his spiritual-mental out of the physical body, it also becomes apparent that he can no longer turn his spiritual-mental sight to the outer physical world. This sensory world disappears from the horizon of his consciousness at the same moment when the spiritual researcher lifts the spiritual-mental out of the physical body. I would like to note this only by the way for those who believe that one could be possibly distracted by spiritual research from the pleasant sight of the physical-sensory world with its wealth. O no, this is not at all that way. Just someone who has become a spiritual researcher realises when he lives in his spiritual-mental and the sight of the physical-sensory disappears; but he appreciates its beauty and real value all the more. He returns repeatedly, as long as it is granted to him, strengthened by his stay in the spiritual world; he develops a bigger interest in the beauties of the physical world—and gains a particular support to recognise the beauties of the physical world and their tasks which have escaped him before without spiritual research. Only those make such objections who have not yet come closer to spiritual research.

If it is now really in such a way that the physical world disappears if we do not have the counterfort of the body in order to perceive—and the spiritual researcher has this body beside himself, does not use it as tool, then the question arises: how does the real spiritual consciousness come about? Does the spiritual consciousness not need a counterfort? Does the soul not need anything by which it can be reflected if it wants to go into the spiritual consciousness?

Spiritual research answers this question in such a way that the human being wants a counterfort too when he leaves his physical body with his spiritual-mental and lives in the spiritual-mental, something that is now a mirror to him. Something becomes a mirror to him that is to be endured really still before death if it is experienced in spiritual research only grievously. There we stand again at a point where I must point to the fact that spiritual research leads not only to bliss, but also to tragic moods what one can endure only with big pain. However, the spiritual researcher must just purchase higher knowledge with pain. That what comes up then as a counterfort is the own life which we have gone through from the point of childhood up to which we can otherwise remember. However, we have it in the memory picture in the everyday life in such a way that we are in it as it were that we are combined with it. We ourselves are our thoughts, our experiences, our pains, all memories strictly speaking; we are in them, are one with them. However, with the spiritual researcher it happens that that what one has, otherwise, in memory gets out of him like out of a cover. That with which you are one, otherwise, and about which you say to yourself, I have experienced it, and now I feel combined in my thoughts, sensations and feelings with that what I have experienced—you feel this now like an outer vision, like a Fata Morgana before yourself. You feel that enlarged what comes out of you in which the spiritual-mental is reflected.

There you realise that you must endure in the spiritual-mental experience, in the initiation—not after death—that you have your life as a substantial basis of experience instead of the outer physical impressions. That is in contrast what you can perceive spiritually.—There you realise to what extent you have become a good or bad mirror for the spiritual world. There you get to know above all what it means to face what you have experienced. For that is now the reflecting surface to which everything is in contrast that the spiritual world shows. Instead of having your body as your tool for perceiving, you have your own egoity, your commemorative egoity, and your own experiences as tool. Own experiences must merge with that what you experience spiritually; they must reflect what you experience spiritually. And now you notice—when you do no longer experience your own inside within your body, but have it like a Fata Morgana outside of you—that at this moment this inside presents itself like an etheric being that becomes larger and larger because it is internally related to the whole spiritual universe.

You feel like being soaked up from the spiritual universe. You feel if you have gone through the indicated experiences, as if something exists in the human life between birth and death that is contained in the forces of the physical body. When you have left the physical body with initiation, something becomes free of the forces of the physical body held together as the etheric body. Then that what has become free has the tendency to spread in the spiritual world, it thereby becomes more and more imperceptible—and you risk that your own self, the self of thoughts, dissolves in the spiritual universe, and that you thereby lose its sight because the reflection does no longer exist after the dissolution.

The physical body counteracts it, as long as the physical just lasts. For at the moment when the danger threatens that the subtler etheric of a more spiritual body as it were would lose itself, the physical body asserts its reinforced forces—and one has to go again back into the physical body. Then this is just in such a way, as if you are forced back by the power of the physical body to the everyday perception, to the usual sight and to the physical way. As you can learn from this representation, you get to know the moment that must take place when the physical and chemical forces seize the outer physical body and take it away if death enters. One learns to recognise how the consciousness can live on after death because now the physical body does no longer call back the just described subtler etheric body. It can just live on at first in this form that our own experience faces us as a memory picture, only as long as the forces of the spiritual universe assert themselves and the subtler body disintegrates in the universe.

Thus, we realise how the spiritual researcher causes that condition by his experiences that must come into being with the human being at first after death. As the first, you get to know what takes place after death immediately. Nevertheless, you also learn to recognise that you have only grasped the very first times after death. In my Occult Science. An Outline I have indicated the length of these very first times after death. They last only some days according to the character of the human being. The memory of the past life takes a few days. It lasts as long as the forces of the inner subtler body which spiritual science makes apparent can continue.

If you consider the conditions this way, you ask yourself, what causes the length of the period in which this memory can take place?—If one compares it to the length of that time which this or that person can stay awake in the usual life, then you have the period within which this memory of the past life takes place. You can say, depending on the capacity of his etheric body the human being opens himself to life without falling asleep without having to call forth sleep as compensation, the memory tableau of the past life lasts longer or shorter which presents itself like a living Fata Morgana .

About such a period and about the following ones about which I will still immediately speak you learn to speak in the area of spiritual research by inner consideration, not by outer measuring. What you experience there in the retrospect in the initiation appears in such a way that you know: it contains the forces that the human being must maintain, before sleep overcomes him. You experience the former life for days. What happens then, however, arises from the spiritual research, too. It does not appear in indifferent thoughts what you have experienced in your life between birth and the present moment; but that also appears what you have experienced morally or, otherwise, in the fields of your efficiency, in your fitness for life.

However, this appears in particular way; I would like to discuss it using a concrete example. We look back at our life, look there at a time when we have done something wrong. This wrong appears now to us in that Fata Morgana of the past life. The impression is for the spiritual researcher in such a way that first like in an uninteresting picture, like in a tableau, this life appears and something gradually emerges from it—and in doing so the spiritual researcher beholds more and more tragic conflicts—about which one could say that the whole personal value arises from that what one has done and has experienced. If you have done anything wrong, this wrong first comes out of the tableau of the past-life in such a way that you look at the picture only, knowing that you have done this. Then this picture is penetrated with emotional forces emerging from the spiritual-mental, and you must say to yourself that you cannot be the human being who you should be if you must always look at this what you have done there. You can be this only if you have wiped out this wrong from the perception of the inner destiny, from karma. The longer you succeed in staying with what presents itself like a spiritual mirror, and the longer you look at it, the stronger the emotional experiences appear which say, you must look at your deed as something wrong, until you have extinguished it!

Indeed, the spiritual researcher must go through this. He must see then that in the Fata Morgana which is in contrast to it and becomes a sum of countless self-reproaches what shows him his value quite clearly how far he is, and what he has to deal with in order to make himself the true human being only. Self-knowledge—it is peculiar that it becomes more and more tragic, more and more difficult, the farther you advance in it, and that you face everything as self-reproach in particular that you should not have done, so that you are so fixated on it that you cannot turn away the spiritual glance from it, before it is extinguished.

Up to here, Aristotle (384-322 BC) already recognised the sight of the human spiritual life. He also recognised what must be attached to this Fata Morgana. Aristotle already knew that the human being if he has gone through the gate of death really lives in his being, and looks back-at the own deeds and misdeeds on which his glance is fixated. However, he was not yet as far as a spiritual researcher that he would get beyond this retrospect. This retrospect extends to eternity according to him. Aristotle could not recognise how the human being could escape from it one day; so that he had another retrospect after the first short retrospect that presents itself figuratively before him forever. This is a rather hopeless aspect of his philosophy if you understand it correctly. Aristotle believes that the short life on earth is there to prepare the experience in the spiritual world in which the human being, looking back, would be fixated on the sight of the imperfect existence between birth and death; and his life after death would consist of the fact that he would be fixated on this sight.

His world would be to look at himself in such a way that he was in the life between birth and death; and as we see a world of animals, plants, stones, mountains, seas and so on, we would be fixated on the sight of the experience of our own actions in the time after death.—Franz Brentano (1838-1917), the excellent investigator of Aristotle pointed clearly to it in his book Aristotle and his World View (1911). What I have just stated—even if the words of Aristotle are sometimes in such a way that one can argue about what he had meant with them—arises from Aristotle absolutely. He did not yet know that this is a passageway only as the modern spiritual research can show which presents itself to the human being as such retrospect that is penetrated with inner emotional experiences.

What presents itself to the spiritual researcher if he penetrates into that region which the human being enters striding through the gate of death?

If he has advanced so far that his body does not reclaim him too fast, then that results which is attached to the uninteresting Fata Morgana as retrospect. Since the spiritual researcher can ascend on his way in such a way that he sees a Fata Morgana of his life events and some of his spiritual experiences at first that are obvious; then his body can reclaim that subtle etheric body in his inside, and he enters like from an initiation dream again into the everyday reality. However, if he continues the exercises on and on, he comes so far that he even beholds what lifts out itself from this Fata Morgana, so that that appears which we are not yet which we must become, if we did anything wrong, for example. We are not yet that who has eliminated this wrong; but we must become someone who eliminates the wrong.

This is the internally oppressive again that one feels the forces evoked by the self-inspection, which want to compensate everything wrong karmically. You look at your imperfections. You see them. However, you also see more and more in which way you must do it, so that you can erase the imperfect, the wrong. You see what you must become. This is the self-knowledge that you feel the germinal forces in yourself, which already press us forward beyond death, so that you say to yourself, these forces live in us after death; we do if we are relieved from our body what these demand. Now I must keep the wrong, the imperfections; however, I feel the forces that can eradicate the wrong. Now you know by the inner sight that it lasts for years, until that what presents itself by own experience gradually gets the forces which can really compensate the wrong. Now they cannot compensate it. They must go through a spiritual world first. As true as the physical consciousness says to itself looking at the sun set in the west, now you have to experience the night, then the sun can appear in the east again. As true the spiritual researcher knows if he experiences the germinal forces in the soul: after you have developed the forces gradually, after you have realised after death—or have realised throughout the years—how the compensating forces must be, you must dive into a spiritual world to find the forces. These forces are collected now, as it were, from this spiritual world, so that the human being, after he has experienced the spiritual world between death and new birth, becomes ripe to enter a new life on earth with these forces.

But spiritual research can also get an impression of that what the soul has to experience if it has appropriated those forces spiritually first after death looking at its past life, after it has realised which forces it must have if it prepares for a new life on earth going through the spiritual world. Since the spiritual researcher, as long as he lives on earth, cannot transform these forces. Nevertheless, he looks into the spiritual world; he sees the material for this transformation. He sees as it were originating in himself how the forces demand a new life.

As you can see lungs in a human embryo which has not yet come to daylight, you know that they can breathe: if they come into breathable air. You can also realise if the soul is relieved of the body, the spiritual organs inhaling the spiritual air in the spiritual world that develop spiritually only when they approach a new life on earth. You get to know this spiritual self-development looking at it directly only, you get to know what it means to grasp the spiritual substance with spiritual organs.—If you wanted to use an expression for what happens there with the soul, you would find no other expression in the usual language than that one says: it is a blissful experience in a certain respect. For it is a life in activity, perpetually invoking and acquiring spiritual substance in this existence between death and new birth, causing the preconditions of a new life on earth. In this existence, the soul feels as a part of a spiritual world, and thereby it feels it like heavenly bliss, after it has felt what it must regard as tragic in the past life, what has to develop as the germinal forces on basis of the previous life.

We have now collected everything concerning the sense of the continued existence when the human being goes through the gate of death. First, we have a spiritual, mirage-like retrospect of the past life lasting some days, and then you look back emotionally at this life. Since these emotional experiences are not only a retrospect, but you experience everything that you have committed as imperfections, as wrong what should be different, so that you reach that in the following life which you should reach, and get the forces which you need so that the next life can become different. As long as you have a retrospect of the previous life, you only work on those forces with your thoughts so that you realise, you must have these or those forces in the future life on earth. If you have experienced your life on earth once again after death in the spiritual, then you reach a wholly spiritual region, and you inhale as it were all those spiritual forces, which descend then to combine with that what father and mother can give as physical substance and to form a new life on earth.

