The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Today I will summarize some truths that will serve us in turn to provide further explanations in a certain direction in the coming days. If we consider our soul life, we can say that towards one pole of this soul life lies the element of thinking, towards the other pole the element of will, and between the two the element of feeling, that which in ordinary life we call feeling, the content of the mind, and so on. In the actual life of the soul, as it takes place in us in our waking state, there is never just one-sided thinking or will, but they are always in connection with each other, they play into each other. Let us assume that we behave very calmly in life, so that we can say, for example, that our will is not active externally. However, when we think during such outwardly directed calmness, we must be aware that will is at work in the thoughts we unfold: in connecting one thought with another, will is at work in this thinking. So even when we are seemingly merely contemplative, merely thinking, at least inwardly the will is present in us, and unless we are raving or sleepwalking, we cannot be willfully active without letting our volitional impulses flow through thoughts. Thoughts always permeate our volition, so that we can say: the will is never present in the life of the soul in isolation. But what is not present in this isolated way can still have different origins. And so the one pole of our soul life, thinking, has a completely different origin than the life of the will.

Even if we only consider everyday life, we will find that thinking always refers to something that is there, that has prerequisites. Thinking is mostly a reflection. Even when we think ahead, when we plan something that we then carry out through the will, such thinking is based on experience, which we then act upon. In a certain respect, this thinking is, of course, also a reflection. The will cannot be directed towards what is already there. In that case, it would always be too late. The will can only be directed towards what is to come, towards the future. In short, if you reflect a little on the inner life of thought, of thinking and of the will, you will find that even in ordinary life, thinking relates more to the past, while the will relates to the future. The inner life of feeling stands between the two. We accompany our thoughts with feeling. Thoughts please us, repel us. Out of our feeling we lead our impulses of will into life. Feeling, the content of the mind, stands between thinking and willing, right in the middle.

But just as it is the case in ordinary life, even if only in a suggestive way, so it is in the great world. And there we have to say: what constitutes our thinking power, what makes up the fact that we can think, that the possibility of thought is in us, we owe it to the life before our birth, or rather before our conception. In the little child that comes to meet us, all the thinking abilities that a person develops are already present in the germ. The child uses thoughts only - as you know from lectures I have already given - as directing forces to build up its body. Especially in the first seven years of life, until the change of teeth, the child uses the powers of thought to build up its body as directing forces. Then they emerge more and more as actual thought forces. But they are thoroughly predisposed in the human being as thought forces when he enters physical, earthly life.

What develops as will forces - an unbiased observation readily reveals this - is actually connected with this thought force only to a small extent in the child. Just observe a wriggling, moving child in the first weeks of life, and you will already realize that this wriggling, this chaotic movement, has only been acquired by the child because his soul and spirit have been clothed with physical corporeality by the physical external world. In this physical body, which we only develop little by little from conception and birth, the will initially lies, and the development of a child's life consists in the fact that gradually the will is, so to speak, captured by the powers of thought that we already bring with us into physical existence through birth. Just observe how the child at first moves its limbs quite senselessly, as it comes out of the activity of the physical body, and how gradually, I might say, thought intrudes into these movements, so that they become meaningful. So there is a pressing and thrusting of thinking into the life of the will, which lives entirely within the shell that surrounds the human being when he is born, or rather, conceived. This life of the will is contained entirely within it.

So that we can draw a schematic picture of a human being, in which we say that he brings his life of thought with him when he descends from the spiritual world. I will indicate this schematically (see drawing, yellow). And he begins his life of will in the physical body that is given to him by his parents (red). The forces of will are within, expressing themselves in a chaotic manner. And within are the powers of thought (arrows), which initially serve as directing forces to spiritualize the will in its corporeality in the right way.

We then perceive these forces of will when we pass through death into the spiritual world. But there they are highly organized. We carry them through the gate of death into spiritual life. The powers of thought that we bring with us from the supersensible life into earthly life, we actually lose in the course of earthly life.

With human beings who die young, it is somewhat different. For now, let us speak first of normal human beings. A normal human being who lives past the age of fifty has basically already lost the real powers of thought that were brought along from the previous life and has just retained the directional powers of the will, which are then carried over through death into the life that we enter when we go through the gate of death.

One can assume that someone is now thinking: Yes, so if you are over fifty years old, you have lost your thinking! - In a sense, this is even the case for most people who are not interested in anything spiritual today. I would just like you to really endeavor to register how much original, inventive thought power is produced by those people today who have reached the age of fifty! As a rule, it is the thoughts of earlier years that have automatically moved on and left an impression on the body, and the body then moves on automatically. After all, the body is a reflection of our mental life, and the person continues in the old rut of thought according to the law of inertia. Today, the only way to protect oneself from continuing in the old rut of thought is to absorb thoughts during one's lifetime that are of a spiritual nature, that are similar to the thought-forces in which we were placed before our birth. So that indeed the time is approaching when old people will be mere automatons if they do not take care to absorb thought-forces from the supersensible world. Of course, man can continue to think automatically; it may appear as if he is thinking. But it is only an automatic movement of the organs in which thoughts have been laid, have been woven in, if the human being is not grasped by that youthful element that comes when we absorb thoughts from spiritual science. This absorption of thoughts from spiritual science is certainly not just any kind of theorizing, but it intervenes quite deeply in human life.

But the matter takes on particular significance when we now consider man's relationship to the surrounding nature. I now understand by nature all that surrounds us for our senses, to which we are thus exposed from waking up to falling asleep. This can be considered in a certain way in the following way. One can visualize what one sees — I mean before spiritual eyes. We call it the sensory carpet. I will draw it schematically. Behind everything that one sees, hears, perceives as warmth, the colors in nature and so on – I draw an eye as a schema for what is perceived there – there is something behind this sensory carpet. Physicists or people of the present world view say: Behind it are atoms and they swirl -, and afterwards, right, as they continue to swirl, there is no sensory carpet at all, but somehow in the eye or in the brain or somewhere or not somewhere, they then evoke the colors and the sounds and so on. Now, please, imagine, quite impartially, that you begin to think about this sensory carpet. If you start thinking and do not assume the illusion that you can observe this huge army of atoms, which the chemists have arranged in such a military way of thinking, let us say, for example, there is Corporal C, then two privates, C, O, O, and then another private as an H; isn't that right, that's how we arranged it militarily: aether, atoms and so on. Now, if, as I said, you do not succumb to this illusion but remain with reality, then you know: the sensory carpet is spread out, the sensory qualities are out there, and what I still grasp with consciousness about what lies in the sensory qualities is just thoughts. In reality, there is nothing behind this sensory carpet but thoughts (blue). I mean, behind what we have in the physical world, there is nothing but thoughts. We will talk about the fact that these are carried by beings. But you can only get behind what we have in our consciousness with thoughts. But the power to think we have from our prenatal life or from the life before our conception. Why is it then that we can penetrate behind the sensory curtain by means of this power?

Just try to familiarize yourself with the idea that I have just mentioned, and try to properly present the question to yourself on the basis of what we have just hinted at, which we have already considered in many contexts. Why is it that we can reach below the sensory level with our thoughts, when our thoughts come from our prenatal life? Very simply, because behind it is that which is not in the present at all, but which is in the past, which belongs to the past. That which is under the carpet of sense is indeed a past, and we only see it correctly when we recognize it as a past. The past has an effect on our present, and out of the past sprouts that which appears to us in the present. Imagine a meadow full of flowers. You see the grass as a green blanket, you see the meadow's floral decoration. That is the present, but it grows out of the past. And if you think through this, then underneath it you do not have an atomistic present, but in reality you have the past as related to what comes from you yourself from the past.

It is interesting: when we begin to reflect on things, it is not the present that is revealed to us, but the past. What is the present? The present has no logical structure at all. The sunbeam falls on some plant, it shines there; in the next moment, when the direction of the sunbeam is different, it shines in a different direction. The image changes every moment. The present is such that we cannot grasp it with mathematics, not with the mere structure of thought. What we can grasp with the mere structure of thought is the past, which continues in the present.

This is something that can reveal itself to man as a great, as a significant truth: When you think, you basically only think the past; when you spin logic, you basically reflect on what has passed. - Anyone who grasps this thought will no longer seek miracles in the past either. For in that the past is woven into the present, it must be in the present as it is in the past. If you think about it, if you ate cherries yesterday, that is a past action; you cannot undo it because it is a past action. But if the cherries had the habit of making a mark somewhere before they disappeared into your mouth, that mark would remain. You could not change this sign. If every cherry had registered its past in your mouth after you had eaten cherries yesterday, and someone came and wanted to cross out five, he could cross them out, but the fact would not change. Nor can you perform any miracle with regard to all natural phenomena, because they are all intrusions from the past. And everything we can grasp with natural laws has already passed, is no longer present. You cannot grasp the present other than through images; that is a fluctuating thing. When a body lights up here, a shadow is created. You have to let the shadow properly define itself, so to speak, and so on. You can construct the shadow. That the shadow really comes into being can only be determined by devotion to the picture. So that one can say: even in ordinary life, limitation, I could also say logical thinking, refers to the past. And the imagination refers to the present. In relation to the present, man always has imaginations.

Just think, if you wanted to live logically in the present! No, to live logically means to draw one concept from another, to move from one concept to another in a lawful manner. Now, just imagine yourself in life. You see some event: is the next one logically connected to it? Can you logically deduce the next event from the previous one? When you look at life, are not its images similar to a dream? The present is similar to a dream, and only that the past is mixed into the present, which causes the present to proceed in a lawful, logical manner. And if you want to divine something in the future in the present, yes, if you just want to think of something you want to do in the future, then that has happened in a completely non-representational way in the first instance. What you will experience tonight is not in your mind as an image, but as something more non-pictorial than an image. At most, it is in your mind as inspiration. Inspiration relates to the future. Logical thinking: past Imagination: present Intuition Inspiration: future.

We can also use a simple diagram to visualize what is involved. When a person – let me characterize him here by this eye (see drawing on page 198) – looks at the tapestry of the senses, he sees it in its transforming images, but he now comes and introduces laws into these images. He develops a natural science out of the changing images of the sensory world. He develops a specialized science. But think about how this natural science is developed. You investigate, you investigate while thinking. You cannot possibly, if you want to develop a science about what spreads out as a carpet of senses, a science that proceeds in logical thoughts, you cannot possibly gain these logical thoughts from the external world. If what is recognized as thoughts and laws of nature were to follow from the external world itself, then it would not be necessary for us to learn anything about the external world. Then the person who, for example, looks at this light would have to know the exact electrical laws and so on, like the other person who has learned it! Equally, if he has not learned it, man knows nothing at all, let us say, about the relationship of an arc to the radius and so on. We bring forth from our inner being the thoughts that we carry into the outer world.

Yes, it is so: what we carry into the outer world as thoughts, we bring forth from our inner being. We are first of all this human being, who is constructed as a head human being. This human being looks at the carpet of senses. Inside the carpet of senses is what we reach through thoughts (see drawing page 198, white) and between this and between what we have inside us, what we do not perceive, there is a connection, so to speak an underground connection. Therefore, what we do not perceive in the external world because it extends into us, we bring out of our inner being in the form of thought life and place it in the external world. This is how it is with counting. The external world does not present anything to us; the laws of counting lie within our own inner being. But that this is true arises from the fact that between these predispositions, which are there in the external world, and our own earthly laws, there is an underground connection, a sub-physical connection, and so we draw the number out of our inner being. It then fits with what is outside. But the path is not through our eyes, not through our senses, but through our organism. And that which we develop as human beings, we develop as whole human beings. It is not true that we grasp some law of nature through the senses; we grasp it as a whole human being.

