The Rudolf Steiner Archive

We have seen that necessity must be thought of in connection with the past, that the world contains as much necessity as it does past. For, as we tried to recognize, the past is reflected in the present. And there was another element involved: we hope to be so strengthened by our striving for clarity about just such concepts as we have been considering that we will be fit to take up the study of the truths of spiritual science. It is disastrous in many respects to have a great longing for what we might term deep spiritual-scientific truths if we shy away from strengthening our minds and thinking by taking in and thoroughly mastering concepts of a demanding nature. They are what disciplines our souls and spirits. And if we take pains to remain inwardly true in the process, no danger can ever threaten us from genuine spiritual-scientific concepts.

I have already mentioned, however, how often many people's longing for spiritual-scientific truths is found to outweigh their longing to work their way through to substantial concepts. Right at the beginning of our efforts in spiritual science there were some individuals who declared that they could not attend my lectures because they sank into a kind of sleep-state as a result of the concepts being discussed. A few especially mediumistic natures even carried things to the point of having to leave the lecture hall in Berlin. And one woman was actually found collapsed in sleep outside the hall, so powerful had been the lulling effect of the search for clear concepts!

The reproach was once made to Goethe that he created “pallid concepts” with his ideas about the metamorphosis of plants and animals and the primal phenomena of color. In his “Prophecies of Bakis,” which I have already had occasion to discuss, he inserted a passage referring to this avoidance of what people were calling “pallid concepts.”¹ As a matter of fact, this quatrain was also greatly misunderstood by those who tried to interpret these “Prophecies of Bakis.” Goethe said, “Pallid dost thou appear to me”—the concept, the idea—“and to the eye dead. How is it that you call forth holy life from founts of inner strength?” Goethe expressed with such accuracy the way people react who don't like to listen to clearly defined concepts, and therefore fall asleep, and who are always wanting to hear grand-sounding words about mysterious matters of the kind that give them something to dream about but never challenge them to think. They say, “Pallid dost thus appear to me, and to the eye dead”; they say it to those who want to speak occasionally on more sharply defined concepts. And they ask them, “How is it that you call forth holy life from founts of inner strength?” Goethe answers them, Passive would be your enjoyment if I could show you perfection.

Only the lack of it lifts you to levels beyond your own self.

In other words, the absence of those perfections that delight the eye or the senses in general proves elevating. Deadness overtakes those who do not attempt to take in and energetically work through what people often refer to as “pallid concepts.” It is therefore necessary, if we are to banish all traces of Baroque mysticism from the spiritual science we are pursuing, to devote ourselves occasionally to a concern with concepts of the utmost precision.

Thus far I have been talking about necessity. The question is now whether all the concepts that we tend, in ordinary life, to lump together with the concept of necessity really all deserve to be so linked. People say that what is necessary happens. But is this actually always the case? I would like to answer with a comparison that will clarify the matter. Let us suppose that we have a river with a gradually rising mountain chain beyond it, and we notice a stream or brook starting to run down from the heights. Let's imagine that something prevents our seeing beyond this point. We study the course of the stream or brook as it conforms to the contours of the mountain range and can state that according to what we are able to see from our vantage point it is a matter of necessity that this brook flows into this river. The mountain's formation conditions this, so that our sentence, “This brook flows into this river,” would unquestionably state a necessary fact. But now let us imagine that somebody decided to regulate the course of this brook, diverting it so that it flows in another direction. That person would have obviated the necessity, which would then not have developed. My comparison is crude, but it is a fact in life and in evolution that necessities don't always have to happen. We have to keep happenings and necessities apart. Two different concepts are involved here.

Now let us return to several previous concerns. First, let us review the insight we arrived at yesterday: that the past affects the present, appearing in reflection in it. But let us recall still another occasion on which mention of mirror images was also in order. We have often made a point of describing what takes place in human perception during ordinary waking consciousness. Human beings are really always outside their bodies and their bodily functions with that part of them that is engaged in the cognitive process; they live inside the things under study, as I've often said. And the fact that a person comes to know something is due to the reflection in his body of this experience he has inside things. So we can say that we are outside our bodies with one part of our perception, and our experience within things is reflected in our bodies.

If we now imagine ourselves looking at the color blue, we experience the blue of a flower, of chicory for example, but we do so unconsciously except for the fact of its reflection in our eyes. Our eyes are a part of our reflecting apparatus. We see the experience that we have in the chicory by allowing it to be reflected in our eyes. And we experience tone similarly. The life we live in tone is experienced unconsciously, and only becomes conscious through being reflected by our hearing organism. Our entire perceptive organism is a reflecting apparatus.

This is what I tried to establish as philosophical fact at the last Congress of Philosophers at Bologna.²

Cognition is thus engendered by reflection from our organism, by a reflecting of what we experience. And as you mull over this concept of reflection, both the reflecting of the past in the present and the reflecting of our present experience through our perceptive organism, you will have to admit that what is thus added to a thing or to an event in the form of reflections is a matter of total indifference to them, something that in neither case has anything directly to do with them. As you observe a mirror image you can quite well imagine that everything in it is as it is whether or not it is under observation. Reflections are therefore elements added to what is reproduced in them. That is especially the case with cognition; whether we develop this or that particular insight is not of the least consequence to the mirror image.

Now imagine yourselves walking through a landscape. Do you believe that the landscape would be any the less beautiful or in any way less whatever it is if you were not passing through it and experiencing it as a series of reflections engendered by your organism? No, those are elements added to the landscape and matters of total indifference to it. But is it a matter of indifference to you? No, it is not. For by walking today through a landscape that is reflected in your inner being and experiencing what is thus reflected, you will have become to some extent a different person in your soul tomorrow. What you experienced—a matter of total indifference to the landscape—signifies for you the beginning of an inner richness that can keep on growing there.

But what does all this really mean? It means, with reference again to the landscape metaphor, that we can say, “This situation was thus and such up to this point.” The fact that you walked through the landscape is a further addition to it. The landscape is reflected in you, becoming a further experience in your soul. Now how did what is continuing to grow there come into being? It did so as the result of something quite new being added to what had previously occurred. Something was really engendered in your soul out of nothingness, for contrasted with what had previously occurred, the reflection is of course a nothingness, a real, absolute nothingness. In other words, you relate to something to which there was no necessity to relate. You are an addition to it. You are added to a necessary happening as a living element that relates to it in a way not conditioned by previous events, since you could have stayed away. In that case, all that you gained from the reflection would not have become a part of the situation.

As you ponder examples of this kind, you become acquainted with the concept of chance; the real concept of it is to be found there. And you also gather from such examples that beings, things endowed with being, have to come up against each other, really to collide, for chance to occur. But we see from this that such a thing as chance can occur in the universe. If that were impossible, the enrichment of soul described above could not take place.

In this sense chance is a thoroughly legitimate concept. It is a real occurrence in cosmic events, and it shows us that new aspects of relationship can be garnered in cosmic evolution as products of reflection. If it were impossible for one participant to be linked with others without bringing about reflection in the cosmic process, then the occurrence of everything comprised in the term chance would be wholly out of the question. If the meadow through which you pass were to act as the agent of your passage, pulling you there with strings, and no reflection were to come about in you as described because of the meadow's total indifference, but the meadow were instead actively to imprint its impression on you, then the outcome could be called law-abiding necessity. But though it is hard to imagine it, there could then be no such thing as a present! There would be no present! And what would come of that? Why, beings who have no desire for such a linking up cannot progress any further if they follow such a course. They have to go back again. That is indeed the law governing devils and ghosts; they have to go out again by the door through which they entered. Goethe's Faust depicts this; they can't introduce any new evolutionary waves, and must return to the place they came from. And it is due to the possibility that new evolutionary waves can be set in motion in the developmental process of the cosmos that freedom exists.

In all our cognitive experiences, except for a certain category of them, no pure reflection takes place; the reflection is imperfect insofar as all kinds of impulses are combined with it. Concepts formed on the basis of past cognitive experience are imperfect. Once we have arrived at a pure concept, we no longer need merely to recall it; we can always create it anew. Though it becomes habitual, it is a habit that has finished with the past, and new reflections are constantly being summoned up with it. The concepts we form are pure reflections, which come to us from the beyond as additions to the things perceived. Therefore, when we form an impulse into concepts, it can be an impulse to freedom. That is what I attempted to develop at greater length in my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity.³ That is exactly the thought developed there.

But the concept of chance necessarily includes the concept of freedom. We must accustom ourselves to entertaining sharply defined concepts, for these are of immense significance for life. I want to cite an instance that has often been discussed here, but it is especially illuminating in the present context. Let us assume that we are studying illness. We must invariably look at illness from the standpoint of the present, never from the standpoint of the past, i.e., of necessity. This means enlivening the standpoint of the present by giving help to the full extent possible. Only if the illness terminates in death may we bring in the concept of necessity, realizing that necessity was involved. Anything other than this is the living present. We must be rigorous in adopting the standpoint that necessity inheres in the past; life rules the present. This example shows us that if we try to illumine concepts with the help of more fruitful viewpoints, we will acquire a certain knack for dealing with them.

A good deal could certainly be said on the subject of chance, and that will be done as time goes on. But for now I wanted to define the concept of chance and to clarify the extent to which it is valid. The easiest way to regard events after learning a little bit about karma is to say that everything is caused by karmic necessity. If someone has an incarnation at this point in time, then his life after death, and then his next incarnation, he calls something experienced in this second incarnation the consequence of the former life. But it is not absolutely necessary to look at things from the standpoint of the present; the consequence could be looked for further on, in the third incarnation. Something can occur then that we might be expecting to happen in the karma of the present incarnation. But an occurrence in the present incarnation may well be just the start of a karmic sequence, a reality generated by something presently living as a result of the reflection process. And the essential point here is that something is turned into a reality by a living element as a result of a reflection that is itself unreal. That is the way chance develops into necessity; when chance becomes a thing of the past, it is transformed into necessity.

On an occasion of great suffering, Goethe made a most beautiful statement, called by him “the word of a wise man.” He was speaking about the growth process of humanity, and said, “The rational world is to be looked upon as a single immortal individual engaged in a continuous bringing forth of what is necessary.” That is, bringing forth something, and when it has been brought forth, it is interwoven into the past and becomes necessity, “thus making itself the master of the element of chance.” A glorious saying to meditate upon! We can learn something from it too: Goethe wrote this sentence while experiencing great suffering, suffering that focused his entire feeling, his whole soul life, on the growth process of the human race, and caused him to ask what the actual course of this growth was. And there was wrung from his soul the realization that the rational world, the human race, brings forth what is necessary, and thus makes itself master over chance, in other words, incorporates chance forever into necessity.

I want to digress here for a moment. An insight such as I have just cited makes valuable material for meditation; it contains so much that flows into us as we meditate upon it. We shouldn't rest content with a mere abstract grasping of such a sentence, which emerged from Goethe's soul in his extreme old age, in 1828, when he was in the throes of great suffering. A great deal of life is packed into such a saying. And the digression I would like to make is this: our insights are always to be looked upon as grace bestowed upon us. And it is just those individuals who garner knowledge from the spiritual world who are aware what a matter of grace such knowledge is when they have prepared themselves to receive it, when their being reaches out to receive what flows to them from the spiritual world. One can experience over and over again how suitably prepared one must be for the reception of spiritual knowledge, how one must be able to wait for it, for one is not at just any and every moment in a condition to receive a particular insight from the spiritual world.

This fact must be stated in just such situations as ours, for it is only too easy for misconception to be piled upon misconception concerning the conditions under which supersensible insights flourish and can be fruitfully disseminated. Numbers of individuals come to me asking questions out of the blue about this or that, and often requesting information about matters that, at the time of questioning, are remote from my concern. They demand that I give them the most exact information. People are commonly convinced that a person who speaks out of a connection with the spiritual world knows about everything it contains and is always in a position to give out any information desired. And if he can't answer a question immediately, the comment is often made that the questioner is probably not supposed to be given the information, or something of the sort.

What we are dealing with here is too crude a conception of the relationship that exists between the spiritual world and the human soul. We should realize that “readiness for truth” is especially required for a direct reception of truths from the spiritual world. Misconceptions about these things must gradually be eliminated. Of course, people at some remove from the realm of truth in the life of the spirit feel a need to ask all sorts of questions, and answers can be given them from the investigator's store of memory, based on past research. But uninvestigated truths should not be requested out of the blue from spiritual researchers. Instead, it should be realized that the investigator feels requests for information about still unresearched matters to be like knife- cuts in his body, to use a physical analogy.

Definite laws govern everything that can lift human beings into the spiritual world. We need to familiarize ourselves with these laws to lessen misunderstandings about the flowing of spiritual truths into the physical world. Only by freeing ourselves from every trace of egoism—and this includes the desire for information on just any subject—will we create healthy conditions for the sort of movement this should and must be. Certain spiritual truths simply must be incorporated into the world today. But they should not encounter the kind of aspirations brought in from the world we formerly lived in or be pursued according to our erstwhile habits. The spiritual movement should not be undermined by them. In most cases, spiritual movements have been undermined by people's failure to adapt their habitual ways to spiritual truths, instead of bringing their accustomed habits to the reception of those truths. And so it could come about that a society was founded in the eighteenth century based upon what Jacob Boehme introduced into the spiritual life of Europe.⁴ It is now correctly reported that this society had a number of members, but only one—the founder of the society—survived. I certainly hope that more than one will do so in our case! But that was what happened in one attempt to establish a society. It is said, too, that a tremendous number of those who became members turned later on into really peculiar human beings. I don't want to go into all the further details reported about the adherents of that eighteenth century society at this point.

When we familiarize ourselves with the spiritual world, as we do in the process of absorbing spiritual science, we develop an ever growing sense of what it is to participate in it. And we prepare ourselves to make the right kind of understanding ascent into higher worlds by taking in, in the form of sharply defined concepts, the world we live in. Those who are unwilling to think as penetratingly about chance and necessity as we have been attempting to do here will not find it easy to rise to a conception of providence. For you see, we can learn a great deal from the spiritual beings who surround us.

The mental niveau of our time is that of mindlessness. I've tried to give you an idea of it by citing some of Fritz Mauthner's comments. I want to add one of the most curious remarks he has made so that you will see what an honest man is capable of, a man who not only says of the prevailing science of the day that it is the only science in existence and that we have overcome the ignorance of our stupid ancestors, but who honestly accepts the prevailing outlook and then goes on to draw some remarkable conclusions about a certain matter.

I once described Mauthner as “out-Kanting Kant.” He did not just write a Critique of Pure Reason, but a Critique of Language. He really got going on words. He invented a definition for the way a word moves from one category to another. I am deliberately citing an incorrect example from his Dictionary of Philosophy, but it is one that he himself held to be correct. The earlier periods of Latin civilization had a word for truth: veritas. Now Mauthner says that the word veritas was introduced into more recent German use, was simply taken over, to become the German word Wahrheit. He terms words in this category “borrowings” (literally “loan translations”). And he traces words thus borrowed through civilization after civilization with tremendous acuity and conscientiousness, tracking down their wanderings and transformations. He does an incredible amount of rummaging around in words. Nowhere does he share Faust's longing to behold “germs and productive powers”; he simply rummages around in words with utmost zeal.

He made attempts like the following: Let us imagine some people or other with its characteristic views. Mauthner cares only about the words derived from these views, for, to him, thinking consists of words. Now, he says, there are the words, but they can be traced back to another people. The second group, where we now come upon the words, borrowed them from the first group and transformed them. And he actually perpetrates the following: (I must cite the example, as it is really too nice for words to show you the way adherents of the present outlook must think to be faithful to it. It is vitally important not to pass lightly over things of this sort.) Mauthner traces various borrowings, looking for the various transformations that have come about in words. Among them the following:

Kaffee (“coffee”), borrowed from another language and still a foreign word in the sense that in German at least the way it is written and spoken is not homogeneous. “Potato” is an English loan from some Red Indian language; in the German Kartoffel there is either a borrowing or a bastardization based upon a shift in meaning; whereas in Erd-apfel (“earth-apple”) and Grum- or Bodebirn (“ground-pear”) we are dealing with cases of transliteration or of description.

The Romans adopted the Greek custom of crowning victors of a race, or on the occasion of a feast, with a wreath, and wreaths of flowers were also used elsewhere for these purposes. But it was only at the time of the Renaissance that the term “crown” was re-introduced in noun and verb form; there were poets' crowns and crowned poets, with the word “crown” signifying “wreath” as in Latin. The plant species used was native to Greece, and was imported, in historical times at least, both as a plant and as a word. The German Lorbeer (“laurel”) (the shrub, not the berry; “baccalaureus” became in turn the symbol of an academic title, the baccalauriat; in French, bachelier; its meaning twisted again to become the English “bachelor”) became the “vegetable of fame” of Speidel's jesting. And crowned poets from Petrarch to Tennyson were called “poets laureate.” The cheap laurel needed no replacement. The myrtle-wreath, which, as a result of faulty observation, or of a still more mistaken popular etymology, was regarded somewhere in the Orient as the symbol of sexual life and later became a chastity symbol, was more easily acquired in Germany as a weed than as a blossom; German brides therefore wear wreaths or crowns of the genuine leaves and false blossoms. Palms are replaced at Easter by pussy-willows as the only seasonal green plant available. And because palms, which in the Orient are the obvious plants for decorative purposes, have lent their name as a prefix to such terms as Palm Sunday and Palm Week in characterizations of the festival season, the green willow branches substituted for them have been designated “palm branches” and “palm catkins.”

As you see, Mauthner traces borrowed terms and words like these in their transmutations from one national region to another. And then he adds, “In the case of verbs too there is no end to the carry-over from Christianity to western peoples of such actual borrowings. The migration of the real facts of the Christian ritual and of Christian thinking may be studied in this book (cf. the article on Christianity).”

If we open the book to that article we come upon a remarkable sentence; “I want to state and demonstrate one thing only in regard to the development of Christianity as the creation of the Germanic and Germanic-Roman peoples, and to the way it still dominates western civilization, for the time being, in western usage, vocabulary and concerns. That is, that Christianity as a whole represents the most prodigious borrowing, or chain of borrowings, that it is possible to find in a scrutiny of history.”

What, then, is Christianity, according to Mauthner? A collection of borrowings! There were words at the time Christianity began. And if we want to find Christianity in Europe today, we'll have to make a search for borrowed words! What Mauthner is claiming is that Christianity is nothing but a collection of such borrowings. The whole civilization of Europe would have to have developed quite differently if certain words had just not happened to get borrowed! But the important thing to note here is that this finding is the logical consequence of current scientific assumptions. It is a consequence logically and honestly reached, and those who fail to draw it are simply less honest than Mauthner. Those who have adopted today's scientific outlook can only agree that all of Christianity means nothing more to them than a collection of borrowed words.

Somebody might object that Mauthner is only pointing out the fact that “coffee” entered our language as a borrowed word, but not how coffee itself was introduced into Europe. It is true that Mauthner didn't indicate that Christianity had to be introduced into Europe because it was a collection of borrowings. He made no assertion whatever on this score. This objection cannot be made without further ado; instead we have to say that those who think in the style of modern science are simply incapable of judging the matter. They are excluding themselves from any discussion of the issue; that is the point.

Small wonder, then, that a man who, in addition to all that I've had to say about him, is also really quite a clever fellow, says,

I don't go as far as James does (Psychology, p. 297) when he holds it impossible to improve memory.⁵ It would not be impossible to render the organs that serve memory capable of greater achievement by exercising them, as has been shown to be possible in the case of the muscles. It is certainly true that educational psychology, which believes that it can strengthen memory in the young by senseless exercises, is based upon the old associative psychology, which sees in memory the mental picture of a force, just as it does in the case of imagining other such mental pictures which this force learns to play with. If memory is nothing more than activity in the same sense that the soul is nothing more than its experiences, then nothing remains to be strengthened. Iron will that does not permit itself to forget useful knowledge and exerts itself to remember when remembering is required is a facet of character, and an individual's memory is in this sense unalterable, as character is. But quite aside from all such considerations, the pointless drilling that goes on in schools is every bit as senseless as the training of the wrong muscles for some special use of the limbs would be. A person who has learned nothing in his younger years except to walk on his hands can make no use of this capability later unless he intends to become a circus performer.

In Mauthner's opinion, schoolchildren receive training that teaches them a wrong use of their brains, analogous to a person's learning only to walk on his hands, an equally useless ability. But although this is clear to Mauthner, he has absolutely no suggestions as to what should take the place of this schooling. (I have explained to you how, in this respect too, furthering what we are developing in eurythmy is important).

Walking on their hands, with their heads down, is the chief training being given our young people. Bible verses (in the elementary grades), memorizing all the tributaries of some foreign river (in the middle school), tables and professional data presented in reference books (at the university level) form the memory training defended on the basis of an assumed strengthening of memory! On the occasion of my state examinations in the history of jurisprudence, I was required to list the 13 prerogatives of a cardinal in their God-ordained order, not forgetting the prerogative of a pallium woven by a particular group of nuns in a particular convent.

Schools should limit themselves to training character, to training it for the function of finding the easiest and best means of access to useful concepts of the real world.

By now we might expect this gentleman to be suggesting what the substitute for the above should be. People of any intelligence can only agree that the way mental training has been carried on ought not to continue, so they expect to hear what he suggests instead. But the article ends right there! There is nothing more! He has been chasing his pigtail in vain, to use yesterday's metaphor. Almost every article in his dictionary creates the impression that he is unsuccessfully chasing the pigtail hanging down behind him.

If we work our way through the concepts necessity and chance and learn to recognize that the human world is to be regarded as an “immortal individual” continuously bringing necessity about and thus establishing dominion over chance, and then add to this the concept that must be acquired if we are to understand how the spiritual world streams into the human soul, we gradually work our way through to a concept of something elevated above necessity and chance, and that is providence. It is a concept attained by a gradual working up to it.

I have often called your attention to the fact that merely looking at the world conveys nothing as to the effect of activities going on in it. It would be good to cultivate the right feeling for what I've just been saying by concerning ourselves in depth with the genius of language that lives behind words, instead of doing as Mauthner does in his concern with speech. Mauthner's data could even assist such an effort on occasion, for the tremendous zeal with which he has ferreted things out can sometimes bring a person contemplating the activity of the genius of language to significant insights that he might not otherwise become aware of. The genius of language does indeed guide us to a plane elevated above necessity and chance. A great deal we participate in goes on around us as we are speaking, without our having a true knowledge of it because we are incapable of lifting it fully into our consciousness. This is the spiritual world, holding sway around us. And to take just a random example, when we speak, these spiritual worlds speak too. We should make the attempt to be aware of this.

Let us try to make a small beginning with it. We have associated necessity with the past and chance with the immediate present. For if everything were necessity, it would also be of the past, and nothing new could ever come into being. That would mean that there could be no life. So if we involve ourselves and our own lives in the world's evolution, we would be confronted by necessity or the reflected past, and in our current life by what is called chance. These two interact. We have two streams: our present life, which we think of as simply chance, and the reflected past or necessity flowing along underneath it. What is considered real from the ordinary physical standpoint can only be related to the past, to necessity, if reality is taken to mean conformity with what already exists. The real has to belong to the past, to the necessary, while what is in the living process of coming into being always has to be freshly produced. Our life is lived in this, and we have to develop living concepts that flow out of necessity to deal with that life. Here, we cannot be onlookers at something corresponding to the concept; we can only live in it. When our own lives confront the stream of evolution, we can therefore preserve the past in the developing stream of life by now transforming the reflected picture into a present element. And we can make it into an ongoing present.

We can make a human virtue of transforming into ongoing life the past that has become rigid necessity, carrying reflections further, keeping them alive and evolving in ourselves. And what name do we give the virtue that carries the past into further life stages? Loyalty! Loyalty is the virtue related to the past, just as love is the virtue related to the present, to immediate living.

But speaking of these matters brings us to what I want to say about the genius of language that we need to become aware of. Wahrheit, the German word for truth, has no connection whatsoever with the Latin veritas; it suggests the past and necessity and ordinary truth, for it is related to the German bewahren (“to preserve”), to bewähren (“to hold good”), to währen, (“to last”), with all that is carried over into the present from the past. And there is a still stronger suggestion of the same meaning in the English language, which translates both the German wahr (“true”) and the German treu (“loyal”) as “true.” And if we want to describe someone telling the truth and being believed, the old German saying auf Treu und Glauben (“on trust,” “in good faith”) is still in use, with treu rather than wahr. Here we see the genius of language at work, and its work is wiser than what human beings do.

And when we ascend from the concept of loyalty to that of love, and then to what I have described in the past as grace, a state of being we have to wait for, we come to the concept of providence; we enter the world where providence holds sway.

If Fritz Mauthner were to concern himself with providence, he would of course search out the source from which it is borrowed and trace the connection of the German Vorsehung (“providence”) to sehen (“to see”) and vorhersehen (“to foresee”), and so on. But a person concerned with reality searches for the world indicated when the union of chance and necessity plays the dominant role rather than either one alone. And the world referred to is that in which there is no such thing as the past in our sense.

I have often told you that when we look into the spiritual world and see the past, it is as though the past had remained standing; it is still there. Time becomes space. The past ceases to be simply the past. Then the concept of necessity also ceases to have any meaning. There is no longer a past, a present, and a future, but rather a state of duration. Lucifer remained behind during the moon evolution in exactly the same way that someone on a walk with another person may stay behind, either out of laziness or because his feet are sore, while his companion keeps on walking. Lucifer has as little directly to do with our earth existence as a person who stays behind has to do with places eventually reached by his companion. He stayed behind during the moon evolution, and there he still remains. In the spiritual world we cannot speak of past things, but only of a state of duration. Lucifer has remained as he was on the moon. All our concepts of necessity and chance change when we look into the spiritual world; providence holds sway there.

I wanted at least to particularize the realms in which what we call necessity, chance and providence are to be sought. This has been a beginning only, and we will return to these matters after spending some time on others. For we must devote ourselves occasionally to studies of a kind that more “mystically” oriented natures may consider unnecessary in a movement like ours. I must regard them as very necessary, however, because I believe that it is also essential for every genuine mystic to occupy himself with thinking.

• 1. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1749–1832, German poet, dramatist, and novelist. The quoted quatrain is from his poetry collection entitled The East-West Divan, published in 1819. The poems are influenced by ancient Persian and Arabian poetry.
• 2. Sixth International Congress for Philosophy, Bologna, 1911.
• 3. Rudolf Steiner, Philosophy of Spiritual Activity, (Hudson, N.Y.: Anthroposophic Press, 1986).
• 4. Jacob Boehme, 1575–1624, German pantheist mystic. He was a shoemaker by profession and the first philosopher to write in German rather than in Latin.
• 5. William James, 1842–1910, American psychologist and Pragmatist philosopher. Published Principles of Psychology in 1890

If you think back to the entrance of the Blessed Boys in the final scene of Goethe's Faust, you will recall the verse:

Boys, brought forth in midnights haunted,
Half-unsealed the sense and brain,
For the parents lost when granted,
For the angels sweetest gain!

I've already called your attention to many a profundity in this final scene of Faust, but it contains a great deal more than I was able to point out on that occasion, more indeed than could possibly be brought to light in a limited period of time.

The four lines just quoted are equally fitted to be the leitmotif of the deeper spiritual-scientific expositions with which we will be concerning ourselves today, tomorrow, and next Monday.

I want to point out today by way of introduction that it is possible to delve more deeply, in a truly spiritual-scientific approach, into the statement made here recently when I characterized sleeping and waking and related matters. I spoke of how the whole nature of spiritual science was such as to require finding the correct approach to the facts we encounter in the world. And I showed that this approach is to be found only when we seek it as was done in our study of the alternating states of sleeping and waking. We tried to understand how differently consciousness functions in the waking and the sleeping states. But much else can be learned here by studying the way consciousness works according to whether it is that of human beings or of other beings. The four lines quoted from Faust refer to a human state of consciousness, possessed by the souls of the “boys brought forth in midnights” and “for the parents lost when granted,” in other words, by souls claimed by death immediately after birth. But the verse states expressly that these souls are “for the angels sweetest gain.”

We'll see that the saying that souls of this kind are “gain for the angels” is comprehensible only if we look into the state of consciousness of beings belonging to the hierarchy of angels. But let us first acquire some preliminary concepts of these matters and so prepare ourselves for the deeper understanding of the spiritual world into which they are to lead us.

I'll start from the fact, familiar to us from various spiritual-scientific studies, of how remote from reality the learning, the truth, and our concepts of things in ordinary life all are. People are even glad not to have these add anything to reality as they see it, for in their view the reliability of knowledge and “the unvarnished truth” depend on the fact that our cognitive processes and our soul experiences add nothing to things. Just consider what a point science makes of restricting itself to merely reflecting what goes on in the world and not allowing the soul the least influence on its pronunciamentos. Let us recall what trouble is taken by those who dream up a world view on the basis of all sorts of illusions to show that their fabrications are dictated by some reality or other outside themselves rather than originate within them. This is true all the way up to what is claimed to be valuable “occult knowledge” such as we hear some people touting. Those who desire to have occult insight here on the physical plane are basically concerned with not adding anything to the conceptions they develop. How proud people of this type are when they can report that such and such beings appeared to them, this or that was “dictated” to them, or something else was mysteriously communicated to their spiritual ears! This satisfies them, for then they can have the feeling that the conceptions they have created are reflections of reality, not something they produced. We might say that in their concern for attaining the reliable knowledge they are seeking, they actually make a fifth wheel on the wagon out of it. Knowledge should not add anything to what already exists, for only then do they regard it as something particularly reliable, particularly right.

We can arrive at a true and reliable concept of the relationship of knowledge to reality only if we gradually ascend from ordinary knowledge about physical matters to higher types of insight. We are familiar with the fact that the next level of knowledge is that called imagination. But if imagination is to have any relationship to reality it cannot be attained by living in the physical body; we must make ourselves capable of overcoming all dependence on the physical body to attain genuine imaginative knowledge. We must have progressed beyond using the physical body as our instrument. But we do still use the etheric body when we seek imaginations; we have to make use of our etheric bodies to obtain really objective imaginative experience, exactly as we make use of our physical bodies for perceiving objects in the physical realm.

Now we find that when a person on the path of clairvoyant knowledge has progressed to the point where he has loosened his soul from his physical body and is using his etheric body as his cognitive tool, what is called knowledge in the physical world, the kind of knowledge sought without a wish to add anything to the findings, remains behind on the physical plane. For example, everything that a modern scientist is interested in finding out is left behind on the physical plane by those who leave it to ascend into the imaginative world. Nothing remains of what scientists and natural philosophers think of as a world of whirling atoms, a world, as I have often explained, that is dreamed up and totally lacking in reality; nothing remains but pictures of this world. In other words, on leaving the physical plane we become aware that the conceptions of a world of whirling atoms left behind there were just dreamed up. In the imaginative world into which we have ascended no direct use can be made of any knowledge acquired on the physical plane. Please note the word direct here. We will see the subtleties of what is involved as we progress.