It may seem now, as if the passage through the life between death and new birth makes it necessary that the consecutive lives on earth would be more and more perfect. However, this is virtually not the case, because it is true what already a great spirit said out of his almost ill soul: “the world is deep and deeper than the day has thought” (Friedrich Nietzsche in Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883)). We can come only slowly and gradually to that what is put in us, and that our human forces are rather imperfect in relation to what they must become once, and what can stand as an ideal of true humanity before us.

Then it becomes apparent that we are not always able to survey after death which forces we have to appropriate in order to compensate the committed wrong. There many forces participate, so that it may be that we believe to compensate with an even bigger egoism or folly what we have committed from egoism or folly in the previous life. Thereby it can happen that the following incarnation is an even more imperfect one, an even harsher training than the previous one was. However, overall the course through the repeated lives is a rise. It is possible that the human being looking back at the past life can be in error concerning the way of compensating something and that thereby imaginary or real descents are caused. Overall, strong rises often follow deep “falls” of the human being, while after death the dreadful happens that we look back at a deep wrong we have committed, or what adhered to us as a big imperfection, and that we experience a big rise after a deep fall.

Many a thing appears if the spiritual researcher pursues the life sharp-sightedly, since this does not only happen. If you have your life after death as background, you merge with the spiritual world, so that you meet the soul—if you meet something wrong that you committed—that you wronged, at the same time and then you witness the wrong which you committed on this soul. Generally expanding the look at something spiritual leads us not only to our own soul at first but to the other human soul.

You learn to observe the other human soul, so that you start observing and pursuing the other soul that is already disembodied—even if it is hard to believe. Indeed, I have to draw your attention to the following. If the spiritual researcher tries to expand his own life in such a way that he penetrates into the space of experience—“space” is thought symbolically, of course—where any soul is, he can witness the destinies of this soul after death. I must say only that you witness the destinies of those souls at first with which you were connected in the preceding life; but if you advance in spiritual experience, the destinies of such souls with which you were connected in former lives also appear. The spiritual researcher realises that he develops relations with almost all souls on earth; however, it is exceptionally difficult to recognise them and you can succeed only using certain aids.

Some questions may become clear to the single listener if I speak this way about the meaning of human immortality. If you take together the previous talk with the today's one, you can say, I can understand that the everyday consciousness can only develop, while it envelops the everlasting of the human soul like a veil, and that we develop the sensory consciousness because we darken what develops after death. We must bear death in ourselves, so that we can have the present consciousness. To such an extent as we develop the forces that lead us to our natural death, we can develop the everyday consciousness. The fact that we can die makes it possible that we can have the sensory world round us.

Thus, one can understand that the human being must die, so to speak, when he has experienced his life. However, someone who hears speaking about the meaning of immortality this way has to ask again, what about those lives, which may end unfilled in the prime of life, maybe because of inner illnesses or inner weaknesses or misfortunes? What can the spiritual researcher say about such deaths? How do they line up in the course of the earth-lives, and what are they after death?

I would not like to speak here abstractly. I have already held these talks for many years here. Hence, it goes without saying that now somebody may believe that I give such portrayals as mere assertions. You experience repeatedly that those who listen to such things for the first time and have not familiarised themselves with the literature make objections which have been cleared up long since. However, I would not be able to progress in our considerations if I had always to say the same every year. Hence, I must refer compared with completely entitled objections to the fact that one must try to penetrate into the literature and to take into account that I have cleared up such objections already in the course of many talks.

We take the case that a misfortune carries off a blossoming human life. Then the spiritual researcher recognises the following. If he pursues this soul beyond the grave, it becomes apparent that it has adsorbed forces by misfortune, which are adapted to prepare higher intellectual abilities for the next life than it could prepare if this misfortune had not been caused. However, you would badly understand the spiritual researcher if you hold the thought in your mind even in the least, that it would be so easy to make yourself more intellectual for the next life on earth if you let a car run over you. That is not the case. Since it becomes apparent that the consciousness cannot decide on that what is necessary in the human destiny beyond the grave but that higher consciousness which becomes effective there before birth or after death in the wholly spiritual world.

With the usual consciousness, we can never survey whether a misfortune has an effect on us in this or that way. Nevertheless, in numerous cases the spiritual researcher realises that, indeed, in the pre-birth spiritual our soul has already caused such destiny in a wholly spiritual consciousness that has led with certain necessity to this misfortune. We are not entitled after birth to decide this. Before birth we direct our existence to the misfortune, with it our soul receives, so to speak, the possibility to destroy the physical body, and thus it has the experience at the moment of the transition: how does our humanity work if this body is destroyed and does not continue to develop naturally? It makes good sense—not for the everyday consciousness but for our superconscious being—that human lives can also perish, so to speak, by misfortunes before reaching the normal age. It is a long shot to state such a thing in the present, but I have to point to it. The spiritual researcher realises with many souls that these or those talents go back to former lives and he beholds how inventive forces, intellectual forces developed by misfortunes in a certain age which can provide services to humanity.

One has to look only reasonably how for these or those performances which are of original kind a certain human age is necessary. Great inventors get around to uncovering certain forces from the depths of life in a certain age by straining their abilities in the extreme. It needs not be an epoch-making invention; it can also be something that completely serves the usual everyday life. This can be because this soul had to go through conditions of life, which destroyed the body at that time. The soul thereby gains inventive forces that control, direct, and penetrate the physical world.—You cannot “prove” with the outer usual logic that such things can be investigated. However, this can be done only what has been shown so often in these talks that the spiritual researcher gets around to observing with a strictly regulated methodology of his soul life what goes forward when a soul experiences any misfortune which leads to this or that, or even to death.

Let us take another case. If a young human life is carried off by an illness, the spiritual researcher realises that the intellectual life is not so much influenced in the next embodiment but the volitional life. Once again, we are not allowed to cause such a strengthening of the volitional life that we wish in the usual consciousness by an illness that we cause artificially. However, if in the whole context of existence, which is controlled by the spiritual world, a human life is carried off by a pneumonia or another illness in the prime of existence, the spiritual researcher realises very often that such a soul could not unfold such willpower that it already possessed in a way. The outer physical body offered resistance. However, while one experienced the illness, and while the spiritual-mental experienced the resistance of the physical body, going through the life between death and new birth it found that in this resistance what gives the willpower. Just by such a consideration, it becomes apparent that life gets its sense in all directions.

Indeed, all pains that we feel in the physical life on earth facing the misfortunes of life or our destiny will always be there. This will not be removed completely, however, it will be reduced if one realises that wisdom pulsates, nevertheless, through our life. From a higher point of view all pains appear which are integrated in life as necessary for our development, and the spiritual researcher assumes that wisdom is to be found everywhere in the world from the start. He considers life with all its strokes of luck and misfortunes as the result of a calculation that is not there, before one has not carried out the calculation. Wisdom does not exist in the human life, before he does not convince himself in many cases with admiration of the fact that wisdom still forms the basis of any life. Because we are in an experience that must happen by the body, the misfortunes will work suitably, will take us with them as human beings, and it would make the life in the body appear an inhuman one if it could not feel pain with misfortunes. Nevertheless, just as the sense perception covers in life what the spiritual-mental is in its importance for eternity, the experience in the body covers that higher point of view from which any conscious experience of the human being appears as penetrated with wisdom.

The spiritual researcher does not become like a dried up field crop by the fact that he can contemplate wisdom even in a misfortune. No, just because he can rise on a higher viewpoint the survey of life appears to him as filled with wisdom, as rational. However, when he enters the life on earth again and lives in his body, he is a feeling human being, of course, as every other human being. As someone who mounts a summit and has a nice sight from it but must not stop to have the sight of that what proceeds below in the valley, the true spiritual researcher can also not lose any compassion and witnesses human happiness and grief if he faces happiness and grief in the life between birth and death. However, just this spiritual research realises that compared to eternity the human being is not born to despair, but that any look at the realm of the spirit shows him the world full of wisdom, meaningful, and that knowledge of true immortality is a knowledge of the meaning of immortality at the same time.

I could only make some indications of human immortality, and from it, the meaning of human immortality has to arise. The spiritual researcher just has to express those matters in words that lie, so to speak, beyond the usual life if he wants to point to that what the human being experiences, after he has gone through the gate of death. What is experienced in the usual life offers no clue to characterise the life after death if one should recognise its spiritual substantiality. Thus, one must take stock of the fact that the human being is not able to carry the picture of a single lion or a single mountain with him through the gate of death, however, that inner spiritual-mental activity which enables us to have a mountain as a mental picture in our consciousness, or to imagine a lion. We carry them through the gate of death. We carry just that mostly through the gate of death what is not “real” in life. If we see various lions, we form the concept of the lion. You can easily prove of course that the concept of the lion does not exist in the sensory reality, but only the single lion; also not the concept of the mountain, but only the single mountain. However, what enables us to recognise mountains and lions and to understand something spiritual-mental, to recognise justice, freedom and so on what enables us to live with a human soul like with our own soul, to penetrate into the human soul by mysterious sympathies, that mysterious weaving from soul to soul—all that we take with us through the gate of death. On the question, whether we are together again with our kith after death we can answer that we are together with them again! We are together with those who are close to us in life. Also already between birth and death ties exist between the souls which belong to the extra-terrestrial—what one only does not recognise because the mental look is mesmerised by the physical sight.

Investigating the spiritual means at the same time recognising the eternity of this spiritual. Recognising the human being as something spiritual means recognising the eternity of the human spirit. Actually, one has to say as spiritual researcher that someone who regards the spirit as mortal does not recognise it in reality. The philosophers who do not believe in the immortality of the human soul are for the investigation of the soul like botanists who deny the existence of plants. It is the certain way of spiritual research that one can say that the soul recognises the spiritual as something natural as the botanist recognises the plant as that what it is.

Therefore, we can say that that is the most valuable for the complete human life concerning the spiritual-mental, concerning the behaviour of the human soul after death what is covered by the outer observation in the physical-sensory experience what is not perceived in this experience. Someone who wants to bring in concepts in the life after death who does not want to suffer from the “hunger for concepts” after death—if you allow me to use the expression—must appropriate concepts which do not apply already here in the life on earth only to the sensorily discernible, but exceed it. We can live on the spiritual-scientific concepts in the life after death. If anybody believed that the hunger for concepts killed him after death, one has to say that an immortal soul can suffer, indeed, from this hunger, but cannot die of it as the physical body can starve to death.

Thus, I could only give you single indications about the meaning of the immortality of the human soul. Of course, I know best of all what those can or must object to such indications who stand so completely in the consciousness of our time. We live in a time that is completely hostile on one side to accept that that development of the soul, about which I have spoken here, leads really into a wholly spiritual experience. However, we live at the same time in a period in which the human soul longs for the knowledge of the spirit in its subconscious depths. There can be also human beings who say, why can the human being not remain with that what nature has given him, with the reason and the senses which nature has given him? However, this would be, as if anybody said that the child should stop at that what it has as a child, and should not learn what it would have to carry out as an adult. Just on the same point of view somebody would stand who said that the soul should stop at the abilities which it already has.