These things must be considered if we want to properly bring to mind the relationship between man and the environment. We are constantly in imaginations, and one need only compare life with dreams without prejudice. When a dream unfolds, it is certainly very chaotic, but it is much more similar to life than logical thinking. Let us take an extreme case. If you take a conversation between reasonable people of the present day, you listen and you talk yourself. Think about what is said in the course of, say, half an hour, and whether there is more coherence in the succession of thoughts than there is in dreams, or whether there is as much coherence as in logical thinking. If you were to demand that logical thinking develops there, you would probably be greatly disappointed. The present world presents itself to us entirely in images, so that basically we are actually dreaming all the time. We have yet to bring logic into it. We wrest logic from our prenatal existence; we first bring it into the context of things and thereby also encounter the past in things. We embrace the present with imagination.

When we observe this imaginative life that constantly surrounds us in the sensual present, we can say to ourselves: this imaginative life gives itself to us. We do nothing to it. Just think how hard you had to work to arrive at logical thinking! You didn't have to make any effort to enjoy life, to observe life; it reveals its images to you by itself. Now, that's how it is in life with imagining the images of the ordinary world around us. But all one needs is to acquire the ability to make images – but now through one's own activity, as one otherwise does in thinking – and to experience images through inner effort, as one otherwise does in thinking. Then one not only sees the present in images, but one also extends pictorial imagination to life before birth or before conception, and one sees before birth or before conception. And when you look into these images, then thinking is populated with the images, and then prenatal life becomes reality. We just have to be able to think in images by training the abilities that are spoken of in “How to Know Higher Worlds”, without these images coming to us by themselves, as is the case in ordinary life. When we make this life of images, in which we actually always live in ordinary life, into an inner life, then we look into the spiritual world, and then we do see the way in which our life actually unfolds.

Today, it is considered almost exclusively spiritual when someone – I have spoken about this often – truly despises material life and says: I strive towards the spirit, matter remains far beneath me. This is a weakness, because only the one who does not need to leave matter below him, but who understands matter itself in its effectiveness as spirit, who can recognize everything material as spiritual and everything spiritual, even in its manifestation as material, only he truly attains a spiritual life. This becomes especially significant when we look at thinking and willing. At most, language, which contains a secret genius within it, still has something of what leads to knowledge in this field.

Consider the basis of will in everyday life: you know that it arises from desire; even the most ideal will arises from desire. Now take the coarsest form of desire. What is the coarsest form of desire? Hunger. Therefore, everything that arises from desire is basically always related to hunger. From what I am trying to suggest to you today, you can see that thinking is the other pole, and will therefore behave like the opposite of desire. We can say: if we base desire on the will, we have to base thinking on satiation, on being full, not on hunger.

This actually corresponds to the facts in the deepest sense. If you take our head organization as human beings and the other organization that is attached to it, it is indeed the case that we perceive. What does it mean to perceive? We perceive through our senses. As we perceive, something is actually constantly being removed within us. Something passes from the outside into our inner being. The ray of light that enters our eye actually carries something away. In a sense, a hole is drilled into our own matter (see drawing on page 201). There was matter, but now the beam of light has drilled a hole into it, and now there is hunger. This hunger must be satisfied, and it is satisfied from the organism, from the available food; that is, this hole is filled with the food that is inside us (red). Now we have thought, now we have thought what we have perceived: by thinking, we continually fill the holes that sensory perceptions create in us with satiety that arises from our organism.

It is extremely interesting to observe, when we consider the organization of the head, how we fill the holes that arise in our remaining organism through the ears and eyes, through the sensations of warmth; there are holes everywhere. Man fills himself completely by thinking, by filling that which is there, in the holes (red).

And it is similar with us if we want it to be. Only then it does not work from outside in, so that we are hollowed out, but it works from within. If we want, hollows arise everywhere in us; these must in turn be filled with matter. So that we can say, we receive negative effects, hollowing out effects, both from outside and from inside, and constantly push our matter into them.

These are the most intimate effects, these hollowing effects, which actually destroy all earthly existence in us. Because by receiving the ray of light, by hearing the sound, we destroy our earthly existence. But we react to this, we in turn fill this with earthly existence. So we have a life between the destruction of earthly existence and the filling of earthly existence: luciferic, ahrimanic. The Luciferic is actually constantly striving to partially turn us into something non-material, to completely remove us from our earthly existence; for if he could, Lucifer would like to spiritualize us completely, that is, dematerialize us. But Ahriman is his opponent; he works in such a way that what Lucifer excavates is constantly being filled in again. Ahriman is the constant filler. If you form Lucifer plastically and make Ahriman plastically, you could quite well, if the matter went through in confusion, always push Ahriman into the cavity of Lucifer, or put Lucifer over it. But since there are also cavities inside, you also have to push in. Ahriman and Lucifer are the two opposing forces at work in man. He himself is the state of equilibrium. Lucifer, with continuous dematerialization, results in continuous materialization: Ahriman. When we perceive, that is Lucifer. When we think about what we have perceived: Ahriman. When we form the idea, this or that we should want: Lucifer. When we really want on earth: Ahriman. So we are in the middle of the two. We oscillate back and forth between them, and we must be clear about ourselves: as human beings, we are placed in the most intimate way between the Ahrimanic and the Luciferic. Actually, you only get to know a person when you take these two opposing poles in him into account.

This is an approach that is based neither on an abstract spiritual reality – for this abstract spiritual reality is, after all, nebulous and mystical – nor on a material one, but rather everything that is materially effective is also spiritual at the same time. We are dealing with the spiritual everywhere. And we see through matter in its existence, in its effectiveness, by being able to see the spirit in everything.

I have already told you that imagination comes to us of its own accord in relation to the present. When we develop imagination artificially, we look into the past. When we develop inspiration, we look into the future, just as one calculates into the future by calculating solar or lunar eclipses, not in relation to the details, but to a higher degree in relation to the great laws of the future. And intuition encompasses all three. And we are actually subject to intuition all the time, we just sleep through it. When we sleep, we are completely immersed in the outside world with our ego and our astral body; there we unfold that intuitive activity that one must otherwise consciously unfold in intuition. But in this present organization the human being is too weak to be conscious when he is intuiting; but he does intuit in fact at night. So one can say: Asleep, the human being develops intuition; awake, he develops—to a certain extent, of course—logical thinking; between the two stands inspiration and imagination. When a person comes out of sleep into waking life, his I and his astral body enter into the physical body and the etheric body; what he brings with him is the inspiration to which I have already drawn your attention in previous lectures. We can say: Man is asleep in intuition, awake in logical thinking, when he wakes up he inspires himself, when he falls asleep he imagines. - You can see from this that the activities we mention as the higher activities of knowledge are not alien to ordinary life, but that they are very much present in ordinary life, that they only have to be raised into consciousness if a higher knowledge is to be developed.

It must be pointed out again and again that in the last three to four centuries, external science has summarized a large number of purely material facts and brought them into laws. These facts must first be spiritually penetrated. But it is good - if I may say so, although it sounds paradoxical at first - that materialism was there, otherwise people would have fallen into nebulosity. They would have finally lost all connection with their earthly existence. When materialism began in the 15th century, humanity was in fact in danger of falling prey to Luciferic influences to a high degree, of being hollowed out more and more and more. That is when the Ahrimanic influences came from that time on. And in the last four or five centuries, the Ahrimanic influences have developed to a certain extent. Today they have become very strong and there is a danger that they will overshoot their target if we do not counter them with something that will effectively weaken them: if we do not counter them with the spiritual.

But here it is important to develop the right feeling for the relationship between the spiritual and the material. In the older German way of thinking, there is a poem called “Muspilli”, which was first found in a book dedicated to Louis the German in the 9th century, but which of course dates from a much earlier time. There is something purely Christian in this poem: it presents us with the battle of Elijah with the Antichrist. But the whole way in which this story unfolds, this fight between Elijah and the Antichrist, is reminiscent of the ancient struggles of the sagas, the inhabitants of Asgard with the inhabitants of Jötunheim, the inhabitants of the realm of the giants. It is simply the realm of the Æsir transformed into the realm of Elijah, the realm of the giants into the realm of the Antichrist.

This way of thinking, which we still encounter, conceals the true fact less than the later ways of thinking. The later ways of thinking always talk about duality, about good and evil, about God and the devil, and so on. But these ways of thinking, which were developed in later times, no longer correspond to the earlier ones. Those people who developed the struggle between the Gods' home and the giants' home did not see the same in the Gods as, for example, today's Christian understands in the realm of his God. Instead, these older ideas had, for example, Asgard, the realm of the Gods, above, and Jötunheim, the realm of the giants, below; in the middle, Man unfolds, Midgard. This is nothing other than the same thing in the Germanic-European way that was present in ancient Persia as Ormuzd and Ahriman. There we would have to say in our language: Lucifer and Ahriman. We would have to address Ormuzd as Lucifer and not just as the good God. And that is the great mistake that is made, that one understands this dualism as if Ormuzd were only the good God and his opponent Ahriman the evil God. The relationship is rather like that of Lucifer to Ahriman. And in Middlegard, at the time when this poem “Muspilli” was written, it is still not imagined that The Christ sends his blood down from above – but: Elijah is there, and sends his blood down. And man is placed in the middle. At the time when Louis the German probably wrote this poem into his book, the idea was still more correct than the later one. For later times have committed the strange act of disregarding the Trinity; that is, to understand the upper gods, who are in Asgard, and the lower gods, the giants, who are in the Ahrimanic realm, as the All, and to understand the upper, the Luciferic ones, as the good gods and the others as the evil gods. This was done in later times; in earlier times, this opposition between Lucifer and Ahriman was still properly envisaged, and therefore something like Elijah was placed in the Luciferic realm with his emotional prophecy, with that which he was able to proclaim at that time, because one wanted to place the Christ in Midgard, in that which lies in the middle.

We must go back to these ideas in full consciousness, otherwise we will not come back to the Trinity: to the Luciferic Gods, to the Ahrimanic powers and in between to what the Christ-realm is. Without advancing to this, we will not come to a real understanding of the world.

This is the topic I wanted to broach, and we will continue to discuss it in the coming days in various ways.

Yesterday I concluded here by saying that in recent times a confusion has arisen regarding the conception of what Ormuzd-Ahriman, living out in Persian duality, actually is. I have also pointed out how one can go back to the older European-Germanic views, such as, for example, in the poem known as the “Muspilli” poem, the poem about the firmament and the earth, in which the antithesis of an upper, luciferic principle and a lower, ahrimanic principle is expressed in a thoroughly Christian form. I say, in a thoroughly Christian form, because it has not been infected by that out of whose spiritual makeup the antithesis of above and below in the sense of the “Muspilli” poem has vanished. It was not presupposed that the Christ principle, so to speak, belongs to the higher spirituality, but the higher spirituality has been raised to the Elijah principle, and it is Elijah who fights against the Antichrist with his trickling blood, which is nothing other than the expression of the Ahrimanic principle in Christian form. Thus, in these older European-Germanic conceptions there still exists a clear consciousness of the necessity to distinguish between an upper and a lower principle, upper forces and lower forces, and that, as it were, the equalization, the harmonization of the two principles is to be sought in the Christ principle. It will also be easy to see that when one has elevated the Elijah principle and placed the antichrist principle below, then in the higher principle there is that which follows the moral impulse of the world order, and in the Ahrimanic principle that which follows the intellectual impulse of world evolution.

In such an awareness of the upper and the lower, one has generally seen a polarity that exists in the world order. When one says up and down, it is of course projected onto the human being in a certain way. And we know that the human being determines up and down by orienting the most essential direction of the spine vertically. This is how up and down arise. So this is meant to be quite relative. But what is being referred to today, quite apart from up and down, is a certain polaric contrast. This polar contrast appears to us in an extraordinarily complicated way in the human being. But one can also study this polar contrast, I would say more externalized, in the world, and it is extraordinarily useful to look at the world order in such a way that it reveals to one, through very special phenomena in which certain forces are radically developed, what secrets actually prevail in it.