Now in earlier lectures I've already shown that the spiritual energy underlying thinking changes when a clairvoyant seeker frees himself from the instrumentality of his physical body. I've said that it is as though all our thinking comes alive. Instead of living in the passive world of thinking experienced on the physical plane, it is as though all our thinking comes alive and starts to tingle as we enter the imaginative world. Once, in Munich, I used a drastic comparison. I said that upon entering that world the thoughts we were previously accustomed to sending hither and thither and otherwise dispatching them as perfectly passive entities become transformed as though we had stuck our heads into a wasps' nest and our thoughts swirled and whirled about, every thought possessing a life of its own. We have to endure it in the sense that we don't feel unfree as a result of being wrested, as it were, out of ourselves by this independent life of our thoughts.

We gradually make the discovery that the insights, the conceptions we obtain on the physical plane as mere images of external reality fall away from us like a rain that rains back down upon the physical world and doesn't enter the imaginative world; they fall away and stay behind in the physical realm. All that is left of them is a memory. So we can look back on everything we have attained by exerting thinking, but that is now left behind on the physical plane as something we have finished with and no longer have any influence on.

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This is a diagram of how it actually is. This would represent the physical body out of which the individual ascends. Then he immediately perceives his knowledge about physical facts falling like raindrops into the physical world. Knowledge of physical things is then outside him.

This is an extremely interesting and extraordinary process. As we ascend into the first spiritual world, the imaginative world, we see our thoughts dropping away from us. And then we see that these thought-forms become beings, and they make a strange impression on us if we really see them. We have the impression as we look at them that they are something wrested from us, something with significance for the physical world only.

Now it is extraordinarily difficult to get a more exact conception of what is dropping away from us there. It is scarcely possible, on ascending into higher worlds, to acquire correct insights by any other means than the most painstaking comparisons. First of all, it is necessary to discover what these thoughts of the physical plane, which have dropped away, can be compared to. These thoughts become very lively indeed. And the curious thing is that these thoughts we see back there on the physical plane are engaging in all sorts of dances similar to eurythmy. It is almost impossible to find these thoughts keeping really still.

I spoke of their dancing resembling eurythmy—not the eurythmy that is being nurtured here, but regular movements of a sort. These thoughts have an extremely peculiar aspect: they are inwardly alive when they have left us. And this fact makes them valuable in this first stage of true clairvoyance.

When a person says something colossally stupid here in physical existence, he certainly doesn't hold on to it for very long, once he has realized the situation. Most people like to skip lightly over their stupidities, once they've recognized them. A really stupid thought laughs when it gets out! It laughs in proportion to its stupidity. And other thoughts can be seen behaving in a similar manner. They manifest an inner life, these thoughts, a very lively play of expression. They convince us that no stupidity we perpetrate escapes being eternalized.

The only way we can get at the facts about these strange thought-forms which put in such a lively appearance is through a comparison. We will find one only if we are in a position to see our thoughts in the way just described. Then we are also in a position to experience what I am going to describe. We need for purposes of comparison the whole wide world of gnomes, the fairy folk that rules all of external earthly nature. These gnomes, who belong to the external inorganic realm in the way other elemental beings belong to plants, water, air, and fire, and so on, this whole world of gnomes has the same character, the same inner nature as the thought-forms described. I could also say that gnomes belong to the same class as our thought- forms, referring however to those thought-forms based on mental images derived from the physical plane alone.

Now as you see, we have a comparison. And that is why there is an inner relationship of sorts between the gnome world and our thoughts about things on the physical plane. As I've mentioned, people make an effort to be faithful to the facts in their knowledge and perceptions, making these into a fifth wheel on the wagon.

The gnomes have a similar relationship to their realm. Speaking euphemistically of course, but in a way corresponding to the facts, when a person talks with a gnome, he finds the gnome regarding the world to which he belongs with tremendous wistfulness, because he is so extremely uninvolved with it. He has as little influence over it as human beings have over the physical world around them with their knowledge. It is a matter of considerable indifference to the physical world surrounding us how we think about it with thoughts derived from the physical plane. A tree grows neither more nor less slowly because of thoughts derived from the physical plane that we may have about it, or because we go past it without giving it any thought at all. As I mentioned recently, we are the only ones to gain by this; our thoughts about the tree have not the least effect upon it.

The gnomes too have a similar external relationship to the world to which they belong externally. I might say that their world belongs to what we call the terrestrial world, the solid element. But we can just as easily disregard the world of the gnomes when we study the solid element as we can disregard watchmakers in a study of the laws involved in watch-making.

It is extremely important to develop a right understanding of a comparison of this kind, one that I have often resorted to, the comparison of the structure of the universe with the mechanism of a watch. If you want to understand a watch, you must study the laws governing its mechanism, and it would be ridiculous to say, Ah ha! The hands of a watch keep moving; there must be tiny demons pushing them. No such demons are involved. But if someone who understands watches as a result of studying them were to say that a watch has nothing to do with the watchmaker who put it together, he would also be talking nonsense. The fact that the world can be understood from its own make-up and that it is possible for scientists to discover natural laws can just as little be taken as proof of the nonexistence of a spiritual basis for the universe. The laws that govern the functioning of a watch are equally discoverable in the watch itself. So when it is stated that the laws that govern nature are to be found within the natural world and it is therefore unnecessary to look for anything divine in the universe, this reflects the same lack of thought as saying of watches that no watchmaker is needed because they are explainable on the basis of their own construction.

In the world surrounding us that is so entirely explainable on the basis of the laws that govern it, gnomes have a function. They too are somewhat comparable to the fifth wheel on a wagon: they accompany the world to which they belong, but without having any effect upon it. I ask you to consider the inner relationship of the world of gnomes to our physical thought world, for then you will realize that we have to make a start at understanding such a thing as the gnome world by taking a state of consciousness into consideration. Then we will ask ourselves how it is that we come to know about the physical world. We do so by forming the reflections I've been discussing. Just as reflections have no real connection with what they reflect, physical knowledge has nothing to do with what it knows about; it doesn't make anything happen in the physical realm. If we come to see physical knowledge as a matter of a state of consciousness and sense in full awareness how unessential, how superfluous, mirrors are to the objects mirrored, we will understand the soul-mood that envelops the world of gnomes. That is their soul-mood. Gnomes are therefore unable to grasp how there can be anything but an ineffectual relationship with this world.

If a clairvoyant person were to feel pain and sorrow, as they can indeed be felt on many occasions in human life, and were then to perceive gnomes, as clairvoyants do, he would find that they cannot comprehend his pain. They are aware that people can feel a general sadness and depression, but they cannot understand how anyone can be attached to physical existence; they laugh at such feelings. Indeed, we might say that our sense of the value of things on the physical plane is lost in encounters with the world of gnomes, because they heap such ridicule upon us for the value we attach to much that exists on the physical plane.

We understand the mental state of gnomes, then, if we become cognizant of the state of consciousness involved in the relationship of physical knowledge to the world reflected in it.

The beings to whom the name undines has been given and who are inwardly related not to the earthly but to the watery element and to everything liquidly rippling and flowing must be pictured somewhat differently. We cannot form a proper concept of plants just by looking at them and making a one-time image of them analogous to a papier-mâché reproduction. To be aware of nothing more than such a one-time impression is to lack any true conception of a plant, and the same holds true in the case of undines. We picture a plant rightly only if we know it in its various states: first in its root development, then growing a stem, then putting forth leaves, then blossoming, the blossoms wilting, fruits appearing, and so on. Goethe tells us in his beautiful Metamorphosis of Plants that we must study a plant's growth process.¹ And there live in the plant, in addition to what it is in and of itself, mobile elemental beings inwardly related to the shaping, rippling, mobile element of water.

And now we have to realize that the imaginative world into whose life we make our way on evolving beyond the physical plane is an inwardly mobile realm resembling the cloud-world in its metamorphoses, resembling the rippling, flowing element. The imaginative world is itself in flowing motion. And just as we encounter the realm of our own physical thoughts when we first enter the spiritual world, under favorable conditions encountering the elemental world of the gnomes, so do we live in the realm of higher elemental beings as waves live in water; we belong to and are part of its encompassing whole; we live in it.

It is of course difficult to give an impression of such matters, but here too we must picture the state of consciousness involved. It helps us to understand to say that all our thinking begins to come alive, that we are swept up by thoughts that become alive as though the thoughts we produce, thoughts endowed with imagination, were to take on a life of their own. Purely physical thoughts such as we had before are left behind, an abandoned realm. Then we can say that the gnomes live in the world we have abandoned. But now we are living in the realm of the undines, and both for them and for us it is a world of movement.

Let us picture this very exactly. We separate from our physical bodies and become strangers to them. We begin to carry on a life of inner mobility, of continuously changing, rippling motion. Everything takes on inner life as we experience ourselves in our etheric bodies. This is the experience we have also immediately upon dying, except that the tempo is slower.

This experiencing of the imaginative world is what we experienced on the moon, except that it is at a higher level now; there, it was a dream-world of imagination, a realm of pictures. On Jupiter we will experience it in full consciousness. We lift ourselves into it upon leaving our physical bodies behind as described. Try to picture it really vividly. The world of the senses is obliterated; what we saw with our eyes and heard with our ears is no longer perceptible. We cease to feel as well. Thoughts related to the outer world are laid aside in a way that could be described as follows: O gnomes, we give you our physical thoughts to keep you company; occupy yourselves with them for awhile.

Now an inner living and weaving sets in, a sharing in everything on earth that is inwardly alive and streams and ripples in the way the earth's fluid element carries on its rhythmic life. It is a sharing with the earth reminiscent too of the ancient moon period. A strange process starts: In addition to being aware of living in a realm of elemental beings belonging to the plant kingdom and to flowing liquids, we realize something else of a very special nature, something quite strange, namely, that we are becoming part of a rhythm that is involved both in the inner rhythm of the earth and in our breathing rhythm. We acquire the idea that the rhythm of our breathing is inwardly related to the rhythm of the earth. In short, we begin to be aware that we are part of the whole earth-organism. We really begin to sense our belonging to it. The earth-organism claims us.

This can be compared to what Goethe described to Eckermann on April 11, 1827, when he said, “I picture the earth with its vapor mantle as a huge living organism involved in an unceasing in- and out-breathing.”² We feel ourselves involved in this. We share in this unique way in the life of the earth.

I'd like to point out something here that demonstrates again how fruitfully spiritual science illuminates the findings of natural science made by some characteristic scientific figures, and how well they go together. So I remind you of the famous exclamation of the Greek philosopher Archimedes, who as he sat in his bath shouted, “Eureka! I've found it!”³ And what had he found out? He lifted his feet out of the bath water and then put them back in again, finding that they were lighter in the water than outside it. So he discovered the important principle that any body suspended in water loses as much weight as the water it displaces weighs. Balloons rise according to the same principle, losing as much weight as the air they displace. In the case of water, a heavy object lying on the bottom does not lose weight, but it does so when it is suspended in the water. This principle obtains throughout nature, and it is an important one, for it is related to something of the greatest importance in human beings.

You will have heard that the human brain weighs on the average 1350 grams. It is therefore quite heavy, almost 1 1/2 kilos. Very fragile organs occupy the space beneath it, organs that would be crushed by laying anything weighing a single kilo on top of them. Yet it is a fact that we all have a brain heavy enough to crush the organs that lie at its base. But the pressure exerted on them actually amounts at most to 20 grams, rather than to a kilo. How is this accounted for? It is due to the fact that the brain is suspended in a fluid; it loses all but 20 grams of its weight because it is floating in the brain fluid. We are speaking here not of what it actually weighs, but of its 20-gram pressure on the organs at its base. We picture it correctly when we conceive the brain floating in the brain fluid and this fluid extending downward into the spinal column.

Now picture this brain fluid rhythmically rising and falling. This fluid with the brain floating in it is involved in rhythmical movement as the diaphragm contracts and expands with the in- and out-movement of the breath, and it is thus involved in the breathing process. Insofar as the brain is its instrument, the whole thought process thus is connected with the breathing process. The brain is thus an extraordinarily sensitive sense organ for the forces continually playing in the earthly realm. Goethe, in his deep insight into matters of this kind, refused, for example, to accept what the crude meteorological science of his time had to say about the rise and fall of barometric pressure being due to atmospheric lightness or heaviness. He spent an endless amount of time registering barometric readings in various localities. And he tried to determine how regular this rise and fall was over the earth as a whole and showed how it could be compared to an inner terrestrial force, an in- and out-breathing on the part of the earth, which is of course closely related to meteorological regularity and irregularity. We need not be surprised at the barometer's changeableness despite the regularity of the earth's in- and out-breathing; human beings too are prone, despite the regularity of their breathing, to contract colds and other conditions that act like barometers showing that something is amiss.

We perceive this wonderful lawfulness in the earth's gravity, this inner life of the terrestrial, even though we are not conscious of it in physical life. We perceive the mysterious inner processes of the “earth-creature” taking place in the continuous rising and falling of the brain fluid in exactly the same way we gaze out into the world and listen to it. Goethe said of it, “I picture the earth with its vapor mantle as a huge living organism involved in an unceasing in- and out-breathing.” We feel that we share in it, though on an unconscious level. But the moment we use our etheric bodies as perceptive organs we begin to perceive it consciously and to participate in it; we become part of this huge earth-creature.

Our age is really the first to confront such matters entirely without understanding. Kepler, whom even those currently eager to wipe out all spiritual insight regard as a great mind, still spoke of our earth as having a periodic respiratory process which he likened to that of whales, a going-to-sleep and reawakening, dependent upon the sun-rhythm and accompanied by a fulling and ebbing of the ocean.⁴ We have an experience of these processes on an unconscious level, and it finds expression in a physical process of which we are not consciously aware.

It will not surprise you, then, that clairvoyant perception reports that what has now withdrawn into the inner organism, the strange relationship between the external atmosphere and our thought process through the blood and the rising and falling of the brain fluid was once an external element on the ancient moon, where dreamlike clairvoyance prevailed. The circulating air was outside. The human being himself was as yet only a vortex in the moon substance, for there was as yet no earthly matter; the moon was still in a fluid state or, at its most material, a thickened fluid. And in this whirling and perceiving the whirling lived moon human beings, floating as condensations in the fluid element.

What we were as moon humanity remains within us. And if we study the brain in the brain fluid and study the nature of the various functions related to the breathing process, we see that it is indeed true that we have inherited the legacy of the ancient moon, but now withdrawn into our interior make-up. We are still there, as brains floating in fluid, in rhythmically alternating motion.

We see here a reflection of the old moon rhythm that constituted human physical nature on the moon. And our whole physical make-up, which we perceive with our nerves and external senses, has spread out over that nature as an outer covering. Hidden beneath it is what remains as a moon legacy.

There are always and everywhere these interrelationships, marvelously wrought. But we have no inner perception of them as long as our eyes and ears are directed only toward the external. The moment we surrender the use of our senses and leave our thoughts behind as described, however, we feel our unity with the life of the earth. And we know ourselves inwardly to be one with the earthly gravity of our etheric life, that life into which we enter upon leaving our physical bodies in the transformed condition known as death.

• 1. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1749–1832, German poet and thinker. Published Metamorphosis of Plants in 1790; in this book he shows the leaf as the primeval organ of the plant out of which all other plant organs evolved.
• 2. Johannes Peter Eckermann, 1792–1854. Published Conversations with Goethe, 1823-1832 in 1836.
• 3. Archimedes, 285–212 B.C., Greek physicist and mathematician.
• 4. Johannes Kepler, 1571–1630, German astronomer. Calculated orbits of the planets and discovered the laws of the movement of the planets.

I have often mentioned the fact that we can derive the right impulses from spiritual science only if we make the effort to progress ever further in a positive, concrete understanding of the spiritual beings about whom spiritual science wishes to instruct us. I have emphasized here before that we must of course realize first that human beings consist of a physical body, an etheric body, an astral body, and so on, and we need to know how these various members are related to one another. But if we are intent upon deriving the right impulses from spiritual science it is not enough to rest content with these abstractions. We need to become thoroughly familiarized with the interrelationships in the cosmos whereby these members of the human entelechy are incorporated into the entire cosmic process.

Our physical bodies incorporate us into the physical world and set us down on the physical plane. They make us resemble our parents and other forbears in the ongoing stream of heredity. They bring this about through the fact that they bear within themselves certain preconditions of similarity to our ancestors. And much else is also responsible for the incorporation of our physical bodies into the physical world. We concerned ourselves yesterday to some extent with an awareness of how human beings who gradually advance to what is known as clairvoyant perception free themselves from their dependence upon their physical bodies as tools for relating to the world.

The next step is then that the etheric rather than the physical body serves as the direct means of interrelationship with the world; imaginative perception takes the place of the mental images and other knowledge acquired with the use of our physical bodies, i.e., with the sense organs and the brain. I tried yesterday to describe in a more pictorial way how changed the soul feels when it progresses from using the physical body to making use of the etheric body.

It is true, of course, that we are always making use of our etheric bodies, except when we are sleeping, but we use them in the sense that they carry on their activity within our physical bodies, so that both the physical and etheric bodies are made use of during our life on the physical plane. But we come to know what the particular characteristics of the etheric body are when it is lifted out of its connection with the physical body and put to use as our sole perceptive instrument. We know that this condition comes about naturally immediately after death, when we have laid the physical body aside. Then, for a short time, we make use of the etheric body, until that too is laid aside.

We have therefore to distinguish the first condition after death, in which we dissolve our bond with the physical body, from the second condition that soon follows it, and brings about the dissolution of our bond with the etheric body.

I have been saying that the physical body binds us to everything that comes to us on the physical plane. What, then, does the etheric body bind us to? It binds us to everything that relates us to the cosmos, to the extraterrestrial, to everything that lives in us that cannot be ascribed directly to any connection with the physical realm. If, for example, a person is born with a physically defective ear, he won't be able to become a musician. But physical defects are due to physical heredity. This is a radical case that illustrates our dependence upon the ongoing heredity process. But we must turn our attention from the capacities to which our physical bodies predispose us to those occasioned by the etheric. These show up more distinctly in particular predispositions of the soul. Only a poor observer can miss the fact of the great differences of soul manifested by individuals. Dull-witted materialists are sometimes little interested in subtle differences of soul; they want to investigate the external form element alone. But alert observers of life are perfectly aware that nobody resembles any other person as far as his individuality is concerned.

People who have entertained theosophical concepts for awhile are satisfied to explain these individual differences by saying that everyone has lived through repeated earth lives and demonstrates in his individual characteristics what he has brought with him from the past. This is right, of course, but it does not suffice for true understanding. Just imagine, for example, a person being born with a sensitive musical ear, but with no opportunity to get a musical education. In such a case his musical ear would go undeveloped. One cannot, of course, be musically educated if one lacks a musical ear, but external opportunity, a person's milieu, must also permit it. There are people who are always satisfied to fall back on the same one-sided explanation of facts, saying that our higher ego, our higher self, takes care of everything. The higher self is actually the world! This may be true, but it is by no means enough to explain everything in the universe. It is true that karma is the cause of our individual predispositions, that our individual differences come from the way we develop in the course of our incarnations. But it is not enough to know that we pass through various earth lives and develop ourselves as individuals; we need to know what enables us to make actual use in life of the capacities developed by us as individuals.

Let us turn our attention to the life between death and a new birth. You are familiar with the content of the published lecture cycle entitled Life between Death and Rebirth, and can gather from it that the various factors preparing us for rebirth, for a new incarnation in a physical body, must be brought together during that life.¹ But it has to be possible in the spiritual world for human beings to find there what they need in order to develop their individual capacities. We can conceive of having had an incarnation during which we laid the foundation for certain developments in the following earth life, but finding no possibility between death and rebirth of bringing to development the potentialities implanted in us for the following incarnation. A plant seed may be full of potential, but unless it is planted in favorable soil it is impossible for its potential to develop. Similarly, we may be ever so full of promise as individuals, but if we are unable to find in the spiritual world factors that nourish us as suitable soil does a plant seed, then the life-conditions needed for the unfolding of the capacities we have developed for a future incarnation cannot be provided.

This can make us aware that the world contains deep hidden secrets that can be discovered if we train the light of spiritual science on the actual facts. A few catchy theories or sayings, such as that we have various incarnations and so on, each as our individuality dictates, from one to the next, are not enough; they do not reach down to what we experience as the riddles of life. The need, as I have reiterated these last few days, is always to find the right perspective. We will encounter much in life that will strike us as profound riddles that need some degree of solution if we are not to feel ourselves helpless strugglers who, though we may see the riddles life presents, cannot cope with them.

There is a riddle I want to bring up here because it deals with the spiritual investigator's connection with the question of what conditions contribute to the development of individuality. I'll characterize it later on. I refer to the riddles we encounter in life with respect to the varying ages at which people die. Let's say one person lives to a great old age, while someone else dies very young. People die, of course, at all the various ages. We can state this thoughtlessly; there is particularly little inclination to be sensitive to a riddle so frequently encountered. But the fact is that the most commonplace matters pose the greatest riddles.

A contemplation of the relationship of the etheric body to the world as a whole brings us closer to this riddle. Everyone knows as a fact of experience that our physical bodies age; we grow older and older physically. And everyone understands what is involved in aging. But where our etheric bodies are concerned the opposite is true: we grow younger, ever younger. When we are very old, our physical bodies are old, but our etheric bodies have grown young. Some of you have already heard of this in my lectures, but I want to discuss it today in a different context. We have to develop our etheric bodies during an incarnation in such a way that when we have come to its close, our astral bodies will be so embedded in these etheric bodies that they feel themselves prepared for their appropriate entrance into the next life. It is really true that when an individual is old and gray and wrinkled, his etheric body burgeons with fresh life, for his astral body must accustom itself at this point to live in an etheric body already teeming with germinal potential. The way the astral body is to permeate and work in the physical body of a child in the following incarnation must already find some degree of expression in its connection with the etheric body grown young.

It is remarkable how the genius of language can reveal some secret or other. As I've mentioned on other occasions, you will find a beautiful passage in Goethe's Faust where the term “growing young” is used in place of “being born,” “growing young” rather than “growing old.” In other words, we start to grow young when we are born.

This is based, of course, on the conception of the soul pre-existing birth. But the forces it will need to enable it to work through the body into which the child is born must have been acquired while the etheric body is growing young in the aging physical body of the previous earth life.

Materialists find special corroboration of their materialistic theories in the fact that even geniuses—or at least those who are regarded as such—sometimes become senile in their old age, and Kant is cited as a particularly relished case. But people who subscribe to this way of thinking do not grasp the fact that the soul can manifest here on the physical plane only through the agency of the physical organs. Kant's brain became unable to serve as the tool of the soul forces he had evolved, and this is why he appeared feebleminded in old age, even though the soul that was preparing to organize the physical body of his next incarnation was actually already living in him. But in the previous earth life this soul was unable to make a suitable instrument of the physical body it inhabited.

If you apply what I have just been saying, you will see that it makes a tremendous, an enormous difference whether an individual dies in extreme old age or as a youngster, perhaps even in childhood. For the etheric body of someone who dies in youth has not yet grown young. If we are speaking of physical human beings we can say that they are growing old, but in speaking of the etheric body we would have to say that it “grows young.” That would be the proper expression for it. The etheric body grows young but it has not yet grown entirely young in those who die at an early age. I once tried to suggest this by saying that when a person dies in childhood or in youth his etheric body has not actually been used up. This etheric body would have lasted him a lifetime; he could have reached sixty years or more with it if he hadn't died young. But the force inherent in such an etheric body remains in existence, just as forces in the physical world do; they are not lost. However, we need to make a closer study of the special, unique attributes of this etheric body.

When a person can live to what is considered a normal old age—say seventy or eighty—his etheric body has grown very young. The whole fruit of his life experience lodges in this young etheric body, is imprinted on and expressed in it, and the astral body then takes possession of it. That happens in the following way. Let us picture the physical body abandoned by the etheric body. So long as the etheric body remains in the physical body, it cannot develop the forces it has acquired in life because it is imprisoned in the physical body. Picture how, in our previous earth life, we acquired this or that capacity. This is to say, we acquired it with the physical body of that incarnation. What we have added to it in the present incarnation has not yet had time to develop organs for its use; we must first create these in our current incarnation for the life to follow. But all this is lodged in the etheric body, which is more elastic, more fluid than the physical. No use can be made of it, however, as long as the etheric body remains bound to the physical body. But when the physical body has fallen away, the etheric body is freed. And now this etheric body brings forth all the fruits of the life we have lived through up to our death. That is also the reason why it presents the whole life-panorama that spreads out before us for a few days, the tableau of finished earth life, so that we may learn and acquire from this panorama everything that can be extracted from our past experiences. And that takes place during the few days during which we have the tableau before us.

Every morning, on awakening, when our astral body enters our physical and etheric bodies, it has to adapt itself to what has evolved out of the physical and etheric bodies of the past incarnation, and there it encounters what we have made of ourselves. The astral body never enters the etheric body in a way that allows it to make use of what the etheric body has developed in the present incarnation. But after death it does so. It is related to the etheric body in a way that lets it feel and perceive and sense the fruits gathered from the life just ended. And when, a few days later, the astral body separates from the etheric, the entire product of that life is contained in the astral body as the result of the astral body's having drawn it out of the etheric body during the days it has spent there. The astral body needs to spend only those few days in the liberated etheric body to live through everything that an incarnation has brought forth. But it takes a long time so to shape what it has thus experienced that a new earth life can be fashioned from it.

It requires a great deal, as you see, to fashion a new life. And if it were left to human wisdom to achieve this fashioning all by itself, the result would certainly be most inadequate. Try to picture yourselves having to shape your entire physical instrument with the content of your consciousness. You would first have to have a thorough understanding of it. But every glance into external science makes it clear how little insight into our physical make-up we possess. But between death and rebirth we possess it sufficiently to be able to fashion our physical body, right down into its most delicate details, in a way that qualifies it to make use of the capacities evolved in the previous incarnation.

If someone were to ask you how a convolution of the brain could be arranged to conform with the capacities acquired in the previous incarnation and you had to decide whether it should be turned or twisted thus or so, you wouldn't be able to say, if you were examined on the subject, that twisting in some particular direction would correspond to a person's having been an orator in his past incarnation, and that that particular twist would produce the right working out in this life of the acquired capacity. How could you conceivably answer out of the consciousness you possess on the physical plane? But we have to answer that question in the life between death and rebirth, for we must endow the new etheric body with the requisite capacity delicately to chisel out our organs. A single word suffices to describe what is needed, but I wanted to evoke a sense of what this word encompasses: wisdom is required, a wisdom human beings really need to have.

Even though Kant grew feebleminded in old age, his soul—which is to say, his astral body as it lived in his newly constituted etheric body—his soul was wise, for it was already in possession of wisdom. But his ego was unable to raise it to a conscious level with the brain. His soul contained the wisdom that was to emerge between death and rebirth and make its contribution to Kant's future incarnation. Kant lived into old age. The older a person grows, physically speaking, the more pronounced is this moment of wisdom.

But in the case of those who die young the situation is different, for the etheric body has not grown young, and there is consequently less earth-acquired wisdom stored up in it. It is earth-acquired wisdom that is involved here. Something else takes its place. Those who die early have old etheric bodies that have not had time to grow young, and these are all the more teeming with will. Direct will-force in all its immediacy, the love element, creative love-force, permeates them. That is the difference between the etheric bodies of the old and young. The former bear more the character of wisdom, the latter of will. The etheric body of a person who dies young streams out love, warm love, a warm etheric love-element, while that of an older person streams out an aura filled with light and wisdom.

We can answer the question that interests us here by asking spiritual science what would happen if, for some reason, everyone were to grow very old, living on to eighty or ninety, if not a single person died young. What would the result be?

In that case, all the etheric bodies deserted by their souls would be imbued with loving wisdom. People living on the earth in the continuity of history would find it possible to learn a great deal during their physical earth lives, for their physical bodies would be wisely fashioned. They would be born somewhat undifferentiated, each similar to all the rest, but they could learn a great deal on the physical plane. They would be delicately and wisely built, and could learn a great deal, since such learning would be connected with an extremely mobile constitution. Due to their extraordinarily sensitive, mechanistically-wisely constituted physical organisms, these people would be in a state of labile balance that could easily shift. A person would learn a great deal, but be terribly nervous, as the current “nervous” age would express it. It would be a humanity tending to fidget and to have a precarious balance, very gifted for learning on the physical plane, but nevertheless very restless and fidgety. We had better say fidgety rather than nervous; why not put it in a way that feels right? In earlier times, even a couple of centuries ago, throughout Europe a person who had strong nerves and could stand a lot was referred to as “nervy” or “nervous.” But nowadays the tone is not set by the same people, so the meaning of the word got turned into the exact opposite.

Now the soul-differentiations we bring with us into an incarnation from the spiritual world would not exist in human development if everybody grew old, if no one were to die young. There would be no talents, no being born with special gifts. People would come into the world more or less like each other, more or less undifferentiated. They would differ from one another and learn different things only as a result of experiencing different conditions on the physical plane, and would be rather similarly adaptable to whatever circumstances they encountered. Special individual needs would be taken care of by karma through the agency of heredity. Beyond this, what we know as predispositions to special soul-qualities would be lacking. People would simply not possess inner differences.

But everything in the world has to be founded on balance, as I've often said, and in these matters too there can be no one-sidedness. Human life must accordingly be built, on the one hand, on the possibility of pouring into the physical body what an individual has stored up as wisdom in the etheric body's growing younger for use in a future incarnation. On the other hand, the will impulses of those who die young are needed. I have shown at hand of many examples how children who die very young have not expended their etheric bodies. Right here at the Goetheanum we ourselves live in the aura of an etheric body out of which those forces that provide artistic stimulus are derived. I explained how a child belonging to the Goetheanum community left his etheric body at his death, and that this etheric body has created an aura that is incorporated into our building. Those able to perceive the nature of the impulses that come from this etheric body find support in them for the artistic impulses to be lived out here.

But this is in general the situation with the etheric bodies of those who die young. They go back; they haven't as yet grown so young as entirely to have worn down the will element; instead, will and creative love-forces accompany them into the spiritual world. And now a continuous interchange has to take place between those etheric bodies that have grown wholly young and those less young. Continuous mutual support is exchanged in the spiritual world between what ascends from the earth in the etheric bodies of the very aged and the etheric bodies of young people, or, indeed, of those in the in-between years. When very young children die, those referred to in Faust as “the midnight-born,” their etheric bodies are very old, quite hoary in fact, but they are endowed with strong will- forces. Etheric bodies of this kind are able to work powerfully on the long-lived etheric bodies of those who grow physically old.

Just think what a brilliant idea it was that made Goethe have the centenarian Faust go to heaven surrounded by the etheric bodies of very young boys, the “midnight-born,” hinting thereby that an exchange of the kind described has to take place!