We see where one can break away from the gross preconceptions that one conceives the real nature of the human essence. One can realise that philosophers of the present break away from the wholly physical experience and interpretation of it. Anyway, it is interesting, even if he misses his aim ever so much that the French philosopher Bergson (Henri B., 1859-1941) regards the memory as something that leads into the spiritual realm. However, one sees at such an example that the philosophers of the present have difficulty bringing themselves to acknowledge the spiritual world. One sees in other points again that a healthy soul life comes up to the front gate of spiritual science. It is extremely interesting that unlimitedly increased attention gives the possibility to transform the human being. If one realises then at least that a very significant philosopher of the present, McGilvary (Evander Bradley McG., 1864-1953), comes out of the health of the American nature just up to the point where he says: if one wants to get to know the real soul being if one wants to get to know what soul what immortality is, one can do this only by developing attention. McGilvary says that the human being can know by an effort, by an increase of the forces of attention that one gets the conception of a spiritual-mental that one has like an inner activity. You realise how such attempts lead to the gate of spiritual science.

Another example: I felt highly satisfied when I got a treatise which a very gifted director of a grammar school—Deinhardt (Johann Heinrich D., 1805-1867)—wrote. There you realise how a highly educated man of the more recent past who could not know spiritual science struggles with the highest questions of life. Indeed, also others did this. Nevertheless, it is interesting to realise that in a talk in which he brought his ideas of immortality forward the editor draws the attention to a letter that he received from this teacher. He writes there: if it were still granted to him to continue his attempts, he still would show how the soul still works in the life between birth and death on a subtle body which goes then through the gate of death. It is encouraging to see somebody struggling in the middle of the age of the arising materialism with the problem that I have treated in the two last talks. I tried there to show that one grasps the immortal essence of the human being spiritual-scientifically, which develops on and on, which goes through the gate of death to prepare for a new earth-life with the passage through the spiritual world. That director refers to this “spiritual-mental essence” as a “subtle body” which the soul organises to carry it through death and in which the subtler forces can gather themselves that the soul needs then to continue its development.

Even if today the glance is deflected from the spiritual-mental because of the great achievements of the outer science, and, hence, the immortality of the human soul is not yet acknowledged and is not understood, nevertheless, one sees the struggle for concepts which give the human being a picture of that what exists after death and brings power and assurance into life and makes the human being only a complete human being. One can say to someone who can live without these “metaphysical things” that life must take place in such a way that it brings up that from its depths—even if the mental glance can be darkened for epochs—what releases the natural view into the fields of the everlasting, the immortal.

Thus, one can say that also for that what seems paradoxical today the time becomes ripe in which that is understood as the achievements of science have always been understood. Already once, I have drawn your attention to the fact that we can feel spiritual science in harmony with the present science. Therefore, I would also like to point to something at the end of these considerations that burst out of the soul of the Greek philosopher Heraclitus who did deep looks into the experience of the universe from the viewpoint of his time. He felt his soul taken along by the “stream of becoming” as which he interpreted the whole universe. Heraclitus considered the restless becoming as the real characteristic of the universe. “Being” was a delusion to him. What exists is there in truth only imaginary.

Everything is active in the stream of becoming, and the soul is woven into this perpetually flowing activity. The fire was the symbol of becoming to Heraclitus, he felt his soul positioned into the fire of the universe. Living in it emotionally he felt the impulse of immortality as an inner experience, as an immediate inner observation. He expressed this impulse that way and his words shall close our considerations of human immortality only somewhat changed.

If the soul—freed from the body—soars the free ether, it appears before itself as an immortal spirit freed from death!

Although in these talks I have already spoken repeatedly about the moral life and the moral world order, I would like to summarise what one can say from the viewpoint of spiritual science about the bases of the moral world order in the human life.

Schiller (Friedrich Sch., 1759-1805, German poet) expressed the basic character of the moral human life in a magnificently simple way:

Do you search the highest, the greatest?

The plant can teach you.

What it does unconsciously

Do it volitionally—that's it.

Just the today's discussions maybe show that this saying applies to the basic character of the moral life. However, it matters that in the second half of this quotation a significant riddle is hidden: how, by which means and where from the human being can want what the plant does without will. You have to search the heart of all philosophical and moral-scientific investigations in this riddle.

In our time, a big number of thinkers who deal with the moral questions of humanity can hardly penetrate so far to get to the undeniable fact of any ethical obligation of the human being. We shall realise that the ethical obligations and impulses shine into life as it were for a big number of thinkers who cannot indicate the place based on their worldviews characteristic for the present where from this light of moral impulses shines into the human souls.

Just if we link to Schiller's saying, we can note a peculiar, at first like the moral life lighting up fact which becomes clear in particular if you descend to the lowest realm of nature, to the mineral realm. Let us assume that we turn our glance upon a rock crystal. The essentials, which are not always perceptible, are that you have to do the following requirement according to the circumstances of the universe. If this rock crystal, if this physical thing develops its inherent laws, it represents its being. If one were able—and indeed the ongoing natural sciences will come to such achievements—to state from the special substance of the rock crystal, how its particular crystal form has to result, the known six-sided prism, from both sides concluded by six-sided pyramids, then you can also know if it reaches such a crystal form how this law expresses itself in the outside world. Then it represents its being in the outer space.

In a sense, we can say the same of the beings of the plant realm, maybe less of the beings of the animal realm. However, the same law also applies in the animal realm, even if somewhat modified, because in nature everything only exists in certain gradations. Indeed, one would have to say a lot if one wanted to discuss the peculiarity of this principle. I want to suggest this only. The deeper you immerse yourself just in this fact, the more you recognise that here for our world order a point exists by which the human being differs, nevertheless, radically from the other physical beings.

Let us assume once that one could really recognise all those principles of formation and other principles that are inherent in a human form, as for example, the crystal form is inherent in a rock crystal, and the human being would express this sum of formative forces inherent to him. Then he would not represent his being in the outer space in the same sense as the other physical beings. Since deeply inside the human being are the moral impulses which are characterised at first by the fact that they cause an inner tendency of development which does not show his being concluded to the human being like the other physical beings if he expresses his formative forces. I admit that I express a rather trivial fact with it, but a fact from which one has to start, nevertheless. Worldviews coloured more materialistically do not acknowledge that; however, one has to acknowledge it in case of an unprejudiced consideration of existence. One has to acknowledge that the human being, we say, perceives something from somewhere at first that wants to settle in his being, and that gives him the impulse not to regard his being as a concluded one like the other physical creatures. Yes, one could say, as completely, as perfectly the human being could bring his formative forces into being as the other physical creatures do, he would never be able to declare his being as concluded compared with the moral impulses. This is why Kant (Immanuel K., 1724-1804), the great philosopher, felt forced to separate his worldview in two completely different parts. He differentiated one part that shows everything that is to be recognised of the outside world in such a way that the human being positions himself in this worldview with all his formative forces. The other part projects in the human existence as “categorical imperative:” act in such a way that the maxim of your action could become an imperative for all human beings. Thus, possibly the categorical imperative could be expressed. This other part of the Kantian worldview positions itself in the human life in such a way that it gives the tonic for the human being. However, how does Kant understand it? In such a way, that it speaks from another world than from that which one grasps with the worldview of knowledge and cognition. Therefore, he speaks about a quite different world that Kant tries to fill with all teachings of a divine being, of human freedom, of the immortality of the human soul and the like. Expressly Kant means that one has to listen to the world that is different from that of the usual human knowledge if one wants to perceive what obliges the human being. The categorical imperative is as it were the gate into a world that is above the sensory world.

Thus, one realises that it is probably felt that the being of man is not concluded with his formative forces. In our time, something strange becomes apparent. One would like to say, our time of the more materialistic-mechanistic, naturalistic way of thinking cannot at all speak—if one leaves it to its innermost impulses strictly—of such a world of which Kant was still speaking. Indeed, the fewest people are consequent in their worldviews. They do not expand all basic feelings that result from the requirements of their worldview, to the whole worldview. Those in particular who adhere to a naturalistic-materialistically coloured worldview—and who prefer today to be called monists—must completely reject the possibility to look up in a world, into which Kant looks like through a front gate with his categorical imperative. They also do this. Not only those who stand more or less on a scientific ground and with those it is comprehensible, but also many people who one calls “psychologists” do it in such a way. Numerous psychological thinkers of the most recent past do no longer manage asking: where from do the moral bases of human life come, actually, and where from that what distinguishes the human being from all other physical beings? Then the people say without thinking, ethics must be founded on the fact that not only the single follows those impulses that are directed immediately to his own being, to his own existence, but also that he follows those impulses that are directed to the whole humanity. “Social ethics” has become a word that is in full vogue in our present.

Because one can look up at no higher worlds with the cognitive forces of which one disposes according to their view, one tries to get a clue in certain border areas with that what one can still accept as “real”: the totality of the human beings or any group of humanity. One calls this moral what is in the sense of this totality, in contrast to that what the single person does only for himself. One can find extremely irrational thoughts that want to maintain ethics and morality under this point of view of mere social ethics. In any case, someone who looks deeper into these matters has just to look for the real contents of that what is to be done, or rather for that, where from such contents can come, for the “places,” from which the moral impulses can originate.

In this sense, Schopenhauer (Arthur Sch., 1788-1850) spoke a brilliant word that I have already often quoted here: “Preaching morality is easy, founding morality is hard.” He means with it: it is difficult to visit the forces and impulses in the human soul that make the human being really a moral being, it is easy to pick up certain principles from the historical course of humanity or also from the religious or other systems with which one can then preach morality. Schopenhauer means that it does not depend whether one can pronounce these or those moral principles, but what forms the basis of the moral impulses as forces.

Now, however, Schopenhauer finds these impulses of the human nature in compassion and empathy in his one-sided way. One has said rightly, why should anybody who feels morally connected with a matter which concerns only himself and no one else, avoid a perjury that is only caused by empathy? Why should anybody be prevented morally, for example, from mutilating himself out of certain empathy? Briefly, and I could bring in many such examples: indeed, the impulse that Schopenhauer finds is very comprehensive, one meets something that must form the basis of most moral actions which however cannot be exhaustive at all.

It is instructive at any price that the theories, the views, and opinions of the origin of morality grasp at nothing the more any worldview tends only to that what one can obtain with the outer senses and the reason that is directed to this outer sensory world. It would take too much time of course if I wanted to show in detail that such a worldview is unable to state the place of origin of morality. Nevertheless, the moral-ethical life is hanging in the air with any such worldview that is directed only to the outer sensory world and to the reason that combines the facts of the sensory world or moulds them into principles.

What I have just said should lead to the explanation of something that must appear quite natural after the preceding talks. If one assumes in the sense of these talks that a world of spiritual beings and spiritual facts forms the basis of our sensory world and the world of the reason, then it is just a given, because one cannot find the impulses of the ethical in the sensory world, to look for these impulses in the spiritual world. Since maybe the requirements, views, and opinions of those are right who believe that just in the moral something speaks into the human nature that comes immediately from a supersensible world. Therefore, we want to approach the consideration of the moral life. However, I will summarise for those listeners who have heard only few of these talks quite briefly, how the spiritual researcher ascends to the spiritual world where we want to search the origin of morality.

I have said the following many a time here. If the human being wants to get beyond the realm of sensory experience, he must not stop with his power of cognition that the human being normally has. Any science, any consideration is right which speaks about limits of knowledge in the sense as I have often explained here and starts from the requirement that the human being can develop no other cognitive forces than those, which are in him by themselves. Nevertheless, in spiritual research it matters that everything that is already in the human being is developed further that forces slumbering in the human being can be woken. Many a time I have spoken of the methods that can develop these slumbering forces. I have spoken of that “spiritual chemistry” which goes forward with the same logic and rationality as natural sciences do, but which extends to the spiritual area and its forces, and, hence, has to develop the natural methods and the natural way of thinking in a way different from natural sciences. In this sense, I have often explained where spiritual science must be a continuation of natural sciences in our time. I would like to point to that what should be mentioned only as it were maybe once again for clarification.

I said once that one cannot consider water if you face it only as water that in it the hydrogen is contained which the chemist separates by the outer chemistry. Water extinguishes fire, it is not ignitable; hydrogen, a gas, is ignitable and can be liquefied. Just as little you can discover the nature of hydrogen that is combined with the oxygen in the water, just as little you can consider the spiritual-mental in the outer human body. However, the spiritual chemistry does not consist in tumultuous performances, in something that can be carried out externally like the outer chemistry, but in the following that I would like to show only quite briefly. You can read out the further details in my Occult Science. An Outline or in the book How Does One Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds?.