Now, in man a certain contrast is less clearly expressed, but it can be very clearly seen if you look at the organization as a whole. Just as man has grown out of the whole order of the world, so too has the bird race. But the secrets that prevail in the world show us this bird race in a certain direction much more clearly than we can see it in humans, where we then have to apply it in a more complicated way.

What then is the characteristic of the bird kingdom? The characteristic of the bird kingdom is that the bird, before our world order, insofar as it is given to us in the physical sphere, first appears to the outer world in the form of an egg, if I may say so. The bird appears to the world in the form of an egg. Then the egg must be broken. The bird develops out of the egg, and you will be aware – because you will have seen what a chicken looks like when it has just hatched from the egg – you will have noticed how it is only when it hatches from the egg that the growth of what feathers are and so on really comes to life. Now, this contrast, if I may call it that, between being in the egg and being in the world with feathers, is not so clearly expressed in humans. After all, humans are not born into the world in an egg, and they are spared the later stage of entering this world with such preparation as growing feathers. But what a contrast we have in the bird kingdom with regard to the egg shape and the later form of life!

If you look at the egg from the outside, the first thing you see is, of course, the chalky shell. This chalky shell has a certain shape. But basically you cannot consider this chalky shell to be something essential in a bird, because otherwise it could not shed it. It cannot belong to something essential in the bird. You can call it, if you speak in trivial terms, a protective covering of the young being. But in any case, something that is particularly localized in the lime shell does not actually have an effect on the shape of the bird. So we have this secretion of matter in the outer shell. We have this secretion of matter as something that is pushed out of the organization of the bird, as something that is thrown off, something that the bird, in the later stages, cannot use for its development; it is therefore something that is thrown out. So there must be forces within the being that secrete what is in the egg and throw it out of itself.

When we consider this whole matter, we cannot really come to terms with it within the natural laws that present themselves within the earthly. One must take what is said in 'Occult Science' to help. In 'Occult Science' you have the indication of how, in a certain epoch of the development of our earth, the moon separates from the earth, how the matter of the moon is separated from the earth. This process actually mimics what takes place here in a certain way. Just as the formative forces of the entire Earth cosmos once separated the forces of the moon from themselves, so the matter of the bird separates this lime shell as something one might say is super-mineral. And what is it that was initially inside this lime shell? (See drawing, red.)

The creature that was originally inside this lime shell was protected by this lime shell from the forces that act in the earth's environment. If the chicken were exposed to these forces too soon, say to the sun too soon, it would of course die. It would not be able to withstand the forces that are at work in the earth's environment. The point is that the being, protected by the chalk shell, lives in a world that is not actually the earthly one.

What kind of world is it in which this creature protected by the lime shell lives? This world is the one we have gone through through Saturn, Sun and Moon evolution and which has ceased to exist, which is no longer there as Earth evolution. The past is still present in the present. And if we say to ourselves: everything that is outside of an egg shell belongs to the earth, then in that which is inside an egg shell we have everything that does not belong to the earth, that wants nothing to do with the earth itself, that, so to speak, does not want to go along with the evolution of the earth. For it must first mature, break the shell and then have matured for the evolution of the earth.

This is also the point where we may draw attention to something else. We may point out that not all the beings that are laid in the egg are actually born. A great many bird's eggs perish, and even more of the eggs of fish and the like, they all perish. And besides, I don't know if it's always opportune to discuss things in such a dry way. Humanity likes to leave a lot in the unconscious, but for the times to come, a certain amount of knowledge is necessary for humanity, and one must not close oneself off from this knowledge. Besides, a large number of bird's eggs also perish because people eat them. They do not reach their goal. And now the question is: What happens to all this, what develops from the egg content, including the latter fact, without it becoming a mature chicken or mature bird or mature fish on earth, what happens to all this? The ordinary materialist will say: Well, nature just creates nonsense, into the blind, and so and so much of what nature creates just perishes. But that is not correct. The essential substances that are in the egg shell in some way do not just become ripe for earthly existence, but they are ripe in their powers for the pre-earthly existence, for the existence that we ourselves, that the earthly beings have gone through during the Saturn, Sun and Moon time. And that is the luciferic existence. They become substances from which the luciferic existence continues to feed. Everything that perishes in the form of eggs provides nourishment for the entities, for certain spiritual entities. But now let us consider what concerns the earth.

So, when we look at the bird species, we first have the Luciferic in the egg content, that which, as such, wants nothing to do with the earth, that which does not want to be on the earth, that which, I might say, surrounds itself with a wall against the laws of the earth, which only then intervene when that which otherwise works on the earth, warmth, light, has burst the shell.

And what intervenes there? The opposing forces intervene there. If you have a bird's egg in front of you, you can say to yourself: Lucifer in his essence is sitting inside there. If you pluck the feathers of a bird, you can say: Here I have the purest image of the Ahrimanic directional forces. The Ahrimanic directional forces are at work here, even in the fine, downy feathers that you find on the fledgling chick. The Ahrimanic forces have already worked through the shell. They were already in conflict with that which does not want to be permeated by feathers. So when you look at the bird's plumage, you have the purest image of the Ahrimanic.

Therefore, you can say: When I look at an egg, Lucifer veils himself from me. He betrays himself to me only through the outer form that he sheds, through that which is cast out in a certain way as matter. So whatever falls away, whether it is a bird's egg shell, a snake skin that is thrown off and so on, that is thrown out of the Luciferic principle, out of the Luciferic forces. In what is thrown away, one can still see something of the actual formation of the Luciferic forces. They actually work, when they work purely, in spirals. And in what you have as plumage, or what you have in general, that it moves from the outside into the physical, there you have the Ahrimanic. Its directional forces act tangentially. Take a peacock's tail and look at it very closely, thinking: This is the purest image of Ahrimanic directional forces.

Now, of course, you must be aware that everywhere Lucifer and Ahriman work into and through each other, so that we only have images of them. But these images are actually most beautifully available in the bird sex; for we need only look at this bird sex as I have just described it.

But of course the forces that are within the eggshell are also active in the bird inside. The bird has these forces, which were inside the eggshell (red), surrounded by the Ahrimanic forces (blue) in its feathers. In the bird, you also have the possibility of being able to localize the etheric and the physical. If you take everything that the bird retains of the Luciferic, which was only in the egg shell, what it retains of the growth forces, then you have what underlies the etheric body. So what I have drawn in red, these are the forces, and that is subject to the activity of the etheric forces. So that we can also say about the bird: What the bird receives as an inheritance from the egg is under the influence of the life forces, the etheric forces, throughout its life. And what it acquires as its plumage is under the influence of the physical forces (arrows) throughout its life. And what is in between, its flesh, muscles and so on, is under the influence of the astral forces (yellow) throughout its life. In the case of the bird, we can thus localize, so to speak, the astral in the flesh and muscles, the physical in the plumage, and the etheric in what remains of the egg contents as growth forces.

In the case of humans, it is much more complicated. Man does not live externally in an egg. He develops his Luciferic in the mother's body, which the bird still carries outwards. That is why Ahriman does not yet come over him in the mother's body. With birds, it is the case that they show, as it were, how they bring the Luciferic out into the world without it actually going astray, and how they also, in turn, take on the Ahrimanic. With human beings, you can see the individual examples develop with particular clarity. Between the human and the bird sex, we can then insert the mammal sex.

In the human being, you have a very strange difference compared to the bird. Take the bird's legs. The bird's legs are, as a rule, when you compare them to the human leg, actually quite stunted organs. How did the bird come to have legs just like it has? Take the sparrow's legs: What miserable rods they are compared to the proud legs that humans have! So take these stunted bird legs – yes, when you look at the bird's entire stunted form, you will say to yourself: the bird is designed primarily for flying, it takes off from the earth, and that is also the reason for the shape of its legs. They are, so to speak, only a hint of its connection to the earth. Man does not lift his legs off the earth. Man cannot fly. He places both his legs on the earth like proud pillars. The way these legs are formed, they are essentially an earthly gift. The bird does not receive this earthly gift because it is not bound to the earth in this way at all, because it is separate from the earth. And by receiving this earthly gift, the human being is more bound to the forces of Ahriman in this earthly gift than the bird is. In a sense, the bird also does not receive its Ahrimanic forces from the earth as fully as the human being does. In the human being, Ahriman shoots into the legs and from there up into the rest of the organism. In the bird, Ahriman sprouts into the feathers.

Now, if you look at a human being, who is more built for the earth in terms of his legs, then you may well ask: Why does a human being not have feathers? A human being does not have feathers because, unlike a bird, he is not built for the earth. If a human being were to fly in the air, he would also have feathers, because then the Ahrimanic forces would affect him from completely different directions. So he has only these few Ahrimanic tendencies, which are present in the hair. These are the Ahrimanic tendencies he has. They are strongest in the head, which is proof enough that the human head has a great deal of Ahrimanism, which we have already gathered from other insights.

If you look at mammals, you will say to yourself: They are even more bound to the earth than humans. These mammals are also bound to the earth with what humans are not bound to, for example with the front limbs; because monkeys only walk upright in rare cases, and even dogs do that when they are attentive, but it is not natural for them. Even for the gorilla it is not natural to walk upright; he climbs. These front limbs are real grasping organs, they are for moving around. Man is therefore half lifted off the earth, the bird is completely lifted off the earth, the mammal is bound to the earth with its front limbs as well as with its hind limbs. So in a sense it is entirely an earthly creature. The human being frees itself from the earth again through the upright position of its backbone, while the mammal is entirely bound to the earth. The mammal's entire remaining form is built accordingly. The mammal has, so to speak, only its hair from the region where the bird has its feathers, which are actually incorporated into the organism from the outside.

If you take all this into account, you will say to yourself: You can, if you look at the relationships of a being – a mammal, bird, human being, and you could now move on to the other beings – you can, if you look at the relationship of these beings to the environment and have a complete overview, find the shape of the being from the understanding of the relationship to the environment. – You can construct the shape for yourself. You can say that the bird has within itself the Luciferic principle, which the Earth does not like at all, so the bird in its egg separates itself from the Earth for as long as possible; then it comes about that the Earth has as little effect on it as possible. Its legs remain stunted, and the forces surrounding the Earth, the nearest forces to the Earth, which surround the Earth in the mantle of warmth, then affect the bird. Therefore, it will have to take on the shape that it has: stunted legs and so on. Man is bound to the earth by his lower limbs; he frees himself. The mammal is in the middle of it all, standing on the earth with four pillars: it is formed out of the earth. It is therefore the forces that directly emanate from the earth that primarily affect the mammal.

Such things were well known to an older, more instinctive science. Therefore, in that which is formed most independently of the earth in man, because it is actually only a metamorphosis of earlier life on earth, therefore an earlier view saw a bird, an eagle, in man's mind. In the human being with a metabolism of the limbs, which is completely organized towards the earth, an earlier view saw an ox or a bull or a cow, because that is an animal that is now completely organized towards the earth. In the middle part of man, who is, as it were, the connecting link between the eagle and the cow or calf, in this middle man, one has seen that which, through the metabolism, is indeed detached from the earthly in a certain way; you can see from this, cannot you, that the lion has a very short intestine. Its metabolic system is extremely primitive, whereas its chest and heart systems are very specially developed. Hence its passion, its rage, and so on. The lion has been seen by the older, more instinctive view as being in the middle part of the human being. These were views that were based on something.