This interchange is always going on. We can therefore say that there exist in the spiritual world the etheric bodies of human beings who have grown physically old, and various things are taking place in them (see drawing, mauve); then, in red, the etheric bodies of deceased young people, with various things taking place in them as well; and an interchange between them, a process of mutual exchange. And what we encounter in the life between death and rebirth is the result of the situations that develop in this exchange between the etheric bodies of those who died young and those who died old. This interchange is essential; without it, the evolution of humanity on earth could not proceed properly.

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The beings who direct this interchange are to be found in the realm of the angel hierarchy, so that we really have to recognize such an interchange between the two kinds of etheric bodies in the spiritual world in which we are immersed. The two kinds of activity coalesce, like two merging rivers. But they are then given proper direction and regulation by angelic beings; that is one of the tasks with which angels are charged. When, therefore, persons are able to come into the world with special talents, this is due not only to the possibility that between death and rebirth wisdom of a materialistic nature that is a fruit of the earth has been imprinted into physical bodies, but that something not as yet fully developed on earth, the product of the etheric bodies of those who died young, has brought about effects present as forces that can be interwoven in the process of fashioning human talents.

You see how spiritual science can bring about a living feeling for things when we really immerse ourselves in its secrets. We learn from spiritual science to lift ourselves in spirit to a contemplation of the mystery of death in an older person. For then we tell ourselves that people grow old in order that human evolution may go forward in the right way for as long as physical bodies are needed as vehicles. We have a premonition, whenever an older person dies, of the fruits that human evolution on earth will bear as a result. And when we give ourselves up to a contemplation of what the future holds, we realize that there has to be a continuous development of talents in mankind's progressive evolution. This person must be gifted in this direction, another in that, with capabilities ranging all the way to the genius level. That could not be the case if nobody were fated to die young. And as we look up to people of special genius, we can attribute their gifts to the fact that some individuals have to die young. To contemplate the mystery of death in the case of young human beings is to realize that early death too is part of the wise design, for it gives rise to seed-forces of soul-endowment needed by the human race for its further progress.

If we can lift ourselves above a personal reaction to death to a contemplation of what is needed by mankind as a whole, we encounter the wisdom involved in the deaths of both young and old. It is important to realize that a truly genuine and earnest study of spiritual science does not remain mere theory, but that a proper grasp of theories leads to attitudes and feelings that enable us to achieve greater harmony in our lives than we could achieve if we didn't have it. We need spiritual science to develop the deeper insight that can lead to a perception of the consonance that lies behind life's otherwise unbearable dissonances.

We learn, too, to understand the sacrifices that we have to make in life and the things that pain us, if we know that the entire universe can be rightly maintained only by developments that cannot help but cause us sorrow. We simply have to make the effort to sense that the many hundreds of geniuses: Homer, Shakespeare, Goethe, Michelangelo, Raphael, and so on, are essential to mankind's progressive evolution, and would not have existed as such had the ground not been prepared by people dying young. This has nothing to do with the individual. Those who die young and thus sacrifice their etheric bodies in their youth provide the entire cosmos with a fruitful soil for the growth and maturing of human soul-capacities.

We become united with the universe when, instead of taking an abstract approach to spiritual science, it becomes for us a seeking out of impulses that flow into us as soul-warmth, reconciling us with the world, moving us to our depths as they show us that, though we human beings have to undergo painful experiences, we suffer them for the sake of harmony in the entire universe.

It is not always easy to withdraw our attention from individual life to focus on the life of the whole world. But the fact that achieving this goal is difficult is also the reason why it strengthens us. And as we develop a feeling for community from our suffering, that sense of the totality of the cosmic order becomes ever more intense and lays ever more profound hold on our innermost souls. And we prepare ourselves in doing this to become participants in the universal order of a kind the gods make use of.

• 1. Rudolf Steiner, Life between Death and Rebirth, (Hudson, N.Y.: Anthroposophic Press, 1987).

If you think over the change that had to be described in advancing from perception of the external, physical world to perceiving the elemental world next above it, you will see that the worlds from which our physical universe and everything in it issued differ greatly from this physical world. A person who adopted the materialistic point of view more for convenience than for the sake of his conviction might say, Well, why should I bother with all these worlds spiritual science speaks of? The world I'm living in now is enough to satisfy me. There may be other worlds, but I'm not going to bother my head about them.

Such a statement is as far from reality as it is possible to get, for it is impossible for anyone to disregard the worlds of the spirit. And it is just when someone says that they don't exist and that he won't trouble himself about them that he is very markedly under their influence. A statement of this sort is made only when the speaker has been led astray by ahrimanic forces.

Not if he had them by the neck, I vow,
Would e'er these people scent the devil.

This accurately states the fact of the matter, though he who stated it did so in a thoroughly ironic spirit.

Ignorance of the spiritual worlds will never enable a person to deal with them. For that, it is necessary to know them. But we must always remember how strongly the physical world colors not only our concepts and ideas, but the way we sense and feel as well. Even when we want to get to know the spiritual world, we have a need, even a longing, to find it resembling the physical world, a wish, at least, to find that we can characterize it adequately with the concepts we have grown used to in physical existence. But I have already called your attention to the fact that the conceptions we form based on the physical world do not suffice to characterize the spiritual world. If more of our members came to understand this, it would be possible to introduce more new ways of expressing things and this is indeed necessary. I made use of an isolated case yesterday in contrasting growing old with growing young. Similar terms could and should be found to express the totally different nature of the spiritual world.

Now I want to call your attention right away to something that demonstrates how vitally necessary it is to arrive at a new terminology if we are to grow into the spiritual world in the right way. Many aspirants would find themselves perceiving the spiritual world relatively sooner if they could free themselves from the habit of depending on words.

When we go through the portals of death, the first phenomenon, the first fact, to appear is the laying aside of the physical body. We know that this physical body then undergoes dissolution into the earth element, regardless of the form of disposal chosen.

So the physical body undergoes dissolution into earthly elements. We can refer to it simply as dissolution. The observable fact is that the physical body disintegrates into its smallest particles, which are then incorporated into earthly matter. That is the physical situation, and we can speak of dissolution of this body into earthly matter if we take into account everything we know about matter and substance. We know too that this dissolution process is a spiritual one as well, but we don't need to go into that any further at the present moment. What is important for us now is the situation as it appears to physical observation.

Now it is of the greatest importance to realize clearly that this dissolution of the physical body is by no means merely the process which our physical organs perceive; it has far greater significance. We must consider the following to form a concept of it.

Human beings spend all of their waking life between birth and death with their ego and astral body enclosed within the physical body. It has always been more or less the case that the ego and astral body inhabited the physical body when people were awake. I will draw the physical body as a vase containing them. There are other ways of drawing this too, but that isn't important.

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Let's be quite exact in picturing our ego and astral body contained here in the physical body. They are enclosed in the etheric body too, but for now we will concern ourselves with the physical body only. When we go to sleep we are no longer thus enclosed, as I've often shown. But then we normally lose our ego-awareness, and even our awareness of the astral body; this awareness is restored only when we press ourselves back, so to speak, into the physical body. It is this pressing into the physical body between birth and death that gives our souls a sense of ego-hood, that allows us, as I might also express it, to feel our souls ego-permeated.

At death the physical body disintegrates into earthly matter. This is of significance. All the time we are asleep, a desire to return to the physical body lives in us, as I've often described. It dominates us from the moment of falling asleep to our awakening; we long to get back into it. When, at death, we have laid it aside, we can't go on longing to do this; we are unable to press ourselves back into it again. The result is that from now on we cannot develop the desire to return to the physical body, so the longing we have during sleep now falls away, and something else takes its place. Its place is taken by the thought of the physical body that now makes its appearance in the astral body and our ego. We contemplate our physical body. It lives in our consciousness and becomes part of its content. And the disintegration of our physical body into its elements results in our maintaining awareness of our physical body during the time between death and rebirth.

This remembering of our physical body is the means whereby we are enabled to know ourselves as egos during the entire time between death and rebirth. Instead of having a physical body, we have knowledge of it; a state of awareness replaces it. The sense of possessing a physical body that we have for the period from birth to death is replaced after death by an awareness of this body. And this awareness, which is a purely spiritual condition, gives us the necessary further connection with the life we lived on earth.

We know that the next outstanding event to take place after death is the laying aside of, the separation from, the etheric body. As I said yesterday, it is the etheric body that connects us with the surrounding cosmos, just as it is the physical body that connects us with the earth.

You can gather from various things I've said that the etheric body is absorbed into the etheric world when we lay it aside after death, just as the physical body is absorbed into the earth world.

But it would be a misconception to picture this absorption of the etheric body into the etheric world as exactly analogous to the disintegration of the physical body into physical matter, for the process is not one of dissolution; instead, what we have imprinted into the etheric body remains there. The etheric body expands. In certain special cases, however, when the etheric body is kept intact because of an early death, it can have a special task too, as I've been describing in the course of these lectures. Generally speaking, however, we can say that the etheric body is absorbed into the etheric world, but that it takes with it the fruits of the life between birth and death, thus enriching the etheric world. We enrich the etheric world at death with what we have given our etheric bodies. It is therefore incorrect to describe the etheric body as dissolving into the surrounding ether. Instead, we need to try to picture a process quite different from any that could take place in the physical realm. It is desirable to find a term for this that could not apply to any physical process, and I have thought much about this, and if I now wish to describe the way this etheric body is absorbed into the etheric world, I can best do so with the phrase “in-binding.” The physical body, then, is subject to dissolution, the etheric body to “in-binding.” This means that the content we have given it is bound up with, embedded in the whole etheric universe; “in-binding” is thus the polar opposite of dissolution. When we are trying to find the fitting term for something that does not exist in the physical, it is good to find an expression descriptive of the actual fact and inapplicable to the physical world.

“In-binding” is the term to use here because of what actually happens. Let us assume that someone has built this or that into his etheric body. The etheric body is connected with everything extraterrestrial, as I have said. Now insofar as a person has some experience of things beyond the merely earthly in his life here (and everybody has such experiences, even materialists, only they're not aware of it), that content lives in his etheric body. It is incorporated into the etheric world, embedded in it. And if we observe a person's abandoned etheric body with clairvoyant vision, we discover in it the answer to a certain question, namely, what were the heavens (taking the term “heavens” to include everything supra-earthly) able to derive for themselves from that person during his lifetime?

What they were able to take for themselves is totally different from what physical observation can see the earth deriving. If we consider somebody's earthly remains, they amount for physical eyes to nothing more than a little heap of earth like other earthly substances. And people assume, though not quite correctly, that the earth would remain just the same if this little heap of earth, the physical body, did not become part of it at the person's death. They assume that it is of little significance for the earth to receive back that part of itself that was a person's body during his lifetime.

But those who contemplate the developing postmortem relationship of the etheric body to what I have called the heavens come to a different view of the matter. They would have to say that the content a person has created for himself as the fruit of his thinking, feeling, and willing, of his work, of his whole existence, of everything that has happened to him and that has, during his life on earth, been incorporated into his etheric body is something for which the heavens are full of gratitude when they receive it. A cloud of gratitude sweeps over those who direct their clairvoyant gaze upon the abandoned etheric body of a deceased human being. The heavens' attitude is the exact opposite of that of the earth with its total lack of gratitude. When our gaze falls on the graves of human beings, not an earthly word of thanks is heard, acknowledging the return to the earth of the materials it provided for man's fashioning, whereas thanks resound from the heavens for everything with which the human being has endowed his etheric body during his lifetime. The heavens have bound man's etheric body into themselves. This too is part of what was brought up yesterday, when the statement was made that when we make a proper study of spiritual science, every concept we derive from it takes on an ethical aspect, brings about a moral deepening of our souls, while at the same time suffusing us with living warmth.

Now let us focus on what has been stated in these lectures: that a person who ascends into spiritual worlds (which he does also in his life after death) possesses a completely different kind of consciousness, a very different view of things. I have already suggested how inwardly mobile thinking then becomes. But this inner mobility is only the first stage of ascent into the spiritual world. On ascending further after death, upon laying aside our etheric bodies, our consciousness is of an entirely different sort than it is here in the physical world. Here, objects are outside us; we perceive them from outside. But when we have ascended as high into the spiritual world as I am now describing, we no longer confront such objects. What for us here in the physical world is the most impenetrable aspect of animals and human beings, their inner life of soul, is their most easily penetrable aspect for beings of the higher worlds. We participate in the soul life there. We have a world of beings rather than a world of objects surrounding us. That is the significant thing about it.

When we stand beside one another here on the physical plane, you stand there and I over here, both of us holding on to an object, say a table. And now we have to eliminate all objects from our consciousness, picturing ourselves in a world occupied by souls, in inner touch with them in the way we relate on the physical plane to our thoughts and feelings. We have to picture it this way. We don't establish contact with a being of the angelic hierarchy by taking its hand, but rather by living in its being as we live in our thoughts and feelings. I have often described the situation as an entering into our thoughts and feelings by these beings. We express this correctly when we say that these beings live in us.

You will find what I've just been saying in my book, An Outline of Occult Science^1">1 There is described in detail how we live in the life after death in a much more intimate relationship with the other beings there than can ever be the case with our fellow human beings on the earth, for we are inwardly as connected with them as we now are with our thoughts and feelings. And we can also approach the dead with our souls while we are here on earth if we work towards that by doing the suggested reading to them. We have to develop the capacity for it, but we will be aware of the dead really coming closer to us. It is a matter of making the effort to achieve an inward living together with them in the way we live in our thoughts and feelings.

Materialistically-minded spiritualists best demonstrate how little inclined people are to enter into these higher concepts of true inner reality. The term “materialistically-minded spiritualists” may sound odd, but it is a fact that large numbers of spiritualists are much more materialistically-minded than ordinary materialists. The latter say, “There's no such thing as spirit,” and they call matter “matter.” But a lot of spiritualists are intent upon perceiving spirits materially, either as apparitions of light, a material substance, or through the sense of touch. Such are the nuances in their encounters with spirits, a materializing of the entire spiritual world. We must acquire the ability to look for deeper reality than that transmitted by the senses. There is even something quite absurd in the materialistic spiritualist's seeking to see the dead with physical eyes when he can't expect to see them with physical eyes after his own death. To see a dead person, we have to try to see him as though we were ourselves dead, that is, of course, without physical eyes.

The fact that we must confront the spiritual world with a consciousness wholly different from the one that confronts the physical world is usually expressed as “we see the physical world objectively, the spiritual world subjectively”—meaning that we see the spirit when we extend our subjective experience to include the spiritual world. This is a much more intensive exercise of sight than physical seeing, but it remains subjective, in intimate connectedness with what is perceived. Very few people of recent times have had any inkling of the fact that this spiritual world must really be described in such a way. Those who have had a premonition of it have had to struggle with terminology. One of them, Berkeley, immediately went too far in his attempt to express how the spiritual world must be related to. It was clear to him that a person perceiving the so-called outer world of matter can certainly not say, “There is something behind what I am perceiving,” but only, “When I open my eyes, I see colors, etc.; when I use my ears to listen, I hear tones, and so on. But I cannot say whether anything material exists beyond and behind these perceptions.” It seemed utter nonsense to Berkeley to state anything beyond “There is no existence independent of perception.”

Berkeley was both right and wrong; right, insofar as it is a crude idea that prompts a person to assume that some form of matter accounts for what we perceive; what we perceive is the universe. Nothing exists beyond our perceptions; minds and their perceptions are all there is. Radically stated, the situation as Bishop Berkeley sees it is the following: Here we have so and so many individuals. Judged on the basis of ordinary life, we say that one, two, three, four or however many people are sitting here, with bodies, etc. But Berkeley would declare this to be untrue and say that only souls are present, their bodies being merely what these souls perceive. They are an illusion; only souls exist. Or, every soul here is harboring something like an external illusion of everyone else's body. But Miss M., for example, should not allow herself to believe that Mrs. K. is really sitting there bodily. Miss M. has a picture in her soul of Mrs. K., and Mrs. K. has one of Miss M. All else is illusion; only souls exist. “Nothing exists independent of perception.”

Bishop Berkeley was right only up to a certain point. He was not a spiritual scientist, and could therefore not be aware of something I can most easily express as follows: Let us suppose that Mrs. K. is not observing Miss M., but instead contemplating some event that took place five days ago and that has popped into her mind again just this moment. An event, such as the breaking of a vase five days ago, is not a spirit. Let us picture her reviewing the whole business, how she held the vase in her hands, how it toppled, how it was shattered into fragments. The whole picture rises up within her. We can certainly say that this picture is not another soul. Still, taking the entire soul as presently constituted, this process now rising up in it is something perceived as objectively as any other object existing outside it. In the one case, the object is beheld in confrontation, while in the other it is a past process rising up and becoming conscious. This latter, too, cannot be said to exist within the soul; it had first withdrawn from it. Otherwise we would have had to keep on picturing the breaking of the vase every minute of our waking life during the past five days. Let us take it as a blessing that the picture existed outside our souls and only now returns to consciousness. It existed outside the soul in just the same sense that everything else does. It existed originally inside it, but then withdrew. Here you have something that is not a spirit, for the breaking of the vase is neither of the spirit nor of the soul, but simply re-enters the soul as an objective element.

If you relate this to what I've been saying in these lectures, namely that what is out there in the universe is really of the past, something long forgotten, you will be able to picture what the external world is insofar as we perceive it as an external world rather than as another soul.

I'll make a schematic drawing. Let's picture a soul here, with various earlier events contained within it, such as that involving the broken vase. And it will contain other events as well, but I won't put them all in separately.

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All immediate conscious experience is comprised within the circular area. The fact that the broken vase can be remembered is due to its having disappeared from conscious experience; it can return to consciousness only as a memory-image. The event has been thrust into the objective realm. Just think how great the longing of many people is to thrust into the objective realm such events as broken vases, to forget them if possible and not allow them to break through into consciousness! They can be submerged to ever greater depths of objectivity. And when they've reached the ultimate degree of submersion, they live outside us.

The things and processes in our environment are there only because they were thought and then pressed into objectivity by beings during the ancient sun and moon periods. Now they have objective existence. Everything we confront was once thought and felt and existed as conscious content, and was then thrust out of consciousness. We might say that the objective world is what gods and spirits once thought and forgot and thrust out of themselves.

Berkeley is therefore obviously incorrect in stating that there is no world outside us, only souls. For what is outside us is the product of forgetting. Of course, the bodies of the individual souls here have not been forgotten by each soul, for their first beginnings were created and thought by spirits on ancient Saturn, then objectified, and so on. We must be quite clear that consciousness preceded existence, that what exists externally had its origin in consciousness, just like what we have in our memories in the first stage of objectification. The objectification process in the case of the individual souls of today goes only as far as in the case of the broken vase. In the case of beings that developed through the Saturn, Sun, and Moon periods it is so far advanced that the thoughts they had have now achieved the solidity of our mountain ranges. Since we are connected with the whole spiritual world, we perceive what the gods thought so long ago.

It will become clear to you as you think this over how important it is that an objective world emerges from subjective realms. I've often stressed the fact that our memories have to remain intact if we are to maintain ego-consciousness, and the gods had to create a world out of themselves for the same reason. The gods thrust out the entire universe in order to preserve their consciousness, just as we carry memory-images for the period of time since we began remembering. And we human beings thrust out our physical bodies and ether bodies in order to attain a higher level of consciousness.

As I've emphasized from another standpoint, death is a terrible thing only from the perspective of the physical world. Looked at from the standpoint of the spiritual world, where we find ourselves from the moment we have died, death is the launching of our entire later consciousness. To look back to death illumines the consciousness we possess between death and rebirth. Though we cannot look back to our birth into the physical world, we can look back continuously to our death as to the most glorious moment of our past life. Looking back during the time after death, we encounter the moment of dying, and this encounter, visible to us in this time-perspective, provides us after death with a continuous ego-consciousness in the nature of a mirror- image, reflected from the fact of death (See drawing).

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As we pass through death, then, we grow out of the way of seeing things that, in the physical world, forces us to look upon objects, and we grow into an outlook experienced as our being increasingly harbored by other spiritual beings, coming closer and closer to them. While we live in our physical bodies here, our thoughts, our feelings, our impulses of will are restricted to ourselves alone. But when we pass through death, these flow out into the world, into the other spiritual beings who then live in us. We reproduce ourselves; our consciousness expands. From a single unit we become a multiplicity, a oneness in the many, and the multiplicity reveals itself as it absorbs our oneness.

So our growing to participation in the world ordinarily referred to as the world of the hierarchies is the process that takes place as soon as we enter the spiritual world. Here on earth we speak of objects and of the experiences we have with them, whereas the dead speak exclusively of beings and of the communications made to them by beings about other beings, speak of a lesser or stronger connection with them, and the like.

Much effort is required to convey an even partially adequate conception of such matters as this growing into the spiritual world. Now that we have tried to form at least a slightly more exact idea of the manner of this growth, let us turn our attention to the facts we spoke about yesterday: those involving death in younger and in maturer years.

A person dying in his youth passes through the gate of death. His physical body disintegrates, his etheric body “in-binds” itself. When this happens to a boy or girl, to someone who is still a child, that individual is granted a particularly strong impression of the inner harmony of the marvelous structure that we feel our physical body to be. It is one of the most outstanding experiences of those who die young that they carry through the gates of death a marked inner conceptual awareness of the marvelous build of the human body. It would be impossible to imagine anything as magnificently built as this human physical body, this great work of art, this world-wonder. I have often spoken about this. But those who die young are filled to overflowing with it.

And this conception, this inner saturation with such an impression, first brings those who die young together with members of the hierarchy of the spirits of form so that their souls become intimately interwoven with those spirits. So we see these souls being received by the spirits of form with particular grace and favor. Furthermore, those souls grow inwardly together with the beings belonging to the hierarchy of the spirits of will. If I may put it thus, the relationship of these spirits of will and of form to the universe is such that they continuously convey to a person privy to their secrets that “those who have to abandon their earth-lives early belong to us, for what they bring us is an essential ingredient of our creative work on mankind's evolution.” Those who die in old age are less suffused with impressions of the marvelous build of the human body, but are the more permeated by a sense of the marvelous build of the entire universe, of the cosmos as a whole. The thinking and feeling content of those dying in maturity is directed more to the external, and they grow together particularly quickly and easily with those beings whom we call the spirits of wisdom, by whom they are received with grace and favor.

Anyone who investigates this in detail receives a strong impression of how human beings live with higher spiritual beings after death. To enter lovingly into what spiritual science can reveal is truly not to end up with empty abstractions, vague talk about the spirit, vague statements that human beings are received by the spiritual world. It is possible to point instead to the fact that one individual is received by the spirits of movement or by the spirits of wisdom, while someone else is received by the spirits of form and of will. And this means getting a conception of how, in inner reality as observed from a higher standpoint, everything that happens is actually good, and how what remains incomprehensible from the standpoint of the physical world becomes fully understandable when seen from a higher level. For the beings of the higher hierarchies know what can be accomplished, not only with those of maturer years, but above all with those who have died young. There is no one who has lived in vain! And the entire evolutionary process in which humanity is involved could not go on if everything were not to happen as it actually happens.

But a concept, a constantly extended concept of all these matters can be attained only by really entering into spiritual science, by really being able to grasp that it is only our epoch that is so God-forsaken, and that in our time only those individuals think truly materialistically who are either unable to think at all or else don't want to think.

I once told you of the case of a philosopher who really thought, and I quoted a remark of his to show you how far a truly thinking philosopher can go—one who doesn't know everything, but who mulls over how much a person can know as the result of his experience on the physical plane. It is legitimate to say that for the most part the stupider people are, the smarter they consider themselves to be. The smarter they are, the more they know how much it takes to discover life's meaning. That is why, a little while ago, I read you the statement of a person who had thought a lot and had said that “someone could claim that there are invisible specters in hens' eggs in addition to the whites and yolks.” This was a man who had really taken great pains over philosophizing and who really knows how little ordinary ideas contribute to insight. He therefore says that it is possible for someone to make the quoted assertion about eggs containing invisible specters along with whites and yolks, and to say, “‘These specters materialize and take on a body, and when the materialization process is completed, they break through the hard eggshell with their sharp beaks and run to the grains scattered for them and eat them.’ Nothing can actually be objected to such a bizarre assertion except that the preposition ‘in’ (‘in hen's eggs’) is used in an unusual way, not in a geometric but in a metaphysical sense. If taken in the latter sense, the assertion is correct.”

The same philosopher, Otto Liebmann, who was a thorough thinker but wanted to limit himself to an outlook on the physical plane alone, goes on to say in his book Thoughts and Facts (quoted here because it enables us to see how people who really think notice what can be perpetuated as a result of relying on thinking restricted to the external),²

It is not only children, but superstitious barbarians and fantastic poets, who since time immemorial have regarded the material world as ensouled throughout. Thales, who like other natural philosophers of ancient times, attributed a soul to magnets and amber because of their magnetism, is credited with the statement that the cosmos is ensouled, and that everything has gods in it.³ Plato calls the stars “divine animals” and speaks in Timaeus of the world-soul.⁴ Aristotle and the Peripatetics thought there were astral spirits, and the doctrine of the ensoulment of the heavenly bodies has been handed down in an essentially unbroken chain of tradition, right down to recent and indeed present times. Kepler talks of the “anima” (soul) of the planets, and in his Harmonices mundi he describes our earth as a gigantic animal whose “whale-like respiration, in alternating periods of sleep and waking dependent on the sun, brings about the tidal rise and fall of the ocean.”⁵ Giordano Bruno enthusiastically depicted the details of this hylozoistic concept, and in his essay Della causa, principio ed uno, as well as elsewhere, expresses his firm conviction that everything in the universe is alive, holding that all corporeal motion in space is the visible expression of the collective life pulsing throughout the world.⁶ The stars and their inhabitants were, in his view, ensouled beings, our earth one gigantic organism, springs and streams the arteries of its divine body. He held the rise and fall of the tides to be effects of the earth's breathing. Volcanic outbreaks and earthquakes are clearly analogous to certain processes in animal organisms, and Goethe bore witness to this when he said to Eckermann (April 1827): “I conceive of the earth with its vapor mantle as a huge animal eternally breathing in and out.”⁷ Fechner's Zend-Avesta,⁸ an extremely strange book, also tends in this direction; like other works of his, it combines jesting with serious commentary, occasionally leading the reader to wonder just how he meant it to be taken.⁹

Gustav Theodor Fechner was really jesting in much he said; he had an inborn tendency to joking. You know, for I mentioned it on one occasion, that he wrote a book called Professor Schleiden and the Moon.¹⁰ Fechner undertook a study of the moon's effect on the weather, and he wrote a good deal about it. Schleiden, a botanist of materialistic persuasion, made fun of him.¹¹ But then Fechner took up the cudgels against Schleiden with his book, Professor Schleiden and the Moon. This was the same Fechner who, in his youth a long time before this, had lashed out in a beautiful little piece of writing against the scientific way of thinking. There is a short work by him in which he proceeds strictly scientifically to prove in all seriousness that the moon is made of iodine.¹² His intention was to demonstrate that it can be strictly scientifically proven that the moon consists of iodine. It is possible to prove this with the very same methodology used in scientific proof of other findings.

When the two men were totally unable to see eye-to-eye in the matter of Fechner's assertions on the subject of the moon's influence on weather, Fechner proposed letting their wives put these to the test. Household arrangements were simpler in those days: pails were set out in the rain to collect water for laundry purposes. Fechner said, “The good Professor Schleiden refuses to believe that it rains less in certain phases of the moon than it does in others. Perhaps we might make a detour via Frau Schleiden.” Since her spouse was unconcerned with differences in the weather at various moon-phases, she could put out her water-catching pails during those phases in which Fechner had reckoned that little rain would fall, whereas Frau Fechner would set hers out at times when Fechner had reckoned on more rain. I won't go on to report that the two wives found agreement no easier than did their husbands, for Frau Professor Schleiden was a bit envious of Frau Professor Fechner for always getting more rain water than she did.

The previous quote from Otto Liebmann continues,

But considering our total ignorance on the score of the sources of spiritual life, we might repeat the question posed by the serious-minded Lessing at the end of his Education of the Human Species regarding the ancient Egyptian, ancient Indian and Pythagorean doctrines of the transmigration of souls: “Is this hypothesis to be thought absurd because it is the most ancient view, because human reason immediately adopted it before schooling had sophisticated and weakened reason?”¹³

What more can we ask? Otto Liebmann comes out with the quite dry statement that no thinking is acute enough to protect us from the doctrine of the transmigration of souls! This shows us that those who have learned to think know how little the thinking restricted to the physical plane can enlighten us about the actual facts of life.

All these things obviously show those able to enter totally seriously into the inner impulses of our spiritual scientific movement how essential this movement is for the present epoch and the near future, and it is not superfluous to give thought again and again to the seriousness that must underlie our movement. This seriousness is what must actually hold us together. We must truly meditate on the subject over and over again to be able to acquire the right feeling for much that causes our movement problems of this or that nature.

And I want to leave nothing untried to make clear to you how vital it is for us to nurture this seriousness, and that we ought really to take the greatest pains to exemplify this seriousness of our movement before the outer world, and to maintain it.

It is fair to say that the breath of life of our movement is rendered difficult in several ways by the carelessness of some of our members, and it is not an easy matter to face the necessity of expressing intimate, significant and weighty truths of spiritual science in spite of such things. It can be noted time and again that some individuals take their connection with our movement much too lightly. I will not cite details today of how hard and sour some of our members make life by taking their membership in the Society with utmost unconcern. I am not talking of private affairs, but it is a fact that we are living today in abnormal times, and it should not happen that many members fail to realize how improper it is to write all sorts of things and send them across national borders; that is so unnecessary. I'm not talking now of private matters that are no concern of the Society. Nor is it, of course, a question of giving away anything in the wrong direction, for the Society does not include anything wrongful in its enterprises. But the way some things are handled by members causes difficulties.

It is essential for us to have some slight awareness of the uniqueness of our movement; we need to guard it as a holy undertaking. We cannot make any progress if we continue to look upon our movement in the way that is typical of the world around us. Though that may make it easy for us, it blocks progress. We need to keep in mind that for a great variety of reasons our movement is most unfavorably regarded by the surrounding world, and will be attacked by it wherever the possibility presents itself.

We need to look at this world around us against the background of the right feeling for our movement if we want to find our way properly, and we ought not to forgive ourselves if we fail to be keen and alert enough to do so. All kinds of things can render life endlessly miserable for us if we don't do the right thing. It could go so far in the way it has gone as to bring the movement to a halt. You see that we really cannot take these things lightly. We must not remain oblivious of the fact that our movement has some extremely odd enemies.

I have often emphasized how little pleasure it affords me to have members continually coming to report things and saying that someone or other has spoken from on high in a thoroughly theosophical manner, and shares our view of the world. What has been adjudged theosophical in these reports is, for the most part, rubbish. We should not take our movement as lightly as is often done. As you can see, the need for a movement that takes things seriously is demonstrated by many hundreds of observable facts.