The human being is the only tool with which you can penetrate into the spiritual. However, he must advance by particular soul exercises to that point where he can connect a sense with the words: I experience myself in my spiritual-mental beyond the physical-bodily—as the hydrogen would have to say if it could experience itself: I experience myself beyond the oxygen. Persevering soul exercises are necessary to separate this spiritual-mental from the physical-bodily, and that the human being gets around to connecting a meaning with the words: I experience myself in the spiritual-mental, but my physical-bodily is outside of me as the table is outside of me. These exercises last shorter or longer and consist in an increase of attention what is already important in the usual life. However, I do not mean the attention on soul contents caused by something exterior, but on soul contents that one puts in the centre of the soul life. If the human being is able to tense all his soul forces and then to concentrate them upon clear soul contents of which he knows for sure that he himself has put them, then everything is crowded together gradually by this stronger concentration of the soul forces that enables him to lift out the spiritual-mental from the physical-bodily. Only the exercise of meditation must take place regardless of practising the so-called concentration. This is something that the human being already knows in the usual life, but one has to increase it unlimitedly in spiritual science: devotion to the general world process.

The second requirement of spiritual science is to be given away to the general world being, as a human being is in sleep, but consciously and not unconsciously. Many people do not experience the right success of these exercises because they get tired of the systematic and persevering performance of these exercises. While one gives the soul forces another direction by such exercises than they have in the everyday life and strains them in another way as they are strained in the everyday life, one arrives at that strange moment where one knows: now you experience spiritual-mentally. However, while you made use of your brain and your senses once, you recognise yourself beyond the body, as usually the outer objects were outside of you. Our time will force itself to acknowledge such a thing, as the profundities of Copernicus, Kepler, and Galilei asserted themselves. They faced the same out-of-date cognitive forces that the recognition of the spiritual worlds faces today. Whereas the opponents were people at that time who maintained old religious traditions, these are today the so-called “freethinkers” who oppose the recognition of the spiritual-scientific knowledge. Nevertheless, one has to do the step to this recognition, as at the time of Copernicus, Galilei and Giordano Bruno the step to the outer natural sciences was done.

I have never spoken to you in abstractions and speculations, but I have always tried to state the concrete spiritual facts to which the human being comes if he reaches the indicated levels of spiritual knowledge. One can experience that the human being lifts out himself from the physical-bodily and experiences himself in such a way that he obtains a consciousness that differs by the experience even from any illusion and hallucination. You experience yourself beyond your head, and if you submerge again, it is, as if you resume using your brain as an outer tool. This experience is stupefying if it appears first. But one can get it as it is described in the writing How Does One Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds?. Then one enters into a world of concrete spiritual experiences where one is within spiritual facts as one is with the senses and the reason in a world of concrete sensory beings and sensory facts.

One faces this world in three levels. I have called the first level that of the Imaginative world. This Imaginative world is no imagined world, but a world in which you experience the facts of the spiritual world as pictures that actually express the processes of the spiritual world. You have to work through this Imaginative world, so that you get to know all sources of error gradually which are very numerous and learn to distinguish what deceives you and what corresponds to a real spiritual existence of beings or processes.

Then you ascend to the second level of knowledge that I call that of Inspiration. Inspiration differs from Imagination that with the latter you have the outer surface of spiritual processes and beings in pictures only, while you have now to develop what distinguishes the spiritual perception radically from the outer perception: the fact that you dive into the spiritual percipience. Indeed, it is in such a way that you do not face the spiritual existence in the way as the sensory existence: the fact that it is there—and I am here; but, indeed, with the spiritual cognition something takes place like diving into that what one perceives. It sounds strange, however, it is literally true: your being extends spatially in all things that you perceive in the spiritual world. While you are, otherwise, at a point of space, enclosed in your skin, and all other things are outside, everything of the spiritual world becomes inner world what you are otherwise used to call outer world. You live in it as far as you are able to penetrate into it.

Then there is still a higher level of cognition about which I do not speak today; this is the Intuition, in the right sense understood, not that which is called in the usual sense. One works the way up through Imagination, Inspiration, and Intuition into the spiritual world.

The following question should now occupy us. If one leaves the body and the usual experiences of existence, which difference is there between the outer knowledge and the moral impulses, ideas and mental pictures? Are we able to point to a source of the moral life if we can maybe indicate this source in that world which one reaches if one leaves the usual sensory world and penetrates with the own spiritual knowledge into a spiritual world?

We consider the world at first that raises a spiritual imagery around us. I simply tell the facts as they arise for the spiritual observation. There one experiences, if one leaves the sense-perceptible world, a kind of darkness spreading about this world, and a new world of spiritual beings and facts appears in which one is also in sleep, otherwise; but as a spiritual researcher one dives consciously in this world. While one dives in it that way, one notices: what you see as colours, what you hear as tones in the sensory world, all that disappears; what you can take with you in the spiritual world is only a memory of it; something that one can imagine at most. If this disappears, one dives in such a way that the mental activity, the imagining activity, and the feeling activity is seized by other beings as it were into which one dives.

For the essentials are that you dive in the spiritual world, in a world of beings. As soon as you dive in the spiritual world, you find concrete facts and beings; and what you observe in the sensory world appears actually in such a way that you live in the extrasensory, invisible, spiritual world; but if we are enclosed in the body, this extrasensory world shows its reflection by the activity of our body. Indeed, it becomes a concrete fact that the complete outer world is a reflection of the spiritual world of which I have explained that it causes the cerebral processes first which produce the reflecting apparatus by which the outer processes are perceived, and which one cannot perceive. As the human being does not perceive himself if he looks into a mirror, but perceives the reflection, he sees the reflection of the spiritual world if he submerges in the physical world, while by the processes of the body the spiritual world is reflected on the reflecting apparatus. Then you notice that the physical world of perception relates to the spiritual world as the reflection relates to the viewer. Indeed, it is in such a way: as the reflection has a meaning only for the viewer if he looks into the mirror who takes up the picture in his soul, the reflection of the spiritual world, the whole physical world of perception has a meaning as a “picture”—apart from the physical process, which is behind it. You notice this if you enter into the spiritual world.

I do not want to establish a teleological view of nature here. I do not mean that the world is arranged by an infinite reason in such a way that the human being can find the possibility to develop his self. However, I simply want to point to the fact that now the human being can carry on what he takes in his self if he has seen it in the outside world, if he has received it in his soul. This whole world of knowledge is built up by a process of reflection, and what disappears as a process of reflection if you dive in the spiritual world about that you know that it belongs to you, and that is taken from it which is only a reflection in the physical world.

These are the essentials that you get to know when you say farewell from the sensory world and ascend to a spiritual world: only the reflection is added to that what you yourself are what would not be there without you, and to which you yourself belong which has come about only because you are a human organism. This reflection has a meaning for your self, for that what you carry as a spiritual-mental core through the times. Hence, you are, as soon as you are in the spiritual world, in a world that is there without you from which you learn to recognise that it must be reflected, so that we can perceive it. Nevertheless, the being itself is not contained in the reflections.

We look at that moment when we enter into the Imaginative world. What about the moral ideas if we ascend to the spiritual world?

The moral impulses present themselves in the Imaginative world in such a way that you must say to yourself, nevertheless, there you have produced something; there you have put something in the spiritual world. What you recognise you have not put in a world, you have put this only in yourself and you carry it on through the times. What corresponds to a moral impulse, a moral action, or even only to a moral volition is creative; so that you must say if you look at it in the spiritual world: with that which we experience with the idea of the ethical in ourselves, we create beings in the spiritual world. We are the originators of processes at first, then of beings of the spiritual world.

You know that spiritual science speaks of the repeated lives on earth. The life on earth that we experience now is built on consecutive former lives on earth, and always after a life on earth, a life in a spiritual existence follows; and from our present life on earth, we look again at the coming ones.

Our moral experience objectifies itself literally, at first as spiritual processes. How I think and act morally, I notice this in the spiritual world as processes. These processes come out from the self of the human being. While one carries on the cognitive experiences with the self into the following lives on earth, that which belongs to the moral or to the immoral life, is put as processes in the world and works on as those, so that we deal again with them because of the karma in the next life on earth. Someone who ascends to the spiritual worlds notices how the moral impulses have a certain relationship to his self.

We take, for example, one of the principal impulses that the significant psychologist Franz Brentano (1836-1917) called the only impulse of the moral world order, the impulse of love. Who would deny that countless things go forward in the moral life from the different levels of love—from the lowest level of love up to the highest levels, up to Spinoza's (Baruch S., 1632-1677) love, amor Dei intellectualis. Everything that happens under the impulse of love what we count among the field of moral—how do we find it in the Imaginative world? We find everything familiar that originates under this impulse, so that we may say, we can live with that what originates under the impulse of love in the spiritual world.

One feels at home with that which arises from the capability of love, in the spiritual world. These are the essentials, as soon as one enters into the Imaginative world.

However, let us take what arises from hatred what presents itself as an action or only as an intention which hatred dictates. There the very remarkable fact appears that everything that flows from the field of hatred appears in the Imaginative world in such a way, that it instils fear and repels. Yes, it belongs to the tragic sides of the experience of the spiritual researcher that he must see himself how he is put in the spiritual world with the forces of sympathy and antipathy. Anyway, as soon as you enter into the spiritual world, it can be that you feel sympathetic or antipathic about yourself. In the physical world, it does not happen that the human beings regard themselves as antipathic,—as sympathetic, may be. However, in the spiritual world one is subjected, like here to the physical laws, to the spiritual laws. Everything that you accomplish from the capability of love and sacrifice, from a moral impulse or that you feel as a moral attitude all that founds processes, which you behold Imaginatively, in such a way that you are allowed to be likeable to yourself because of your loving thinking, acting or feeling. Everything that is undertaken, for example, with hatred or similar impulses, with malice, vanity and the like, appears in the Imaginative world in such a way that one knows: you are the creator of these processes that are simply the objectification of your hateful or mischievous impulses. You perceive yourself within it in such a way that the processes compel you that you are antipathic about yourself. There we have no other choice but to be antipathic to ourselves.

It is necessary for a spiritual researcher to learn to endure such situations in certain cases in a thorough self-knowledge, and to learn to endure in patience how they appear in the further karma. I do not really want to say that a spiritual researcher should not have such antipathy, but that he should not have the intention to place himself as a saint or as a higher human being. He must strive rather to improve his moral life so that the tragic of this antipathic self-feeling takes place in a decreased measure. Since it means a condition of the most dreadful tension that one wants to escape from oneself; and this feeling appears only while ascending to the spiritual world. There one realises where from the impulses come by which we do the likeable and learn to avoid what we hate. Since what one does in the usual world from such impulses has an effect in the spiritual world as a force. Yes, one may say, when the human being falls asleep, the forces work on which I have just characterised. They have a strong effect on sleep and cause the health of sleep, at least partly. What arises like a result from the day life, and what does not allow the human beings to fall asleep this is at the same time what the spiritual researcher must behold.

We ask ourselves now, where from do those moral impulses come which speak in the human soul?

In the usual life, one does not know where from they speak. However, they are there and speak in such a way that someone who uses the reason only which combines the facts of the sensory world and establishes laws cannot find them. Where from does that come what speaks into the human being like from another world?

It is there just as knowledge only if one beholds it in the Imaginative world. However, it works as dark forces whose origin remains dark for cognition, which, however, speak as impulses into the soul. The effects of that what the spiritual researcher beholds are experienced in the sensory world as moral impulses; the causes are in the spiritual world. Hence, the human being appears as a being who must always say to himself, if your power of love is completely developed ever so much, you belong to a spiritual world and you find the other part of your being where you acquire that what expresses itself as moral life here, for example, in the conscience. Conscience is a very big riddle if one wants to be consistent.