Now we have to come back to these things in a different, I would say much more conscious way. We have to realize, for example, that we humans differ from all animals in our I. For the vast majority of people today, our I is still a very dormant organ. If one believes that the I is very much awake, one is actually mistaken. For in the will — I have already explained this to you — the human being is actually asleep too, and when the I acts willfully, we are not dealing with something that stands before us as the I, but rather with something that stands before us as night actually stands before us. We take the night for granted, even though it is dark, and we do the same in our lives. If you really look back on your life, it does not only consist of the days that were as bright as day, but also of the nights. But they are always crossed out of the course of time, so to speak. It is similar with our ego. Our ego is actually noticeable to ordinary consciousness in that it is not there for consciousness; it is already there, but for consciousness it is not there. Something is missing in that place, and that is how you see the ego. It is really like having a white wall and a place that has not been painted white; then you see the black. And so you actually see our ego in ordinary consciousness as the erased. And so it is also during waking: the I is actually always asleep at first; but it shines through as the sleeping one through thoughts, ideas and feelings, and therefore the I is also perceived in ordinary consciousness, that is, it is supposed that it is perceived. So we can say: our I is actually not perceived directly at first.

Now, a prejudiced psychology, a doctrine of the soul, believes that this I actually sits inside the human being; where his muscles are, his flesh is, his bones are and so on, there the I is also inside. If one were to survey life just a little, one would very soon perceive that this is not the case. But it is difficult to bring such a consideration before people today. I already tried it in 1911 in my lecture at the philosophers' congress in Bologna. But to this day no one has understood this lecture. I tried to show what the ego actually is. This I actually lies in every perception, it actually lies in everything that makes an impression on us. The I does not lie in my flesh and in my bones, but in that which I can perceive through my eyes. When you see a red flower somewhere: in your I, in your entire experience, which you have because you are devoted to the red, you cannot separate the red from the flower. With all of it, you have also given the I, the I is connected with the content of your soul. But your soul content is not in your bones! You spread the content of your soul throughout the entire space. So this I is even less than the air you are breathing in, even less than the air that was in you before. This I is connected with every perception and with everything that is actually outside of you. It is only active within you because it sends forces into it from your perception. And furthermore, the I is connected with something else: You need only walk, that is, develop your will. In doing so, your ego goes with you, or rather, the ego participates in the movement, and whether you sneak along slowly, walk, move in a Kiebitz step or turn somehow and the like, whether you dance or jump, the ego participates in all of it. The ego participates in everything that comes from you. But that is not in you either. Think, it takes you with it. When you dance a round dance, do you think the dance is in you? It wouldn't have any space in you! How could it have space? But the I is there, the I is doing the dance. So in your perceptions and in your activity, there sits the I. But it is never actually in you in the full sense of the word, not in the way that your stomach is in you. It is always something outside you, this I. It is just as much outside the head as it is outside the legs, except that when you walk it is very much involved in the movements your legs make. The I is actually very much involved in the movement that the legs make. But the head is less involved in the I.

But what is the further difference between the legs or the limbs in general and the metabolism of the head? In the case of the head, the etheric body and the astral body are also relatively independent; the head is mostly physical body. This head, which is so old that it comes from the previous incarnation, has become the most physical, and is really the worst inhabitant of the earth. In contrast, in the case of the legs, or rather the limbs, and in the case of the metabolism, the etheric body and the astral body are intimately connected with the physical body. So we can say: In the case of the legs, the etheric body and the astral body are connected to the physical body; only the I is relatively free of the legs and only takes the legs with it when the legs move. And it is the same with the metabolism: the metabolic organs are essentially connected to the etheric and astral bodies.

We can now say: How does the human head differ from the 'metabolic-limb human'? — In that the head actually has a free ether body, a free astral body and a free I; the metabolic limb-human being has only a free I, while the ether body and the astral body in the metabolic limb-human being are bound to the physical body; they are not free from it.

Perhaps the following will help you to understand the matter even better. Imagine that your astral body or your etheric body, the part that has to supply your metabolic limb man, suddenly decides to behave in the same way as the etheric body and the astral body of the head: it also wants to be free. Do you think it would have this strange idea that it also wanted to be free? Let's say, for example, that the astral body of your metabolic person wanted to behave like its colleague, the astral body of the head is allowed to behave. It is just a different part, so I say: its colleague. What arises there? What arises is something that should not arise at all because it contradicts the shape of the human being: our abdomen wants to become a head, it wants to become like the head. And the strange thing is, what is healthy in the head makes the abdomen sick. Basically, it is a general characteristic of all abdominal diseases that the abdomen takes on the configuration of the head.

It is, of course, only a special case of what I have explained, for example, for carcinoma in a Stuttgart or Zurich lecture, where I have shown that carcinoma formation is based on the fact that in a part of the human body where no sensory organs are supposed to develop inwardly, the astral body suddenly begins to want to develop sensory organs. A carcinoma is just an ear or an eye that wants to be in the wrong place. It grows there. It wants to form an ear or an eye. So when the astral body or the etheric body of the lower body wants to behave like the astral or etheric body of the head, the lower body becomes ill.

And the other way around, when the head also begins – it begins quietly in migraine-like conditions – to want to live like the lower body, to draw its astral body or its etheric body into its affairs, then the head becomes ill. When it draws in its etheric body, migraine-like conditions arise. When it draws in its astral body, even worse things arise.

These are the things that show you how complicated human nature is. This human nature cannot be studied in the way that today's trivial science does, but it must be studied by looking at it in all its complexity, by saying: the head cannot be like the abdomen, because if the head is like the abdomen, it can only be sick. So if, for example, the cerebrum begins to develop its metabolism too strongly, if it begins to develop secretion processes too strongly, then illnesses will arise. And these strong secretory processes arise precisely from the fact that the head makes too much use of its etheric body. But as soon as our abdomen is left to its own devices, when it becomes head-like, so to speak, when it develops an inclination to develop sensory organs, for example, then its diseases develop. So you can say: the head of the human being has a free etheric body, a free astral body, a free I. The metabolic-limb man has a bound etheric body, that is, an etheric body bound to physical matter, a bound astral body and only a free ego. And the middle man, the rhythmic man, has a bound etheric body, a free astral body and a free ego.

Head: free etheric body, free astral body, free I
Rhythmic human being: bound etheric body, free astral body, free I
Metabolic-limb human being: bound etheric body, bound astral body, free I

This is an overview of the human constitution from an extremely important point of view, because it gives you an impression of how the I actually has something free in relation to the whole human being, how the I actually falling asleep, has an effect on the human being, but how it always remains relatively free from the human being, how it is actually connected with external perception as well as with what the human being does as an external movement, but how it does not actually merge completely with the human body. In what does the human being's I live? Is there any way to see in what the human being's I lives?

Well, we can see something of it in what develops in the feathers of birds. Human beings do not have feathers, but their I lives in the forces that are in our environment and that are the guiding forces for the feathers of birds. The I lives externally in these forces. And we can see these formative forces even more clearly. In the feathers of birds we see them, as it were, held by the bird's body; but these forces also form the guidelines for free-moving beings: insects. When you see the insects buzzing around and grasp them imaginatively, you have an image of the realm in which your I lives. Just imagine insects buzzing around you: beetles, flies, beautiful butterflies, ugly horseflies and bumblebees and all sorts; imagine all of them floating around you in the most diverse guidelines: that is the outwardly visible image of what your ego actually lives in. And it is more than a mere image when one says: ugly thoughts live there, like bumblebees, like horseflies; beautiful thoughts like butterflies; some people's thoughts bite like evil flies, and so on. Only one is spiritual and the other physical. Man's I lives entirely in the environment.

This has an extraordinarily strong significance, and much of the real knowledge of the world depends on correctly assessing what one sees, on not just raving and rambling in general about a spirit, but also being able to see in the image outside what one experiences in an abstract, spiritual form within one's own self for one's own sake. For everything that exists spiritually also exists in the world in the form of images. What exists only in spirit exists somewhere in the image. One must only know how to properly assess the image. And when the Ahrimanic enters our ego, in that the ego finds itself in the butterflies and the feathers of the birds out there, that is, in the formative forces out there, then our ego in turn has the ability to form all kinds of forms from within. We construct the circle, we construct the egg shape, the triangle; we also build a world out of the inner being. And if we search for it, we will find: these are precisely the forces that are thrown out of the luciferic principle.

I said the other day: Mathematicians, when they study space, should consider the relationship of spatial dimensions to a hen's egg; something very interesting would come out of it.

This is the contrast: we live with the I both in the forms that we can construct into the world in this way and in that which is constructed out of the world.

Yes, anyone who understands the various wonderful shades of the bird world also understands something of the nature of the human soul in its relationship to the world. For what the bird turns outward in its plumage, what it lets us see, that shimmers through our ego in the flickering, shimmering, glittering perception from the outside in.

So we must try to grasp the world with the help of images. Our abstract science today grasps very little of the real world.

It is indeed the case that much of the legitimacy, the secrets of the world's existence, has been obscured in the consciousness of humanity by the misunderstandings that I discussed yesterday and the day before yesterday in relation to the conception of the polar opposites of Ormuzd and Ahriman. Above all, it is only through this that modern materialism has become possible, which fills humanity with the awareness that there are contradictions all around us that are being investigated by today's conventional science and from which the universe will gradually be able to be understood. A simple consideration can teach that in this way an understanding of the universe can never be possible. For just think back to some things that I explained here a few weeks ago and put them in the right perspective for yourself. Remember how those people who are considered to be natural scientists today actually only refer to the human being insofar as the human being is a corpse after his death. That which of the remaining natural laws, of the remaining natural processes, permeates the human being after he has become a corpse, can initially be explained according to the usual natural laws. But what lives in man between birth and death already resists these natural laws. And if we were to judge not according to prejudice but according to reality, we would have to say: Between birth and death, and actually from the time of his first embryonic development, man fights against that which is governed by natural laws as we understand them in our science today.

Take the surrounding nature and everything that physics, chemistry, physiology, biology and so on say about this nature today, visualize all that is said about nature and then think of man as he lives between birth and death, then you will say to yourself: This whole life is a struggle against the realm that is ruled by these natural laws. It is only because the human organization, as it were, wants to know nothing about these natural laws, fights them, that man is human between birth and death.

From this, however, you can already see that if human becoming is to be placed in the universe, in the cosmos, it is necessary to assume different laws, a different kind of becoming for the universe. Thus, with our present laws of nature, we present a world in which man, and even plants and animals, are not included. But today we want to consider only the human being in relation to the rest of nature. Man is not included in the nature that today's science dominates. Indeed, with every breath, man rebels against this nature, of which this science speaks.

Nevertheless, we can speak of the Cosmos, of the Universe, because man also comes forth from the bosom of this Cosmos, just as he stands before us as a physical human being. But then we must think of this cosmos as being of a different nature from what we have in mind when we speak in terms of today's science. We will be able to form a concept of what is actually meant by the above if we bring to mind the following fact, established by spiritual science.

Let us consider the moment when a person dies, whether young or old. The corpse remains behind. We can compare this process, and it is more than a comparison, with the sloughing of a snake or the shedding of the shell of a young bird. The corpse is shed, and what is shed is taken up by the laws of nature, which we have in mind with today's science, just as, for example, the snake skin is taken up by the outer laws of nature when it is shed and no longer follows the snake's laws of growth. That which becomes a corpse is taken up by the laws of the earth. But between birth and death, one has the human form, the human shape. This dissolves, it ceases to exist. In a sense, the corpse still has this shape, but it only has it in imitation, so to speak. It still imitates this shape. The shape of the corpse is no longer the same as the one we have during our life between birth and death. For it is characteristic of this shape that the person feels it, that the person can move with it; this shape has a certain sum of strength that unfolds when the person moves. All that is gone when only the corpse is still present. That which actually gives the corpse its shape has gone from the corpse, but that already disappears when the person has just died. The person does not take that with them. They take their etheric body with them for some time – we will ignore that for the time being – but in any case, they do not take with them what their physical form, their physical shape is. In a sense, he loses this physical form. To put it more precisely, if one were to follow the movements and activities of a person after he has left his body and passed through the gate of death, one would find different movements and impulses than those of the physical form.