[Steiner ended this lecture with more details about events that were known to his audience and that had occurred shortly before these lectures were given. However, these events cannot be fully reconstructed, and as this passage thus lacks a concrete context for modern readers, it has been moved to this section. Steiner continued:

I'll cite some facts experienced during the last few days, hoping that no member sitting here will be so indiscreet as to spread abroad what is discussed here in our intimate circle. At a conference of teachers held in this area, somebody recently spoke who had written about our movement without knowing anything about it. The teachers association in question was asked to let one of our members listen to the talk and maybe even reply to it. The way this request was refused is characteristic of our times. The letter denying our request to be present where one of our neighbors speaks about our movement contains among other sentences the following “...because if one of you came, that person would probably feel that the speaker does not know your movement sufficiently. Therefore, to avoid unpleasant feelings for the speaker due to the presence of a person from your movement, we ask you not to send anybody. For there will not be enough time for a discussion and the matter would only lead to unpleasant feelings as the man who will speak to us does not know you.”

This is the reason for denying our request; let's take note of that. It has to be said again and again that it is possible today that people say they do not want anyone from our movement to be present because somebody will be speaking about us who does not know anything about us. This is indeed possible, my dear friends; it is a fact.

It has come to the point where people not only think such things but even write them down, and even write them as justification for denying a request. That is the current condition of morality. However, this is not the only instance of such morality; it can be found everywhere. Unfortunately, we had to decide to show our building to that same group, so that those people could not say we were as impolite to them as they were to us. And unfortunately at just the time when they were taken on a tour of our building, a eurythmy lesson was apparently in progress. I don't want to speak about what this eurythmy evoked in the dirty minds of those who were shown through our halls. I regret that it is necessary to mention these things at all. I do not mention them to characterize or criticize the outer world, the people around us. I can only pity them from the bottom of my heart. Rather I mention these things for your sake, so that you become accustomed to finding the right standpoint and to knowing that opposition, enmity, and meanness lurk everywhere. The fact that something is sacred to some people does not protect it against being pulled down, dragged down, by others to the most profane level.

When we are confronted with hate for some reason, we must become conscious of it. This is necessary because we are much too careless about the way we place ourselves in relation to the world around us. Granted, it is inconvenient to place oneself rightly in relation to the outer world, but it is worse to close one's eyes and be ignorant of the hate and opposition lurking everywhere.

Above all we must realize that opposition based on facts cannot ever harm us. We can deal with opposition based on facts. But it is difficult when the opposition is such that one wants to wash one's hands every time one has looked at it. This is the case, for example, with those people in Leipzig who do not base their opposition to us on facts but work only with seemingly plausible slander. Even if you were to write to them in a factual tone, people there will answer out of a fundamental attitude that belongs on the same level as the attitude I have just characterized.

We can foresee that as we are increasingly being noticed in the world, and as we complete our building, opposition and yet more opposition will be called forth; for envy and resentment grow enormously the more our building is noticed in the world. From this, special obligations arise for us.]

• 1">1. Rudolf Steiner, An Outline of Occult Science, (Spring Valley, N.Y.: Anthroposophic Press, 1985).
1
• 2. Otto Liebmann, 1840–1912, German philosopher and professor of philosophy. Leader of Neo-Kantianism. Published Thoughts and Facts in 1882.
• 3. “The cosmos is ensouled and all full of gods.” De Anima I, 5. Aristotle, 384–322 B.C., Greek philosopher. De Anima, one of his major works, was published in 322 B.C.
• 4. Plato, 427–347 B.C., Greek philosopher. Teacher of Aristotle.
• 5. Johannes Kepler, 1571–1630, German astronomer.
• 6. Giordano Bruno, 1548–1600, Italian philosopher and Dominican monk. Was burned on the stake as heretic for teaching that the world is infinite in space and time and that all matter is ensouled.
• 7. Goethe and Eckermann, see Lecture VI, note 2.
• 8. Gustav Theodor Fechner, 1801–1887, German physicist, psychologist, and philosopher.
• 9. See Liebmann's book Thoughts and Facts, p. 279.
• 10. Gustav Theodor Fechner, Professor Schleiden and the Moon, Leipzig, 1856.
• 11. Matthias Jakob Schleiden, 1804–1881, German natural scientist and professor.
• 12. Fechner wrote a booklet entitled Proof that the Moon consists of Iodine and published it under the pseudonym Dr. Mises in 1832.
• 13. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, 1729–1781, German poet, playwright, and critic. Published essay entitled Education of the Human Species in 1780.

I thought that at most a dozen people would be here today and wanted to say something, as is to be expected, that is not part of our usual considerations, but which may be important for some who can immerse themselves in the matter, for the assessment of some things that currently play a role in relation to certain concepts of space and time and movement.

There are theoretical physicists today who believe that a profound revolution is taking place in relation to the simplest conceptions of the world. Among these simple conceptions of the world, on which theoretical physics is based, we want to look today at a small part that relates to time, space and motion. This will provide the basis for a more extensive consideration to be undertaken in the near future, which can lead us deeper into what is currently being sought in fundamental physical considerations.

You will all have heard that what is known as the theory of relativity is prevailing in modern physics. The theory of relativity – and here there are also many variations – is today advocated by countless theoretical physicists. It is expected to bring about a complete revolution in all the concepts that physicists, when they have been engaged in elementary theoretical considerations, have hitherto recognized as correct and which, after all, go back essentially to Newton. Now, however, the newer theoretical physicists of today believe that all these Newtonian concepts, which were still accepted as absolutely incontrovertible during our time as students, must undergo a revolution, indeed that, to a certain extent, the entire theoretical basis of physics, as it has been believed and is still believed, is actually false. Now, the reason why I have to relate the observation I want to make to this newly emerging theory of relativity will become clear later.

In order for what I have to say not to remain completely incomprehensible, I would like to start from very simple, elementary concepts in order to show you immediately what kind of idea can be associated with the concept of time. Let us start, as I said, with very elementary things. Let us assume that some object, which I will call \(a\) for the sake of argument, a rolling ball or something similar, moves in a direction that I will indicate with this line; so \(a\) moves along the straight line in the direction of \(b\):

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Now, as you all know, the distance traveled by such a moving object in one second is called the speed. So let us assume that \(a\) would come here in one second, up to \(a_1\). In physics, this distance \(a\) up to \(a_1\) would be called the speed and denoted by \(c\). And if we further assume that the moving object continues through the following seconds, then, if it were to perform a uniform motion – and we only want to talk about such a motion – it would be at \(a_2\) at the end of the second second, where \(aa_1 = a_1a_2\) , that is, with the same speed \(c\). During the second second, the moving object goes from \(a_1\) to \(a_2\), during the third second from \(a_2\) to \(a_3\), during the fourth second from \(a_3\) to \(a_4\), and so on. Now, let us assume that we observe this movement for a certain period of time and that our movable object travels a certain distance. If it moves from \(a_5\)

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then, when this movable has rolled from \(a\) to \(a_5\), the piece of space - which we understand here in its one dimension - is called the way; so that \(a\) to \(a_5\) is the way that it has traveled; \(c\) is the speed; the distance traveled is denoted by \(s\); and one says: the movable \(a\) has traveled the distance \(s\) at a speed \(c\) in a certain time - here five seconds. This transit time is denoted by \(t\).

Now there is a certain relationship between distance, time and speed. The simplest relationship that has been found is that one would say here: \(s\) - the distance - is five times from \( \)to \(a_1\), that is, once the distance \(a\) to \(a_1\) times \(5\), which is \(5\) seconds, so that is the time ; so we have to multiply what we have called the speed – this piece of \(aa_1\) – by \(5\), and then we get the distance \(s = c \cdot t\) (distance = speed \(\cdot\) time). So there are three terms in this formula: \(s\), \(c\), \(t\).

Now you know that an infinite amount has been written about time by a number of philosophers, mathematicians and also theoretical mechanics. People believe that they have an idea, a concept, of time, but if they had to explain and reflect on what they understand by time, everyone would very soon realize that they do not really have a proper idea of this concept of time, which is one of the most commonly used concepts in mechanics. In order to be able to study anything about the concept of time, let us stick to this formula, which, after all, initially sets the concept of time into a uniform, rectilinear motion. But even though this formula can be found in every physics book, in physics it is surrounded by a whole host of – I won't say ambiguities, but a lack of clarity, a lack of will to go deeper into the matter. And this is due in particular to the fact that in our schools, the teaching with regard to something that we all learn does not teach us certain distinctions, but these are important if one wants to arrive at more precise concepts in a certain direction. In our schools, we learn to speak of four types of calculation: addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. But when it comes to division, I don't think we are often made aware that there are actually two completely different things involved in the usual calculation operation. I will show you this in a very simple way.

Let us assume that we have an ordinary apple and divide it. We can divide it into five, into ten parts and so on, then, when we have divided it, we get a so-and-so-many-parts of the apple. If we want to distribute the parts, what we distribute is just a piece of the apple. We are actually performing a division here. I want to write it as a fraction, because that is the same as a division. I can say: an apple is divided into, say, ten parts, and the result is one tenth of an apple. Now take a look at what I have written on the blackboard:

In the numerator or dividend, we have a quality, something real; in the divisor or denominator, we have nothing real, but a mere number; \(10\) is a mere number here; and in the quotient, we have something real again: one tenth of an apple.

This fact does not change if we divide twenty apples instead of one. If we divide \(20\) apples by \(10\), we get \(2\) apples instead of one tenth of an apple:

The \(20\) apples are again a thing; below is only the number and as a quotient we get again a thing. That is a division.

But dividing can have a completely different meaning. I can have \(20\) apples in the dividend above, but below as the denominator or divisor, let's say \(2\) apples, then I have a thing above and below. What do I get as a result? In this case, I do not get a real thing as a result, but I find out how often \(2\) apples are contained in \(20\) apples, I get \(10\), that is, I get a number:

Again, I am dealing with a division, but this time it has a completely different meaning than the division in the first case. In the first case, I divide a thing and get another thing in return; in the second case, I don't divide at all, but set myself the task of exploring how often a thing is contained in another thing, and that's where I get a number.

We can therefore say that division is not always the same as dividing, but that there are two types of division that are strictly different from each other. When teaching, it is therefore always necessary to explain that there are two types of division. In the first, the task arises for me to investigate what comes out when you divide a thing; in the second, the task arises to investigate how often a thing is contained in a similar thing – they must be similar, because of course you can't ask how often \(2\) apples are contained in \(20\) pears – and then we get a number out.

This must be borne in mind when studying the formula \(s = c \cdot t\).

Now this formula can also be written differently. I don't always have to look for the \(s\), but I can also look for the \(c\) or \(t\), then the formula changes. If I look for the \(c\), then I get it by dividing the \(s\) by \(t\). By dividing the whole space by \(t\), I get the space that has been traversed in \(5\) seconds, by \(5\), which is the speed \(c\): $$c= \frac{s}{t}$$ Likewise, you can get \(t\): the time. Let's assume that you divide \(s\) by \(c\). If you ask: how often is the distance of one second included in the whole distance, then it is included five times. So you get the time:

Let's take a closer look at these formulas. First, let's take the second one and compare: \(s\), which is the distance here, the length \(a\) to \(a_5\), we have that in the numerator; here in the denominator we have \(c\). What is \(c\)? Well, that's the distance in one second. Distances are this: \(s\) is a distance, \(c\) is a distance. What form of division does that resemble? Well, it resembles this form \(20\) apples : \(2\) apples = \(10\). Here (in the numerator) you have apples and here (in the denominator) you have apples; here (in the numerator of \(\frac{s}{c}\)) you have distance and here (in the denominator) you have distance. What should be in front of that? Just a number. That is, \(t\) turns out to be nothing more than a number in our physical considerations. For if I regard \(s\) and \(c\) as distance, that is, as a thing - both are, after all, distance or a piece of distance -, then, from the nature of the division, time \(t\) can only figure as a number. Just as the number \(10\) (\(20\) apples : \(2\) apples = \(10\)) is a number and nothing less or more, so in this division \(t\), time, can also be nothing but a number.

You can also take the division form \(1 apple: 10 = \frac{1}{10} apple\), then this is the same as the formula \(c = \frac{s}{t}\). On the other hand, if we divide a thing by a thing, what must come out? A number like here \(t = \frac{s}{c}\), where with \(t\) we are dealing with a mere number. That is, both formulas indicate that - insofar as we stop at physics - we get nothing more than a number for the time after the nature of the division. And in this case (\(20\) apples: \(2\) apples = \(10\)) it is a number that refers to apples and shows how often \(2\) apples are contained in \(20\) apples, and here, in the case of time, \(\frac{s}{c} = t\) is a number that shows how often the velocity is contained in space.

Now, none of you will see the number as such as a thing. If you give any boy or girl not \(3\) apples, but only \(3\) as a number, they will not be satisfied. So in the number you cannot see a thing, but just a mere abstraction, something that merely indicates relationships in the external world.

From this consideration, we can see that time itself slips through our fingers through the physical consideration; it shrinks to a mere number. Just as we cannot philosophize about the number, we cannot philosophize about time either, that is, it has been reduced to the idea of a number. That is why we cannot find time in things, no matter how long we search everywhere, because it only appears as a number. What is the connection? Well, I don't think a boy or girl needs to be particularly old to give a healthy gut feeling answer to the question: What interests you, the apples or the number? Of course, someone could speak sophistically and say, “I am interested in the number because I prefer \(8\) apples to \(6\)”; but that is only because \(8\) apples are more than \(6\). So the number is not what it is about, but the apples are, the tangible is.

But from this it follows that we must adhere to the material and not to the number when we speak of time, space and speed. And if we now consider the material, time is eliminated from the outset, that is, it is a number and not a material thing. So you can say to yourself: we have \(s\), we have space, we have the piece of space that our movable passes through. If it continues to roll, it can still cover a great deal of space. Space is something material outside. But that is not what is most important, because space can be thought of as continuing forever. But there is something else that is very important to us, and that is \(c\). How \(a\) travels through space depends entirely on whether it travels, say, \(20\) or \(25\) or \(50\) cm in one second, and so on. In turn, how much it travels depends on how fast it moves. But how fast it runs, that is inside it, that is peculiar to it inside. And the whole process depends on what is peculiar to the movable inside. So it depends on the speed of the movable, which belongs to the movable as such, is an inner quality of the movable. And if we look at the world in terms of mechanical processes, then, when we speak of reality, we must speak of the intrinsic speed of the bodies or atoms or molecules. And the whole process forces us to speak of intrinsic speed as belonging to things, just as red color belongs to the rose.

So the fundamental concept is speed; it is what matters. It follows that we must not adhere to the formula that has \(c\) here \(c = \frac{s}{t}\), and must not believe that with space and time we have something particularly real, but what is real in things is speed, not time. Time, in turn, is only abstracted from the concept of speed because things have different speeds. If we look at the different speeds and want to reduce them to a common denominator, we get the concept of time. This is an abstraction, just as the generic term “apple” is an abstraction and only the particular, the concrete apple, is real. So if we look at the mechanical reality of things, we have to look at speed and must not believe that we can put the concept of time in the foreground. That is the big mistake that is made everywhere in physics, that one does not consider that one must start from the speed that is inside things, that belongs to them as life belongs to living bodies.

So, my dear friends, remember: not time but velocity is what must underlie mechanics. You might say that making these distinctions is mere madness. But it is not madness. These things are fundamental to our understanding of certain aspects of reality, and I will point out to you in a moment something that shows how fundamentally significant they are.

In the various discussions about the theory of relativity, people were struggling to come to terms with the concepts of time and speed. Now I would like to show you, by means of two speculations, the way in which certain people think and formulate their thoughts when they talk about time and speed. I have to introduce you to a strange character, Mr. Lumen, who plays a certain role in the theory of relativity. What kind of strange gentleman is he? Yes, you see, this is an, I would say, “imaginary acquaintance” that Flammarion has made. This Mr. Lumen has a very strange ability, which we can understand in the following way.

You all know from your physics lessons that light has a certain speed; it travels 300,000 km per second. \(c\), so everything that, in our view, is mechanically inherent in light is a speed of 300,000 km per second. Let us assume, for example, that here is the earth and that a beam of light goes out into space from the objects and events that happen on earth (as schematically indicated on the board) and one says yes, because the light goes out, one sees the things. Let us now assume the following. We have had a somewhat abstruse mathematical-physical lesson, and, let us say, a eurythmy lesson from three to four o'clock. From all this, the light goes out into space and one can observe from outside what is happening here. And since light travels at a speed of 300,000 km per second, what happened here between three and four o'clock this afternoon also went out into space at a speed of 300,000 km a second, so that if you imagine an observer 300,000 km away, he will see what is happening here on Earth only after one second.

Now Flammarion assumes that Mr. Lumen rushes out into space even faster than the speed of light, namely at a speed of 400,000 km per second. What will be the result of this? He will continually overtake the light, because after the light has traveled one second, he is already 100,000 km further away. When he rushes out and looks back, he must come to the manifestations of light, where he sees what has happened here now and between three and four o'clock. But since he not only catches up with the light, but overtakes it, it must follow that he does not perceive the eurythmy lesson first and then our lesson, but everything in reverse, first the end and then the earlier. It is a strange spectacle that this Mr. Lumen experiences. He sees everything in such a way that he first sees the end and then the beginning, because he overtakes the light.

As I said, such ideas have played a certain role in the discussions about the theory of relativity. I would like to present you with yet another idea, which has also played a certain role and which the naturalist Baer formed. He said to himself: One could imagine that man does not live his life in about 70 or 80 years, but in 70 or 80 seconds. His pulse would simply have to beat so much faster that one second would contain a year. This could cause man to be not just like a mayfly, but like a 70-second animal, if only his pulse beat fast enough. What would be the result? Such a person would experience tremendous things in 70 seconds. If, for example, he looks at a plant that has remained true to its species, he would never come to the conclusion that a plant grows out of the earth, but he would come to the conclusion that plants are eternal beings. Thus, such a person would have a completely different view of the world, simply because the speed of his life could be thought of as increasing in the same measure as the speed of his pulse compared to the rest of us. Or, says Baer, let us imagine that man does not live 80 seconds or 80 years, but 80,000 years, and that the pulse rate is so much slower, then the whole world would be different again. For example, the sun, which appears to move at a certain speed to us, would race across the sky like a fiery wind; we would not distinguish the individual sun, but would see it racing around like a reddish wheel. Plants would shoot up quickly and then fade away at breakneck speed, and so on.

Baer presents this as a possible idea to show how the world view depends on the subjective constitution of the organism. You see, everything, absolutely everything, is called into question.

If we consider the type of thinking that underlies such ideas as those of Mr. Lumen or Baer's Flammarions, one thing is important to note. Let's take Mr. Lumen again. It is assumed that Mr. Lumen would be able to fly 400,000 km per second, thus overtaking light and catching up with later light images. But now take what you can really take when you delve deeper into our spiritual scientific concepts. We can even disregard the coarser physical body altogether and go straight to the etheric body. Yes, when we go into the etheric body, what is it? It is ether, light ether, it is itself weaving light. Hold on to that, because what follows from it? It follows that when we move in space, we can move at the highest speed that is peculiar to light. So if someone says that a person like Mr. Lumen moves at a speed of 400,000 km per second, then we have to ask – I will even leave out the physical body and just assume that an etheric body could move out – how fast could he possibly move? Well, at most at a speed of 300,000 km per second, the speed of light. We cannot say that the etheric body overtakes light, because it is itself movable light. So Mr. Lumen cannot be woven out of anything that exists in space; in other words, he is an unreal conception, he is a pure fantasy. For to the tangible or the substantial in the world, its speed is immanent or inherent. It is inside of it. It is its property. We cannot tear it out. We cannot say: we separate the speed from the thing – but it is a property of the thing. We cannot speak of a property that exists separately outside the thing. So we must also say, in the face of Baer's ideas: in the moment when one realizes that the speed of the pulse beat belongs to the essence of every human being, one also realizes that we cannot have any other speed than that of our pulse beat. We are human because we have a certain pulse rate, and we cannot imagine it being any different, because we would cease to be human if, for example, our pulse were a thousand times faster than it actually is. Speed belongs to the material world.

It is important to see how spiritual science leads to the essence of things, and what the thinking that has developed into our time leads to without engaging in spiritual science. It leads to the formation of ideas such as those of Mr. Lumen or the pulse rate that has accelerated a thousand times, which are simply impossible or unreal. One calculates with fantastic concepts if one does not realize that time is a mere number. Thus, so-called rational mechanics has led to completely unreal concepts. Spiritual science leads us to say: Yes, what is such a Mr. Lumen, who races 400,000 km while he would at most travel 300,000... [gap in the transcript]... He is nothing more than the famous gentleman who pulls himself up by his own hair.

From this point of view, then, spiritual science is there to bring human thinking, which has lapsed into fantasy, back to reality, not to dissuade it from reality. You see, while people accuse spiritual science of being fantastic, it is actually there to guide the fantastic ideas and concepts of physics back to reality. And it will be extremely important for healthy thinking in the future that children are really taught something like the two types of division, so that they do not calculate with all kinds of ambiguities, but with definite concepts. When it comes to ideas and concepts that have a bearing on reality, there is no other way than to face reality squarely, that is, to think with spiritual science, because only then do real, not fanciful, concepts emerge.

Before the theory of relativity, physics had Newton's idea that space is an emptiness, a vessel, so to speak – whether it is infinite or not, we will not examine that now – and time flows like a uniform stream; things are in space and processes run in time, and depending on whether a thing needs this or that time to cover a certain space, it is given a certain speed. This idea is untrue because it does not look at the essence of space and time and thus divides speed, which is actually an inner property, into the two unreal ideas of space and time. Speed is truly the original, while physics always regards speed as a function of space and time. But what belongs to things is their essential nature, and spiritual science shows that one must take certain paths in order to avoid fantasies about space and time - such as that of infinite space or that of time as a flowing stream - but to arrive at the real reality of speed. The entire field of mechanics, which we absorbed in our youth as something tremendously secure, as the most secure there is in science after mathematics, operates with very vague concepts because it does not know what the nature of speed is and does not know how to regard it as fundamental.

Now the impetus for the theory of relativity from Minkowski, Einstein, Planck, Poincaré, the late mathematician and physicist and so on, came precisely because they could no longer cope with this childish Newtonian idea of empty space and regularly flowing time and things that move at a certain speed. Certain experiments led to concepts that did not agree with what had been considered the most certain.

Recently, I have developed a concept here that is purely related to spiritual science, which may have come as a surprise to some. I have developed the concept that it is not true at all to believe that the most important thing in the head is substance, matter, because precisely where we suspect matter, it is hollow and, from a spiritual point of view, we are all hollow-headed. I used the comparison with the air bubbles in a bottle of Selters water. There it is also the case that where we believe we perceive something real, there is nothing. All around is the spiritual reality and in it there are holes everywhere; you see them, just as you only see the bubbles in the Selters water, which are air, you do not see the water. And if people believe that there is something where I touch the table, that is not true either, because there is actually nothing there. I touch the hollow space and because there is nothing there, that is why I cannot go further.

We arrived at this conclusion quite systematically on the basis of spiritual scientific premises. Certain insightful and perceptive physicists have now been pushed to a similar conclusion by other means, because certain processes in nature simply do not agree with the concepts of Newtonian mechanics, which are considered so certain. And these things include, for example, the processes at work in the cathode rays that you are familiar with, which, as you know, can be observed in certain evacuated glass tubes. Here we are dealing with something that, as a moving part, has speed, with electrons, figuratively speaking, with flowing electricity. And through observation, through the experiment of observing the cathode rays in the tubes, which are flowing electricity, the physicists have come to very peculiar ideas. And I would like to read you one such idea. It can be found in a lecture by Poincaré on “The New Mechanics”. He ties in with the ideas that arise from the cathode ray experiment, because this does not agree with the Newtonian concept of speed. And after rather confused trains of thought, he sees himself compelled to make the following concession:... [gap in the transcript] ..., and there the physicist feels compelled to say the following:

“Matter has now become completely passive. The property of resisting the forces that seek to change its motion no longer applies to it in the true sense of the word. When a cannonball moves at high speed and thereby becomes the carrier of a living force, of a tremendous energy that spreads death and destruction, it is no longer the iron molecules that are the seat of this energy, but this seat is to be sought in the ether that surrounds the molecules. One could almost say that there is no longer any matter, only holes in the ether.” - Well, what more do you want, my dear friends? — “And as far as these holes seem to play an active role, it consists in the fact that these holes cannot change their location without affecting the surrounding ether, which reacts against such changes.”

Matter is holes in the ether! Physics is therefore compelled to admit this based on its current experience. And building on such experiences, another physicist, Planck, uttered a sentence that is highly remarkable, namely the sentence that says: We experienced in the forties of the 19th century that Helmholtz approached a certain problem in such a way – it wasn't Helmholtz, but Julius Robert Mayer, but we don't want to get into this important question of priority now – as someone who doesn't put the cart before the horse, but before the horse. People had always said before that the distribution of forces in space had to be studied in a certain way. Helmholtz turned the matter around. He said that one must study the universe in such a way that only the whole universe can be a perpetuum mobile, whereas no individual process in the universe can ever be a perpetuum mobile. The people before Helmholtz had tried to explain the world without any perpetuum mobile at all. But now Planck says that a similar process must occur with regard to the ether. There are countless theories about the ether, ranging from the idea that was held in the past, when the ether was thought of as rarefied matter, to the idea of Lord Kelvin or J. J. Thompson, who imagined the ether to be a rigid liquid - of course, it is not to be thought of as a liquid like water - all intermediate stages are represented. And now Planck says as a physicist: Physics will only be cured when we start from the principle that no conception of the ether gives a tenable physics that attributes material properties to the ether. That is the sentence that one of the most important physicists of the present day has uttered. This means that if the ether is to be a tenable basis for physics, only spiritual properties may be attributed to it. And from this it follows that today's physicists are urged to think of matter as holes surrounded by ether, which, however, must be imagined as having no material but only spiritual properties. So: holes surrounded by spiritual ether, that is what must be taken as a basis in order to arrive at a tenable physics. This is being prepared today; it exists.

Now one can raise the question: Yes, but where does that leave the possibility of establishing a materialistic world view when physicists talk about matter consisting of holes and the ether can only have spiritual properties? One is almost forced to say: there is no longer any matter, there are only holes in the spiritual ether, and matter cannot change its location without exerting an influence on the surrounding ether, a reaction in the spiritual ether. That is what physics comes to.

However, one will need a sharp logic and must not be afraid to tackle such questions as to how the concept of speed is really to be grasped if it is not to contradict what the experiment expresses.

Take these things as something that should be said to prove that the humanities, so reviled as being unscientific, are in their foundations infinitely more scientific than that which is considered science today, because they approach things, I would say get to grips with them, in the sharpest logic. And that is what we must seek above all: a sharp grasp of the concepts, a definite conception of what otherwise confronts us as a vague thing in the world.

For the purposes of research and reflection in the physical world, it is above all, one might say, a matter close to the human heart to find one's way in the relationships of the physical world - in which one spends one's existence between birth and death - to the higher worlds to which one actually belongs. We are quite clear about the fact that, even if a person's thinking is still very vague, there is still an eminently clear feeling, a distinct sensation, that he must know something about these relationships in some form. No matter how vaguely man may think about the higher worlds, no matter how much despair he may feel for various reasons about the possibility of knowing anything about them, it is natural and appropriate for the human feeling and perception to relate to a higher world.

Of course, it can be objected that, especially in our present materialistic times, there are many people who either deny in some form or other that there is any spiritual world at all, or at least deny that man can know anything about it. But one can also say that one must first learn to have a “negative” attitude towards the spiritual world, so to speak, because it is not “natural” for a person to deny a spiritual, a supersensible world. One must first arrive at this position through all kinds of theories; one must first, one might say, be taught to deny a spiritual world with any degree of seriousness. So that when one speaks of the natural man, one can still speak in a way that is appropriate to his perception, turning the gaze of the soul in some way upwards to the spiritual worlds.

But now, if there is even the slightest possibility that there are people who want nothing whatsoever to do with the spiritual world, there must be something about human nature that makes it difficult to determine our relationship with the spiritual world. And this relationship does indeed seem difficult to grasp. For we see that in the course of history, which we can follow, a great number of all kinds of philosophies and world views have emerged that seemingly contradict each other. But I have often explained that it is only seemingly, because if it were easy for man to determine his relationship to the supersensible world, then the history of world views would not be full of seemingly contradictory world views. From this alone it is clear that it is, to a certain extent, difficult to determine the relationship to the spiritual world. And that is why the question can also be raised as to the origin of this difficulty, what it is that actually exists in the soul of man, that he has a hard time relating to the spiritual world.

Now, if we examine all the attempts that are made outside of a spiritual-scientific world view, say in mere philosophy or in external science, and ask ourselves what these attempts are actually based on, what they are based on, then we have to say: when we look at these attempts, when we see what kind of soul power men chiefly employ to fathom the relation of the physical to the spiritual world, one finds that, again and again, I might say except in isolated cases, men see in thinking above all that soul faculty, that soul activity which, rightly employed, could lead to the discovery of something, to a determination about the relation of man to the supersensible worlds. It is therefore necessary, so to speak, to consider the thinking, the thinking work of the soul, and to ask oneself: What about thinking, about making oneself thoughts, in relation to the human being who lives in the physical world and the spiritual worlds? What about this relationship of thinking to the spiritual worlds?

So the question is: what is the value of thinking for a form of knowledge that satisfies people? — I would like to consider this question today as a preliminary, and then discuss other questions in front of you afterwards. I would like us to prepare ourselves, so to speak, for a worthy discussion by considering the question of the value of thinking for knowledge.

Now, we can, as it were, get behind thinking if we proceed in the following way. In the course of the last lectures we have already indicated that certain peculiarities of thinking, or, even better, of thoughts, are to be considered. I have pointed out how there are many people who see it as a mistake of all scientific thinking when this scientific thinking is not just a mere copy, so to speak, a mental photograph of an external reality. For these people say: if thinking is to have any relationship at all to the real, to reality, then it must not bring anything to this reality from itself; for in the moment when thinking brings something to reality, one is not dealing with a copy, with a photograph of a reality, but with a fantasy, with a fantasy image. And in order to avoid dealing with such a fantasy, one must strictly ensure that no one includes in their thoughts anything that is not a mere photograph of external reality.

Now, with a slight effort of thought, you will immediately come to say to yourself: Yes, for the external physical world, for what we call the physical plane, this seems to be quite right. It seems to correspond to a quite correct perception that one must not add anything to reality through thinking if one does not want to have fantasy images instead of a reflection of reality. For the physical plane, it can truly be said that it is absolutely right to refrain from adding any ingredient of thought to what one receives from outside through perception.

Now I would like to draw your attention to the views of two philosophers regarding the view expressed in what has just been said: Aristotle and Leibniz.