We have now found where the forces are rooted which exist as conscience and the like. Let us assume that we face a person and the particular configuration of our image life causes us to hate him. What could induce us to hate him, what we would fear in the spiritual world as processes, this voice speaks in our soul, you shall not hate! What has an effect on the capability of love, by which we may be likeable to ourselves in the spiritual world, speaks into the life on earth, you shall love. Thus, it is with the other phenomena of moral life that crystallise spiritually as conscience.

How does this conscience appear as a fact in the spiritual world?

You do not yet find it as a fact in the Imaginative world. You must dive into the Inspirative world—must dive in such a way that you feel poured out about the whole field of perception in the spiritual and this inner perception as your field of perception that you experience in yourself. The origin of conscience speaks down from there. It expresses itself only as it were in that what one can experience in the Imaginative world, however, its centre is in the Inspirative world. If you rise into it and try once by way of trial to ask yourself, what happens if you refrain from all that what the voice of your conscience says to you? Let us assume once by way of trial that you could do something good as you do something out of hatred, and let us assume that your conscience does not speak,—you would notice that something happens that I want to make clear at first by a comparison.

You experience something like a drop of water in yourself that evaporates on a hot place immediately. Such a thing happens if by way of trial the conscience wants to extinguish itself in the Imaginative world. There you experience that you lose the centre of gravity as it were; you are no longer able to orientate yourself in the spiritual world. It belongs to the most dreadful experiences that you have then to be in the spiritual world and to feel the consciousness dwindling, after you have trained yourself first to carry consciousness into this world. It is a dreadful condition if unscrupulous human beings have experiences there, when they arrive at the spiritual world. Since let us assume that a person who is not very conscientious, otherwise, comes to the spiritual world. Everybody can carry out the exercises, which I have described in the writing How Does One Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds? if he carries out them with the necessary energy, so that he perceives then in the spiritual world. One should not have come to it, as long as it is not salutary. Hence, such exercises with which one does not lose the consciousness are also recommended in the mentioned book, which make a person moral, so that his consciousness is not extinguished in the spiritual world.

However, let us assume that an unscrupulous person reaches the spiritual world. Then his consciousness would dissolve immediately, would evaporate. There are such unconscionable spiritual researchers absolutely. They feel the urge immediately to hand over themselves to other spiritual beings because we enter there into a sphere of beings. The unscrupulous human beings who come so far where conscience gives us a firm centre of gravity feel their consciousness there evaporating as it were, give in to another being, make themselves obsessed by another being in order to find purchase on it. One can make this experience. Hence, such a person if he returns to the day consciousness does no longer announce what he has experienced in the spiritual world, but that what a being is speaking through him by which he has made himself obsessed. The integrity of our being is here maintained, while we really carry that voice as a force in us into the Inspirative world, which exists here as conscience. Then you feel in yourself, but in such a way that that what you produce what appears already in the Imaginative world exists that you do not lose the centre of gravity and that it is something that hold and carries you. What can hold and carry the human being in his true spiritual being in the spiritual world speaks through two worlds down, through the Imaginative world, down to the sensory world, and this is the voice of conscience.

Thus, conscience is something whose origin many thinkers cannot discover really about which they think that it developed only by the social order,—and that is carried down from the spiritual world that is effective in the sensorily experiencing human being and whose origin is found in the spiritual world. You can find the mysteries of the whole world only if you really develop those cognitive forces about which I have often spoken here. Then you must say in particular about the world of moral that it sends down its impulses from the spiritual realms, and that the human being if he becomes aware of the moral impulses experiences the effect of that which has its origin in the spiritual world. If you figure the normal world order out correctly, you realise that on one side that spiritual worlds speak through the soul, on the other side, however, also that one creates realities with the moral impulses that continue working, which one finds again. We send these realities to the spiritual world; they are causes in this world. They form the basis of the sensory world.

I could only suggest—while I have not mentioned a wide field of many intermediate stages—what the spiritual researcher has to experience if he ascends from the sensory world to the spiritual worlds. Nevertheless, I would like to add something else. What we see originating that way, while we act morally or immorally what expresses itself in its effects in our moral impulses what we perceive as formative or destructive forces in the Imaginative world appears as the first causes of the world existence generally. We turn our look to the universe where security, order and harmony prevail and we look back at primeval times in which beings were active in a similar way as we are today, where beings sent their moral impulses out which appear so unimportant and as nothing beside the whole world existence. However, these moral impulses grow more and more in time! The moral impulses that originated in primeval times from these beings grew more and more and became the natural forces. One learns to recognise—I have to skip intermediate stages—if one regards the astronomical laws that fulfilled Kepler with such devoutness: the fact that in the universe old and ripe, originally moral impulses are working. Those who became leaders in ancient times had to exceed certain levels—we know from previous talks that one cannot ascend in the same way, as one ascended once in the mysteries to the spiritual worlds, this has to happen in another way today.

One of these highest degrees enabled the soul to behold into the lofty realms of spiritual existence. One called this degree the degree of the sun hero or the sun man. Why sun hero? Because such a soul must have developed the inner life so far that it is not exposed to the inner arbitrariness when it rises in the realms of cognition to which the usual soul life is exposed, but to such impulses which work with internally recognised and experienced necessity. Then you can say to yourself, if you deviated from them, you would cause such a mess as the sun would cause in the universe if it deviated from its way even for a while only. Because one had to attain such firmness of the inner life on such a degree of cognition, one called such recognizers sun men in the ancient mysteries. That pointed to the connection of that what we send out into the world and what grows out of it,—as well as the “laws of the universe” have grown out of moral impulses from beings of distant, distant times.

If you consider this, you begin experiencing a sentence by Kant somewhat different. When he contemplated the moral duty, the moral consciousness generally he pronounced the meaningful words: “Two things fill the mind with ever-increasing wonder and awe, the more often and the more intensely the mind of thought is drawn to them: the starry heaven above me and the moral law within me” (Critique of Practical Reason). Such connections, which one experiences, which one surveys where one sees the moral law working in time, filled him when he spoke of the “starry heaven above me and the moral law within me.” Someone who recognises the ancient impulses of moral life spiritual-scientifically recognises at the same time how this moral life is connected with the true source of the human being. Hence, spiritual science can give a firm base of this moral life. So one can almost say: yes, any knowledge is there to find ourselves in our inside and to carry what we find in such a way through the world and the times; however, everything that we experience as moral impulses in ourselves makes us creators, co-creators of the world. We can understand how we must despise ourselves as immoral human beings who bring downfall and destruction into the world if we recognise that we are connected by the moral world order more really with the world than by the other knowledge that we take up in our reason. Then you feel what such deep spirits felt like Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762-1814) whose 100th day of death we recently celebrated. He says, what is the sensory world? It has no independent, inherent reasonable existence; it is only the sensualised material for duty, for the moral world order. What spiritual science has to bring to light such a deep spirit as Fichte anticipated it concerning the moral worldview who looked at the world in such a way that he said, the moral world order is the most real, and the other is there only that we have a material in which we can express the moral impulses.

Of course, spiritual science cannot position itself on the ground of Fichte's worldview, because it is one-sided. It comes from a time in which spiritual science did not yet exist. Nevertheless, one can see with admiration how Fichte experienced the moral world order in himself. Since spiritual science just shows that all the other knowledge presents itself as a world tableau; however, moral is that what we must be if we want to develop our whole being. This does not only fasten us in ourselves, but positions us with real balance in the whole world order. If one realises in such a way that just spiritual science can find the living support of the moral world order, then one clearly understands what I have already often pronounced in these talks. However, one is with the modern spiritual science in such situation even today, as for example once Giordano Bruno was before his contemporaries when he wanted to extend the worldview to the blue vault of heaven in infinite widths of space. He had to show to the human beings of his time: what you perceive as the blue vault of heaven is only the borders of your narrow view. Such a spiritual phantasmagoria is that what the human being has put in his existence by birth or conception and death. However, as the blue vault of heaven is only the narrow border of our own view in space, birth and death are only the borders for the human view in time. As well as that which the human being set to himself as the borders of space was recognised as Maya, the borders beyond birth and death open up for the human soul, and the infinite worlds are acknowledged which are beyond birth and death.

Today we stand there with the spiritual-scientific information in our time in such a way as the modern natural sciences stood with their views in the aurora of our time. However, one still stands alone in a way. One stands there in such a way that one has the insurmountable confidence of truth that searches its way through the narrowest scratches and rock crevices, even if the opponent powers want to fight against it. One feels isolated, nevertheless, with spiritual science. One feels the modern time interfering into spiritual science how the souls must demand it,—and one feels in harmony with that what the most significant spirits of all times anticipated and thought what they have often pronounced more simply than one must pronounce it today what they properly pronounced nevertheless from their souls, feeling the truth. Thus, one feels in harmony with many spirits, while one has to point from spiritual science to the true sources of the moral life and moral world order coming from the divine-spiritual worlds. One feels also in harmony with a sentence by Goethe I would like to quote which summarises what I have said in the course of this talk. Goethe said a significant word for that who can feel the moral life really: wholly quietly, a God speaks in our breast, wholly quietly, but also clearly; he makes us recognise what we have to grasp and what we have to avoid (fromTorquato Tasso). While Goethe says: wholly quietly, but also clearly a God speaks, he points as it were anticipating to that what spiritual science can find as the impulses of the moral life in the spiritual world.

We look up at the spiritual world, and we say to ourselves, just the moral life testifies that the human being has his origin in the spiritual worlds; since from there the God announces quietly but also quite clearly what we have to grasp and what we have to avoid. Indeed, he covers what the spiritual researcher beholds as the reasons of both, but what the human being expresses in moral impulses. That has its true primal grounds in the spiritual world, what dives from it into our soul, what speaks in the human soul as a real God, as God's voice from the spiritual world, announcing the nature of the human being by which he reaches beyond that what his fellow creatures are in the universe.

Shortly after the death of Voltaire (pen name of François-Marie Arouet, 1694-1778) Lessing's (Gotthold Ephraim L., 1729-1781) writing The Education of the Human Race appeared (1780), and one would like to say that in this writing you can find the starting point of a historical consideration in the spiritual-scientific sense. I have mentioned this writing by Lessing repeatedly in these talks. It tries to find the causes for the view of the repeated lives from the consciousness of the eighteenth century.

Someone who tries to think Lessing's discussions through to the end in this testament of his intellectual work realises that by the ideas of this writing coherence comes into the whole structure of the human historical becoming. We see successive epochs in this historical becoming of the human being, which differ from each other. If we look back at ancient epochs, we realise that the human soul experiences other things, that it searched its ideals in other things than in later epochs. We can say as it were that the different epochs of the historical becoming differ sharply from each other by the character of that what they can give to the human souls. Sense and coherence come in this historical becoming if one considers that this human soul—which could participate in cultural blessings and impressions of one epoch after the belief that the human being lives only once—that this human soul appears for Lessing and the modern spiritual science in repeated lives on earth. Thus, it gets out from any epoch what it can give. Then it experiences a life between death and the next birth in a wholly spiritual world. It appears in the next epoch again, of course with some divergences in the individual lives, to carry over the fruits, the results, and the impressions of the former epoch to the next one. Therefore, we can say that the human soul participates in all epochs through the historical development. Thereby one can really speak taking up the idea of Lessing once again of a kind of education of the human soul by the spirits of the successive epochs. If one goes once spiritual-scientifically even more exactly into that what exists as elementary beginnings already in Lessing's ideas about the education of the human race, then one is in the field of the interpretation of history, where above all our souls develop only so far as one believes to be today in the wholly scientific field. Then only one will have history.