So what is actually there in the physical form ceases to be visible to the outer eye when the person has passed through the gate of death. The corpse has only had this form, and it still retains it. It loses it little by little, it is no longer its own. Just as if you – if I may use a rough comparison – have a pot shape and put it over the dough of the cake: the cake then also has the shape, but it is not part of the pot shape, and you cannot say that the cake you then have has this shape from its own material; no, it has received it from the pot that was put over it. And just as the cake retains the shape of the pan when you remove the pan, so the corpse retains the shape of the human being when that shape is removed. But this form itself, which is actually the form with which we walk around, ceases when the human being passes through the gate of death. However, the fact that we have this form, that this form can develop out of the laws of the world, just as a crystal develops out of the laws of the world, is inherent in the laws of the world. So we may ask ourselves: What becomes of this form? And here spiritual scientific research gives us the answer: That which is spirit continues to nourish and sustain itself from the Hierarchy, which we call the Archai, the Primordial Foundations. So we can say: Something passes from the human form into the realm of the Archai.

It is indeed the case that the physical form we receive at birth and discard at death comes from the realm of the archai, the primal depths, the primal forces, that we actually have our physical form because we are enveloped by a spirit from the realm of the archai. We are immersed in a spirit that came from the realm of the archai, which in turn withdraws what it has lent us during our life.

You see, it is something else that makes you realize how you actually belong to the whole cosmos. It is already the case that, so to speak, the archai extend their feeler horns. If that is one of the archai, it extends its structure: this forms the human form, and only then is the human being inside. You can only imagine your existence within the cosmos correctly if you imagine yourself, so to speak, clothed in an outgrowth of the archai. If you now imagine that man, like me, has also dealt with this in these days - in the Lemurian period, as a being such as the earth man is, only emerging and only gradually taking on this form, then you get in what can be provided as a description, as I have given it in “Occult Science in Outline” of the transformation of the human form — just recall how I described it in the account of the Atlantean world — you get the description of what the archai actually do. You get a description of how the archai work from their realm down into the earthly realm, how they metamorphose the human form. This metamorphosis of the human form from the Lemurian period to the time when the human form will disappear from the earth is something that is constituted and shaped from the realm of the archai. And as the archai work on the human being in this way, they simultaneously bring forth that which is truly the spirit of the age. For this spirit of the age is intimately connected with the shaping of human beings, in that, as it were, their skin is given a certain form. The spirit of the age essentially resides in the very outermost sphere of human perception. And if one understands the working of these archai, then one also understands how not only human forms change, but also how the spirits of the age change in the course of earthly existence.

Now you know that in the order of the hierarchies behind the archai lie the spirits of form, the exusiai (see list on page 236). If you look up from the earthly existence of what constitutes the human being to its form, to what is inherent in the entire planet from its beginning to its end, then you will see something more comprehensive in terms of external cosmic law than that which already contains the human form. For, do we not have, when we describe the evolution of the earth, first an echo of the old Saturn time, we call this the polaric epoch; we have an echo of the old sun time, the hyperborean epoch, an echo of the old moon time, the lemurian epoch. Then comes the actual Earth time, the first Earth time, the Atlantean epoch, and now we live in the post-Atlantean epoch. Man has only just developed in his form. The Earth must have more comprehensive laws than those that express themselves in the part of the Earth's development in which man in his present form, or rather in the metamorphoses of his present form, is possible. We must look back to the first beginning of the Earth, when man had not yet attained his form, when he was still present as a spiritual-ethereal being, and we must look forward to that which will also yet happen on Earth, when, after a series of millennia, human beings will have disappeared from the Earth as physical beings. Then the physical earth will continue to exist for a time, yes, it will even be inhabited by people, but no longer in visible human forms, but as etheric beings.

If we take this whole shaping of the earth, including the human being, but going beyond the human being: if we embrace the laws, of which our present natural laws are really only the very smallest part, with the spiritual view, then we have in them that which belongs to the realm of the Exusiai. From the realm of the Exusiai the earthly has been formed in the same way as the human being has been formed from the realm of the elemental forces, the human being together with all that must be in the earth so that the human being can come into being at all. So that we can say: the earthly form passes, when it once dissolves, into the realm of the Exusiai.

If we now consider the second link in the human being, the human etheric body, it is also the case that we may not address it as our complete property at all, but just as the physical form actually belongs to the realm of the Archai and we are clothed in an outgrowth of the realm of the archai, so we are clothed in relation to our etheric body in an outgrowth of the realm of the archangels, the archangeloi. So that we can say: When we go through the gate of death, we still retain this etheric body for a short time. We know that it then dissolves, but its dissolution does not mean that it disappears into nothingness, but rather that it returns to the realm of the archangeloi. They, in turn, lay claim to it; they lower, as it were, a part of their being to the earthly human realm and thereby constitute the human etheric body for the duration of its life. We can therefore say: something passes from the human etheric body into the realm of the archangeloi.

And with regard to the astral body, it is certainly the case that there is a similar relationship to the realm of the Angeloi, the angels, as there is to the realm of the Archai with regard to the physical form and to the realm of the Archangeloi with regard to the etheric body. We do not have our astral body entirely of our own either. It is an evagination of the angelic beings. So that we can say: From the human astral body, something passes over into the realm of the Angeloi at death. We also have our astral body like a garment of our being from the realm of the Angeloi. So you see how, by having a physical human form, an etheric body, and an astral body, we are actually embedded in the realms of the next higher hierarchies. And by participating in the laws of the earth, by walking around on earth as human beings, by developing a will, by developing actions on earth, in short, by participating in the laws of the earth, we also participate in the realm of the exusiai, the spirits of form, the elohim.

But here a significant moment occurs. When you look at your physical form in the state in which you are asleep: when your body is in bed, it has its form; you will find this form again in the morning. This form is certainly not dissolved at all, and so one cannot say that the physical body is a corpse, that it is merely a cast like a pot, but the form is really there. So that the archai, by participating in this form, are constantly connected with what is present on earth as a physical being. Likewise, the archangeloi are connected with the human etheric body. But the situation is different with regard to the human astral body. This human astral body is by no means connected with the physical human form from the moment of falling asleep to the moment of waking up; this astral body is, so to speak, in a completely different environment from falling asleep to waking up than from waking up to falling asleep. And the point is that while the archaic principle is inevitably connected with the physical form from birth to death, and the archangelic principle with the etheric being, it is the case with the angelic principle, with the angel principle, that it must, so to speak, accompany the human being from one state to another and back again. This principle of the angeloi, this essentiality of the angeloi, must, as it were, accompany the path into the state of sleep and back again.

You see, a new element arises when we speak of the angelos. And in fact, it depends on the person themselves – on their attitude, on their inclination of their entire emotional world to the spiritual world – whether the angel accompanies them when they leave their physical body and etheric body to enter the state of sleep. It goes with children, but with a person who has reached a certain maturity, it actually depends on the person's disposition, on whether the person has an inner affinity with the angel in his soul. And if this affinity is not present, if the person believes only in the material, if the person harbors only thoughts of the material, the angel does not go with him.

Because if you imagine the fully developed human being (see illustration on page 234), the earth as the result of the exusiai (outer red), the human physical body as the result of the archai (inner red), the human etheric body as the result of the archangeloi (yellow), the human astral body as a result of the work of the angeloi (blue), if you can imagine all this, you can say: as long as the human being is awake, the angel is in the bosom of the archangels, the archai, the exusiai, in short, the higher spiritual beings. When a person leaves their physical body and etheric body, and if they leave with a materialistic attitude, then the angel would indeed deny its own realm, its affiliation with the archangels, the archai, the exusiai, if it were to go with them. You see, here we enter a realm in which human thinking is decisive for an important event, for an important fact within human life, for the fact of whether or not a person is present during the angel's visit in his sleep.

Today, we cannot say: Well, if angels exist, we do not need to believe in them when we are awake, because when we are asleep, they will take care of us. No, they do not go with us when they are denied during the day! This is something that leads very deeply into the secrets of human existence and at the same time shows you how a person's disposition is just as much a part of the whole cosmic order of things as, let us say, a person's blood circulation is a part of what external natural science overlooks or actually does not overlook.

Man himself, with his ego and the prospect of becoming an independent being, is then included in the whole. But man only acquired this sense of self in the course of his earthly existence. And he came to it slowly. And if we go back to ancient times, when there was the so-called instinctive clairvoyance of mankind, then people did not yet have this sense of self at all. When these ancient inhabitants of the earth had their special insights, these instinctive insights, then these were actually not their own insights, because this I was not yet awakened at all. It surrendered to what the angel thought, to what the archangel felt, to what the arche wanted. It lived in the bosom of these entities. Today we look back on the wonderful ancient wisdom. But it is not human wisdom at all, basically, but a wisdom that came to Earth through the Archai, Archangeloi, Angeloi, who clothed human beings and entered human souls through this ancient wisdom, which much higher beings actually possessed and appropriated before the Earth became Earth. And man must acquire his own wisdom with the help of his angel, to whom he should be connected in mind. We are now approaching this time. And now, in this period that has now begun, when man has awakened the ego more and more, man was, if he did not pull himself together through his own resolve, so to speak abandoned by what the angel, the archangel, thought in him.

But because man was abandoned by these angels, he only then really came into contact with earthly existence. And this coming into contact with earthly existence is what, on the one hand, makes man free, but it is also that which causes the necessity for man to now strive up out of his strength to that which makes the higher hierarchies possible, to live with man in his consciousness. We must strive to receive thoughts again that enable the angels to live with us. These are thoughts that we can only receive through the imagination of spiritual science. And when we again orient our whole feeling towards the world through receiving such thoughts, then we can again reach up into the realm of the archangeloi. Now, when a person wakes up and returns to their physical body, they are in danger of not even realizing that they have an etheric body and that the substance of the archangeloi rules in this etheric body. They must first learn this again. And they must learn that the primal forces, the archai, rule in their physical form. He must learn to understand the moment of falling asleep and the moment of waking up.

For man came out of the realm of the higher hierarchies by advancing to his ego, by experiencing this ego. He became an independent being. But as a result, he entered into another realm, the realm of Ahriman. The I goes, and now especially in an awakened state, into the realm of Ahriman.

The earthly form enters the realm of the Exusiai
Something passes from the human form into the realm of the Archai
Something passes from the human etheric body into the realm of the Archangeloi
Something passes from the human astral body into the realm of the Angeloi
The I goes into the realm of Ahriman (Maja of Ahriman).

The danger of falling into the realm of Ahriman was most acute around 333 BC, before the Mystery of Golgotha. This is the time when people began to rely on mere intellect and mere logic. Then the Mystery of Golgotha occurred and soon took root in humanity. And from the year 333 after the Mystery of Golgotha, the time began when man must consciously strive into the realm of the higher hierarchies.

Admittedly, because of the onset of intellectualism in the 15th century, he has not yet risen again from the realm of Ahriman. But by living in the intellect, and not in reality, he actually lives in the image, he lives in maya. And that is his good fortune. He does not live in the real realm of Ahriman, but in the maya of Ahriman, in mere appearance, in the sense in which I have explained this in recent days. Through this he can in turn turn back. But he can only do so out of freedom. Because it is Maya, we live in images; the whole intellectualistic culture is only an image. Since that time, since 333 BC, it has been placed in the freedom of man to strive upwards. The Catholic Church tried hard to prevent this; it must finally be overcome in this direction. Man must strive upwards to the spiritual worlds.