Aristotle, who can be seen as the summarizer of the Greek world view, is a philosopher who was no longer initiated into the secrets of the spiritual world, but who lived in the very first period after, I would say, the “age of initiation”. Whereas before all philosophers were still somehow touched by the initiation when they expressed philosophically what they knew as initiates - P/ato, for example, who was a kind of initiate to the highest degree, but expressed himself philosophically - with Aristotle one must say that he also had no trace of an initiation, but still all kinds of after-effects of an initiation were there. So this is a philosopher who only speaks philosophically, without initiation, without any kind of initiatory impulse, but who, in his philosophy, gives in a rationalized way what the initiates who were before him gave in a spiritualized way. That is Aristotle.

The sentence we now want to consider comes from Aristotle. [It was written on the board:

There is nothing in the mind that is not in the senses.

So let us take note of this sentence: there is nothing in — we can add — 'human' intelligence that is not in the senses.

This sentence of Aristotle's must not be interpreted in any kind of materialistic way, because Aristotle is far removed from any kind of materialistic worldview. This sentence is not to be taken in a worldview sense, but rather epistemologically. That is to say, Aristotle rejects the idea that one can gain knowledge about the world from within, but asserts that one can only gain knowledge by directing one's senses to the outside world, by receiving sensory impressions and then using reason to form concepts from these sensory impressions; but of course he does not deny that one receives spiritual things with the sensory impressions. He thinks of nature as permeated by the spirit; only, he thinks, one cannot arrive at the spiritual if one does not look out into nature.

Here you can see the difference to the materialist. The materialist concludes: there is only material outside, and one only forms concepts of the material. Aristotle thinks that all of nature is permeated by spirit, but the path of the human soul to reach the spirit is such that one must start from the sensory perception and process the sensory impressions into concepts. If Aristotle himself had been touched by an initiatory impulse, he would not have said that; for then he would have known that if one frees oneself from sensory perception in the way we have described, one can attain knowledge of the spiritual world from within. So he did not want to deny the spiritual world, but only to show the path that human knowledge must take.

This sentence then played a major role in the Middle Ages and has been reinterpreted in a materialistic way in the materialistic age. You only need to change a small thing in this sentence of Aristotle's - there is nothing in the world for the intellect that is not in the senses - and we have immediately formed materialism from it. Isn't it true, you just need to make what, in the sense of Aristotle, is the human path of knowledge, the principle of a world view, and then you have materialism.

Leibniz came up with a similar sentence, and we also want to look at this sentence. Leibniz is not that far behind us; in the 17th century. Let us now also take this sentence of Leibniz to heart. So Leibniz says: There is nothing in, we can say again, “human” intelligence - I just add “human” - that is not in the senses, except for intelligence itself, except for the intellect itself.

[It was written on the board]:

There is nothing in human intelligence that is not in the senses, except for intelligence itself, except for intellect itself.

Thus the intellect that man has within him, working, is not in the senses. In these two sentences you can see a real school example of how one can completely agree with the formulation of a sentence, and yet how the sentence can be incomplete.

Now I do not want to dwell on the extent to which this sentence of Leibniz's is also philosophically incomplete. Let us just note for the moment that Leibniz was of the view that the intellect itself is not somehow already grounded in the senses, but that man must bring the work of the intellect to what the senses give him. So that one can say: the intellect itself is an inner activity that has not yet passed through the senses.

If you have followed the last lectures, you know that this inner work is already free of the senses and takes place in the etheric body of the human being. In our language, we can say: There is nothing in the intelligence working in the etheric body that is not in the senses, except for the intelligence itself working in the etheric body; what works in there does not come in from the senses.

But thinking as such is in reality, when it is properly considered in true self-knowledge, this working in the etheric body, and that is what philosophers call the intellect. This thinking is therefore a kind of work, a working, we could say. And because, for our spiritual scientific understanding, Leibniz, even if he is not absolutely right, is still more right than Aristotle, we can say: this thinking - or, better expressed, this thinking activity, this thinking work in man, which is a performance of the etheric body - that is not in the outer reality of the physical plane. For the physical plane is exhausted in what it allows us to perceive through the senses. So, by placing ourselves as human beings in the physical plane, we bring intellect into it, but this intellect itself is not in the physical world.

And here we now come to the difficulty of those philosophers who want to get behind the world riddle through the intellect. People have to say to themselves: Yes, if I think about it properly, the intellect does not belong to the sense world; but I am now in a peculiar situation. I know of no other spiritual world than just the intellect; it is a spiritual world behind sensuality. So what do I get from the intellect? It cannot receive anything, no content, if it does not inform itself through the senses from the external physical world. It only stands there for itself. — But then the philosopher stands before a rather peculiar thing. He must indeed reflect: I have an activity within me, the activity of the intellect. Through this activity of the intellect I want to get to the bottom of the secrets of the sense world. But I can only think about what is out there in the sense world; but these thoughts arise through something that does not itself belong to the sense world. So what do these thoughts have to do with the sense world? Even if I now also know that the intellect is a spiritual thing, I must still despair of being able to approach anything that is reality through the spiritual thing that I have.

Now I will try to approach the matter by way of comparison. In the last lectures we expressed the same thing in a different way. We expressed it by leading ourselves to recognize that in what we achieve through our thinking we have mirror images of reality, that these mirror images actually come in addition to reality and are not realities themselves.

You see, it is the same truth, only expressed differently here in a philosophical way. We had to say: the intellect forms mirror images. These mirror images, as an image of the reality that is being mirrored, are indifferent to reality, because the reality that is being mirrored does not need these mirror images. So that one might come to doubt reality altogether, the whole reality value of thinking, of intelligence, and ask oneself: Does thinking have any real significance? Does it not actually add something to external reality through what it is? Does any single thought have any real value if, in relation to reality, it is nothing more than a mirror image?

Let us now endeavor to properly examine the reality of thought. In other words, we want to answer the question: Is thought really just something imagined that has no real value at all? Or, we can approach the question from a different angle: Where does thought have a reality? — Now, as I said, I will try to illustrate this through a comparison. Here is a watch; I pick up the watch, now I have the watch in my hand. Everything about the watch is outside the muscles and nerves of my hand. My hand and the watch are two different things. But suppose it were dark here, I had never seen the watch and would perceive the watch only through feeling, then I would perceive something of the watch by stretching out my hand and grasping the watch. If you direct your attention to the watch, you will say to yourself, I can learn something about the reality of the watch by holding it in my hand, by grasping it. But if we hypothetically assume for a moment that I only have one hand and not two, I would not be able to grasp the first hand with the second hand as I can actually do now. I could grasp the watch with my one hand, but I could not grasp the hand itself with another hand; at most I could touch it with my nose, but let us not consider that for the moment, shall we? Yet the hand is just as real as the watch. How do I convince myself of the reality of the watch? By taking it in my hand and touching it. How do I convince myself of the reality of the hand? I could not convince myself by touching it if I did not have a second hand; but I do know with inner certainty that I have a hand, that I have what I have on me to grasp the watch just as realistically as I can guarantee the reality of the watch by touching it. Do you notice the difference between the real hand and the real watch? I have to experience the reality of the hand in a different way than the reality of the clock.

You can transfer this comparison entirely to human thinking, to the intellect. You can never grasp that which the intellect comprehends so directly through the intellect itself; just as little as you can grasp the hand itself with a hand. The intellect cannot perceive itself as it perceives the other things; but it is nevertheless convinced of its reality through inner certainty. It is an inner certainty that convinces the intellect of its reality. But then one must understand this intellect, this working of the intellect, as an activity of the human subject; one must realize that the intellect, spiritually speaking, is only a hand that is stretched out to grasp something. All this is figuratively speaking, but they are very real images. And just as, on the one hand, my hand is able to convince me of the reality of the watch – namely, by being able, for example, to feel the weight of the watch, the smoothness of the watch, that is, by being able to experience through the nature of my hand everything that is real about the clock – on the other hand, through the real of the intellect, I am able to experience other things about things than what the senses experience. The intellect is therefore a grasping organ in the spiritual sense, which we must perceive in #»s, not in the outside world.

And you see, here lies the difficulty for philosophers. They believe that if they have thoughts about the world, then these thoughts must come from outside, and then they realize that they do not come from outside at all, but that the intellect produces these thoughts. And since they regard the intellect as alien to external reality, they must actually regard all thoughts as fantasy images. But one must ascribe a subjective reality to the intellect, a reality that is experienced internally. Then one has the realm of reality in which the intellect is perceived. Thus, by examining the actual nature of the intellect, we come to be able to say: Yes, everything that the intellect accomplishes may or need only be a reflection of external reality, but this reflection has been created by the work of real intellect. This is a human activity. Its reality consists in the fact that man works by acquiring knowledge of the reality of the intellect through the intellect. So we can say that man's intellectual activity, which works in man, but it works in such a way that it is quite justified to say that what this intellect works out has no significance for the world in which it works - just as the hand has no significance for the clock; for the clock it is of no importance whether it is grasped by the hand or not – it is something that exists for and in man, that he forms images of things through the intellect. But with regard to the things of the physical plane, everything that this intellect works out is unreal, a mirror image, dead, nothing alive. We can say that the images of the physical world that are worked out in the intellect are lifeless, dead images.

[It was written on the board]:

Intellectual activity - dead images.

Thus, the images that man forms of the physical world are also dead images. One misunderstands the actual nature of this content of the intellect if one ascribes to it something other than the fact that it can be a copy of the physical world.

But the matter becomes quite different when man comes to live with the experiences of his existence in time. When we face the things of the external world and form images of them through the intellect, we get dead concepts; but if we allow these concepts to be present in our soul, then after some time, when the experience of which we have formed an image is long gone, we can, through memory, as we say, bring up the image of that experience from memory. We can say: Yes, now I know nothing of the experience; but when I remember, it comes up. It was not in my consciousness before I remembered, but it is there, somewhere in the depths of my soul, unconsciously, I just have to bring it up from the unconscious.

So the image of a past experience that I have seen in the past is down there in the unconscious. Fine, there it is, I'll bring it up. But down there it is not so meaningless. You just need to take the very ordinary difference between an idea that we receive from an experience in such a way that it gives us joy, lifts us up, and an idea of some experience that has not given us joy. We can now push an idea that has given us joy down into the unconscious, and can push an idea that has not given us joy into the unconscious. Few people reflect on what is to be said about the difference between an idea that gives pleasure and one that causes grief or pain. But there is an enormous difference. And this difference becomes particularly apparent when one tries to ascertain the reality value of such ideas, which have actually already faded from normal memory.

So let us consider an idea that a person may have enjoyed but had no reason to think back to in later life, or an idea that caused him pain and to which he also had little reason to think back. They do not come to his consciousness, but they play a role in the unconscious soul life. If only people would recognize from spiritual science what ideas stored up in the soul mean, even if they are completely forgotten. We are actually always the result of our experiences. The expression on our face, especially in more intimate gestures, is really a reflection of what we have experienced in our present incarnation. You can see this in the faces of people who experienced something sad in their childhood. So what goes on down there, in other words, is involved in the processes of human life. What is repressed into oblivion, into the unconscious, in the form of inhibiting, sad images, consumes us, it cuts off our life force. What we have experienced that is joyful and uplifting revives us. And when you study the fate of our imaginative life in the unconscious, you find how tremendously dependent the present mood, the whole constitution of a person, is on what lies in his subconscious.

Now compare the memories, the images that have already entered the unconscious soul life, with the images that we currently have in our consciousness. Then you will say to yourself: the images that we currently have in our consciousness are dead. Dead images do not participate in our life process. Only when they descend into the unconscious do they begin to participate in the process of life and then become life-promoting or life-inhibiting ideas. So that the ideas, by being pushed down into the deeper layers of the soul, only really begin to live. I have always pointed this out in the lectures I have given in various places on the hidden foundations of the soul's life. Thus, the ideas, which are initially dead ideas, begin to live when they are implanted in our soul life; but they live all the more the more unconscious we become.

If you now follow the process with spiritual scientific knowledge, something very peculiar happens, which I can only describe as [a drawing is begun]:

Let us assume that this is the boundary between the conscious and the unconscious; that this line, this stroke, is the boundary between “conscious”, which is above, and “unconscious”, which is below. And now we have formed all kinds of ideas in our consciousness. I will denote them schematically with all kinds of figures. We have formed these ideas; let us assume that these ideas go down into the unconscious. They go down there [the arrows were drawn].

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Yes, you see, when these images that go down there are followed with spiritual-scientific knowledge, then they transform themselves. Outwardly we have recognized that they become life-promoting or life-inhibiting; inwardly it shows through spiritual-scientific knowledge that they become imaginations by sliding down below the surface, as it were. In the unconscious or subconscious, everything that goes down becomes imagination, everything becomes an image. You can have the most abstract ideas in your ordinary day-to-day consciousness: when you go below the threshold of ordinary day-to-day consciousness, everything becomes imagination. That is to say, there is a process in man, a sum of processes, which is always endeavoring — through the dead ideas of the earthly, ordinary, materialistic consciousness passing into the subconscious — to transform all the ideas of consciousness in the subconscious into images, into imaginations, before man comes to imaginative knowledge.

If we want to describe what we have in our unconscious of our imaginative life, if we want to get to know it, then we must actually say: all this consists of unconscious imaginations, and all the ideas that we can in turn raise from the unconscious into the conscious, we must bring them up through an activity that also remains unconscious to us. We must bring them back into consciousness, but we must strip them of their pictorial character, transform them back into abstract, non-pictorial ideas. And when you are in the process of reflecting, “Oh, I experienced something; what was it? and you make an effort – you all know the process – to remember something, then it is the effort that you have to devote to stripping the image that is sitting there of its pictorial character and transforming it back into the imaginative form of consciousness.

From this, however, you will see that the ideas become more spiritual when we push them down into the unconscious. We must therefore say: When we take what the intellect offers us and absorb it into the unconscious, then we must characterize the world of ideas that is there in us and that we have pushed down as a higher, more spiritual world. We must therefore say: the world of possible memories – please note that I say the world of possible memories; not all the images that go down there need to be remembered again, but they are all there below in the unconscious soul life – the world of possible memories actually consists of imaginations, of unconscious imaginations.

[It was written on the board:

World of possible memories – imaginations.

Now, there are times when it is possible for a person's normal consciousness – and perhaps we will be able to talk about other such possibilities in the next few days – to conjure up these images, which would otherwise never pass from the realm of possible memories into the realm of actual memories, into consciousness. Take the experiences sometimes had by people who are drowning! And if you could compare them with the experiences of those who have passed through the gate of death, you would find that even there, some images, where the effort in ordinary physical life is not enough to bring them up again, then arise as if by themselves. But episodes, parts of them, also arise in the ordinary dream world. Even the dream as it presents itself to us is a complicated reality, because what is actually experienced is in many ways hidden behind it. But the ideas that we cover up are taken from memory. So the dream, the experiences of those struggling with death, like drowning people and the like, and experiences that occur immediately after passing through the gate of death, show this world of imagination, which is a more spiritual world than the world of ordinary human intelligence on the physical plane.

But if you take what I have just described, that these ideas, which have passed into the region of memory, work to promote or inhibit life, you will say to yourself: There is some life in it. While the ideas of the ordinary intellect are dead, there is some life in them, but it is not particularly strong. But even here ordinary experience can offer something that can show you that what happens to these images as they descend into the subconscious region can signify an even stronger life.

I have already emphasized the very common fact that people who have to learn something by heart in order to recite it, learn and sleep on it, and that this sleep is necessary to make the memory more capable. This is, however, only a slight hint at something that spiritual science shows much more clearly, indeed completely clearly, namely that our entire world of ideas, as we develop it and push it down into the subconscious, becomes more and more alive in the subconscious, while in consciousness it is dead.

Now, the ideas that come up again are not even those that are most involved in promoting or inhibiting life, but rather those that connect with us much more intimately. Ideas that we often absorb only incidentally, without even paying much attention to them in life, connect with our life-promoting or life-inhibiting powers to a much greater extent. Let us assume that someone is involved in spiritual science. He first takes in this spiritual science as it is worked out by the physical intellect. He has to start from there. We have to tie in with what the physical intellect perceives through the senses. Otherwise I could not speak about the spiritual world at all, because language is for the physical world. But there is a difference in how we, let me say, clothed in life, take in such a world of ideas.

Suppose a person takes the truths of spiritual science seriously and with dignity, so to speak, so that he feels: there is seriousness, deep seriousness. Another person takes in the ideas of spiritual science in such a way that he actually only listens to them theoretically and does not take them very seriously. The one takes them, as it were, in an atmosphere of superficiality, the other in an atmosphere of seriousness. We do not need to be very aware of how we take them in; it has more to do with how we go through life without always thinking about it. Those who are predisposed or accustomed to taking things seriously, and not frivolously or cynically, do not always think about how to take them; they behave seriously and naturally. In the same way, those who are only superficially predisposed take them in superficially; they cannot help it. Thus we accompany our life of imagination with something that we do not imagine, that really is something that goes along with what we are aware of. But what goes along with what we are aware of goes much deeper into the unconscious than what we consciously think. The way we form our ideas goes much deeper into the unconscious than what we consciously think. And when a person is asleep and his astral body and I am out of the physical and etheric body, then this way of forming ideas plays an infinitely important role in the astral body and I. One can say: Anyone who takes on any ideas with the necessary seriousness has these ideas in his astral body and in his I in such a way that they are there like invigorating solar power for the plant. They are truly the most invigorating of forces. And he incorporates into these ideas that which is invigorating, invigorating and going beyond the present incarnation, and creating the preconditions for the next incarnation. It is already evident from the creative soul that you have something in the subconscious that is more spiritual than what can be brought up through the dream.

There we have a world of unconscious mental life, connected with the whole core of the human being. This way of taking life, as it were, penetrates into our spiritual life forces, and it is quite the same as unconscious inspiration.

[It was written on the board]:

World of the unconscious life of imagination – inspirations.

I will then explain to you – today is no longer the time for this – how even ordinary life shows that these unconscious inspirations unconsciously have an effect in the person already in the incarnation in which they are formed, but unconsciously. Then I will show you further that there is still a higher world for the human being. But you can see from what has been presented today that the human soul life has an inner movement, that what is experienced on the physical plane through physical intelligence is experienced further down, that it then ascends into more spiritual regions, into even more spiritual regions at last than we experience on the physical plane. [The arrows were drawn.] So the life of imagination is in inner movement, in ascending movement. And now you remember what I drew for you yesterday: how certain processes in man were shown in a descending movement. So that you can say to yourself: When I have the human being in front of me, there is a descending current and an ascending current in the human being, and they work together. We will discuss tomorrow how they work together.

[Diagram on the board]:

World of unconscious mental life: inspirations
World of memory: imaginations
Intellectual activity: dead images

Yesterday I spoke about a kind of ascending movement that is rooted in human nature. And basically, by contemplating this ascending movement, we have rediscovered everything we already know, namely, at the lowest level, knowledge that is applicable only to the facts of the physical plane, physical knowledge, which is called objective knowledge in “How to Know Higher Worlds”. So today I will call it physical knowledge. We then came to know the next higher stage of knowledge, the so-called imaginative knowledge; but we considered it as archetypally conscious imaginative knowledge; conscious imaginative knowledge can only be present in the human being who tries to work his way up to it in the way described in the book “How to Know Higher Worlds”. The words “physical knowledge”, “unconscious imaginative knowledge”, “conscious imaginative knowledge” were written on the blackboard; see diagram.

But the fact is that the content of imaginative knowledge, that is, imaginations, are in every human being. So that the development of the human soul in this respect is nothing more than an expansion of consciousness to include a realm that is always present in the human soul. We may say, then, that the situation with imaginative knowledge is no different than it would be with objects in a dark room. For in the depths of the human soul all the imaginations that come into question for the human being are present just as the objects of a dark room are. And just as the objects in a dark room are not increased in number when light is brought into the room, but remain as they are, only illuminated, so, after the consciousness for imaginative knowledge has been awakened, there is no different content in the soul than there was before; they are only illuminated by the light of consciousness. So, in a sense, by struggling to the imaginative level of knowledge, we experience nothing other than what has long been present in our soul as a sum of imaginations.

If we look back again at what we were able to understand yesterday, we know that when our perceptions of the objects around us through our physical senses descend into the realm of memory, that is, into the unconscious, , so that we are in a position to be unaware of them for some time, but they have not been lost, but can be brought up again from the soul, then we have to say that we are sinking down into the unconscious that which we have in ordinary physical consciousness. Thus the world of representations that we gain through physical knowledge of the external world is constantly being taken up by our spiritual, by the supersensible; it continually slips into the supersensible. Every moment we gain representations of the external world through physical perceptions, and these representations are handed over to our supersensible nature. It will not be difficult for you to consider this in the light of everything that has been said over the years, because this is the most superficial supersensible process imaginable, a process that takes place continuously: the transition from ordinary perceptions to perceptions that we can remember. So it seems obvious, and this is also true according to spiritual research, that everything that takes place when we perceive the external world is a process of the physical plane. Even when we form ideas about the physical external world, this is still a process of the physical plane. But in the moment when we let the ideas sink down into the unconscious, we are already standing at the entrance to the supersensible world.

This is even a very important point to be taken into account by anyone who, not through all kinds of occult chatter but through serious human soul-searching, wants to gain an understanding of the occult world. For there is a very important fact hidden in the saying I have just applied: When we as human beings face the things of the external world and form ideas, it is a process of the physical plane. At the moment when the idea sinks down into the unconscious and is stored there until it is brought up again by a memory, a supersensible process takes place, a real supersensible process. So that you can say to yourself: If one is able to follow this process, which consists in the fact that a thought that is up in the consciousness sinks down into the subconscious and is present there as an image, one can, in other words, follow an idea as it is down in the subconscious, then one actually begins to glide into the realm of the supersensible. Just think: when you go through the usual process of remembering, the idea must first come up into consciousness, and you perceive it up here in consciousness, never down in the unconscious. You must distinguish between ordinary remembering and pursuing the ideas down into the unconscious. What takes place in remembering can be compared to a swimmer sinking under the water, whom you see until he is completely submerged. Now he is down and you no longer see him. When he comes up again, you see him again! [It was drawn.] It is the same with human perceptions: you have them as long as they are on the physical plane; when they go down, you have forgotten them; when you remember them again, they come up again like the float. But the process I am talking about, which already points to imaginative knowledge, could be compared to you diving under yourself and thereby being able to see the swimmer down in the water, so that he does not disappear when he submerges.

But from this follows nothing less than that the line I drew earlier, the level surface, as it were, below which the imagination sinks into the unconscious, into the realm of memory, is the threshold of the spiritual world itself, the first threshold of the spiritual world. This follows with absolute necessity. It is the first threshold of the spiritual world! Just think how close the human being is to this threshold of the spiritual world. [The words 'threshold of the spiritual world' were written next to the diagram.]

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And now take a process by which one can try to really get down there, to submerge. The process would be to try to follow ideas down into the unconscious. This can actually only be done by trial and error. It can be done by doing something like the following. You have formed an idea about the outside world; you try to artificially evoke the process of remembering independently of the outside world. Think of how it is recommended in “How to Know Higher Worlds”, where the very ordinary rule of looking back at the events of the day is given. When one looks back at the experiences of the day, one trains oneself to enter into the paths that the imagination itself takes by descending below the threshold and then ascending again. So the whole process of remembering is designed to follow the images that have sunk below the threshold of consciousness.

But in addition, it is said in “How to Know Higher Worlds” that one does well to trace the ideas one has formed in reverse order, that is, from the end back to the beginning; and if one wants to survey the day, to follow the stream of events backwards from evening to morning. In doing so, one must make a different effort than is made in the way of ordinary recollections. And this different effort of will brings one to grasp, as it were below the threshold of consciousness, what one has had as an experiential image. And in the course of trying, one comes to feel, to experience inwardly, how one runs after the images, runs after them below this threshold of consciousness. It is really a process of inner experiential probing that comes into play here. But it is important to do this review really seriously, not in a way that after a while you lose the seriousness of the matter. But then, if you do this process of looking back for a long time, or in general do the process of bringing up an experience from memory, an experienced world of ideas, so that you imagine the matter in reverse, thus applying a greater force than you when you remember in the usual sequence, then you also experience that you are no longer able to grasp the idea from a certain point on in the same way as you would have grasped it in ordinary life on the physical plane.

On the physical plane, memory expresses itself in such a way – and it is best for memory on the physical plane to express itself in this way – that if one brings up the image that one wants or is supposed to remember, one does so in a way that is true to the context of one's life, one brings it up in the way one has formed it on the physical plane. But if, through the suggested trial, one gradually gets used to chasing the ideas, as it were, under the threshold of consciousness, one does not discover them down there as they are in life. That is the mistake people always make when they believe that they will find a copy of what is in the physical world in the spiritual world. They have to assume that the ideas will look different down there. In reality, they look like this below the threshold of consciousness: they have stripped away everything that is characteristic of the physical plane. Down there they become entirely images; and they become so completely that we feel life in them. We feel life in them. It is very important to keep this sentence in mind: we feel life in them. You can only be convinced that you have really followed an idea down below the threshold of consciousness when you have the feeling that the idea is beginning to live, to stir. When I compared the ascent to imaginative knowledge with sticking one's head into an anthill, I explained it from a different point of view. I said: everything begins to stir, everything becomes active.

Now, for example, let us say you have had an ordinary experience during the day – I will take that – sat at a table and held a book in your hand. Now, at some time in the evening, you vividly imagine what it was like: the table, the book, you sitting there, as if you were outside of yourself. And it is always good to visualize the whole thing pictorially from the outset, not in abstract thoughts, because abstraction, the ability to abstract, has no significance at all for the imaginative world. So you imagine this picture: sitting at a table, with a book in your hand. - With table and book I simply want to say, imagine as vividly as possible some detail from everyday life. Then, if you really let your soul gaze upon this image, if you really imagine it intensely in meditation, then from a certain moment on you will feel differently than usual; yes, I will say comparatively, it is similar to when you would take a living being in your hand.

When you pick up an inanimate object, you have the feeling that the object is still, it does not tingle or crawl in your hand. Even if you have a moving dead object in your hand, you calm down when you feel that this life does not come from the object, but is mechanically assigned to it. It is a different matter if you happen to have a living object, let's say a mouse, in your hand. Let's say, for example, that you reached into a cupboard and thought you were taking some object in your hand and discovered that you had a mouse in your hand. And then, you feel the crawling and tingling of the mouse in your hand! There are people who start screaming at the top of their lungs when they suddenly feel a mouse in their hand. And the screaming is no less when they cannot yet see what is crawling and tingling in their hand. So there is a difference between having a dead or a living object in your hand. You have to get used to the living object first in order to tolerate it to a certain extent. Isn't it true that people are accustomed to touching dogs and cats, but they have to get used to it first. But if you put a living being in someone's hand in the middle of the night, in the dark of night, without their knowing it, they will also be shocked.

You have to realize this difference you feel between touching a dead and a living object. When you touch a dead object, you have a different feeling than when you touch a living one. Now, when you have an idea on the physical plane, you have a feeling that you can compare to touching a dead object. But as soon as you really go below the threshold of consciousness, that changes; so that you get the feeling: the thought has life within, begins to stir. It is the same discovery you have – as a comparison for the feeling of the soul – as when you have grasped a mouse: the thought tingles and crawls.

It is very important that we pay attention to this feeling if we are to get an idea of imaginative knowledge; for we are in the imaginative world at the moment when the thoughts that we bring up from the subconscious begin to tingle and crawl, begin to behave in such a way that we have the feeling: down there, under the threshold, everything is actually swirling and churning. And while it is very quiet up there in the attic and thoughts can be controlled so nicely, just as machines can be controlled, down there one thought follows another, the thoughts tingle and crawl, they churn and roll, down there they suddenly become a very active world. It is important to appropriate this feeling, because at that moment, when you begin to feel the life of the world of thought, you are in the imaginative or elementary world. That is where you are! And one can enter so easily if only one follows the very simplest rules given in “How to Know Higher Worlds”, if only one refrains from trying to enter by the way of all kinds of “practices” hinted at in recent days. One can really enter so easily. Just think that one of the very first things clearly stated in the book “How to Know Higher Worlds” is that one should try to follow the life of a plant, for example: how it gradually grows and gradually fades away. Yes, if you really follow this, you have to go through the life of the plant in your thoughts. First you have the thought of the very small seed, and if you do not make the thought flexible, you will not be able to follow the plant as it grows. You have to make the thought flexible. And then again, when you think of the plant shedding its leaves, gradually dying, withering, you have to think of shrinking and wrinkling. As soon as you begin to think in terms of living things, you have to make the thought itself mobile. The thought must begin to acquire inner mobility through your own power.

There are two beautiful poems by Goethe. One is called “The Metamorphosis of Plants” and the other “The Metamorphosis of Animals”. These two poems can be read, you can find them beautiful, but you can also do the following. You can try to really think the thoughts in these poems as Goethe thought them, from the first line to the last, and then you will find that if you go through with it, the thought can move inwardly from beginning to end. And anyone who does not follow the thought of these poems in this way has not understood the metamorphosis. But anyone who follows the thought in this way and then lets it sink down into the unconscious, and then, after having done this several times, remembers precisely this thought of the metamorphosis – for this is no different from the thinking that you are supposed to follow in 'How to Know Higher Worlds' Knowledge of Higher Worlds?», will sink into the unconscious, and will then, after he has done this often, remember precisely this thought of the metamorphosis. So he who carries this out, who sinks this thought down and then makes the effort to do it fifty, sixty, a hundred times, and a hundred and one times it will perhaps take, will one day bring it up. But then this thought, which he has practiced in this way, will be a mobile one. You will see that it does not come up like a small machine, but forgive me for using this example again, like a small mouse; you will see how it is an inwardly mobile, living element.

I said that it is so easy to delve into this elemental world if you just tear yourself away from the human tendency towards abstract thought. This tendency to have limited, abstract thoughts instead of inwardly mobile thoughts is so terribly great. Isn't it true that people are so eager to say what this or that is and what is meant by it, and are so satisfied when they can say that this or that is meant by it, because it gives them a thought that does not move like a machine. And people become so terribly impatient in their ordinary lives when you try by all means to convey to them flexible and not such abstract boxed thoughts. Because all outer life of the physical plan and all life of outer science consists of such dead boxed thoughts, of nested thoughts. How often have I had to experience that people asked me about this or that: Yes, what about it? What is that? They wanted a complete, rounded thought that they could write down and then read again, repeating it as often as they liked. But the aim should be to have a thought that is flexible within, a thought that lives on, really lives on.

But you see, there is also a very serious side to the mouse. Why do some people scream when they discover that they have reached into a cupboard and are holding a mouse in their hand? Because they are afraid! And this feeling really does arise at the moment when you realize, really realize: the thought is alive! Then you start to be afraid too! And that is precisely what good preparation for the matter consists of: unlearning to be afraid of the living thought. The materialists do not want to come to such living thoughts, I have emphasized this often. Why? Because they are afraid. Yes, the master of materialism, Ahriman, appears once in the Mystery Drama with the expression “fear”. There you have the passage in the Mysteries where it is indicated how one feels when thoughts begin to become mobile. But now, all the indications in “How to Know Higher Worlds”, if followed, lead to getting rid of this fear of the mobile, of the living thought.