Only then, one brings sense and coherence in the historical becoming; one will recognise how an epoch builds itself up one after the other, what the souls gain from the different epochs, why they are positioned in the different epochs. Then that what spiritual science has to say no longer appears as something fantastic to many people. Then one smiles less about the fact that spiritual science assumes not only a physical-bodily cover of the human being, but that it must recognise an inner spiritual-mental being of the human being which one has to consider, however, in such a way that it develops its different formations and arrangements in the course of the epochs.

Spiritual-scientifically, we distinguish three parts in the human soul, as it has developed up to the present epoch. One may say that the most primitive part of this arrangement is that in which the blind passions work and the desires and emotions pulsate, on which, however, also that works what provides the perception of the physical outside world for us. We call this part the sentient soul. Then as distinct from the sentient soul we speak of another soul part that shows us the human being already with bigger inwardness, shows him in such a way as he can grasp himself if he turns away the look from the physical surroundings and rises above his more unaware desires, emotions, and passions. We call this higher member of the human soul the intellectual or mind soul in which the spiritual life of the human being turns already more inward. We call the highest member of the human soul the consciousness soul, that member in which, above all, the full self-awareness of the human being, the purest ego-consciousness appears.

If we speak about the three soul members—sentient soul, intellectual or mind soul and consciousness soul, we do not talk about abstractions or about arbitrarily constructed concepts and ideas; but we see at the same time how in the course of the historical development these three soul members gradually developing.

If we went far back in the historical becoming, behind the times in which Homer and Hesiod sung in which the Greek tragic poets lived and the Greek philosophy originated, we would find what we recognise in the echoes of the ancient Egyptian and Chaldean cultures even today. The outer research has already brought many things of them to light. Spiritual science, however, shows that in the epoch that dates back behind the eighth to tenth centuries before our calendar until the second and third millennia the human souls, that means our souls experienced something that one cannot compare at all with the modern life. At that time, our modern thinking that appears as something natural to us in the scientific worldview would have still been impossible. It would have also been impossible that the human soul felt isolated and strictly separated from nature at the most important moments of its life. All that was still impossible at that time. The human being felt his soul like living in the whole universe, in the whole nature, felt like a piece of nature, as the hand had to feel as a part of the organism if it could have consciousness. Only with the help of spiritual science, we can imagine the quite different soul life just today that reached possibly until the eighth to tenth centuries before our calendar.

If at that time the human being said, my desires drive me to put forward a foot, or if he said, I breathe—or if he felt hunger or saturation, he felt something in this transition of the inner experience into the movement of the body that he faced in such a way as he faced other experiences if he said to himself, it flashes, it is thundering, or, the wind blusters through the trees. The human being did not distinguish what he experienced emotionally from that what took action outdoors; he was with the whole inner life in nature. For it, however, that he felt himself still as a member in the big total organism, he had an original clairvoyance, he could behold in the spiritual world. He saw nature not in such a way as he sees her today, but ensouled by spiritual beings to which we work our way up again with the methods of spiritual science today. It was natural in those times that one experienced nature ensouled and spiritualised. However, one could not think such thoughts as we think the physical processes but one saw them like in pictures and the pictures were that what the physical principles are for us, and something of these pictures is preserved in the legends and mythologies of the nations, even in the real fairy tales until today. The human being had a pictorial imagination in ancient times.

We can gain these things today not only with the help of spiritual science, but I hope that I have succeeded in the new edition of my World Views and Approaches to Life in the Nineteenth Century (final title:The Riddles of Philosophy, CW 20) in pointing to the fact that one can consider the spiritual life completely philosophically. Then one can realise that a pictorial imagination existed in primeval times which went over to the Greek-Latin imagination only gradually, and that the human soul felt projected in the total organism of the world by the old pictorial imagination that was felt ensouled. This took place mainly in the sentient soul.

The Greek-Roman imagination lasting until the fourteenth, fifteenth centuries preferably demanded the intellectual or mind soul. I have already tried to show the quite different feeling and imagination of those times with the talks on Raphael and Michelangelo. I have explained how the Greek—later also the members of the Latin culture—felt completely one with his “soul body” because in the Greek world mainly the intellectual or mind soul was developed. He felt with his soul living within any single member of his body at the same time. While the preceding times of the sentient soul had a consciousness of the fact that the human being is a member of the whole nature, the Greek had a consciousness that that what lived in his whole body and what this body can give him is for him the immediate, true sight of nature at the same time.

This became different in modern times; also even today, one does not realise these matters with full thoroughness because one does not yet want to penetrate into spiritual science. It changed in particular since the aurora of modern thinking, since Copernicus, Kepler, Galilei, and Giordano Bruno. For at that time the consciousness soul started developing. It started developing in such a way that the human being became a riddle to himself, while he started now feeling separated with his independent soul from the whole nature, while he felt his soul as something particular beside the body at the same time. As strange as it sounds, nevertheless, it is right that the human soul felt more separated from nature when the more materialistic tendencies appeared in natural sciences. What a time arose in the western culture since the fifteenth century? At this time, a net of lawfulness spreads out as it were which extends to unlimited spatial widths.

It is great to see Giordano Bruno standing there in the aurora of modern times and imagining the power of physical laws extending into infinite widths. However, in these spatial widths one cannot find what the human being experiences in his soul. If the ancient Egyptian or Chaldean looked up at the stars, he felt that from the constellation of the stars a force arose which was connected with his own moral experience in this or that way. If the old astrologer looked up at the stars and felt the human destiny in them, this view of nature still allowed him to imagine the soul in the work of nature. Now, however, a time arose which made it to the human being more and more impossible to imagine the soul within nature. Since just with the appearance of modern natural sciences the human being had to struggle with the question: how have I to position myself to the work of nature from which no longer anything soul-like shines to me? The human soul had to get around to asking itself for the position of natural sciences to the own soul. With Giordano Bruno, we see this fight. He imagines the own soul as a monad. Although he imagines the world in the sense of modern natural sciences, he still imagines it as ensouled by monads.

Leibniz (Gottfried Wilhelm L., 1646-1710) also imagines the soul as a monad, and he imagines it in such a way that it can suitably relate to the world. Leibniz asks, how must the human soul be to be able to exist in my view of nature? He cannot answer it without formulating this view of nature in a particular way at the same time.

Leibniz considers everything as a combination of monads. If we look into anything of nature, we find the underlying ensouled monads. What we see is for Leibniz in such a way, as if we look at a swarm of mosquitoes which appears like a cloudscape; if we come closer, this cloudscape disintegrates in the single mosquitoes, and the swarm of mosquitoes appears to us first only in such a way because we do not look exactly at it. I have to imagine the view of nature, Leibniz said, in such a way that the human soul can exist in it. He was able to do this only if he imagined it as a monad among monads. Hence, he differentiates monads vaguely living from day to day, then sleeping, then dreaming monads, then those as it is the human soul. However, everything else that originates because everything that we see originating appears to us only in such a way as a swarm of mosquitoes appears to us as a cloud. We could enumerate the most brilliant spirits until our days. We would find that the fight for the knowledge of the human soul presents itself compared with the modern view of nature in such a way that the human soul feels, I must be able to get an idea of that what can arise as a view of nature, and what does no longer offer any ensoulment of nature. Compared with this fight is that what appears as a more or less materialistically coloured monism only an episode that will pass by. Nevertheless, the human soul that is separated from its view of nature will strive more and more to gain contents in itself, that means to arrive at that what it extracted from nature in old epochs.

Hence, we can say: since the age of modern natural sciences everything aims at deepening the human soul in itself, and everything points to the modern spiritual science, which I represent here, that the human soul can get around—experiencing itself in a spiritual world—knowing to be carried by spiritual-divine powers whose outer expression the outer nature is. As true as the human being when he still lived in his sentient soul recognised himself as a piece of the whole nature, as true as the Greek-Latin age, which experienced itself still in the intellectual or mind soul, did not yet feel separated from the bodily, the modern human being experiences himself in the consciousness soul. However, his soul knows itself separated from nature, since it must get an idea of it that no longer contains anything mental. The human soul had to strengthen itself to conjure up the wealth of spiritual experiences from itself, which can return to that assurance which it had when it still felt as a member of the ensouled universe.

Thus, the modern human soul experiences itself in the development of the consciousness soul since the fourteenth century. From the eighth, tenth pre-Christian centuries until the time of the fourteenth, fifteenth post-Christian centuries the development of the intellectual or mind soul lasted. We have to recognise that the spiritual life that the human soul conjures up from itself will be able to become wealthier and wealthier, so that it can live again in a spiritual realm. What we experience as the inner recognition of the consciousness soul began from the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries on. We live for about four centuries in this period.

Voltaire lived in the middle of this period, in the middle between the emerging consciousness soul and us. You understand this spirit if you put him historically in this age of the self-experiencing consciousness soul. Since Voltaire with all his shining spiritual qualities, with his superior intellectual activity, with all the good qualities he had is a symptomatic expression of the pursuit of the consciousness soul, just as he is with all his bad, questionable qualities.

Two matters must face him in this age. One is that a glorious view of nature developed during the last century that got its shine only in the modern natural sciences, in which however no place was for the human soul grasping itself. Besides, the most brilliant spirits attempted to solve that riddle: how does the human soul attain an idea by which it can assert itself compared to this modern view of nature? The view of nature becomes more and more glorious; the striving in the human soul to assert itself to get inner assurance appears more and more in such a way that we see it like surging up and down. Since we see the human soul, as if it wants to attempt repeatedly to find itself compared with the view of nature, but shies away from it repeatedly because it is helpless to find that in itself what the consciousness soul has to conjure up in this time. Thus, we are still fighting and that is the most important reason why spiritual science has to position itself in the fight for the inner universe about which I have spoken in these talks and which the human beings have to search.

Thus, we see spirits like Descartes, Hume, Berkeley, and Locke attempting as it were to answer this riddle: what do I have to do with my soul compared with the view of the outside nature? One could link to each of these spirits who face us there. We want to link, for example, to Locke (John L., 1632-1704).

Locke—who is a symptomatic expression of that what one searched in the English cultural life at the beginning of Voltaire's age to understand the soul—appears to us in the following way. Locke feels, so to speak, completely defeated by the power of the view of nature, so that he must say, we can find nothing in our soul except that, what the soul has taken up only from the outer nature by the senses. The view of nature works so immensely, so impressively that Locke wants to limit all human soul life, in so far it develops knowledge, to that, what the senses induce in it and what the reason can combine as a world view. He faces the world in such a way that he says to himself, we find nothing in the human soul that does not isolate it that does not show it as a “tabula rasa,” as a blank slate, before from the outer nature the sensory impressions come which work on the soul. We realise that the power of the view of nature is so big and immense that Locke loses the confidence to find something in the human soul generally. One must consider the moral-spiritual aspect of Locke's standpoint above all. Indeed, old traditions, the religions connected the human being with the spiritual world. Nevertheless, up to the times of modern natural sciences one believed to be connected with the spiritual of the world, also with the help of spiritual links. There was a view of nature now that worked so overpowering that the human soul did not dare to think anything about itself. Now the soul stood there—and the view with which it stood there originated from spirits like Locke above all.

The human beings said to themselves, we can know nothing that is not delivered to us by the senses and by the reason limited to the senses. Now it mattered to develop so much mental force from the old traditions and emotions that one could recognise—beside that what one can recognise only as a picture of the outer nature—any spiritual-divine world from which one had to admit that one cannot attain it by knowledge, even if one believes in it. The view of nature assumed a form at first that cast off any cognitive connection of the human soul with the divine-spiritual primordial ground.

Thus, that worldview and that attitude towards life originated in which Voltaire was put in his youth at first. He stood at first before the spirit of his time so that it made a tremendous impression on him when he fled soon to England because he had been pursued in France and became familiar there just with that philosophy of Enlightenment. This philosophy limited any human cognition generally to the consideration of the view of nature and still cherished a divine-spiritual world only because of the temperament of the soul. Thus, Voltaire's core was occupied, so to speak, by this world experience, by this soul feeling, and in his so worried and, however, so clever soul the immediate conviction emerged that one stands on sure ground only on the ground of the overpowering physical laws. However, the religious temperament was strong in him. The soul did not give up its faith in a connection with a spiritual-divine world.