333 BC
333 AD
= 666

If you add these two numbers together, you get 666. That is the “number of the beast”, where man was most exposed to really sinking into the realm of the animals. But of course he remains exposed to it, even after the year 333, when he, after the Maya of Ahriman has occurred, does not strive upwards. So it is a matter of the fact that by sailing into the realm of Ahriman as far as its Maja, we have thereby become free beings. No providence, no world wisdom could withhold from us sailing into the realm of Ahriman, otherwise it would have left us unfree.

But consider, it is one thing for man to acquire a spiritual attitude and thereby keep his astral body connected to the Angelos when he is asleep, but quite another for man to acquire no spiritual attitude, in which case the Angelos does not accompany the sleeping person, for then man brings with him from sleep that which is the inspiration of Ahriman. And it is indeed the case that in the present epoch man's whole materialistic way of thinking, his whole being filled with materialistic thoughts, is emerging with ever greater rapidity from the sleeping state of man. Man can protect himself against the fact that he again and again brings with him from his sleep that which condemns him to materialism, that is, to being connected with the earth, to becoming matter, to mortality in his soul; he can only prevent it by permeating himself with the attitude that fills him when he absorbs spiritual-scientific concepts. The state of sleep is therefore in itself something that slowly brings about materialism. But Ahriman also makes other efforts to distance man from his angel, and these conditions are becoming more and more frequent. In 1914 they were particularly bad, where people were numbed by Ahrimanic forces, where their consciousness, their straight consciousness, was taken from them, so that they came into states where the angel was not present and where therefore the Ahrimanic influences became great. That was why I told so many people in 1914: one should not believe that, for example, the correct view of the origin of the war in 1914 could ever be seen from external documents. In the past, something could be discovered from the documents in the archives. What happened this time happened more spiritually, from the spiritual world, and a large part of those people who were involved at the time did not do so with their full consciousness, but were led over by Ahrimanic forces into a paralysis of consciousness, where the realm of the Angeloi did not participate. If we want to understand our time, we must look at the influence of the spiritual world in this time. This is absolutely necessary.

But there are many other ways in which we are striving today, which come from Ahrimanic sources, to detach people, so to speak, from their connection with the realm of the Angeloi, Archangeloi, Archai, Exusiai and so on, to draw people to the Ahrimanic, to draw the whole of culture to the Ahrimanic. Just think how often one hears today – I have said this over and over again, mentioned it for many years – when someone has once again told a lie, a whopper of a lie: But he believed what he said, he said it to the best of his knowledge and belief. — Yes, that changes just as little about the objective fact as it changes something when you stick your finger in the flame to the best of your knowledge and belief; no providence will help you that you do not burn your finger when you stick it in to the best of your knowledge and belief. In the cosmic context, invoking one's best knowledge and conscience is of little help either – and it would be sad if it were otherwise. Man does not have the freedom to tell untruths out of best knowledge and conscience, but man has the obligation to take care that what he says is true. He must stand in such a relationship to the world that what he entertains as thoughts is born out of the world, and does not live in him alone, cut off from the world. If what one says to the best of one's knowledge and belief is not true, one can only realize it when one says it, in isolation from the world. For if anyone writes: There is a group in the world that has Luciferic characteristics above and Ahrimanic traits below. And when others claim, as they repeatedly do, that he has said it to the best of his knowledge and belief, this means that through such an attitude Ahriman is declared to be the ruler of the world. For the one who makes such an assertion has the obligation to convince himself whether or not what he says is true! And it is an Ahrimanic influence when even jurisprudence has been taken over by it today, when one does not strictly prosecute someone who has been accused of telling a lie, and says that he did it in good faith, in this or that good faith. This good faith is something that is precisely the Ahrimanic seduction and temptation in the worst sense. There is basically no word more tempting and seductive than this one of good faith. Because this good faith is the lazy person's friend for the most indolent of humanity, who does not feel the obligation, when asserting something, to first convince themselves whether it is true or not, whether something corresponds to the facts or not.

And anyone who seriously wants to fight against the spread of Ahriman, to fight in a concrete way, must fight against this: Something has been said in good faith - must be fought against in the first place; for by invoking good faith, man cuts himself off from the objective world context. That which lives in us in such a way that we consider ourselves authorized to assert it must also agree with the world context; it must not merely correspond to us; for whatever else is in the external world is abandoned by angels, is at the mercy of Ahriman. And all that is asserted as untruth in good faith is something that most powerfully drives people into the Ahrimanic, that draws them into the Ahrimanic with a strong rope. And the appeal to good faith in the case of untruths is today the best means of delivering world civilization into the hands of the Ahrimanic entity.

You see, if you look into what actually constitutes the world, then you have to understand something like this. But you don't just have to fantasize in generalities like the mere nebulous mysticism of angels, archangels, archai and so on, and stick to theories. You have to go to the world where it is concrete. For it is indeed the case that people lose the support of the world of the angels by lying down on the lazy bed of good faith for that which they have not tested and which they nevertheless assert.

These things show how what flows out as an attitude is connected with real life, with directly real life, and how it permeates us with spiritual scientific truths and insights. And these spiritual scientific truths and insights must send their power down into the details of life.

It is precisely this that makes many people so angry about what spiritual science is: that spiritual science is not just another theory like the other worldviews, but that it is something living, that it demands of people, above all, to overcome such laziness - laziness in both senses of the word - as this, which lies in asserting good faith when representing untruth. People do not like this, and excuses are rife everywhere: so-and-so claimed something in good faith. As a result, our science, especially historical science, is thoroughly corrupted. For you can easily imagine that such people, who go before the world with mere assertions of the caliber I have told you about, do not deserve any credence, even if they claim anything else, if they for example, somehow represent external science; then one must first check whether he has copied it from someone else who still belonged to the better generation, where one still felt inwardly obliged to what one wrote. And when you see how people today officially imitate these Frohnmeyers, then you will see how great the trust in official science and its representatives can be! But it is most important that these things are looked into. And one would very much wish for a following for spiritual science that would be truly imbued with the fact that today a serious commitment is needed to insights that will bring about a strong change in the world. Because today it does not work with small things.

This is what one would like to see: that Anthroposophy could acquire an enthusiastic following that would be passionate about realizing it. Over in the building, I mentioned that today, from the side where the lies can be counted by the dozens, a new, sensational, that is, scandalous, brochure is being announced. These people are at work. Why? Because out of their bad feelings of the soul they can feel strongly enthusiastic. They can lie enthusiastically. We must get used to being able to advocate the truth with equal enthusiasm, otherwise we will not be able to advance with civilization, my dear friends!

Anyone who looks around the world today must be clear about the fact that the path back to the hierarchies must be seriously sought, out of the Ahrimanic embrace. But this means that we have to look at the details. Time and again, when some nefarious opponent comes along and throws this or that into the world, even our own followers still come and say: We still have to examine whether this or that was done out of this or that weakness. In the Anthroposophical Society, unfortunately, there is always a yearning to accuse those who speak the truth much more than to accuse opponents who would like to trample all truth into the mud from the depths of their souls. As long as it is still the custom in the Anthroposophical Society itself to repeatedly have compassion for the lie, we will not move forward.

It must be said again and again from time to time that we must recognize the lie as a lie; for it is into the lie that Ahriman slips, and it is mostly the lie that, when it has been told, refers to good faith, to the best of one's knowledge and belief. I have given you enough examples where this good faith, this best knowledge and conscience, is invoked. But examine the facts and see this Ahrimanic influence of so-called good faith, which even plays a constant role in our jurisprudence, so that one can say that humanity has been seized by Ahriman even in jurisprudence. These are the things that must be seriously considered. If the Anthroposophical Society is to be what it wants to be, then it must be imbued with a fervent sense of truth, because today that is identical with a fervent sense of humanity's progress. Everything else is only filled with the will that leads into the forces of decline and drives ever further into them.

What I am saying today is not just another of those truisms, but something that individual people need to know, because the signs of the times demand it.

We now have to continue our study of the relationship between man and the world. And to link up what I have to say in the next few days with what I have already said recently, I should like to begin by calling attention to a theme which I treated some time ago—I mean the anthroposophical teaching about the senses.¹

I said a long time ago, and I am always repeating it, that orthodox science takes into consideration only those senses for which obvious organs exist, such as the organs of sight, of hearing, and so on. This way of looking at the matter is not satisfactory, because the province of sight, for example, is strictly delimited within the total range of our experiences, and so, equally, is, let us say, the perception of the ego of another man, or the perception of the meaning of words. To-day, when everything is in a way turned upside down, it has even become customary to say that when we are face to face with another ego, what we see first is the human form; we know that we ourselves have such a form, that in us this form harbours an ego, and so we conclude that there is also an ego in this other human form which resembles our own. In drawing such a conclusion there is not the slightest real consciousness of what lies behind the wholly direct perception of the other ego. Such an inference is meaningless. For just as we stand before the outer world and take in a certain part of it directly with our sense of sight, so, in exactly the same way, the other ego penetrates directly into the sphere of our experience. We must ascribe to ourselves an ego-sense, just as we do a sense of sight. At the same time we must be quite clear that this ego-sense is something quite other than the development of consciousness of our own ego. Becoming conscious of one's own ego is not actually a perception; it is a completely different process from the process which takes place when we perceive another ego.

In the same way, listening to words and becoming aware of a meaning in them is something quite different from hearing mere tone, mere sound. Although to begin with it is more difficult to point to an organ for the word-sense than it is to relate the ear to the sense of sound, nevertheless anyone who can really analyse the whole field of our experience becomes aware that within this field we have to make a distinction between the sense that has to do with musical and vocal sound and the sense for words.

Further, it is again something quite different to perceive the thought of another within his words, within the structure and relationship of his words; and here again we have to distinguish between the perception of his thought and our own thought. It is only because of the superficial way in which soul-phenomena are studied to-day that no distinction is made between the thought which we unfold as the inner activity of our own soul-life, and the activity which we direct outwards in perceiving another person's thought. Of course, when we have perceived the thought of another, we ourselves must think in order to understand his thought, in order to bring it into connection with other thoughts which we ourselves have fostered. But our own thinking is something quite other than the perception of the thought of another person.

When we analyse the whole range of our experience into provinces which are really quite distinct from one another and yet have a certain relationship, so that we can call them all senses, we get the twelve senses of man which I have often enumerated. The physiological or psychological treatment of the senses is one of the weakest chapters in modern science, for it really only generalises about them.

Within the range of the senses, the sense of hearing, for example, is of course radically different from the sense of sight or the sense of taste. And having come to a clear conception of the sense of hearing or of the sense of sight, we then have to recognise a word-sense, a sense of thought and an ego-sense. Most of the concepts current to-day in scientific treatises on the senses are actually taken from the sense of touch. And our philosophy has for some time been wont to base a whole theory of knowledge on this, a theory which actually consists of nothing but a transference of certain perceptions proper to the sense of touch to the whole sphere of capacity for sense-perception.

Now when we really analyse the whole range of those external experiences of which we become aware in the same way as we become aware, let us say, of the experiences of sight or touch or warmth, we get twelve senses, clearly distinguishable one from another. On earlier occasions I have enumerated them as follows: First, the ego-sense (see diagram, at end) which, as I have said, is to be distinguished from the consciousness of our own ego. By the ego-sense we mean nothing more than the capacity to perceive the ego of another man. The second sense is the sense of thought, the third the word-sense, the fourth the sense of hearing, the fifth the sense of warmth, the sixth the sense of sight, the seventh the sense of taste, the eighth the sense of smell, the ninth the sense of balance. Anyone who is able to make distinctions in the realm of the senses knows that, just as there is a clearly defined realm of sight, so there is a clearly defined realm from which we receive simply a sensation of standing as man in a certain state of balance. Without a sense to convey this state of standing balanced, or of being poised, or of dancing in balance, we should be entirely unable to develop full consciousness. Next comes the sense of movement. This is the perception of whether we are at rest or in movement. We must experience this within ourselves, just as we experience the sense of sight. The eleventh sense is the sense of life, and the twelfth the sense of touch.