So you see, you enter into a completely different world, a world at whose threshold you must truly discard abstract thinking, which dominates the entire physical plane. The endeavor of people who want to enter the occult world with a certain degree of comfort always consists of wanting to take with them the ordinary thinking of the physical plane. You cannot do that. You cannot take ordinary physical thinking into the occult world. You have to take mobile thinking into it. All thinking must become agile and mobile. If you do not feel this within you – and as I said, you are not doing it right if you do not feel it relatively soon – if you do not pay attention to what I have just said, then it is very easy not to grasp the peculiarity of the spiritual world. And one should grasp it if one wants to deal with the spiritual world at all.

You see, it is so difficult to struggle with human abstractness in this field; because once you have grasped this flexibility of thought, you will also understand that a flexible thought cannot occur in any old way, here or there. You cannot, for example, find a land animal in the water; you cannot accustom a bird, which is suited to the air, to live deep down in the water. If you go to the living, you cannot do otherwise than to accept the idea that one must not take it out of its element. You have to keep that in mind.

I once tried, in a very strict way, initially in a small area – I always try to do it this way, but I will just mention it now as an example – with a very important idea, to show vividly, precisely with an example, how things must be when one takes into account the inner life of the thought. In Copenhagen I gave a small lecture cycle on 'The Spiritual Guidance of the Human Being and of Humanity', which is also available in print. At a certain point in this lecture cycle, I drew attention to the mystery of the two Jesus children. Now take it as it is presented there. We have a lecture cycle that begins in a certain way. It draws attention to how man can already acquire certain insights if he tries to look at the first years of a child's development, tries to look back at these things. The whole thing is designed. Then it continues. The part of the hierarchies in human progress is presented - the book is printed, it is probably in everyone's hands, so I am talking about something very well known - then there is a certain connection, at a very specific point, about the two Jesus children. It is part of the discussion of the two Jesus children that it happens at a certain point. And anyone who says, “Well, why shouldn't we be able to take this discussion of the two Jesus children and present it exoterically, even though it has been taken out of context?” is asking the same question as someone who asks, “Why does the hand have to be on the arm, on this part of the body?” They could even say, “Why isn't the hand on the knee?” It could perhaps be there too. He does not understand the whole organism as a living being, he believes that the hand could also be somewhere else, right? The hand cannot be anywhere other than on the arm! So in this context, the thought of the two Jesus children cannot be in a different place because it is tempting to develop the matter in such a way that the living thought is included in the presentation.

Now someone comes along and writes a piece of writing and takes this thought in a crude way and puts it in context with other thoughts that have nothing to do with it! But that means nothing other than: he puts his hand on his knee! What does someone do who puts his hand on his knee? Yes, you can't do it to an organism, but you could draw it. Paper is patient, you could just draw a human figure, supported here, and the two knees so that hands grow out of them. [This drawing has not been handed down.] Not true, you could draw that, but then you would have drawn an impossible organism; you would have proved that you understand nothing of real life! One could also use the comparison: he has placed the eagle, the bird that is meant for the air, in the depths of the sea or something similar.

What did such a person try to do? Yes, you see, what he tried can be done with all things that relate only to knowledge of the physical plane. One professor can write a book by starting with one, another can start with another, and it does not matter so much there: things can be taken out and so on. But there one is not dealing with living beings, but with thought machines. That is the essential point.

A person who does something like this, who tears something out of context and puts it into an impossible context, has proved that he is completely ignorant of the essence that has been the driving force and inspiration of our entire spiritual scientific movement since its inception, because he is trying to apply the very ordinary materialistic scheme to the spiritual as well. This is very essential. It is very important to face these things squarely, otherwise one does not understand the inner significance of higher knowledge. One cannot say everything at any given point. And it is really true with regard to the exoteric, which borders on the esoteric, that Hegel has already said that a thought belongs in its place in context. I hinted at this recently when I tried to make some suggestions in this direction on Hegel's birthday. In this way, one achieves nothing less than to submerge into life with thinking, whereas otherwise one always lives in the dead; one submerges into life.

But through this, something also reveals itself that could not be recognized at all before and that cannot be examined at all on the physical plane, namely, arising and ceasing. You can also see this from “How to Know Higher Worlds.” On the physical plane, nothing else can be observed than what has come into being. The arising cannot be observed at all; only what has come into being can be observed on the physical plane. The passing away cannot be observed either, because when the object passes into the passing away, it is no longer on the physical plane, or at least it moves away from the physical plane.

So one cannot observe arising and ceasing on the physical plane. The consequence of this is that we can say: we enter into a completely new world element when we discover the movable thought, namely into the world of life and that is the world of arising and ceasing.

Occultly speaking, this could also be expressed in the following way: During the old moon time, man was - albeit only in the dream consciousness - in the world of becoming and passing away. It was not that he saw with his senses what was arising, for he had not yet developed the senses to perceive with, but was still immersed in things. He imagined in a dream-like way, but the images that he imagined in a dream-like way allowed him to really follow the arising and passing away. And that is what he must first strive for again by developing mobile thoughts. So the ascent to imaginative knowledge is at the same time a return, only a return to the level of consciousness. We return to something we have outgrown; we return properly.

So that we can say: This imaginative knowledge is the return to the world of becoming and passing away. We discover becoming and passing away when we return. And we cannot learn anything about becoming and passing away if we do not come to imaginative knowledge. It is quite impossible to discern anything about becoming and passing away without coming to imaginative knowledge.

That is why what Goethe wrote about the metamorphosis of plants and animals is so infinitely meaningful, because Goethe really wrote it from the point of view of imaginative knowledge. And that is why people could not understand what was actually meant when I wrote my comments on “Goethe's Scientific Writings”, which, in the most diverse turns of phrase, repeatedly express that it does not depend on the current scientific but to delve into Goethe's scientific knowledge and to see something tremendously outstanding in it, something quite different from current scientific knowledge. That is why I referred to a sentence that Goethe expressed so beautifully and in which he indicates what is important to him. Goethe made the Italian Journey and followed not only art but also nature with interest. When reading the 'Italian Journey', one can see how he gradually immersed himself in everything that the mineral, plant and so on could offer him. And then, when he had arrived in Sicily, he said that, after what he had observed there, he now wanted to make a journey to India, not to discover anything new, but to look at what had already been discovered by others in his way. In other words, to look at it with flexible concepts! That is what is important: to look at what others have discovered with flexible concepts. That is the tremendously significant fact that Goethe introduced these flexible concepts into scientific life.

Therefore, for those who understand occultism, the following is a fact that is otherwise misunderstood. Ernst Haeckel and other materialistic, or as they are also called, monistic scholars, have spoken very appreciatively about Goethe's Metamorphosis of Plants and Animals. But the fact that they were able to express their appreciation is based on a very strange process, which I will also make clear to you through a comparison.

Imagine you have a plant in a flowerpot in front of you, or even better, outside in the garden, and you want to enjoy this plant. You go out into the garden to enjoy it, to enter into a relationship with it. And now imagine that there is a person who cannot do anything with the plant. And if you ask yourself why, you discover: He is actually disturbed by life! And so he makes a cast of the plant very finely, so that the plant is now like the real one, but in papier-mâché. He puts it in his room and now he enjoys it. Life disturbed him; only now does he enjoy it!

I cannot tell you what torments I suffered as a boy when comparing, which is also characteristic of the attitude of people, I often had to hear as a boy that someone wanted to emphasize the beauty of a rose particularly by saying: Truly, as if made of wax! - It's enough to make you want to tear your hair out! But it does exist. It really does exist that someone emphasizes the excellence of a living thing by saying, in his phrase, that it is like a dead thing. It really does exist. For those who have a sense for the matter, it is something terrible. But if you don't have such feelings, you really can't develop according to reality.

Now, the following happened with Ernst Haeckel. Goethe wrote “The Metamorphosis of Plants” and “The Metamorphosis of Animals”, Haeckel reads them and Ahriman transforms what is alive that Goethe has written into mock-ups, into something that is actually made of papier-mâché, and Haeckel grasps that. He actually likes it. So that in what he praises, he has not praised what Goethe really meant, but Haeckel has only translated it into the mechanistic. Ahriman steps between Goethe and Haeckel, transforming the living into a dead one.

Now, as I said, this conscious upward leap to imaginative knowledge is a return. I said at the beginning of the lecture: the imaginations are actually already within us, they have been within us since the time of the moon, and the development on earth consists in the fact that we have covered them with the ordinary layers of consciousness. Now we are returning through what we have acquired in our ordinary earthly consciousness. It is a real return.

And now one can ask: how can one describe the whole thing? One can now say: it is a descent and a re-ascent. Only now is there any justification for drawing this line at all [the words on the blackboard are connected by a line, see diagram]; there would be no sense in drawing it from the outset. And only now can we say: on the level of ordinary physical cognition, there we are below; here is unconscious imaginative cognition, which now sits below in our nature and has to do with the forces of becoming and passing away; and on the other side, in the ascent, is conscious imaginative cognition. [Both were marked on the blackboard.]

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If we take Goethe as an obvious example – I will only look at him as an example – we can say that in Goethe's later works, the point has been reached where the outer development of humanity embraces imaginative knowledge, where it is actually introduced into science.

Now one may ask: Now one can study whether or not very strange things are associated with it? Yes, they are associated with it, because basically the whole of Goethe's way of thinking is quite different from that of other people. And Schiller, who was unable to develop this way of thinking, was only able to understand Goethe with the greatest effort, as you can see from the correspondence between Schiller and Goethe at the point I have often quoted, where Schiller writes to Goethe on August 23, 1794:

”...For a long time now, although from a considerable distance, I have observed the course of your mind and noted the path you have mapped out with ever-renewed admiration. You seek what is necessary in nature, but you seek it by the most difficult route, which any weaker force would do well to avoid. You take all of nature together to get light on the individual; in the totality of its manifestations you seek the explanation for the individual. From the simple organization you ascend, step by step, to the more complicated, to finally build the most complicated of all, the human being, genetically from the materials of the whole of nature. By recreating it, as it were, you seek to penetrate its hidden technology. A great and truly heroic idea, which shows sufficiently how much your mind holds the rich totality of its ideas together in a beautiful unity. You could never have hoped that your life would be enough for such a goal, but even just to embark on such a path is worth more than any other ending, and you have chosen, like Achilles in the Iliad between Phthia and immortality. If you had been born a Greek, or even an Italian, and had been surrounded from your cradle by a refined nature and idealizing art, your path would have been infinitely shortened, perhaps even made superfluous. You would have absorbed the form of the necessary into your first view of things, and the great style would have developed in you with your first experiences. Now that you have been born a German, since your Greek spirit has been thrown into this Nordic creation, you had no choice but to either become a Nordic artist yourself or to replace what reality withheld from your imagination by the help of your thinking power, and thus to give birth to a Greece from within and in a rational way, so to speak. In that period of your life when the soul forms its inner world from the outer world, surrounded by imperfect forms, you had already absorbed a wild and Nordic nature into yourself, when your victorious genius, superior to its material, discovered this defect from within, and from without it was confirmed by your acquaintance with Greek nature. Now you had to correct the old, inferior nature, which had already been forced upon your imagination, according to the better model that your creative mind created for itself, and this could not, of course, be done otherwise than according to guiding concepts. But this logical direction, which the mind is compelled to take in reflection, does not go well with the aesthetic one, through which alone it forms. So you had more work to do, because just as you went from intuition to abstraction, you now had to convert concepts back into intuitions, and transform thoughts into feelings, because only through these can the genius bring forth... “

He considers him to be a Greek transplanted to the Nordic world, and so on. Yes, there you see the whole difficulty Schiller had in understanding Goethe! Some people could learn something from this who believe they can understand Goethe in the twinkling of an eye and thereby elevate themselves above Schiller, even though Schiller was not exactly a fool when it came to those people who believe they can understand Goethe so readily!

But the peculiar thing that can be discovered is that Goethe also has a very peculiar and different view in relation to other areas, for example in relation to the ethical development of the human being, namely in the way of thinking about what the human being deserves or does not deserve as reward or punishment.

It is impossible to understand Goethe's work from the very beginning if you do not consider his, I would say his entire environment's, divergent way of thinking about reward and punishment. Read the poem “Prometheus,” where he even rebels against the gods. Prometheus, that is of course a revolt against the way people think about rewards and punishments. For Goethe there is the possibility of forming very special ideas about rewards and punishments. And in his “Wilhelm Meister” he really did try to present this, I would say, in a wonderfully probing way in the secrets of the world. You don't understand “Wilhelm Meister” if you don't consider that.

But where does that come from? It comes from the fact that in the realm of physical knowledge one cannot form any idea at all of what punishment or reward is to be applied to anything human in relation to the world, because that can only arise in the realm of imagination. That is why the occultists always said: When you ascend to imaginative knowledge, you experience not only the elemental world, but also - as they put it - “the world of wrath and punishment”. So it is not only a return to the world of becoming and passing away, but at the same time a climbing up to the world of wrath and punishment. The words “return to the world of becoming and passing away” and “world of wrath and punishment” were written on the blackboard. ]

Therefore, only spiritual science can truly illuminate the peculiar chain of cause and effect between what a person is worthy and unworthy of in relation to the universe. All other “justifications” in the world are preparatory to this.

We have now reached an important point, and I will continue with this tomorrow.

Yesterday we brought our observations on the characteristics of imaginative knowledge to a certain point of view and emphasized that everything that a person consciously brings into their consciousness through imaginative knowledge is actually already within them. I have used the comparison that in a dark room there are various objects, or for that matter people, which cannot be seen with the physical eyes in a dark room. Then one enters with a light, and everything inside is illuminated; nothing is new in it, everything was already there before. The only difference is that the things are seen and perceived afterwards, and not before. It is the same with what imaginative knowledge presents to us. Everything that imaginative knowledge brings to consciousness is present in man, reigns and works in man down there in the hidden depths of the soul; it belongs to what lives and moves in man. And what is especially important for man on the physical plane is that he is continually increased or diminished in his powers in some way through what he absorbs, experiences and lets sink down from his imaginative life into the depths of consciousness.

I shall have more to say to you on this subject on a later occasion, for the process is very incompletely characterized when one says: Here [it is drawn] is the threshold of consciousness; here is an idea that sinks down into the subconscious and is now down there like a living being. As I said, the process is quite incompletely described. But we want to ascend slowly and gradually to the true facts in this area.

What I want to say today is that we are becoming aware of how these imaginative cognitive facts are, of course, - as you can see from the discussion - thoroughly and deeply connected with all the conditions of human life, even on the physical plane from birth to death. But they belong to the unconscious or subconscious conditions of life. So that from what we have considered, we can also gain the important truth that man, as he lives on earth, is dependent on conditions that do not enter into the bright day-consciousness that we have from birth to death, except when we sleep. So we are dependent on life factors that cannot be known with ordinary normal consciousness.

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But from the way I have presented it, these life factors that prevail down there – and we said yesterday, in the etheric body – are still quite close to the person, so close that, because they are related, they connect with what the person continually lets sink down from his world of ideas. For man can, so to speak, when he transforms his thoughts into memories, transform his thoughts himself into the substance that is down there in the subconscious. It is, after all, substantively quite the same as what we think. When what we think is down there, it is just as much a seething, swirling world as what lives and moves down there, which is basically a living thought life. But this is the etheric body, which has come into the etheric body from the cosmos. And because it is related to our conscious thought life, it is still very close to the human being. And just as it lives and moves in us today in our unconscious, so it was basically fully present during the old moon existence. This [moon thinking] was - if you imagine it as a dream, if you think that it is completely immersed in dream life - generally proceeding as when you dream, but perceive the living weaving of thought in the dream. That is the old moon dweller's concept of the imagination. It is only during our life on earth that we have to make an effort to have thoughts, to form thoughts through our own efforts. The old moon dweller did not form thoughts through his own efforts. He lived in dream images, which were not as dead as our thoughts, but were living, weaving images, forming thoughts.

You can see from what I have described to you that when we immerse ourselves in the imaginative world, we gain something and lose something at the same time. We lose the reassurance of the peaceful earthly experience of thoughts; we no longer have that in our power because thoughts themselves are living inner forces. In ordinary life we feel that we are the masters of our thoughts; we do not have them in the imaginative world; but in return we also grasp a life that is just life. The thoughts we have in physical life are dead; what we grasp there lives and moves. And so it was already during the old moon existence for people, only they had it in dreams, and not consciously. Then, in the evolution on earth, there is an ascent to consciousness. And from the conscious realization of that which was a dream during the old moon existence, imaginative knowledge emerges as the first step from which spiritual-scientific knowledge must be taken. This imaginative knowledge is therefore still very much related to the human being.

Now, I said, one gains something and one loses something. People would agree with the first part, gaining something, but they do not agree with the losing. And from this, countless errors arise; very, very many errors arise from this. You see, it is not so easy if you do not make an effort to imagine what this dream-like imaginative imagining was like during the moon phase. When we live here on earth, it is inconvenient, because of the physical developmental period, to always have to form ideas and thoughts only on the basis of earthly facts. That is precisely the inconvenience of studying. One must really weigh the facts, judge the facts, and connect the facts, and one must slowly work one's way through one's own efforts into the worlds of thought and imagination, which one masters as an earthly human being with an earthly will. Some people find it much more comfortable to have the living world of thought simply handed to them, so that they only need to wait for it: when they receive the 'enlightenment' from it, it enters into their soul life, and they no longer need to develop thoughts. That is how they think, but it does not take them any further than they are. One stands much higher as an earth human than as a moon human, because one has developed further. Compared to the dreamy moon-imagination, the earthman, who combines facts and forms concepts from life experiences with his rational judgment, stands much higher than the moonman and than the one who longs for this moonman existence, which is supposed to consist of illuminations that have not been worked out through thought.

One can have peculiar experiences there. Not that a person, when he sinks back to this moon-like realization, has no thoughts. He has thoughts, but they come by themselves, he does not need to do the work of thinking. That seems rather comfortable. One can experience a certain, very important, specific experience over and over again, which must be considered if one wants to understand these things at all.

There are people who develop a certain visionary clairvoyance. This dream-like imagining, this visionary clairvoyance, always involves a regression to a lunar nature. For real clairvoyance that can be desired for the earth must be based on a higher level, on an even greater development through the world of thought than the recognition of the physical plane. The regression is not an elevation, not a development upwards for the person, but a development downwards, a becoming less intelligent than one is as a normal earth person. And then the strange experience occurs, which one can have again and again. There are people who have a certain visionary clairvoyance, but are not really intelligent at all. Yes, their clairvoyance is almost directly related to the fact that they shun intelligence, that they do not want to develop the intelligence that one has to develop as an earthly human being. It is precisely this attenuation of ordinary earthly intelligence that is very often associated with a certain degree of visionary clairvoyance, which is a lunar atavistic one. And then perhaps the following occurs: Such people can then make notes of their images. These notes are not thoughtless, but interwoven with thoughts - the thoughts come with the images and within them are interwoven spiritual, very spiritual images. And then the puzzle can arise: Yes, there is a person who describes in pictures, in very beautiful pictures, Atlantis or other things that come to him in a visionary way, and that is absolutely logically intelligent. But I never perceived such intelligent logic in that person when he was supposed to explain things of the physical plane; then he does not have it. He has not become enough of an earth person. But if he is allowed to fall back into lunar intelligence, then the intelligence comes. But then it is not his intelligence, then he is merely a medium for the lunar intelligence, then the lunar intelligence works in him. One can receive beautiful descriptions of spiritual worlds from people who have sunk a little back into the lunar stage, and who, when they want to apply their earthly acquired intelligence, cannot themselves understand what they have actually produced, and in most cases do not even want to do so.

I said: In the ascent to imaginative knowledge one must gain something and lose something, and that people usually do not want to lose anything. I also pointed out that people who have spirit do not want to lose it. These are not the people who love visionary clairvoyance, for they are quite willing to lose ordinary intelligence, ordinary thinking. But there is another group that does not want to lose this intelligence. They want to maintain this intelligence as it is on the physical plane, they just do not want to develop it further. They do not want to work on this intelligence so that the person comes to use the concepts more freely than they are used in the processes of the physical plane. And then such people come to allegorizing, to symbolizing, which is after all again only an activity of the physical plane, because it does not further the thinking, but leaves it standing, and then puts outer thought-capes on it from all kinds of exquisite occult things. It is very important to bear that in mind.

And you see, that was already in the consciousness of those who slowly and gradually worked or wanted to work their way up to the points of view that we must have in spiritual science today. Today, in spiritual science, we really must bring humanity something of clear thinking, combined with the possibility of knowing something of spiritual worlds, but in clear, completely clear thinking. It has taken a long time for the possibility to arise – and hopefully it has now – to see through these things in this way. And many people have worked their way through to this. People of such great clarity as Goethe, for example, have come very close to complete clarity. But many have worked their way through to this. Just think how Jakob Böhme wrestled with the transition points of the materialistic age, with the chaotically writhing, moving, whirling and tumbling concepts. He had already had them, but to really work through them so that what emerged is what stands with Jakob Böhme as a profound illumination of some secrets of the spiritual world.

Another person has expressed a wonderful sentence – I would say, as if illuminating the field of vision wonderfully, as dawned on modern times – from which one can see, or at least from what he has otherwise achieved, one can see how he was not able to penetrate with a completely clear view to what spiritual science should be today, but he was still able to come so far as to represent the most important nerve. The man I am talking about realized in the 18th century that if you want to know the human being, you have to penetrate through the darkness, through the confusion of external material knowledge. Even if you are at the first stage of imaginative knowledge, this is necessary. Because we have seen what weaves down there in the depths of the soul, you can't reach that with physical knowledge. You have to penetrate through the darkness. But that is not the only thing you have to do. You also have to penetrate through the confusion of ordinary concepts to knowledge, you also have to dispel these confusions. So you also have to get beyond the ordinary thinking that works on the physical plane.

And then this man coined a very beautiful sentence. The first part of this sentence is readily followed, the second part is almost never followed. But it is important to follow it. You see, most people today who want to become or be mystics in some way or other admit that one must strip away the sensual, the material, that one must strip away the confusions of the material in order to penetrate into the spiritual. But that one must also discard the forms of the spiritual that adhere to conceptual thinking, very few people admit; for they would like to take them with them, would like to manage them in the same way as on the physical plane, would like to find the thought down there in the subconscious as a possibility for remembrance in exactly the same form as it has up there.

But it would be a mistake to believe that the clairvoyant, when he looks into the human mind, finds the thoughts there in exactly the same form as the person who has them in his head. That is not true. Down there they are transformed, they are living entities, an elementary world. The world of thoughts that man has here on the physical plane is not found in the spiritual world. That is why that man coined a beautiful sentence that I want to write down for you, because it can really be seen as a kind of trial in one's own mind: how can one possibly get to know something about the worlds that lie outside the earthly world? He said, [it was written on the board]:

Dissipez vos ténèbres matérielles ei vous trouverez l'Homme

With this part of the sentence: To disperse the material darkness and confusion - people who want to be mystics agree. But people today still hardly understand the second part of the sentence. [It was written on the blackboard]:

Dissipez vos ténèbres spirituelles et vous trouverez Dieu

whereby we have to imagine the whole content of spiritual science for “Dieu”, because that is still colored by religious ideas. Not true, he could not yet find the expression that can be found today.

Now you can surely imagine that when someone reads the sentence today: “Dissipez vos ténèbres matétrielles et vous trouverez l'homme”, they think: Yes, fine, that's how I enter the spiritual world, that's what I want. But when he reads, “Dissipez vos ténèbres spirituelles et vous trouverez Dieu,” he says, “Yes, but what will remain for me then? I will have nothing?”

Yes, what remains there? Precisely that remains, which is the content of today's spiritual science. This is necessary: the content of knowledge of the physical plane, which is usually believed to be the only correct one, must be dispelled just as the material darkness is dispelled. Now notice how this is taken into account in our spiritual science... [space in the transcript].

This sentence is a sentence of the so-called “philosophe inconnu”, of Saint-Martin, who saw himself as a disciple of Jakob Böhme. Thus, we already find in Saint-Martin a deep longing for that which is to come to light in spiritual science. But he calls himself “philosophe inconnu”, unknown philosopher, because what he carried within him remained foreign to those who saw him, of course, saw his nose, saw his hands, heard the words he spoke. The actual philosopher Saint-Martin remained unknown to them, quite unknown.

So, after the discussions we had yesterday, the appropriation of imaginative knowledge is a return, a conscious return to the way in which man had his relationship to the world during the lunar time. So that we can say - you remember, we have already presented this from a different side here in lectures: In man, today, still prevail, but supersensibly, as spiritual-supersensibles, the events, which are not actually normal events on earth, but were normal events during the moon time. He has preserved these moon events; he can fall back in a certain sense. Then he produces knowledge in a completely different way than the earth man can produce such knowledge. He can have visionary clairvoyance, have subdued intelligence and pose the very riddle I spoke of earlier, namely that if one were to induce him to work reasonably scientifically, or even to make reasonable conclusions about the most ordinary, everyday events, he cannot do it, that he does not succeed; but when he writes something out of the vision, even about the events that took place at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha, he only writes pictures, remains in the moon life, but still writes terribly cleverly. And what he writes does not match what is otherwise known about the person. So, theoretically he can do nothing, but he writes very cleverly in a mediumistic way, so that one can be amazed at the cleverness. But that is not a further development, that is a regression of the human being. Of course, that does not exclude the possibility that truths can come to light through such a person, because he is, after all, in an earthly existence and connected to the earthly existence and, in addition, has this lively moon life in him.

I have tried to depict the different types of people in the Mystery Dramas, and also to draw a character who falls back into the lunar, who is therefore unintelligent on the physical plane and yet can reveal correct things, who is therefore below the level of the normal earthly human being: that is Theodora. Theodora is a figure who is meant to be a regression into lunar consciousness. That is very clear. I would like to say that it is very clearly indicated there, as it is, by saying at the one point where Theodora appears: “Theodora, a seer. In her, the will element is transformed into naive seership.” Naive seership means, of course, naive visionary. It is a naive seership, and that is how the character is developed. And for this reason, it is also that in the last mystery, Theodora herself can no longer appear, but only her soul, because she cannot go through certain things. These Mystery Dramas should be taken very, very literally. Perhaps some of you will one day realize that hardly anything that has happened here in recent days could not already be read in the Mysteries in some form or other. If one had read it as the things were meant to be read, we would not have needed these confusions.

So let us remember: what is experienced as the imaginative world is still relatively close to the human being. What can be experienced as the inspired world, on the other hand, is much less close to the human being. For when one first enters into the inspired world, it encompasses those facts that did not take place during the moon's existence but already during the old sun's existence and that the human being has also retained. So you penetrate into even greater depths of the human soul when you work your way through to the inspired world. And the inspired world that you encounter first has a certain peculiarity.

You see, when a person works his way through to the imaginative world, he encounters facts that took place during the old moon's existence. If you imagine the old moon in the phases when it was separated from the then sun (you can read about this in “Secret Science”), then at certain times, man lived on this moon that was separated from the sun. And what the human being experienced there is what one encounters first when one returns with the old, dream-like, imaginative clairvoyance. But when one enters the inspired world, then one experiences in the return not a being split off from the sun, but a being directly inside the sun; thus the facts that the human being experienced together with the sun. One experiences truly correct solar facts. And these solar facts, you see, are actually no longer related to man. Because the way man is now, during his earthly existence, if he does not look into the depths of his soul, does not look at what is in the deeply hidden reasons of his soul, he is actually, through what he is on earth, really more of a shell. It is not a real human being, it is more of a shell. First of all, there is the physical form itself, which has been created during the earthly existence as it appears to us on the physical plane. But there are forces at work within it that cannot be seen and that are not even sought by current science.

A friend of ours has been encouraged to search in this direction with the biological material at his disposal. The friend is putting a lot of effort into it and perhaps after some time - such things require a great deal of study - will be able to come up with a way to bridge the gap to these hidden parts of human nature. But for this it is necessary to search out those biological facts that are not taken into account by present-day science, that the present-day researcher, who experiments, leaves lying, as it were. So one has to search through the preparations for what does not interest the other researchers at all, what they leave lying. Of course, a lot is still missing, and a lot of new research has to be done. It is quite possible that it will take many years of work before it can be completed. But it would be an eminently important work because it could show us what can still be achieved by physical science of what lives in human nature from the old moon. It will result in a completely new embryology, a new part, a new side to embryology. It is necessary that this be done. But that is really all; more cannot be found by looking at the human being from the outside. For what can be found today in the human being from the outside is actually not older, not even as old as the oldest time of the old moon existence. But from such research, of which I have just spoken, conclusions can be drawn about processes of the old moon existence. These will correspond with what is described in “Occult Science”. But, as I said, we do not get very far back when we look at human beings as they are today; not even to the beginning of the ancient moon existence, let alone to the ancient sun existence.

If you want to go back to the old solar existence, then you have to take much, much less material in the human being than can be taken in the science I just spoke of. Because what it is about is that something actually penetrates into human nature, which man on earth can bring to revelation, but does not have to bring to revelation. He can, but he does not have to, bring it to revelation. When, for example, an artist or poet is truly inspired, then these inspirations come from the spiritual world of the existence of the sun. They really come from the spiritual world of the existence of the sun. It is just that our time is so terribly poor in spirit that what comes from the inspirations of the existence of the sun is rejected, and people actually only ever want to create in a naturalistic way, to stick to the model, that is to say to the earthly, while what can come from the model is only the material for what one should actually create. The arts that protect the individual artist from becoming attached to the model, from falling back on the material, are architecture and music. Architecture cannot reproduce anything; it often does it quite badly. And music cannot reproduce anything either, because it is not real music if you reproduce bird calls and cat meows, as you reproduce models in painting and so on. In music, only the very highest material of sound can be used. But it should be the same in every art. Just as much as the musician takes from music, the painter must take from the model. What the tones are for the musician, the form and color must be for the painter. The model should not give him more than the material. So the artistic cannot be taken from the model, but arises from inspiration, which leads back to the ancient solar existence. Hence the strangeness to the earth of truly great works of art. I said that man can live without artistic inspiration, he can, he can indeed bring it in, but he does not need to bring it in. The Botokude, doesn't he say: Man can also live without art.

But now you can – and those who experience things in a deeper sense will do so sooner or later – you can raise an important, crucial question: Yes, if we have a Saturn existence, a Sun existence, a Moon existence, an Earth existence, all with certain facts, and in imaginative knowledge, to the sun in inspired knowledge, and from this it follows that we return to Saturn in intuitive knowledge; yes, if this is so, that we do not have new facts but return to the old facts, why then does man need further development at all?

Someone might ask this question: Why further development? Why the whole earthly existence, which detaches us from the facts through which we have developed, so that the insights are pushed down into the unconscious, and we must first recognize them again? Why the whole thing?