We see an infinitely extensive admiration of that originating what the modern natural sciences and the view of nature have brought on one side, and an admiration of the philosophical discussions that Locke, for example, raised. On the other side, we see the need originating in him to exert everything that the human spirit can exert as reasons for such a view of nature. Nevertheless, he adhered to the old idea of the immortality of the human soul, to a connection of the human being with the whole world existence, to the idea of freedom of the human soul in certain limits. Now a peculiar trait of Voltaire faces us that shows us how in him completely a symptomatic expression of that exists what lived in the whole time.

What we face there becomes maybe most vivid if I mention another work that appeared almost at the same time as Lessing's Education of the Human Race, namely theCritique of Pure Reason by Kant. Kant lived since his youth in quite similar conditions concerning the view of nature, as Voltaire did. Kant was devoted to the spirit of Enlightenment in the sense of the word. The dictum is due to him: Enlightenment means that the human soul has the courage to use its reason. It is contained in the nice essay What is Enlightenment? (1784). As to Voltaire Kant is like the fullest consequence of the impulses of Enlightenment. Kant faces like Locke and later Hume the power of the view of nature that showed how the world and the human soul come about. Since one cannot reject what has come up as a view of nature. This worked impressively! This view of nature worked so impressively on Locke that he rejected everything for knowledge that could not come from the sensory impressions and the reason. Kant goes forward “in principle.” He is the thorough, principal man who must lead back everything to the principles, and, hence, he writes his Critique of Pure Reason.

He shows in it how the human being can generally have knowledge only from the outer nature and how the human soul can get a practical but not deniable confidence that can arise from another side than that to which the outer knowledge is due. In the second edition of hisCritique of Pure ReasonKant betrayed his position in the preface: “I had to cancel the knowledge to make room for the faith.” Kant demands an area for the faith where the conscience projects where the categorical imperative speaks which does not give knowledge, however, an impulse to which the human being has to adhere, and leads to the idea of God and the idea of freedom. That is why Kant had to tackle with the matter in principle, while he put the question: if the human soul can attain no knowledge about itself already under the impulse of the modern view of nature, how can we receive a reasonable faith? He asserted a reasonable faith for the human being by the fact that he cast off the knowledge generally from the area where something is to be said about the human soul, while he limited the knowledge to the outer world.

Voltaire did not yet have what Kant had to reduce to a principle without which he could not live which then the whole future lives on. He had the logical side only which said that any cognition limits itself to the physical knowledge. He had to take out from the power of his personality what Kant took out in a principle, from something quite impersonal. Thus, we see Voltaire conjuring up from his temperament, from his ramble mind in his whole life that is identical with a side of the cultural life of the eighteenth century what Kant tried to derive from a principle, the categorical imperative. We see him repeatedly endeavouring in his long life to exert his wit and cleverness to say to himself, we can know nothing compared with the view of nature. But now human soul, step into the breach and try with wit and cleverness to bring all reasons whichever they may be whether good or bad to maintain what must be maintained compared with the view of nature!

Thus, in Voltaire's temperament and ramble mind that lived what had shrunk with Kant to an impersonal principle. Someone who wants to assess human souls must try to search into the structure of a soul with all its fights that as it were must maintain for a long life what can disappear from it by the power and importance of the view of nature perpetually. If we consider Voltaire in such a way and turn the glance at that which he created in detail, then he becomes understandable. Since as he stood there with his soul, he had a world against himself strictly speaking. Voltaire searched a spiritual worldview in which God, freedom, and immortality have space that can be up to the view of nature. Since Voltaire became a more and more ardent and biased confessor of the modern scientific view, and this striving lived and developed in him—because it was the basis of his nature with all the forms which assumed a surely unpleasant character sometimes in the course of his life.

Just at the time in which we recognise Voltaire as the most spirited expression of the struggle of the human soul to find itself as consciousness soul it was almost impossible to realise how this struggle of the human soul relates to an older struggle of the human soul in former epochs. Voltaire could not get to a pure, noble image of the Greek culture, for example. The scientific way of thinking appeared to him much more important and greater than that which the Greeks had intended with their view of nature that contained the picture of the mental-spiritual life at the same time. Therefore, Voltaire had to misjudge an epoch as it were in which in any form of culture the affinity of the human soul with the remaining world expressed itself. One can still recognise this in the figures of Homer and the great Greek tragic poets, Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. As to Voltaire, one could not at all compare these Greek tragic poets to that which humanity reached in his time. To him the Greeks with their worldviews were human beings who had produced figments about nature; whereas the age of the great scientific researchers appeared as that which furthered the human beings in shorter time than all former epochs had done. Yes, in the age in which the human soul had to strive to maintain itself compared with the view of nature it had to become unfair compared with former ages in which the human soul could still extract its forces from the surrounding nature, so to speak, without its assistance.

Thus, we see the relation of Voltaire to former times gets a tragic character as it were; and we see him positioned in his surroundings in entire opposition to the world which he had grown out, actually.

If one surveys the French cultural life at the time of Voltaire, one can say that this world still cared less about the big riddles which the scientific way of thinking and the arising consciousness soul had to solve. This world still lived in those traditions that were given as it were to the world, so that it could develop in complete silence to the age of Enlightenment, to the age of the conception of itself. Voltaire saw himself surrounded with a world—and his French world was still filled with the most rigid intolerant Catholic principle—which wanted to extract anything mental-spiritual from the traditions, and which refused what was just dear to him: to be on his own towards the view of nature.

A tremendous aversion emerged in Voltaire against the cultural world surrounding him, an aversion that caused a life full of vicissitudes. He was twice in the Bastille, in 1717 and 1726; then he had to flee to England in 1726 where he stayed up to 1729. Next he returned to France and lived since 1734 a longer time secluded at the castle of the marchioness du Chatelet in Cirey in Lorraine. At that time, he became engrossed especially in scientific studies that should show him how the worldview can be grasped in the sense of modern natural sciences. From that, he got an insight of the necessary spiritual basic conditions of modern times. One may argue ever so much against him that he flattered, that he lied, that he deceived his friends, that he tried often to achieve something with the lowest means, all that was not nice. However, a holy enthusiasm was in him that expressed itself through the often cynical-frivolous form in such a way: the impulses of the human soul demand that the soul finds a worldview from itself, renews itself in a worldview that it can put before itself. At first, he could only have the view of nature. Hence, ardent hatred arose in him against Catholicism. He wanted above all to penetrate with his worldview into that which opposed him. He used any means at his disposal.

While he faced Catholicism that way, he found himself cut-off from everything that could connect him with it. For he hated the facilities and customs of Catholicism, its rites. He recognised no connection with that what resulted from his worldview that he wanted to support on natural sciences. The other matter was that he adhered to God, freedom, and immortality only because of his temperament, of his ramble and clever soul, however, only with abstract thoughts and ideas.

If the Greek looked up to those regions, where from the human being got his impulses, he saw something divine-spiritual prevailing there. Let us look at the works of the Greek tragic poets. We see in them the human world shown, adjacent to a divine-spiritual world, we see the divine world working on the world and the destinies of the human beings influenced by the destinies of the spiritual beings. We see above all in the images of the old times a lively consciousness of these spiritual beings existing in poetry. Exactly the same way as human beings could come to life in the tragedy, in the epic, these contents of consciousness could come to life in poetry. They came to life in the poems of Homer! We see in the age, when the human soul struggled out of the other co-creatures that the connection with such beings got lost to it! We can pursue how the supersensible figures still living in the Greek poetry become more and more abstract, already from Vergil until the modern times—with the exception of Dante who wrote his Divine Comedy on basis of a clairvoyant inspiration, and with whom these figures are alive again, indeed, in the form as he could see them.

Nevertheless, everywhere we see these figures growing paler and paler, and the human beings are left more and more to their own resources. We recognise that the poets must refrain more and more from a supersensible world that they do no longer face. Voltaire was too great to be able to refrain from the spiritual beings with his survey of life. His temperament was too big, too comprehensive. This was in his predisposition. Hence, the strange, the miracle which faces us as it were already in his youth epic, in theHenriade (1723) where he describes the destinies of King Henry IV of France. There we recognise that he cannot confine himself to what takes place in the outer world. However, we recognise on the other side that he feels restricted in his action everywhere, so that he is connected with the words from which he gets ideas of freedom, immortality and God only with abstractions. His soul had developed too far to show life in his Henriadein all the fights which were fought out at that time between the various religious and political parties like somebody who looks only as a human being with scientific view at it, and who grasps the other human life only as abstract ideas of God, freedom and immortality. His soul is too great for that. Hence, we see the longing projecting in Voltaire to connect the human soul with a supersensible world. However, we also realise that he cannot behold a humanly possible supersensible world from Catholicism that he hates. Since hagiography was only a collection of legends, and Christ was more or less a devout, good natured enthusiast to him.

However, Voltaire could not accept that the human life runs during its most important events only in such a way, as it happened around Henry IV of France as it looks if one investigates it with the outer senses and deduces with the reason. Thus, strange figures appear in the Henriade like the Discord(e). Why this figure of Discord with the representative of Enlightenment, with Voltaire? She looks at the events of France that do not happen in such a way, as she wants it. She wants more and more disagreement among the human beings, so that she can achieve her goal. With annoyance, she looks down at what happens against Rome, and, therefore, she takes to the road to Rome to come to an understanding with Rome.

Now one could say that all that is allegory. However, just from poetic impulses one has to say what I have just said: this Discord accepts completely realistic forms, so that one cannot consider her as mere allegory. Voltaire describes, for example, that she comes to the pope, that she is alone with him, and that she gets him around. There she behaves like a flirtatious person of the age of Voltaire; she carries out all possible arts of seduction. Just from the poetic impulses, I would like to say, I do not give an allegory credit for that it is able to sway the pope for the political party in France. With that what the pope can give her she returns to France, works as an agitator, appears in the figure of Saint Francis, as Augustine to the monks, goes from city to city, from village to village, and when she wants that Henry III does not win, she manages to seduce the Dominican monk Jacques Clement. Voltaire put everything into this portrayal what he had on his mind against Catholicism in the sense of his freethinking.

It is interesting to recognise how far Voltaire goes in the representation of this Dominican monk who should be seduced by Discord, so that he causes the doom of Henry III and Henry IV. A prayer is stated in the Henriade, which Clement, the monk, sends to heaven. I would like to read out this prayer, so that you get the feeling for that what lived in his soul against Catholicism from which he expected that one of his devout followers sends the following prayer to heaven:

O God! Whose vengeful justice should descend

To crush the tyrant, and thy faith defend

Is murder now, and heresy thy care

Thy wrath unjust, must we, thy children, bear?

Too long the partial trial we endure,

Too long a Godless monarch reigns secure.

Raise thy dread arm, o God! Thy people save,

Descend upon the king, thy anger gave;

Spirits of ruin his approach proclaim,

Ye Heav'ns announce his wrath in show'rs of flame!

Their trembling host, avenging lightnings blast,

Their chiefs, their soldiers perish to the last!

Let their two kings expire before my eyes,

Drive them like wither'd leaves, when storms arise;

Sav'd by thy arm, thy League its voice shall raise

And o'er their breathless bodies chant thy praise!

Stopp'd by these accents in her mid career,

Discord, in air suspended hung to hear;

The dropt to Hell, and from its dungeon drew

The fiercest fiend those fiery regions knew;

Fanaticism!—Nature abhors the name,

Unown'd the monster from Religion came;

Nurs'd in her bosom, arm'd for her defence,

His aim destruction, zeal his fair pretence.