The senses in this group here (see diagram) can be clearly distinguished one from another, and at the same time we can discover what they have in common when we perceive through them. It is our cognitive intercourse with the external world that this group of senses conveys to us in very varying ways. First, we have four senses which unite us with the outer world beyond any doubt. They are the ego-sense, the sense of thought, the word-sense and the sense of hearing. You will unhesitatingly recognise that when we perceive the ego of another person, we are with our entire experience in the outer world, as also when we perceive the thoughts or words of another. As regards the sense of hearing it is not quite so obvious; but that is only because people have taken an abstract view of the matter, and have diffused over the whole of the senses the colouring of a common concept, a concept of what sense-life is supposed to be, and do not consider what is specific in each individual sense. Of course, one cannot apply external experiment to one's ideas upon these matters, but one has to be capable of an inner feeling for these experiences.

Customary thinking overlooks the fact that hearing, since its physical medium is the air in movement, takes us straight into the outer world. And you have only to consider how very external our sense of hearing actually is, compared with the whole of our organic experience, to come to the conclusion that a distinction must be made between the sense of hearing and the sense of sight. In the case of the sense of sight we realise at once, simply by observing its organ, the eye, how what is conveyed by this sense is to a great extent an inner process; it is at least relatively an inner process. When we sleep we close our eyes; we do not shut our ears. Such seemingly simple, trivial facts point to something of deep significance for the whole of human life. And though when we go to sleep we have to shut off our inner senses, because during sleep we must not perceive through sight, yet we are not obliged to close our ears, because the ear lives in the outer world in a totally different way from the eye. The eye is much more a component of our inner life; the sense of sight is directed much more inwards than is the sense of hearing—I am not talking about the apprehension of what is heard; that is something quite different. The apprehension which lies behind the experience of music is something other than the actual process of hearing.

Now these senses, which in essentials form a link between the outer and inner, are specifically outer senses (see diagram). The next four senses, the senses of warmth, sight, taste and smell, are so to say on the border between outer and inner; they are both outer and inner experiences. Just try to think of all the experiences that are conveyed to you by any one of these senses, and you will see how, whilst in them all there is an experience lived in common with the outer world, there is at the same time an experience within yourself. If you drink an acid, and thus call into play your sense of taste, you have undoubtedly an inner experience with the acid, but you have also, on the other hand, an experience that is directed outwards, that can be compared with the experience of another man's ego or of the word. But it would be very bad if in the same way a subjective, inner experience were to be involved in listening to words. Just think, you make a wry face when you drink vinegar; that shows quite clearly that along with the outer experience you have an inner one; the outer and inner experiences merge into one another. If the same thing were to happen in the case of words, if, for example, someone were to make a speech, and you had to experience it inwardly in the way you do when you drink vinegar or wine or something of that sort, then you would certainly never be objectively clear about the man's words, about what he says to you. Just as in drinking vinegar you have an unpleasant experience and in drinking wine a pleasant one, so in the same way you would colour an external experience. You must not colour the external experience when you perceive the words of another. If you see things in the right light, that is just where morality comes in. For there are men—this is especially true as regards the ego-sense, but it also applies to the sense of thought—who are so firmly fixed in their middle senses, in the senses of warmth, sight, taste and smell, that they judge others, or the thoughts of others, in accordance with these senses. Then they do not hear the thoughts of the other men at all, but perceive them in the same way that they perceive wine or vinegar or any other food or drink.

Here we see how something of a moral nature is the outcome of a quite amoral manner of observation. Let us take a man in whom the sense of hearing, and even more the word-sense, the sense of thought and the ego-sense, are poorly developed. Such a man lives as it were without head; he uses his head-senses in the same way as he uses those of a more animal tendency. The animal is unable to perceive objectively in the way that, through the senses of warmth, sight, taste and smell, the man can perceive objective-subjectively. The animal smells; as you may well imagine, it can only in the very slightest degree make objective what it encounters in the sense of smell ... the experience is in a high degree a subjective one. Now all men, of course, have in addition the sense of hearing, the word-sense, the thought-sense and the ego-sense; but those whose whole organisation tends more towards the senses of warmth and sight, still more towards those of taste or even of smell, change everything around them according to their subjective experiences of taste and smell. Such things are to be seen every day. If you want an example, you can see it in the latest pamphlet by X. He is not in the least able to grasp the words or thoughts of another. He seizes hold of everything as if he were drinking wine or vinegar or eating some kind of food. Everything becomes subjective experience. To reduce the higher senses to the character of the lower ones is immoral. It is quite possible to bring the moral into connection with our whole world-conception, whereas at the present time the fact that men do not know how to build a bridge between what they call natural law and what they call morality, acts as a destructive influence undermining our entire civilisation.

When we come to the next four senses, to the sense of balance, the sense of movement, the sense of life and the sense of touch, we come to the specifically inner senses. For, you see, what the sense of balance conveys to us is our own state of balance; what the sense of movement conveys to us is the state of movement in which we ourselves are. Our sense of life is that general perception of how our organs are functioning, of whether they are promoting life or obstructing it. In the case of the sense of touch, it is possible to be deceived; nevertheless, when you touch something, the experience you have is an inner experience. You do not feel this chalk; roughly speaking, what you feel is the impact of the chalk on your skin ... the process can of course be characterised more exactly. In the sense of touch, as in the experience of no other sense in the same way, the experience lies in the reaction of your own inner being to an external process.

But now this last group of senses is modified by something else. You must recall something I said here a few weeks ago.² Let us consider the human being in relation to what he perceives through these last four senses. Although we perceive our own movement, our own balance, in a decidedly subjective manner, this movement and this balance are nevertheless quite objective processes, for physically speaking it is a matter of indifference whether it is a block of wood that is moved, or a man; whether it is a block of wood in balance or a man. In the external physical world a man in movement is exactly the same thing to observe as a block of wood; and similarly with regard to balance. And if you take the sense of life—the same thing applies. Our sense of life conveys to us processes that are quite objective. Imagine a process in a retort: it takes its course according to certain laws; it can be described quite objectively. What the sense of life perceives is such a process, a process which takes place inwardly. If this process is in order, as a purely objective process, this is conveyed to you by the sense of life; if it is not in order, the sense of life conveys this to you also. Even though the process is confined within your skin, the sense of life transmits it to you. To sum up, an objective process is something which has absolutely no specific connection with the content of your soul-life. And the same thing applies to your sense of touch. When we touch something, there is always a change in our whole organic structure. Our reaction is an organic change within us. Thus we have actually something objective in what is brought about through these four senses, something that so places us as human beings in the world that we are like objective beings who can also be seen in the external sense-world.

Thus we may say that these are pronounced inner senses; but what we perceive through them in ourselves is exactly the same as what we perceive in the world outside us. In short, whether we set in motion a log of wood, or whether the human being is in external motion, it makes no difference to the physical course of the process. The sense of movement is only there in order that what is taking place in the outer world may also come to our subjective consciousness.

Thus you see that the truly subjective senses are the senses which are specifically external; it is they which have the task of assimilating into our humanity what is perceived externally through them. The middle group of senses shows an interplay between the outer and the inner world. And through the last group a specific experience of what we are as part of the world-not-ourselves is conveyed to us.

We could carry this study much further; we should then discover many of the distinctive qualities of this sense or that. We only have to become accustomed to the idea that the treatment of the senses must not be limited to describing them according to their more obvious organs, but that we must analyse them according to their field of experience. It is by no means correct, for instance, that no specific organ exists for the word-sense; only its field has not been discovered by the materialistic physiology of to-day. Or take the sense of thought—that too is there, but has not been explored as has, let us say, the sense of sight.

When we consider man in this way, it cannot fail to be borne in upon us that what we usually call soul-life is bound up with what we may call the higher senses. If we want to encompass the content of what we call soul-life, we can scarcely go further than from the ego-sense to the sense of sight. If you think of all that you have through the ego-sense, the sense of thought, the word-sense, the sense of hearing, the sense of warmth and the sense of sight, you have practically the whole range of what we call soul-life. Something of the characteristics of the specifically outer senses still enters a little into the sense of warmth, upon which our soul-life is much more dependent than we usually think. And of course the sense of sight has a very wide significance for our whole soul-life. But with the senses of taste and smell we are already entering into the animal realm, and with the senses of balance, movement and life and so on, we plunge completely into our bodily nature. These senses we perceive altogether inwardly.

If we want to show this diagrammatically, we should have to show it like this (see diagram). We draw a circle around the upper region; and there in this upper sphere lies our true inner life. Without these external senses, this inner life could not exist. What sort of men should we be if we had no other egos near us, if we were never to perceive words and thoughts? Just imagine! On the other hand, the senses from taste downwards (see diagram B) perceive in an inward direction, transmit primarily inward processes, but processes which become progressively more obscure. Of course, a man must have a clear perception of his own balance otherwise he would become giddy and collapse. To fall into a faint is the same thing for the sense of balance as blindness is for the eyes. But now what these other senses mediate becomes vague and confused. The sense of taste still develops to some extent on the surface. There we do have a clear consciousness of it. But although our whole body tastes (with the exception of the limb-system, but actually even that too), very few men are able to detect the taste of foods in the stomach, because civilisation, or culture, or refinement of taste has not developed so far in that direction. Very few men indeed can still detect the taste of the various foodstuffs in their stomachs. You do still taste them in some of the other organs, but once the foodstuffs are in the stomach, then for most men it is all one what they are—although unconsciously the sense of taste does very clearly continue throughout the whole digestive tract. The entire man tastes what he eats, but the sensation very quickly dies down when what has been eaten has been given over to the body.

The entire man develops throughout his organism the sense of smell, the passive relationship to aromatic bodies. This sense again is only concentrated at the very surface, whereas actually the whole man is taken hold of by the scent of a flower or by any other aromatic substance. When we know that the senses of taste and smell permeate the entire man, we know too what is involved in the experience of tasting or smelling, how the experience is continued further inwards; and when one knows what it is to taste, for instance, one abandons altogether the materialistic conception. And if one is clear that this process of tasting goes through the entire organism, one is no longer inclined to describe the further process of digestion purely from the chemical point of view, as is done by the materialistic science of to-day.

On the other hand, it cannot be gainsaid that there is an immense difference between what I have shown in the diagram as yellow and what I have shown as red (It has not been practicable to produce the diagram in colour.) There is an immense difference between the content of what we have in our soul-life through the ego-sense, word-sense and so on, and the experiences we have through taste, smell, movement, life-sense and so on. And you will understand this difference best if you make clear to yourselves how you receive what you experience in yourselves when you listen, let us say, to the words of another man, or to a musical sound. What you then experience in yourselves is of no significance for the outer process. What difference does it make, to the bell that you are listening to it? The only connection between your inner experience and the process that takes place in the bell is that you are listening to it.

You cannot say the same thing when you consider the objective process in tasting or smelling, or even in touching. There you have to do with a world-process. You cannot separate what goes on in your organism from what takes place in your soul. You cannot say in this case, as in the case of the ringing bell, “What difference does it make to the bell whether I listen to it?” You cannot say, “When I drink vinegar, what has the process which takes place on my tongue to do with what I experience?” That you cannot say. There, an inner connection does obtain; there the objective and the subjective processes are one.