Yes, you see, it is only through this that we become true human beings, because only through it can we truly perfect our true nature. And this can also be seen outwardly if one really studies those personalities who had something of the flexible concepts, of this conceptual mind, as I have mentioned to you in the examples of Goethe's “Metamorphosis of Plants” and “Metamorphosis of Animals”. Such natures must be studied. And such natures show at the same time that they, when they are completely true to themselves inwardly, stand in a very definite relation to yet another world of the soul. This is especially evident in Goethe. Study “Wilhelm Meister”, study all of Goethe's poetry, and you will find that in his work there is a remarkable way of judging and passing judgment on the world. If you look into these things, you will find that in the same measure as Goethe's idea of metamorphosis develops, so does a truly genuine, magnificent inner soul tolerance. A wonderful tolerance develops in his soul, a remarkable way of relating to the world and to life, a soul tolerance! And this is connected with very deep facts.

You see, if we look at the animal world, this animal world has the most diverse forms. If we compare, for example, the hyena, which has its carrion-craving written all over its face and which carries its nature in its entire posture, with the lion, with the wolf, and if we in turn compare these animals with the eagle and the eagle with the vulture, then these animals in comparison with turtles, snakes, worms, the various insects, if we take all these different animal forms, we must still ask ourselves: How does this relate to the spiritual world?

This can only be studied by studying the old moon existence. Because why? You see, during the old moon existence, man did not yet exist in his present form. The corresponding forms that existed at the human level were the angels. The Angeloi, the angels, had very different judgments and a very different way of thinking [than we have today]. The angels were at the same level back then that people are at today, but they were not in a physical body like the people on earth today. They had a very soft, flexible body, because the spirits of form had not yet been involved in forming a solid body. Now, these angeloi thought in terms that were much more alive compared to our earthly concepts, and this was not during their time on earth but during the time on the moon. These concepts, however, have something very peculiar in addition to their liveliness. They were steeped to a high degree in impulses of feeling. Inspired by the archangels, the archai, the spirits of form, the spirits of movement, and so on upwards, the angels grasped the concepts during the lunar time. But these are living, impulsive concepts; much more impulsive than we find the concepts in today's people, who alternately become either “rapture nickels” or “poison nickels” when they put their emotions into how they judge life. There are such people, and they can be the best of people, but they will alternately be enraptured, enraptured about something, or be quite pronounced “poison nickels”, so that the whole soul is in what they express and the whole goes out in the concepts, doesn't it. Now that was present in a much higher degree - directly creative - in these angels on the moon.

Imagine a moon dweller who thinks in this way! He says to himself: Yes, I must now grasp a concept. Inspiration gives me: Wretched creature, who carries his back rising from behind to the front, who makes a repulsive face out of longing for carrion! - That is how this creature came into being, condemned to be a hyena. The creative concept is there. The forms of the animal kingdom are intimately connected with this creative thinking, which creates according to the principle of good and evil. And the whole animal kingdom in its various forms is such a manifestation of good and evil.

The people [of Earth] were not supposed to learn this. One who did not want to let go of the culture of the moon seduced people into recognizing good and evil in the way he had experienced it during the lunar period. The... [gap in the transcription] judged thus; but people should learn to judge differently. This strong identification of the emotions with the concepts should not go down into deeper psychological levels. That had to be discarded, that had to give way to a more objective, more relaxed form. Therefore man had to progress from lunar to earthly development. And if he continues to progress, he will become even more tolerant. A lunar angel, yes, he hated the hyena in an incredible way because for him it represented evil. He hated the snake, hated everything that was ugly and loved everything that was beautiful. Good and evil belonged to the realm of creative life. Man had to unlearn this. Man could not develop an earth science if he were to classify animals, as the moon angels did, into beautiful and ugly – no, we classify differently, according to objective terms – into decent and indecent animals, into playful, into cunning animals, and so on. The moon angels had all that. But it would not be scientific today, for example, if a learned book were to say: “The weasel - characteristic: cunning.” This may be the case in a satirical poem, but in science today this must be suppressed; it cannot be so today.

So in order to make progress in this field, one must be able to rise to a level at which one regards the animal kingdom without emotion in the same scientific way as one regards the natural world when one has the most intense emotions in one's earthly life. And we can see this in this peculiar distillation of Goethe's mind. For him, human life is to a much greater extent a calm stream, which he observes like natural phenomena. That is precisely the wonderful inner serenity of Goethe's view of life, that for him part of human life also enters into the stream of natural facts. This is how he was able to be so objective.

Now, from this point on, we have to take up the matter again and continue the deliberations tomorrow.

In the last few days I have spoken to you about how the knowledge that human beings acquire on the physical plane as earthly human beings is initially a kind of dead knowledge, a knowledge that relates to what we must call knowledge of the next higher world, like the dead to the living. I have tried to make clear how this dead, as it were mechanical knowledge of the physical man on earth comes to life when we raise ourselves to the level of those steps of knowledge through which man can learn something of the so-called higher worlds.

Dead knowledge! Knowledge today is indeed dead, but as physical knowledge on earth it was not always dead. It only became so. And you all know the time when human knowledge on earth became so dead. I have often spoken to you about how, when we go back to ancient times, to times of the development of the earth before the Mystery of Golgotha had taken place, even ordinary earthly knowledge was more alive because there was a kind of ancient inheritance [of higher knowledge]. There was always something of the ancient inheritance of higher knowledge mixed into ordinary earthly knowledge. You can follow this in the various documents of knowledge and religion of mankind. Just see how in the Bible, in the Old Testament, when the supersensible worlds are mentioned, it is always spoken of either as a dream or as the inspiration of the prophets. There we always have a natural descent from living knowledge. The old atavistic inheritance of clairvoyance, which had remained with them as a lunar legacy, had not yet been extinguished in man. This was extinguished at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha.

I ask you to take this sentence quite literally. Because if any of you repeats this sentence anywhere in such a way that you report that I said that the old atavistic knowledge was extinguished by the mystery of Golgotha, then you are saying the exact opposite of what I have just expressed. At the time of the Mystery of Golgotha, this knowledge had been lost through the entirely natural process of human development, and the Mystery of Golgotha provided a substitute for what had gradually been lost, bringing life into the human soul from a different direction. So that today we are confronted with the following fact: if one goes back into ancient human traditions, one finds all kinds of knowledge even before the time of the Mystery of Golgotha. But in this knowledge, the ancients did not suspect anything of a realization of the Most High, the Most Important for man, but basically it was subordinate things that one believed one recognized in this way. Everything important, everything related to the supersensible worlds, was traced back to an ancient wisdom, to a wisdom that was given to mankind, as it were, through a primeval revelation. That is what you expressed in one of our four mysteries. And it was presented in such a way that this heritage was then passed on from generation to generation in the wisdom schools. In the book “Christianity as Mystical Fact” you will find that we have tried to show how, through the Mystery of Golgotha, a substitute was created for this dying old wisdom, how, as it were, the Primordial Mystery became a historical fact at Golgotha, and how, through the cross of initiation being perceptibly set up at Golgotha for all men, life was to be poured into the human soul. So that one can say since then: There is our dead knowledge, which man gains through his own effort on the physical plane, and there is something in addition to this that flows into his soul through the fact that, through the Mystery of Golgotha, the substantial that was to enter the earth aura through the Christ has flowed into the earth aura, and now flows into the human soul as a second source of human knowledge.

So that one can say: From the spiritual-scientific point of view, the matter must be viewed in such a way that man's physical knowledge of the earth is dead, but that life enters into it when man allows this physical knowledge of the earth to be fertilized by that which the Mystery of Golgotha can be for him. And then we have the next higher level of knowledge, which we call imaginative knowledge. This is now already a living, a truly living thing. And this living realization, this imaginative realization, is about the things that we have discussed in recent days.

As important, I would like to emphasize again today what I already said yesterday, that this imaginative realization is still related to the nature of the human soul. It is a return to the moon age. And it is so akin to the nature of the human soul that, in fact, as I described yesterday, atavistic dream-like moon-knowledge can still emerge in human nature today, and that much of what can be recognized through a higher art of clairvoyance can, so to speak, come together with what comes out through atavism, provided the moon clairvoyant has the necessary modesty.

But beyond this [imaginative knowledge], there is everything that enters the human soul through inspiration. Substantively, these are the facts of the ancient solar evolution, with which the human being was connected. And what man has taken up into himself as an element of life during the old solar development is also preserved down there in the depths of human nature. This must be illuminated by conscious knowledge if inspiration is to occur.

Yesterday I indicated that in real, true art there is an unconscious emergence of these things that belong to the ancient facts of the sun and that man has preserved as hereditary traits; that when this, which is deep in the hidden depths of the soul, is raised up into the conscious life of the soul, it can become conscious to man as artistic inspiration. Man then lives only in the consequences that arise from below; he does not live in the causes. If I had to hint to you that the thought below the threshold of consciousness is very different from the thought we have when we bring something from the subconscious thoughts through the memory back , it must be emphasized that what actually lives in the depths of the artist's soul is even more different, radically different, from what then rises to the artist's consciousness.

Now we have to engrave an idiosyncrasy quite sharply in our minds if we want to understand the whole of inspiration at all. You see, for the person who is touched by inspiration, there is no difference between an objective law of nature and that which he experiences in his soul as a thought, as a soul experience. He feels the law of nature as belonging to him just as he feels that which lives in his own soul as belonging to him. Let me put it this way: When the person who is inspired decides to do something, when he acts on some motive, then there is a lawfulness underlying it. This lawfulness one is initially authorized to feel as a lawfulness of one's own heart, as one's own experience. But one feels it in the same objectivity as one feels the rising of the sun in objectivity. I can also say it this way: when I pick up the watch, I experience it as my affair on the physical plane. In the case of physical knowledge, I will not experience it as my affair when the sun rises in the morning. But with regard to that which really comes from the impulse of the inspired world, one experiences what happens in nature as belonging to oneself.

Human interest truly extends beyond natural affairs. Natural affairs become man's own interests. As long as one does not feel the life of the plant within oneself as intimately as the experiences of one's own heart, there can be no truth in inspiration. As long as you do not feel a falling stone, splashing on the surface of the water and making drops splash up, in the same way as you can feel what is going on in your own being, inspiration is not true. I could also say: Everything in man that is closer to him than nature in its fullness does not belong to the inspired truths. But it would be utter nonsense to believe that if someone were to smash the inspired person's skull, the inspired person would feel this objectively in the same way as he feels the eruption of a volcano. Subjectively, he makes this distinction self-evident; but at that moment, when someone is smashing his skull, he is not an inspiration. But for everything that is in this sense the realm of inspiration, his interest is extended beyond the whole of nature. And I have already pointed out in the Hague Cycle how it is the broadening of interest that is the main thing in the case of extended knowledge. Anyone who cannot detach himself, at least for a short period, from what concerns him alone, cannot, of course, achieve inspiration. He does not always need it; on the contrary, he will do well to sharply distinguish his own interests from those that are to be the subject of his inspiration. But when man extends his interest beyond objectivity, when he tries to feel the life of the plant in its becoming as he feels what is happening in his own life, when what grows and germinates and becomes and passes away out there is as intimately familiar to him as the life within his own being, then he is inspired with regard to everything that comes to him in this way.

But then this way of taking an interest is necessarily linked to a gradual ascent to a way of judging people like the Goethean way of judging people that we have mentioned. Goethe learned to

endeavor [for living thoughts] to distinguish the human being's actions from the human essence. And this is something extremely important! What we do or have done belongs to the objective world, is karma put into action; what we are as a personality is in a state of continuous becoming. And the judgment we pass on anything a person has done must, in principle, be on a completely different level than the judgment we pass on the value or worthlessness of a human personality. If we want to approach the higher worlds, we must learn to face the human personality as objectively as we face a plant or a stone objectively. We must learn to be able to take an interest in the personality of those people who have done deeds that we may have to condemn in the most eminent sense. It is precisely this separation of the human being from his deeds, the separation of the human being from his karma, that one must be able to carry out if one is to be able to gain a right relationship to the higher worlds.

And here, if we truly want to stand on the ground of spiritual science, we must also see that this is one of the cases where we come into sharp opposition to the materialistic thinking of our time. This materialistic thinking of our time has, as a tendency, to draw the personality of man more and more into judging his actions. Just think, in recent times, in the field of external jurisprudence, more and more the tendency has emerged that one must not only pass judgment on a particular act when a person has committed it, but one must also observe the whole of human nature, take into account what the person's soul is like, how he came to do it, whether he is inferior or fully developed, and the like. And certain circles even demand that not only doctors but also psychologists be consulted as experts in the assessment of offenses and crimes by the external judiciary. But it is presumptuous to judge the essence of man instead of deeds, which concern only the external life.

Among the more recent philosophers, only one has paid any attention to this. You will find him mentioned in my “Riddles of Philosophy”, though from a different point of view. It is Dilthey who has pointed out that jurisprudence must in turn free itself from psychological jurisprudence and from everything similar.

What a person does concerns two areas: firstly, his karma. This takes effect of its own accord through its causality and is no concern of other people. Christ Himself did not judge the sin of the adulteress, but wrote it into the ground, because it will be lived out in the course of karma. Secondly, the human deed concerns human coexistence, and only from this point of view is the human deed to be judged. It is not the place of the external social order to judge man as such.

But spiritual science will gradually develop into something other than judgment; it will develop into understanding. And those psychologists who might be called upon today to act as experts when judgments are to be passed on the external deeds of man will be of no use, for they will know nothing of a person's soul. The assessment of a person should not correspond to judgment, but to understanding; because the tendency should be to help, and not to judge, under all circumstances. To help, and not to judge! But one can only help if one has an understanding of what is going on in a human soul.

However, if one tends to help in truth rather than in lies, one will be most misunderstood by the world. For the one who is to be helped will be least inclined to judge the one who wants to help in the right way. The one who is to be helped will want to be helped in the way he thinks best! But that may be the worst help one can give him if one helps him in the way he thinks best himself. An understanding gained on the basis of mental and spiritual life will often lead us to do something quite different for the person we want to help, rather than doing exactly what he or she presumes we should do for them. Perhaps sometimes even withdrawing from such a person will be much better than cajoling; perhaps brusquely rejecting something will be a much better, more loving help than flattering and accommodating oneself to what the person in question wants. Someone who treats him strictly can be much more loving to a person than someone who gives in to him in every way. And of course misunderstanding is inevitable in this field, that is quite natural. Perhaps the one who makes the greatest effort to enter into a person's soul in this way will be most misunderstood. But that is not the point, the important thing is to seek understanding under all circumstances and not to exercise judgment.

In the context of our spiritual-scientific lectures, it was often necessary to speak of Ahriman and Lucifer. Of course, especially after the explanations that have been given recently, one can understand how human nature can be seized more or less strongly by Ahriman and Lucifer. For basically, life is a constant oscillation between Ahrimanic and Luciferic impulses, only that the state of equilibrium is sought by the being of the world itself, and life consists precisely in maintaining this state of equilibrium. But now consider a great, an enormous difference. One can do two things: one can pass judgment, declaring that some deed of a person is influenced by Ahriman or Lucifer, and one can judge the person accordingly. Or one can do the other: one can recognize that a deed of a person is influenced by Ahriman or Lucifer, and one can try to understand the person on the basis of this fact. And between these two judgments lies the greatest conceivable difference. For to pass judgment on the basis that something Ahrimanic or Luciferic is in man requires that one never pass judgment from any other point of view than this: one judges human beings no more by this knowledge, that Ahriman and Lucifer live in man, than one judges any plant because it blossoms red and not blue. The idea that anything in man is Ahrimanic or Luciferic must be excluded from any kind of judgment, just as our judgment must refrain from making any value judgment if we want to recognize the plant, whether it be red or blue.

Above all, we must try to keep our knowledge free of all emotion, of all subjectivity. And we will be able to do this more and more, the more we strive to do so, the more we really strive to take such things, as they have just been expressed, with the utmost seriousness.

Goethe, for example, endeavored, especially in his most mature period, to present events between people as natural phenomena. Of course, not from the point of view that there is a mechanical necessity in human relationships as there is in natural relationships. On the contrary, the position of the human soul in relation to the events of human life gradually becomes such that one regards the events of human life with the same objective love with which one regards natural phenomena. This gives rise to that inner tolerance that arises out of knowledge itself.

But in this way one acquires the possibility of gradually allowing into knowledge that which otherwise may not enter into knowledge at all: namely, the terminology that arises from feeling and will. When I explained psychoanalysis to you, we just concluded on one day that we had to speak a condemning word about it; but we first proved that it followed from the matter itself. And why could this judgment be made? Here one may also express something subjective. Why was I allowed to express what seems to be a completely subjective judgment about psychoanalysis? Because I have endeavored – I am expressing something subjective, but then it is the case that things are perhaps most easily understood – to study psychoanalysis in the way I study something that is very pleasant and very congenial to me. That is to say, to have the same objective love for the one as for the other. And we must gradually struggle through to this, really struggle through; otherwise we seek nothing but sensation in knowledge, seek only what is pleasant in knowledge. But one never has knowledge if one seeks only what is pleasant in knowledge!

For our physical life, the sunlike can never enter the human being's consciousness except by giving him pleasure or repelling him. Only feelings enter from the sunlike, and we must approach the sunlike with our understanding, we must penetrate down into what is otherwise foreign to man. We said that the moonlike is related to man, but the sunlike is no longer related to man. We must bring down, carry down into regions where we would otherwise not penetrate, our understanding, if we want to bring the sunlike of inspiration close to us.

Real knowledge of the higher worlds indeed requires preparation in the whole mood of our soul, and without this mood in our soul we cannot penetrate into the higher worlds. I do not mean merely penetrating clairvoyantly, but also pursuing things with understanding. One cannot understand the things related in Occult Science if one wishes to take them in with the frame of mind one would otherwise have for something outwardly indifferent, I mean for something mathematical or the like; but one can only take them in if one first prepares oneself in one's mind for them. He who wants to absorb the inspired knowledge with the ordinary understanding of the physical plane is like the man who believes he can enter a plant with his physical body and be in it in its life. That is why people have always been prepared before they were given knowledge of the higher worlds, they have always been prepared slowly so that the soul's state was such that this knowledge of the higher worlds could affect the mind in the right way. It had to have this effect on the mind because this peculiar way of relating to the higher world requires a certain strain on the mind, a certain holding together, a gathering of the soul's inner strength. Above all, it requires that one is not wounded, that a certain inner exertion of strength is necessary in order to relate to the knowledge of the higher worlds in the right way.

Therefore, it is necessary for the human being to create a counterweight, a true counterweight, one that allows him, so to speak, to tip the scales in his soul in the other direction. We must look at the matter very carefully.

If you make an effort with your soul – and you have to do that if you really want to grasp the spiritual worlds, even just what is given from the spiritual worlds; you cannot follow a lecture on the spiritual worlds if you don't listen carefully, if you don't make an effort with your soul – if you really try to understand what is said about the spiritual world, you feel that you have to make an effort. One should not be surprised at this. One should not say, yes, that tires me, because it is quite natural to tire! But if it tires one so much, then, as long as we are earth people, a consequence will naturally arise. And this consequence is that selfishness is aroused in man. The more man feels himself in himself, the stronger is his selfishness. Take the most ordinary phenomenon: as long as you go through the world in good health, you are not selfish with regard to the physical body; the moment you become ill, the moment everything hurts, you become selfish with regard to the outer body. That is quite natural. And it is simply nonsense to demand of the sick person that he should not be selfish in relation to his illness. That is simply nonsense. And when someone says, “I may be ill, but I accept my illness selflessly,” that is of course also just a false pretence.

But it is the same when you go through the soul effort that is necessary to work your way up into the higher worlds, to climb up. There you also enter into the selfish. You should not deceive yourself, but should hold the truth before you, especially if you want to penetrate into this world. You have to say to yourself: You are working your way into a mood of selfishness if you want to enter the higher worlds, because you have to feel these efforts within you.

I would like to compare this working into the higher worlds with something. I would like to compare it with a peculiar kind of artistic activity, as it was present in our friend Christian Morgenstern. This certain idiosyncratic manner of his — I have often emphasized it — was different in Morgenstern than in other poets. When he worked his way into the serious, it was different with him than with other poets; it was to a much higher degree self-carrying into the region of the serious. Therefore, he needed a counterweight, something like in the gallows song:

A weasel
sat on a pebble
amid the tumbling stream.
Do you know
why?
The mooncalf
told me
in silence:
The most cunning
animal
did it for the sake of the rhyme.

He needed these light poems, these satirical poems, as a counterweight, for balance. Those who can always make a long face poetically, who sentimentally look up to the higher worlds, are not true poets. The true ones are those who need the counterweight, the counterpart.

Now, of course, we are looking everywhere, aren't we, for the possibility of understanding the phenomenon of egoism that must accompany the striving into the higher worlds. We must not judge egoism when it occurs in such a region, because we must understand it as a natural phenomenon. We must not have the egoism of always wanting to be rid of egoism, because then we are not being true to ourselves. We create, for example, the counterpart in relation to many things [through the exercises] in “How to Know Higher Worlds”; first of all the inner counterparts. But also in what we have created as eurythmy there is a kind of counterpart in this peculiar way of bringing the etheric body into its appropriate movements, and of gaining an understanding for this whole language of the human being. It will encourage young people in particular to live in a way that is in harmony with the spiritual world.

But something that must be emphasized on this occasion is that an element should be particularly sought by the person who really wants to gain a right relationship with the spiritual worlds. This is the element of humor. Do not be surprised at this, but it must be clearly stated, or at least more clearly stated than it has always been done. It is really necessary not to face the striving for the higher world humorlessly! It is this humorless facing that produces such terrible excesses. For if the person who imagines himself to be Homer or Socrates or Goethe were to realize how endlessly ridiculous he must feel in this role, it would help him tremendously to recover his views! But such things can only fail to occur to someone who keeps humor at a distance from his untrue, sentimental life. Because if someone really, yes, I would even say, had the “misfortune” of having been Homer, and through a correct recognition in a later incarnation came to the conclusion that this was the case, then this realization would really appear to him in a humorous light at first. Precisely because it is true, it would at first appear to him in a humorous light. One would truly laugh at oneself at first!

It is difficult to speak about this chapter in the right way, especially in a nutshell. But keeping one's soul open and free to humor is a good way to take the serious in real earnest. Otherwise, sentimentality contaminates and belies the seriousness, and sentimentality is the worst enemy of true seriousness for the serious things in life. I could even imagine that someone who, as a foreign lady once said, only wants to face the seriousness of spiritual-scientific knowledge “with a face down to the stomach” might have found it unpleasant that I spoke of thoughts these days that look like a mouse in one's hand. But one frees oneself from the seriousness of the facts by trying to present them in such a form. For one easily distorts the facts when one approaches them with mere sentimentality, because then one feels sufficiently uplifted to the higher worlds in one's sentimentality and does not believe that one should also still come up to the spiritual worlds through the pliable, elastic, mobile understanding. And truly, it is easier to speak of conquering the elemental world when one is “altruistic, truly altruistic.” It is easier to get some hazy ideas about the elemental world from that than to really make the thing so vivid that one has the transition of thought from a dead object to a living being. This vivid characterization is what we should strive for. So that we gradually train ourselves to ascend into these spiritual worlds without all sentimentality. The serious side is coming. The effort arises precisely from the difficult work of acquiring spiritual science. And what matters is that we gain the strength to correctly understand the place of the spiritual scientific world view within today's materialism and, through this strength, to become a proper member of the spiritual scientific movement. We can gain this strength in no other way than by trying to understand in the right way how these spiritual worlds can be clothed in words, in concepts, that are taken from the physical world, even though the spiritual worlds themselves are so unlike the physical world.

Inspiration as such deals with those inner facts in human nature that are the legacy of the ancient solar evolution, that are connected with everything that makes man capable of accomplishing in the world that which is from heaven, that which is right from heaven. But to do that, the human being must reflect not only on what can be worked out in the individual life within the soul work that is present between birth and death; rather, the human being must reflect on what is in the hidden depths of his soul so that the divine worlds can work into his organization. He who is to be a poet in the world must have the brain of a poet, that is to say, his brain must be prepared for it by the spiritual world. He who wants to be a painter must have the brain of a painter. And in order to give a person a painter's brain or a poet's brain, those forces and impulses must work in human nature that were already substantially present during the cosmic development in the old solar age and were linked to human nature when the human being himself was not nearly as condensed as he is on earth, when the human being himself had only just reached airtightness. Do you think that during the time of the old sun, man consisted only of warmth and air? In what works on warmth and air in man, there lies, as an inheritance from the time of the old sun, what can prepare the human brain to be a painter's or a poet's brain.

From this you can see, however, how we must say, through this observation of what is seen in man and how it goes from the microcosm into the macrocosm: man is one with his surroundings through what is ancient solar inheritance; for air and warmth are just as much outside as they are inside. I have often pointed out that the amount of air I have in me now is out of me in the next moment; it is always going out and coming in, exhaling, inhaling. The air has my form, and in the moment when I exhale the air, it is indeed the same air; it is then only outside, outside of the human being. But as truly as my bones are myself, so truly is the air form, from the moment of inhalation to the moment of exhalation, that which belongs to my own being. As truly as the bones belong to me from my birth to my death, so the air stream belongs to me from the moment it is inhaled to the moment it is exhaled. It is just as much me as my bones are me, only the me-ness of that air stream lasts only from one inhalation to the next exhalation, and the me-ness of my bones lasts approximately from birth to death. Only in terms of time are these things different: the air man dies with the exhalation and is born with the inhalation. And just as our bones are born before our physical birth and gradually decay, something is born in us when we breathe in, and something in us dies when we breathe out. That which is born in us when we breathe in dies when we breathe out; this belongs to the genetic makeup from the old sun, it was laid down back then.

We see how the human realm expands out into the cosmos, how man grows together with it. But we should learn to understand how man lives in the spiritual realm at all. Our time does not even have the talent to grasp this connection between man and the spiritual in the most primitive way. We must come back to that. It would never have occurred to an ancient person to form words as they are formed today when it is necessary to form a word for any compound substance. Now, at most, chemists look for hypothetical conditions to find appropriate names when something is to be named according to the principles of chemistry. These names are very unpleasant for people to pronounce, sometimes they have an awful lot of syllables! Let yourself be informed about this, for example, by those of our friends who are chemists! But where things are not named according to these principles, the names are not connected to the things.

This was not always the case. Today I have spoken to you about inspiration; I have shown you how inspiration leads back to the ancient solar heritage of man. But man had come to the sun through breathing. That is to say, what is now breathing and what lives in the element of air was laid down in former times. So there must be a relationship between human breathing and inspiration. You only have to consider what the word inspiration actually originally means. The intimate relationship between breathing and 'inspiration' is already expressed in this word, because it is basically the word for inhaling. Those who want to deny the spirits would only have to look at the development of language. We have already hinted at this from another angle: one would find the spirits of speech, but also how these spirits of speech work in human nature! Then we will find how we are embedded in the spiritual worlds, how the spirits work with us, how the spirits work with us in everything we do in life. And we will feel ourselves in a real way: our self expanded to the great self of the world. Intuition will become what theory is. And that is the way to really enter into the spiritual worlds.

But we really have to go into these things as well. We have to take them in detail, we have to try to take them seriously, to take some of what has just been said about the relationship between human beings and the spiritual worlds in relation to the simplest of circumstances seriously.

This is what I would like to suggest to you at the end of these lectures, which were intended to show you from a certain point of view how there is a descending current in man and an ascending current, and how man stands in the ascending and descending currents.

And when Faust opens the book and utters the words:

“How the powers of heaven ascend and descend
And pass the golden buckets!”

there you have what I have been trying to convey to you during these days, this rising and descending of the heavenly powers, which Faust first gazes at and cannot understand. But it is expressed in this way in the Faustian legend, so that we can already see in the “Faust” where modern times must strive. It must be very clear to us that we want with our spiritual science what people should strive for. We cannot but recognize that spiritual science must become the spiritual possession of humanity. And as soon as we have come to work together in this becoming a new spiritual possession, we must do everything to realize it, to achieve this goal for humanity.

And with that, I consider these considerations to be concluded for the time being.

Today I shall give neither a lecture nor a lecture, but rather discuss some things in the way that I believe is still missing in our branches. I will tie in with the brochure “Science and Theosophy” by F. vor Wrangell, published in Leipzig by Max Altmann in 1914. In doing so, I would like to show in particular how one can tie into such a writing can be linked to such a writing.¹

The title 'Science and Theosophy' obviously touches on an issue that it is important for us to consider, because we will very often be confronted with the objection that our movement is not scientific or that scientists do not know what to do with it. In short, it will certainly be necessary for one or other of us to deal with science in some way, because he will have to face this objection and perhaps also be pointed to some individual points in doing so. Therefore, it will be good to start by considering the views of a man who believes that he is fully immersed in the scientific spirit of the present day, and of whom, having read his booklet, one can readily can say that he deals with the relationship between science and theosophy in a very astute way, and in such a way that he creates a relationship that many will try to create who are involved in the scientific work of our time. And with such people, who want to create a relationship between science and theosophy, we, or at least a certain number of us, must be able to think along the same lines.

Furthermore, since the brochure is written favorably for Theosophy, we are not so much compelled to fall back on polemics and criticism, but can tie in with some of the author's thoughts, which arise from the specifics of our spiritual striving. Of course, if some of us were to write such a brochure, we might even avoid the title “Theosophy” after the various experiences we have had in such a debate. This is a question that may perhaps be examined in more detail in the course of reading the brochure itself.

The brochure is divided into individual, easy-to-follow chapters and bears as its motto a saying of Kant's, which reads:

“It is not correct to always speak in the lecture halls of wisdom that in the metaphysical sense no more than one single world can exist.” Kant.

Taken out of context, there is certainly not much to be gleaned from this saying of Kant's. However, the author of this paper wants to refer to Kant in the opinion that Kant wanted to say with this saying that the world view that external science creates need not be seen as the only possible one. Here, perhaps, the author of this paper has not quite accurately captured Kant's opinion, because Kant basically means something different in the context of his saying. Kant means: When man reflects, metaphysically reflects, he can think of various real worlds, and then the question is, why of these various conceivable possible worlds, the one in which we live exists for us, while for the author of the booklet the question is: Is it possible to have other world views besides the materialistic one? Of course, he is of the opinion that precisely another, a spiritual world view must also relate to this world of ours.

Then the writing begins with its first essay, which bears the title:

Introductory

A powerful spiritual movement has taken hold of European culture at the present time, in contrast to the materialistic current of thought that prevailed in the leading intellectual circles around the middle of the 19th century.

The author thus looks, as it were, at the hustle and bustle of intellectual work around him and finds that things have changed from the mid-19th century; that in the mid-19th century, scientific salvation was found in materialism, whereas now - in the time when this booklet was published, 1914 - a powerful spiritual movement has taken hold of European culture.