The Dominican monk prays this to cause the death of Henry III and Henry IV, he prays to heaven, so that God sends death. Discord is attracted by this prayer of the monk, enters his cell, and calls “Fanaticism” as confederate from hell. Voltaire presents a figure again to us quite really! How does he speak of Fanaticism from which/whom he assumes that he finds his best support in the principles of the national disposition in modern times? He speaks about him:

'Twas he on Raba's plains, near Arnon's flood,

Taught Ammon's wretched race the rites of blood;

To Moloc's shrine, the frantic mother led,

To slay her infant which her womb had bred!

He form'd the vow which Jepthe's lips exprest,

And plung'd his #8224 in his daughter's breast!

'Twas he, at Aulis, Calchas voice inspir'd,

When Iphigenia's blood the priest requir'd;

Thy forests, France, were long his dark abode,

Where streams of blood to fierce Teutates flow'd;

Still does affrighted memory retain

The sacred murders of the Druid fane;

Rome, falling, own'd the God' mysterious birth,

From Pagan temples to the church retir'd,

The fiend, with rage, Christ's meck disciples fir'd;

Teaching the patient martyrs of his word,

To brandish persecution's bloody sword.

'Twas he, that furious sect in London bred,

By whom too good, too weak, a monarch bled!

Madrid and Lisbon yet his rites disgrace;

He lights those piles where Israel's hapless race,

By Christian priests, in yearly triumph thrown,

Their fathers' heav'n-taught faith, in flames atone!

Robed in Religion's vestments to our eyes,

Still from the church, he borrow'd his disguise ...

(Translation published by Burton and Co., London, 1797)

Discord fetches this guy from the gorges of Hell. From this guy Clement gets the #8224 with which he wounds Henry III, so that he dies.

We see spiritual powers working in Voltaire's poem that way. We realise that God sent down Louis the Saint, the ancestor of the kings, to encourage Henry IV, to instil wisdom into him as it were. Voltaire does not shrink back from putting words in the king's mouth what should happen in the history of France. We realise also that he links the time of Henry IV in an even worse sense to the fact that—after Henry had first advanced triumphantly and got tired then—he leads back this to the fact that Discord led him to the “temple of love” where he tired in unhappy love, until he is called again to a new fight. One reads this portrayal of the temple of love as he presents it as a kind of magic service that the adversaries of Henry IV are addicted to, as a kind of devil service with altars and rituals, which play a role with certain parties. One can say that Voltaire tends not by his reason, not by his intellect, not by that what he becomes from his fight for the consciousness soul but by his ramble temperament, by the sum of his emotions, to connect the whole human life with a spiritual world. However, in that struggle of the human soul, which takes place in the forecourt of the spiritual life, before one could think of spiritual science, is the tragedy of Voltaire that he must search the connection of the outer life with a spiritual world where he wants to show true experiences of the human life. Nevertheless, he can do it only insufficiently. Hence, the Henriade appears as an “unreadable” poem today because everything that Voltaire could exert along these lines is based on traditions which he hates because he feels unable to portray the secret forces anyhow which are working in the human evolution.

The agility of Voltaire's soul was necessary to keep up itself towards the fact that it can get inner contents less and less from the outer view of nature. Already in the Henriade, with those figures which are mythological figures and do not appear at all as mere allegories one notes Voltaire's soul fighting and looking for something that it can tie the human life to, and still finding nothing. One must consider this side of Voltaire and will properly appreciate what he did to understand the human development. Therefore, his marvellous characteristic of Charles XII and Louis XIV is so exemplary, in spite of all defects because for him the biggest riddle was how one experiences historical becoming. Which forces work in it, which work in the environment of the human becoming?

Because of the power that the view of nature exerted on him, he must express himself with all power and cynicism, besides, so to speak, kicking over the traces everywhere, for example, if he incriminates the Maid of Orleans of everything that he regards as superstition. But just Voltaire's soul is such by which one can recognise how souls feel which face the pulse of time in such a way that they do not hear it beating, but feel in the pulse of their own blood that an age comes to an end and a new age is not yet there.—One feels the tragic of this soul that asks, how do I find purchase compared with the new picture of nature? Today we would ask, how does the consciousness soul struggle out in the human being? We find the answer if we look at Voltaire who looks at everything that France could produce as outer culture and to whom the old traditional powers became abstract which are delivered from prehistory. He describes the heaven, the hell—the heaven even splendidly in a certain respect -, in which Henry IV is taken up by Louis the Saint. He describes how the spiritual forces divide the natural forces, how worlds work into each other,—and how all that gnaws, nevertheless, at the deepest subconscious soul grounds which search the hold where the soul can be anchored with its deepest divine being. However, Voltaire cannot find this anchor.

When the decade approached in which Voltaire died, a seed was put in a soul to search the primary source of knowledge in the human being that immerses itself not only in nature but that can also become engrossed in the spiritual universe. When Voltaire had died, Goethe bore the idea of his Faustin himself. Goethe gets out a figure, actually, of that what Voltaire would have called the most superstitious image, a figure which shows us how to search the deepest longing, the deepest wanting and the highest cognition of the human soul. Under the influence of this look into the deepest depths of the human soul, Goethe put a figure that is rather similar to Voltaire: Mephistopheles, save that Faust who searches the birth of the consciousness soul in another way says to Mephistopheles: “In your Nothingness I hope to find my All!” (verse 6256). Strictly speaking, these words sound to Voltaire from Goethe who searched the striving of modern times for the consciousness soul and its anchorage in the spiritual worlds in another way than Voltaire did. Voltaire is like the star of a declining world to which any striving is directed to achieve the consciousness soul and into which the scientific worldview shines which very strongly forces to the consciousness soul. Voltaire is still the greatest star of this declining world, although he cannot find what extends the human soul again to a spiritual world. Nothing is more typical for Voltaire than a quotation that he did about Corneille (Pierre C., 1606-1684, French dramatist) in his history of Louis XIV. There he says that Corneille edited a French translation of the booklet The Imitation of Christ by Thomas à Kempis (~1380-1471), and he would have heard that the French translation would have had 32 editions. He cannot believe this and says: “for it seems to me so unbelievable that a healthy soul can read this book to an end only once.” There we see expressed how Voltaire could not find the possibility to open a source to the spiritual world in his inside.

Today we say that spiritual science is a real continuation of that to which the scientific worldview forces the human being, but also that this spiritual science is a real continuation of the Goethean worldview. We speak of the fact that in the human being a second human being lives who can experience himself emotionally, we speak with the words of Goethe: “Two souls live, alas, in my breast.” Nevertheless, we speak of it in such a way that the spiritual-mental of the human being searches its spiritual-mental native country and can find it. We talk again in spiritual science of a spiritual world to which the human being belongs with his spiritual being as he belongs with his bodily physical to the physical world. However, the view of nature overpowers Voltaire so that he has no feeling for the “second human being” in the human being. While soon after him Goethe lets his Faust strive with all power for that second human being who strives from the physical-bodily human being to the spiritual worlds, we realise with Voltaire that he can understand nothing of such a second human being. A quotation relating to this second human being is very typical: “So much I have endeavoured to find that we are two, nevertheless, I have found in the end that I am only one.” He cannot admit that this second human being is in him. He has taken care, but this is his tragedy: in the end, he can only find that he is only one who is bound to his brain. This was his deep tragedy about which Voltaire himself helped by his cynicism, even by his frivolity. Subconscious soul depths, the second human being in the human being in connection with a spiritual world,—the upper consciousness was not allowed to confess that to itself. The upper consciousness needed numbing. He could find that in the outer experience because the outer experience dedicated itself to the magnificent, clever worldview that he could create within the most inconsistent soul experiences.

 Thus, we can understand that Voltaire had a rather rough ride to manage with himself, and that he wanted many a numbing. One must already look at the greatness of this man to understand such paradoxical matter that he feigned a severe illness and called for the priest one day—it was in Switzerland where he did so many benefits—,so that the priest came along to give him the last rites. After he had received the sacraments, he jumped up and said that to the priest, it was only a joke, and mocked him. However, one must even live in such “derived” world that does not have the real connection of the human soul with the spiritual worlds as Voltaire lived in such a world and could not come to the connection to which he wanted to come.

If we look once again at Goethe, he takes a “vagrant”—Faust—to show how the deepest impulses arise in the human soul. If we pursue the whole life of Goethe, we realise how he tries to find the human character in its full juiciness in the simplest souls. Voltaire completely lives in a derived layer, in his educated class where everything is uprooted. There he cannot find what ties together the human soul with a spiritual world, and thus he can even speak to that derived layer. Today we can hardly understand that a spirit like Voltaire says: “I do not deign to write for shoemakers and dressmakers; to give those anything that they can believe in, apostles are good for that, not I.” He does not want his holiest conviction to be treated as we would want it today, namely that it penetrates into any human soul. However, he does the typical quotation that he writes only for the educated class because he grew out of it: “Only an upper class can understand heaven and earth which arise to my enlightened mind; the lowlife is in such a way that the silliest heaven and the silliest earth is just the best for it!”

In this respect, Voltaire lives within a dying cultural sphere. This is his tragedy. However, such cultural spheres also have the possibility to develop maturity concerning certain tendencies. Voltaire developed that maturity. It expresses itself in his clever, urgent judgement that does not confuse itself, even in the joke, it expresses itself in his healthy way—even if he is frivolous—to work on the world and to relate to the world in a way. Thus, one can also understand that a spirit who was so great in many a respect, as Frederick the Great (1712-1786), could feel attracted to Voltaire, could push off him again, allowed him to return after some time repeatedly, saying about him, this Voltaire deserves, actually, nothing better than to be a learnt slave, but I estimate what he can give me as his French. He could still give him even more than only the element of language. I have tried to indicate this today.

One can understand that the eighteenth century that had to put everything in the right light on one side what hampered the emerging consciousness soul what had to show a certain greatness, however, just in the downward spirit of the cultural current. One can understand that this had to be expressed in such a peculiar way just with Voltaire. You see Voltaire in the right light if you put that as a counter-image what we have found as the positive, as the continuing in the sense of Lessing or Goethe for the pursuit of the consciousness element. Indeed, what I have spoken about Voltaire today can serve only to cause a consciousness of how difficult it is to gain an objective picture just of this peculiar man: He fought for many things, he strove for live as something natural today in us—also in those who do not intend at all to read Voltaire's writings.

Yes, one can say just with Voltaire that humanity can outgrow his writings; but it cannot outgrow what he was as a force because it has to remain always as a part of the spiritual striving of humanity. Since what had to result as the liberation of the human soul is based on the fact that at first something had to be cleared away by such a decomposing, one would like to say, Mephistophelian spirit like Voltaire. One is not surprised that similar applies to the historical picture of Voltaire what happened to his mortal remains. In the honorary burial parts of the Pantheon in Paris they were buried first; when another political current got the power, it was exhumed again and dissipated; then when the third political current replaced the previous one, the bones were collected again and buried. Some people state now that these bones fetched back again are not the real ones. The historical picture of Voltaire will be right which is portrayed from the one side like that of a liberator from bondage, like an apostle of tolerance, on the other side, however, is denigrated so much. With the whole complexity of Voltaire's personality, it can easily happen if one considers the historical picture of Voltaire objectively that then some people maybe say that it is not right, as the bones buried in the pantheon are not the real ones. Nevertheless, I say, if spiritual science can fulfil its task in the present and future, the picture of the great destroyer, of that who abolished so much, can maybe arise before spiritual science in its full objectivity.Since Voltaire is a human being—he pronounced it even towards Frederick the Great—with all mistakes of a human being and, one would even like to say, a human being with all “miracles” of a human being who is well-suited to fulfil the poet's saying:

By the parties' favour and hatred confused,

His portrayal of character fluctuates in history. (Schiller in the prologue of “Wallenstein”)

His personality was such that his picture can only “fluctuate.” However, although it fluctuates, one has to confess compared with the picture of Voltaire with those to whom he is likeable as well as with those to whom he is unpleasant that he was, nevertheless, a great human being who filled a place in the ongoing education of the human race.