Now he continues:

What are the inner reasons for this counter-current? It seems to me that they lie not only in people's metaphysical need, but also, at least in part, in the widely awakened awareness of the danger to human civilization that is associated with the domination of a materialistic world view.

Thus the author of this booklet is one of those who not only believe that a metaphysical need of humanity has awakened in the 20th century, but also believe that there is a certain moral danger in the minds of people being seized by the materialistic world view.

With increasing speed, the materialistic intellectual current pours through numerous channels from the intellectual heights into the lowlands of human society, displacing the religious convictions based on reverence, which provided a firm hold for the moral life of the masses. It is becoming increasingly clear to many that the victory of a materialistic worldview inevitably leads to a materialistic outlook on life and a corresponding lifestyle, which sees the only reasonable degree of life in exploiting the short lifespan for as much enjoyment as possible.

In earlier times, too, when a solid edifice of morals based on tradition and authority succumbed to corrosive intellectual criticism, humanity was seized by a craving for raw sensual pleasure and led down disastrous paths that took it away from what we feel is its most intrinsic destiny.

This is not contradicted by the fact that among those men who, inspired by an unconditional love of truth, communicate the results of their research and thinking to their fellow men, without regard to the consequences might ensue that many, if not most, of these men stand at a high level of moral greatness and are moved by noble, unselfish motives, in the full conviction that they are thus serving humanity.

So here the author points out that certain dangers for the moral life of human beings must arise as a consequence of a materialistic world view, and he says: This danger cannot be countered solely with the objection that those people who theoretically recognize a materialistic world view as theirs and as the right one themselves stand on a high level of moral conduct.

The author touches here, from his own observations, on a point to which I have repeatedly referred in our spiritual science, I may well say, from a higher point of view. For if one says that a spirit such as Haeckel, who works in such an eminently theoretical and materialistic way, stands on the ground of high moral ideals and also shows a higher moral conception of life in his own conduct, and that therefore the materialistic world-view does not necessarily lead to a materialistic way of life, one forgets one thing – and I have pointed this out in various lectures that I have given – namely, one forgets that in the development of mankind, feelings and thoughts move at different speeds.

If you look at just a short piece of human development, you will find that thoughts move relatively quickly. From the 15th and 16th centuries onwards, materialistic thinking, the living out of human theorizing in materialistic thought, has developed rapidly and all sciences have gradually been permeated theoretically by materialistic thought forms. Moral life, which is expressed in feelings, has developed less rapidly. At least people still show in their old feelings and emotions that feeling has not progressed as quickly. Therefore, people today still live in terms of the moral feelings that arose from the previous worldview, and that is why there is a dichotomy today between materialistic thinking and a non-materialistic life and a non-materialistic way of life that is still in the old sense. But the time is approaching when the consequences will be drawn from the materialistic-theoretical world view, so that what can be called is just around the corner: the moral life will be flooded by the consequence of the materialistic world view. One can therefore deepen one's understanding of the different speeds that feelings and thoughts have when viewed from a spiritual science perspective.

Now it says further:

But if the final result of this mental work is one that seems to contradict the destiny of man, the question is justified as to whether there is not a fundamental error in the seemingly so solid structure of the critical train of thought.

The author is therefore convinced that immoral consequences must follow from theoretical materialism, and that he can only expect salvation for humanity from morality. And so he wonders whether a materialistic world view, which must necessarily lead to immorality, not only shows errors, but has errors in itself when viewed critically. And so he continues:

Is this error only felt in one's feelings, or can it also be discovered intellectually? I have also been concerned with this question, and in the following I will attempt to clarify it for myself. I hope that my train of thought will also interest some readers who, like me, are convinced that it is more effective to fight an error with its own weapons than to merely call it into question. To indicate my scientific standpoint, I would mention that I am an astronomer by training, that my independent work lies in the fields of theoretical meteorology and physical geography, and that from early youth I have moved almost exclusively in academic circles, and respect for strict science based on critical thinking has become second nature to me, so to speak.

This does, however, justify the author's claim to have something to say about the relationship between science and Theosophy, because he shows that he is familiar with science on a certain point and that his judgment must therefore be infinitely more valuable than the judgment of someone who, for example, reads Kant and says, that is all nonsense, we Theosophists do not need to read Kant, and who thus only reveals that he himself has perhaps not seriously read and thought through five lines of Kant. It continues:

I am firmly convinced that a Weltanschhauung which cannot stand up to a strict critique of reason cannot endure, however much it appeals to the emotions. These introductory words should inform the reader of the task I have set myself in this essay and the point of view from which I intended to treat it.

The next essay describes in a few sentences what a materialistic-mechanical worldview is, the worldview that developed in the second half of the 19th century in such a way that there were and still are many who consider what the author describes here in a few sentences to be the only scientifically possible worldview. Let us consider what the author writes:

The basic assumptions of the materialistic-mechanical worldview

Let us first consider the most important basic assumptions of a materialistic-mechanical worldview. They can be summarized in the following teachings:

1. All events that we observe through our senses and perceive mentally follow a law, i.e. every state of the cosmos is necessarily determined by the temporally preceding state and also necessarily results in the subsequent states. All changes, i.e. all events, are inevitable consequences of the forces present in the cosmos.

Now, what the author is trying to analyze here as the basic assumption of the materialistic-mechanical world view has often been said in the course of our lectures. But if you compare what the author says here with the way it is said in our lectures, you will notice the difference. And for those who want to familiarize themselves with our spiritual-scientific consciousness, it is good to become aware of this difference.

Anyone who reads this first point, in which the materialistic-mechanical world view is characterized in a beautiful, astute and scientifically knowledgeable way, will see: that is very good; that hits the mark of the materialistic-mechanical world view. But when we try to give such a characterization in the lectures that are held for the purpose of our movement, it is attempted in just the opposite way, and it would be good if one would reflect on how differently we proceed in such matters.

Herr von Wrangell, on the other hand, presents what might be called a materialistic-mechanical world view. He speaks a few sentences from his own perspective, summarizing the impressions he has gained from the matter. You will have noticed – if you are at all inclined to notice such things – that I usually do not proceed in this way, but quite differently. I usually start from something that is there, that is there as a result of a historical process. And so, if I wanted to characterize this point, I did not simply say such sentences about myself, but I chose one of the essential, and indeed good, authors to express in the words and manner of such an author what the matter in question is.

Thus, I have often linked to the name Du» Bors-Reymond that which could serve as a basis for my lectures. As a result, you may often have gained the impression, if you do not see the whole in context, that I wanted to criticize Du Bois-Reymond. But I never want to criticize, I just want to pick out a representative characteristic example so that it is he who speaks, not I. This is what one might call the sense for facts that is necessary for us, the sense that we do not make assertions but let the facts speak. I have often related that Du Bois-Reymond gave a speech on the recognition of nature at the Leipzig Natural Science Convention in 1872. He also spoke about the way in which he had come to his view of the world through his scientific research.

Du Bois-Reymond is a physiologist in his specific field of research. His main work is in the field of nerve physiology. He has often spoken in elegant terms about the world view of the natural scientists. At the Leipzig Naturalists' Assembly in 1872, for example, he spoke about the limits of the scientific world view, about the limits of natural knowledge, and in doing so he also spoke of Laplacean minds. What is that? Du Bois-Reymond characterized it at the time. This Laplacian mind is that of someone who is well versed in mathematics, physics, biology, chemistry, and so on in the present day and forms a world view out of these sciences. Such a Laplacian mind thus comes to form a world view that starts from so-called astronomical knowledge of reality.

What is astronomical knowledge of reality, we might ask; what is astronomical knowledge? We can explain it in a few words.

The astronomer visualizes: the sun, the planets, the moon, the earth; he visualizes the planets orbiting around the sun or moving in ellipses around it, he visualizes the force of attraction, the gravitation, acting on the planets, he visualizes an inertia, and from this inertia he visualizes that the planets orbit around the sun.

Thus, the astronomer has in mind that he can follow what is going on around him in the universe as the great events; that he can follow them from the material entities that can be seen in space and from the forces that they exert on each other in space. The fact that the entities exert material forces on one another sets things in motion; that is, things come into motion when one imagines the solar system in this way and looks at it in this way. One has a picture of the things that are spread out in space and of the events that take place over time.

Now, anyone who wants to form a world view that is in line with the times, in the sense of Du Bois-Reymonds, says the following. We have to assume that all matter consists of the smallest parts, of atoms. Just as a solar system consists of the sun, the moon and the planets, so does the smallest piece of matter consist of something similar to the sun with the planets. And just as the sun exerts forces and the planets exert forces on each other, so do the forces between the individual atoms. This sets the atoms in motion. So we have motion inside every material particle. The atoms, like the sun and the planets, are in motion. These movements are small, but they are such that we can compare them with the great movements performed by the heavenly bodies out in space, so that if we take the smallest piece of matter that we can see, something is going on inside it, like what the astronomer imagines out in space. And now natural science came to imagine everything in such a way that wherever something is really in motion, it stems from the fact that the atoms are guided by their forces.

In the second half of the 19th century, especially the science of heat, as it was founded by Julius Robert Mayer, Joule, Tyndall and Helmholtz, and further developed by C. ausius and others, contributed to the formation of this world view. So, when you touch a body and feel warmth, you say: what you feel as the sensation of warmth is only an appearance. What really exists outside is that the smallest parts, the atoms of the substance in question, are in motion; and you know a state of warmth when you know how the atoms are in motion, when you have an astronomical knowledge of it, to use the words of Du Bois-Reymond. The ideal of the Laplacian mind is to be able to say: What do I care about heat? My world view depends on my being able to find out the motion of the atoms, which through their motion cause all that we have in the way of heat, light, etc. This Laplacian mind thus forms a world view that consists of space, matter with its effective forces, and motion. In the lecture he gave at the Leipzig Naturalists' Assembly on the limits of natural knowledge, Du Bois-Reymond posits this ideal of the Laplacian mind and asks: what would such a Laplacian mind be capable of?

You see, his ideal is astronomical knowledge of the world. If a mathematician takes the image of our solar system as it is at any given point in time, he only needs to insert certain numbers into his formula and he gets an image of what it was like an hour, three hours, ten years, centuries ago. How does one go about calculating whether a solar or lunar eclipse took place at a certain time in the first decade of our era? In this case, we have well-developed formulas based on the current state of science. All you need to do is insert the corresponding numbers into the formula to calculate each individual state. You can calculate when a solar eclipse will occur, let's say in 1970 or in 2728. In short, you can calculate every state that precedes or follows in time. And now Laplace's mind should have the formula that encompasses this entire solar system. So anyone with Laplace's mind, which included the atoms in space and all their states of motion, could - and Du Bois-Reymond says the same thing - calculate today, for example, when Caesar crossed the Rubicon from the world formula that he has of the atoms and their present states of motion. He would only have to insert the necessary information into the formula. It would only depend on the position of the atoms at that time, and the fact would have to follow: Caesar crosses the Rubicon. - If you insert certain values into the formula, a certain picture of the current state of the atoms should result, and then, for example, you would be able to recognize the Battle of Salamis. One would only need to proceed from differential to differential and one would be able to reconstruct the entire Battle of Salamis. That is the ideal of Laplace's mind: a knowledge of the world, which is called astronomical. Occasionally something more can be added about these things. Now I will only mention a small experience for those who are attentive to it. As a boy, I once came across a school program. Such school programs are printed, after all. They usually contain an essay written by one of the teachers. At the time, this essay was not that easy for me to understand, because it was titled “The force of attraction considered as an effect of motion”. Even then, I was dealing with an author who, so to speak, had also set himself the ideal of Laplace's mind; and he had expounded many other things in the same direction.

If you take all this together, you will see that I did not try to speak of an astronomical-materialistic world view as a mere idea, but to let the facts and the personalities speak for themselves. In a sense, then, I did strive to cultivate a style of presentation that excludes the personal. For if I were to relate what Du Bois-Reymond said on a particular occasion, I would let him speak for himself and not myself. My task is only to follow up what the personalities have said; I try to let the world speak. This is the attempt to exclude oneself, not to relate one's own views, but facts. When reading this point by Wrangell, one should be aware that our spiritual science already strives for the sense of fact in the way it presents the facts, the sense not merely to suckle at the objective, but the sense to immerse oneself in the facts, to really sink into them.

Now you will recognize what I have peeled out of the facts if you let the following lines of the booklet sink in again: “All events that we observe through our senses and perceive mentally proceed according to the laws of nature, that is, every state of the cosmos is necessarily conditioned by the temporally preceding state and just as necessarily results in the states that follow it. All changes, i.e. all events, are inevitable consequences of the forces present in the cosmos.

And now it says:

It does not affect the essence of the question whether one - for the sake of better clarity - calls the carrier of the forces “matter” or, according to the monists, imagines the concept “energy” as the only effective thing that, although it presents different forms of appearance to the human senses, basically represents an unchangeable sum of latent or current possibilities for movement.

I would only use such a sentence in the rarest of cases, and only when something else has already been summarized. Remember that I once spoke of what is expressed in this sentence. It says: “It does not affect the essence of the question whether, for the sake of better clarity, one calls the carrier of the forces ‘Stofb’ or, according to the process of the monists, conceives of the concept ‘energy’ as the only effective thing...”. I would not put it that way, but would point out that Haeckel's and Büchner's students, above all, look at the material that is spread out in space. According to the Swabian Vischer, they were the “Stoffhuber,” the “material boosters.”

Then came the man who is now the president of the Monistenbund: Ostwald. At a meeting of natural scientists, I believe it was the one in Kiel - I have spoken of it before - he gave a lecture on the overcoming of materialism through energetics, through energism. There he pointed out that it was not the matter that mattered, but the force. He thus replaced matter with force. Do you remember how I quoted his own words at the time? He said, in essence: when one person receives a slap in the face from another, it is not the matter of the substance that is dealt a blow, but the force with which the slap is dealt. Nowhere do we perceive the substance, but the force. And so, in place of substance, we find force, or, with a certain not merely descriptive but transformational meaning, energy. But this energism, which now calls itself monism, is nothing but a masked materialism. Again I have tried to show you by way of example how there really was a time when the “energy grabbers” took the place of the “substance grabbers”. I did not attempt to present a theoretical sentence, but tried to characterize from the real. And that must be our endeavor in any case. For it is only by having a sense for the real in the physical that we develop a sense for the real in the spiritual, and do not just mumble our own assertions.

So the author of the booklet says: “It does not affect the essence of the question whether one calls the carrier of the forces ‘matter’ for the sake of better clarity, or, according to the process of the monists, imagines the concept of energy as the only effective thing...

What the author means here by the expression “latent or actual possibilities of movement” can be explained as follows: Imagine some kind of counterweight here, and on top of it a tube, a glass tube, with water inside. This water presses on the floor here. In the moment when I pull away the counterweight, the water runs down. In the latter case, we are dealing with a current movement; before I pulled the support away, the same force was there, only it was not current, but at rest. Everything that then flowed down from the water and became current was previously latent, not current.

The course of all events is irrevocably predetermined, and man, in his thinking, feeling and willing, is just as unfree as, for example, a stone is in its fall.

That is the necessary consequence of the Laplacian world view. The Laplacian brain concludes that if I put my hand there, that is an image of the moving atoms, and if the Laplacian brain can still calculate the image, as I have indicated, then this excludes the freedom of man, that is, the Laplacian brain excludes the freedom of man.

This is the first point that Mr. von Wrangell makes on the basis of the materialistic-mechanical world view. The second point is as follows:

2. The inner experiences that take place in a person's consciousness (his feelings, thoughts, volitional impulses) are not essentially different from other processes in nature that a person observes through his senses. These inner experiences are only side effects of material processes within the human brain and nervous system.

This second point expresses that when I think, feel and will, it is only a concomitant of the inner processes that the Laplacian mind selects. We are therefore not dealing with independent thoughts, feelings and impulses of the will, but only with accompanying phenomena. If you follow what I said, for example, in the lecture 'The Legacy of the 19th Century' and in similar other lectures, if you study some of the material contained in 'Riddles of Philosophy', you will see how many minds in the second half of the 19th century, this view was taken for granted, that man is actually nothing more than the structure of material processes and their energies, and that thoughts, feelings and will impulses are only accompanying phenomena.

As the third point of the materialistic-mechanical world view, Mr. von Wrangell states the following:

3. After the physical death of man, the existence of the human individual finally ceases, because the so-called spiritual life of man is bound to his physicality and cannot exist without it.

This point can be understood by everyone as a consequence of the first point. The first point is the one that matters. The second and third are necessary consequences.

In the next essay, Mr. von Wrangell discusses what he calls:

examining these basic assumptions

What are the basic assumptions of the materialistic world view based on? Are they indisputably proven facts or only more or less probable hypotheses? The first of the three aforementioned assumptions, that all events are necessarily bound to follow a certain course, is the most important and has the most far-reaching consequences. It is not only regarded as beyond doubt by materialists, but also by many spiritualists, who, while accepting the independent existence of spiritual entities and believing in the continued existence of the spiritual being of man, their “soul”, after physical death, assume that there is an unalterable law within the spiritual world as well as within the sensory world. First of all, it should be noted that this idea of the absolute, unexceptional lawfulness, i.e. necessity of all events, also in the spiritual realm, excludes the concept of morality, of good and evil, because to act morally means to choose the good, when evil could be chosen.

In this chapter, Mr. von Wrangell tries to make it clear to himself that there can be no morality if the materialistic-mechanical world view is the only correct one. Because if I have to do every moment of my life what is only a by-product of atoms, then there can be no question of freedom, nor of morality, because everything is done out of necessity. Just as one cannot say that a stone that falls to the earth is good and one that does not fall to the earth is not good, so one cannot say that people's actions are good or not good. In the case of a criminal, everything happens out of necessity; in the case of a good person, everything happens out of necessity. Therefore there is something correct in the sentence: “First of all, it should be noted that this idea of the unconditional, unexceptional lawfulness, i.e. necessity of all events, also in the spiritual realm, excludes the concept of morality, of good and evil; because to act morally means to choose the good, when evil could be chosen.” But one cannot choose when everything is constrained by material necessity.

The next chapter is headed:

Freedom and Morality

As soon as there is no freedom of decision, there can be no question of morality in the sense in which this concept is understood by people and corresponds to our inner feelings. We can certainly speak of more or less useful, unfree actions and impulses, but a moral judgment of unfree actions or feelings has no justification, no sense. With the elimination of freedom, responsibility also ceases to exist. This undoubted connection between freedom and morality cannot be used as an argument against the concept of lawfulness; it is merely intended to remind us of the logical consequences associated with the assumption of absolute necessity.

So Mr. von Wrangell is trying to make it clear here that it absolutely follows from the materialistic-mechanical world view that one cannot actually speak of freedom and morality.

Now he is a scientific mind, and a scientific mind is accustomed to honestly and sincerely drawing the consequences of assumptions. Our time misses much that would immediately seem absurd to it if it had really already taken on the scientific conscience, if it did not stir and throw together all kinds of things without a scientific conscience. Mr. von Wrangell does not do that, but says: If we accept the materialistic world view, we can no longer speak of freedom and morality; because either the materialistic world view is correct, and then it is nonsense to speak of freedom and morality, or one speaks of freedom and morality, and then there is no sense in speaking of the materialistic-mechanical world view.

But since Hetr von Wrangell is a scientist who is already accustomed to drawing the consequences of his assumptions – that is an important fact – he is not accustomed to having things so sloppy in his thinking; because it is a sloppiness of thinking when someone says, “I am a materialist” and does not at the same time deny morality. He does not want to be guilty of this sloppiness of thinking. On the other hand, he also has the habit that one has when one has become a scientist, namely to say: May the world go to pieces, what I have scientifically recognized must be true! Therefore, one cannot simply discard the materialistic view, but if the materialistic world view is true, then it must be accepted and then one is faced with the sad necessity of having to throw morality overboard. So it is not just a matter of asking: where does morality take us? – he says that is not enough – but the materialistic world view must be examined, quite apart from the consequences this has for morality. So we have to tackle a different kind of materialistic world view.

The next chapter is called:

The World Enigma

Yes, one can say that the question of whether man is responsible for his actions, i.e., whether he has the possibility of regulating his volitional impulses according to motives that are unambiguously determined by his bodily organization, includes the whole world riddle for us humans, the question of freedom or unfreedom of will. For if this question is answered in the sense of the absolute necessity of all happenings in the whole universe, without exception, then materialism is the only correct view and the world, with all its agony and suffering, is a mechanism that runs to no purpose, without a recognizable beginning, but with the eternal death of the whole as its final goal.

When we started our spiritual science movement, I had occasion to read some poems by the poet Marie Eugenie delle Grazie, who, one might say, has come to terms with a materialistic-mechanical world view and even as a poet really draws the consequences from it. That is why she formed poems like “A dirty whirlwind is existence.” — One must come to that conclusion if one is not sloppy in one's thinking, if one lets one's thinking affect one's feelings. And only because people are so sloppy and cowardly in their thinking do they not ask themselves: What becomes of life under the influence of the materialistic-mechanical worldview? But it must be shown that it is inherently false, otherwise one would simply have accepted the consequence of delle Grazie.

Mr. von Wrangell continues:

The greatest minds and deepest thinkers have endeavored to solve this most important of all questions, and it seems presumptuous to want to say something new. However, it cannot be a matter of a generally valid answer here, but at most a reference to the train of thought that led to a subjective solution to the puzzle. Such a reference can sometimes be of help to a similarly minded soul.

Mr. von Wrangell thus points out that the greatest minds, poets and thinkers have endeavored to solve this question, and that it is unnecessary to say anything new about it. At most, it could be a hint at the train of thought that led to a subjective solution of this puzzle; that is, a hint at his own train of thought.

In the next chapter, he examines where the idea comes from that what precedes always follows what comes after in a lawful manner. It is called:

The origin of the law

From this point of view, it seems justified to raise the question: Where do we get the idea of the absolute lawfulness of all events? Is it perhaps an intuitive truth that underlies all thinking, or has humanity only gradually, through long and arduous mental work, come to this idea; an idea that now appears to the Europeans, who live off the cultural achievements of the past, as a self-evident truth?

So Mr. von Wrangell is asking here: Did man always believe in this unconditional law, or did people only come to it over time? Only then can one recognize the validity of this idea; for if man has always believed in it, then there must be something true about it that can be taken for granted; but if people have only just come to it, then one can examine how they have arrived at this idea. In this way one can form an opinion about its validity. He says further:

The latter is the case. This is an acquired, not an original insight. On the contrary, man's original, direct consciousness gives him the idea of inner freedom limited by external circumstances, of arbitrariness in his volitional decisions. The idea of conformity to law is only gradually being derived from experience.

Now, as you can see from my countless lectures, it is clear how slowly people have come to this idea of conformity to law, from the old clairvoyance to the time when the idea of conformity to law has come. In truth, the idea of conformity to law is only four centuries old, because it basically comes from Galileo. I have often discussed this. If you go back before Galileo, there is no idea at all that everything is permeated by such a law.

Mr. von Wrangell says: “This is an acquired, not an original insight... The idea of lawfulness has only gradually been taken from experience.” Now, I would like to know whether the child is compelled by its inner astral circumstances to reach for the sugar, that is, whether it is natural for it to do so, or whether the child thinks it already has a choice. I have told something like an anecdote before, which I would like to mention here as well. It was during my studies; I used to pace up and down in the lobby of Vienna's Südbahnhof with a fellow student. He was a hardened materialist and firmly held the view that all thinking is just a process in the brain, like the hands on a clock moving forward. And just as one cannot say that this is something special, but is connected with the mechanical substances and forces present in it, so he thought that the brain also makes these astronomical movements. That was a Laplacian head; we were eighteen to nineteen years old at the time. So I said to him once: But you never say “my brain thinks,” you say “I think.” Why do you keep lying then? Why do you always say “I think” and not “my brain thinks?” - Now, this fellow student had taken his knowledge, the ideas of volition and conformity to law, not from experience, but from complicated theories. He did not believe in inner arbitrariness, but he said “I think” and not “my brain thinks”. So he was in constant contradiction to himself.

The next chapter is called:

Freedom of the will cannot be proved by experience.

Can this contradiction be resolved rationally? It is obvious that an experience-based proof of the freedom of the will of people or other beings cannot be provided.

Mr. von Wrangell says that the truth of the freedom of the will of people cannot be proven by external experience, because one can only make one's own decision.

Mr. von Wrangell says, then, that one cannot prove the truth of the freedom of human will through external experience, because one can only make one decision. If one wanted to prove it, then one would have to be able to make two decisions. Now, I have already mentioned that one does not refer to experience at all in this question, but rather constructs an experience. For example, they once imagined a donkey with a bundle of hay on each side, the same tasty, equally sized bundle of hay. The donkey, which is getting hungrier and hungrier, is now supposed to decide whether to eat from one or the other bundle of hay, because one is as tasty as the other and as large as the other. And so he does not know whether he should turn this way or that. In short, the donkey could not come to a proper decision and had to starve between the two bundles of hay. Such things have been constructed because it was felt that one cannot get there experientially by observing freedom. Mr. von Wrangell draws attention to this and then asks the question:

But can the freedom of the will be refuted by experience? To answer this question, let us first recall some epistemological truths!

To answer this question, Mr. von Wrangell now speaks of some epistemological truths in the next chapter. This chapter is called:

Epistemological Retrospection

Man has direct awareness only of himself. He feels desires, which he seeks to satisfy and which trigger impulses of will in him; he receives impressions, of which he soon becomes convinced that they are dependent on certain sense organs of his body. When he closes his eyes, he receives no impressions of light and color; when he plugs his ears, he weakens his sound sensations or loses them altogether. Likewise, experience shows that the nose conveys the sense of smell and the mouth, in the parts covered by mucous membranes, conveys the sense of taste. Only the sense of touch seems to be tied to no particular part of the body, but can be exercised through the entire skin. The normal healthy person has five different senses in an awake state, each conveying its specific type of impression.

In this, Mr. von Wrangell is influenced by popular knowledge of the senses. Those who once listened to a small lecture cycle that I then titled “Anthroposophy” will have seen that one cannot get by with five senses, but rather has to assume twelve senses. Among these twelve senses is also the sense for the thinking of another person, for the other I. Therefore, anyone who has followed our spiritual scientific movement correctly can recognize the inadequacy of Wrangell's assertions. They are not incorrect, but they are only partially correct. We cannot say, “Man has direct consciousness only of himself.” That is incorrect. For then we could never perceive other I's.

In recent times, however, there has been a very complicated view, which is held by all sorts of people. Perhaps the philosopher and psychologist Lipps could be cited as a characteristic personality among those who hold it. They are not aware when a person confronts them that they have a direct impression of his ego, but they say: When I confront a person, he has a face; it makes certain movements, and he says certain things, and from what he says and does, one should be able to conclude that there is an ego behind it. So the ego is something inferred, not something directly perceived. A new school of philosophy, however, which has Max Scheler as its most prominent representative, takes a different view. It has already made the observation that one can have an immediate impression of the ego of another person. And what has been written about the ego, more rigorously scientifically by Husserl, the philosopher, and then somewhat more popularly, especially in his more recent essays, by Scheler, shows that more recent philosophy is on the way to recognizing that direct consciousness can also know something of another consciousness. — One can therefore say that Mr. von Wrangell has been infected by popular epistemology when he says: “Man has direct awareness only of himself.” And further: “He feels desires, which he seeks to satisfy and which trigger impulses of will in him.” And then he describes how man perceives the world through his senses.

I have already written about this sense physiology. Read in “Lucifer-Gnosis” and you will see that I tried to explain the impossibility of this sense physiology with the simple comparison of the seals. I said at the time: This sense physiology is materialistic from the very beginning. It proceeds from the assumption that nothing can enter into us from the outside, because it secretly conceives of the outside as materialistic. But it is the same as with the seal and the sealing wax: the seal always remains outside the sealing wax; nothing passes from the material of the seal into the sealing wax. But the name “Miller” engraved on it passes completely from the seal to the sealing wax. If we now place the main emphasis on what is spiritually expressed in the name Miller, and not on the material, of which nothing passes over, we can see that what is presented from the point of view of sensory physiology says nothing. But these are such horrible doctrines that have been hammered into people's brains that most people just don't follow them up, even if they want to become spiritualists. You can read more about this in my book “The Riddles of Philosophy”, in the chapter “The World as Illusion”.

Then Mr. von Wrangell continues:

Since man cannot imagine that an existing state can change without a cause, he assumes that the sensory impressions he feels are caused by forces that he locates outside of his own directly felt self. He calls these external causes of his internal sensory impressions “things” and, in their totality, “the world” or - epistemologically - the “not-me”, in contrast to the directly perceived “me”.

That's clear, you just have to get used to the fact that there is a bit of epistemological talk.

A thousandfold experience and the corresponding agreement with beings that he recognizes as being the same as himself - his fellow human beings - teach him that these “things,” this “not-I,” can exist independently of his consciousness.

Otherwise, man would have to believe that if he turns his eye away not only from living but also from inanimate things, things cease to exist.

If, for example, he loses consciousness during sleep, he finds upon awakening that things persist in their “reality,” that is, in their ability to evoke sensations in him. Man also recognizes his own body as belonging in some respects to the world “outside him.”

This is good to emphasize, because we not only have things that are inside, but also things that are outside.

He can receive sensory impressions from his limbs, as from other things; for example, he can see, touch, etc. his hands, and here too he distinguishes between the inner process of his sensory impressions and their outer cause, which in this case he recognizes as one of his body parts. He soon becomes convinced that it is his body, that is, that this thing has a very special connection to his “I,” to that which feels and thinks, especially through the sense of touch, which shows him that when he brings his own body parts into contact with other things, he feels the contact directly, but he does not feel it directly when other objects are brought into contact with each other.” ²

It is very good to be made aware of something like this. So this is how Mr. von Wrangell answers the question of how it comes about that a person recognizes his own body among the things that are outside in a certain thing. Those who think sloppily simply say: thinking about something like this is nonsense; these people who think about something like this want to be scientists. But Wrangell says: When these two pieces of chalk collide, it doesn't hurt, but when I bump into something with my body, it hurts. That's the difference. And because one hurts and the other doesn't, I label the one as belonging to me and the other as not belonging to me. It is good to know that we have nothing but the consequence of this consciousness.

Now, you see, my dear friends, I had intended to finish discussing this brochure today. But we have only got as far as page 10. An attempt should be made to find the connection between what is written in the world and what, in the strict sense, belongs to our spiritual science. But the next chapters are still too interesting: the formation of concepts, ideas of space and time; the principle of causality; the application of the idea of arbitrariness to the environment; observation of phenomena that occur uniformly; the essence of all science; astronomy, the oldest science; uniform motion; measurement; the principle underlying clocks. It is so interesting that perhaps we will continue the discussion tomorrow at seven o'clock.

• 1. The quotations in this and the following lectures reflect the entire text of the Wrangell brochure.
• 2. In the brochure itself, the following footnote appears: “The ‘elimination of sensitivity in sensitives’ observed by de Rochas is a particular abnormal phenomenon that deserves in-depth study.”