The sins committed by modern physiology in this sphere are well-nigh incredible, when one considers that such a process as tasting is placed in a similar relationship to the soul as that of seeing or hearing. And there are philosophical treatises which speak in a purely general way of sensible qualities and their relation to the soul. Locke, and even Kant, speak generally of a relationship of the outer sense-world to human subjectivity, whereas for all that is shown in our diagram from the sense of sight upwards, we have to do with something quite different from all that the diagram shows from the sense of sight downwards. It is impossible to apply one single doctrine to both these spheres. And it is because men have done so that, from the time of Hume or Locke or even earlier, this great confusion has arisen in the theory of knowledge which has rendered modern conceptions barren right into the sphere of physiology. For one cannot approach the real nature of processes if one thus pursues preconceived ideas without an unprejudiced observation of things.

When we picture the human being in this way, we have to understand that in the one direction we have obviously a life directed inwards, a sphere in which we live for ourselves, related to the outer world merely in perceiving it; in the other direction, of course, we also perceive—but we enter into the world by what we perceive. In short, we may say: What takes place on my tongue when I taste is an entirely objective process in me; when this process goes on in me, it is a world-process that is taking place. But I cannot say that what arises in me as a picture through the sense of sight is a world-process. Were it not to happen, the whole world would remain as it is. The difference between the upper and the lower man must always be borne in mind. Unless we bear this difference in mind we cannot get any further in certain directions.

Now let us consider mathematical truths, the truths of geometry. A superficial observer would say: Oh yes, of course man gets his mathematics out of his head, or from somewhere or other (ideas on the subject are not very precise). But it is not so. Mathematics derives from an altogether different sphere. And if you study the human being, you will get to know the sphere from which mathematics comes. It is from the sense of movement and the sense of balance. It is from such depths that mathematical thought comes, depths to which we no longer penetrate with our ordinary soul-life. What enables us to develop mathematics lives at a deeper level than our ordinary soul-life. And thus we see that mathematics is really rooted in that part of us which is at the same time cosmic. In fact, we are only really subjective in what lies here (see diagram) from the sense of sight upwards. In respect of what lies down there we are like logs, as much so as the rest of the outer world. Hence we can never say that geometry, for instance, has anything of a subjective nature in it, for it originates from that in us wherein we ourselves are objective. It is concerned with the very same space which we measure when we walk, and which our movements communicate to us—the very same space which, when we have elicited it from ourselves in pictorial form, we then proceed to apply to what we see. Nor can there be any question of describing space as in any way subjective, for it does not come from the sphere whence the subjective arises.

Such a way of looking at things as I am now putting before you is poles apart from Kantianism, because Kantianism does not recognise the radical distinction between these two spheres of human life. Followers of Kant do not know that space cannot be subjective, because it arises from that sphere in man which is in itself objective, from that sphere to which we relate ourselves as objects. We are connected with this sphere in a different way from the way in which we are related to the world outside us; but it is nevertheless genuine outer world, especially each night, for while we are asleep we withdraw from it with our subjectivity, our ego and our astral body.

It is essential to understand that to assemble an immense number of external facts for what purports to be science and is intended to promote culture is useless if its thought is full of confused ideas, if this science lacks clear concepts about the most important things. And if the forces of decadence are to be checked and the forces of renewal, of progress, furthered, the essential task which confronts us is to understand the absolute necessity of reaching clear ideas, ideas that are not hazy but clear-cut. We must be absolutely clear that it is useless to proceed from concepts and definitions, but that what is needed is the unprejudiced observation of the field in which the facts lie.

For example, no one is entitled to delimit the sphere of sight as a sense-sphere, if he does not at the same time distinguish the sphere of word-perception as a similar sphere. Only try to organise the sphere of total experience as I have often done, and you will see that it is not permissible to say: We have eyes, therefore we have a sense of sight and we are studying it. But you will have to say: Of course there must be a reason for the fact that sight has a physical-sensible organ of so specific a nature, but this does not justify us in restricting the range of the senses to those which have clearly perceptible physical organs. If we do that it will be a very long time before we shall reach any higher conception; we shall meet only what happens in everyday life. The important thing is really to distinguish between what is subjective in man, what is his inner soul-life, and the sphere wherein he is actually asleep. There, man is a cosmic being in relation to all that is conveyed by his senses. In that sphere he is a cosmic being. In your ordinary soul-life you know nothing of what happens when you move your arm—not at least without a faculty of higher vision. That movement is a will-activity. It is a process which lies as much outside you as any other external process, notwithstanding the fact that it is so intimately connected with you. On the other hand, there can be no idea, no mental image, in which we are not ourselves present with our consciousness. Thus when you distinguish these three spheres, you find something else as well. In all that your ego-sense, your thought-sense, your word-sense, your sense of hearing convey to you, thereby constituting your soul-life, you receive what is predominantly associated with the idea.

In the same way, everything connected with the senses of warmth, sight, taste and smell has to do with feeling. That is not quite obvious with regard to one of these senses, the sense of sight. It is quite obvious with regard to taste, smell and warmth, but if you look into the matter closely you will find that it is also true of sight.

In contrast with this, all that has to do with the senses of balance, movement, life, and even with the sense of touch (although that is not so easy to see, because the sense of touch retires within us) is connected with the will. In human life, everything is connected, and yet everything is metamorphosed. I have tried to-day to summarise for you what I have treated at length on various occasions. And tomorrow and the day after we will carry our study to a conclusion.

• 1. Die Zwolf Sinne des Menschen in ihrer Beziehung zu Imagination, Inspiration und Intuition, 8th Aug., 1920. (Translation not yet published.)
• 2. Lecture V of Irdische und kosmische Gesetzmassigkeiten, 3rd July, 1921. (Translation not yet published.)

Yesterday I tried to draw the line between those sensory experiences which belong to the upper man, constituting man's essential soul life, and those which are more connected with the lower man, the content of which stands in much the same relationship to human consciousness as external experiences proper, only that these experiences take place within man. We have seen that the ego-sense, the sense of thought, the word-sense, the sense of hearing, the sense of warmth and the sense of sight are all experiences of the former kind, and that we then plunge into two regions in which man's inner experiences resemble external experiences so far as his consciousness is concerned; these two regions are, first, the senses of taste and smell, and then the other four, the inner senses proper.

You see at once how difficult it is to make do with the rough and ready terms which are suitable enough for descriptions of the external world, but quite inadequate directly one comes to consider the being of man and the structure of the world within him.

But at all events, if we are quite clear about this distinction between the upper and the lower man, both of which in a certain way are representative of the world-process, we shall also be well aware that there is a cleavage in our experience, that our relationship to the one pole of our experience is utterly different from our relationship to the other. Unless we grasp this division of the human being thoroughly we shall never reach full clarity about the most important problem of the present and of the near future, the problem of the relationship of the moral world, within which we live with our higher nature, within which we have responsibility, to that other world with which we are also connected, the world of natural necessity.

We know that in recent centuries, since the middle of the fifteenth century, human progress has consisted predominantly in the development of ideas about natural necessity. Humanity has paid less attention in recent centuries to the other pole of human experience. Anyone who is at all able to read the signs of the times, anyone who knows how to recognise the task of the times, is quite clear that there is a deep cleft between what is called moral necessity and what is called natural necessity.

This cleavage has arisen primarily because a great many of those who believe themselves to represent the spiritual life of to-day distinguish between a certain sphere of experience that can be grasped by science, by knowledge, and another sphere that is said to be grasped only by faith. And you know that in certain quarters only what can be brought under strict natural law is acknowledged to be really scientific; and another kind of certitude is postulated for all that falls within the sphere of the moral life, a certitude which only claims to be the certitude of faith. There are circumstantial theories as to the necessary distinction that has to be made between real scientific certainty and the certitude of belief.

All these distinctions, these theories, have come about because to-day we have very little historical consciousness; we pay very little attention to the conditions under which our present soul-content came into being. I have often given the classic example of this. I have often told you that to-day, when philosophers speak of the distinction between body and soul, they think they are using a concept which derives from original observation, whereas what they think about body and soul is merely the result of the decision of the eighth Æcumenical Council of 869, which raised to the status of dogma the doctrine that man must not be regarded as consisting of body, soul and spirit but of body and soul only, although some spiritual characteristics may be ascribed to the soul.

In the centuries that followed, this dogma became more and more firmly established. The Schoolmen in particular were steeped in it. And when modern philosophy developed out of Scholasticism, people thought that now they were forming their judgments from experience. But they were only judging according to their usual habits, through the centuries-old custom of assuming man to consist of body and soul.

This is the classic example of many situations in which present-day humanity believes that it forms an unprejudiced judgment, whereas the judgment it utters is nothing but the result of an historical event. One comes to a really sound judgment—and then not without difficulty—only by the survey of ever wider and wider historical epochs.

For example, the man who knows nothing but the scientific thought of the present time quite naturally thinks it the only valid kind of thought, and is incapable of thinking that there could be any other kind of knowledge. The man who, as well as being familiar with the scientific opinion of the present time—which has hardened somewhat since the middle of the fifteenth century—also knows a little of what was accepted in the early Middle Ages, right back to the fourth century, will form his judgments about the relations of man with the world somewhat as the Neo-Scholastics do. But at most he will be able to form opinions about man's relation to intellectuality; he will not be able to form any opinion about his relation to spirituality. For he does not know that if we go back earlier than, say, Aristotle, who died in 322 B.C., we have to see ourselves in a very different spiritual configuration from the one at present prevailing, in order to get any sort of understanding as to how the men of that time thought. To try to understand Plato or Heraclitus or Thales with a constitution of soul such as we have at the present day is an utter impossibility. We do not even understand Aristotle. And anyone who is at all familiar with the discussions that have taken place in modern times about the Aristotelian philosophy knows that amidst all the waging of wordy warfare which still goes on in connection with Aristotle countless misconceptions have arisen, simply because men have not reckoned with the fact that the moment we go back to Plato, for example, who was Aristotle's teacher, we need an entirely different spiritual constitution. For if one approaches Aristotle in a forward direction, from the direction of Plato, one judges his logic differently from the way one does if one merely looks back upon it with the spiritual make-up resulting from present-day culture.

Even when Aristotle was compiling his logic, which is certainly pretty abstract, very much intellectualised, he still had at least an external knowledge, even if not personal vision—there was certainly very little of that left in Aristotle—but he was still clearly aware that at one time it had been possible to see into the spiritual world, even if only in an instinctive way. And for him the rules of logic were the last utterance from above, from the spiritual world, if I may put it so. For Aristotle, accordingly, what he established as the laws or principles of logic were, so to say, shadows which had been cast down from the spiritual world—the world that was still a world of experience, a fact of consciousness, for Plato.

The enormous differences that obtain between different epochs of humanity is a thing that is usually overlooked. Let us take the years from the death of Aristotle, 322 B.C., to the Council of Nicea, A.D. 325; there you have a period which it is very difficult to get to know, because the Church took care to destroy all documents that might have given a more or less accurate picture of the state of soul of those three pre-Christian and three post-Christian centuries.

You have only to recall how often reference is made to-day to the Gnosis. But how do people know about the Gnosis? They know it through the writings of its opponents. Except for a very few texts, and those very far from representative ones, the whole of the Gnostic literature has been wiped out, and all we have are quotations from it in the works of its opponents, in works which are intended to refute it. We know about as much of the Gnosis as we should know of Anthroposophy if we were to make its acquaintance through the writings of Pius X. Nevertheless, out of this superficial knowledge people do hold forth about the Gnosis.

But the Gnosis was an essential element in the spiritual life of the centuries that I have just mentioned, To-day, of course, we cannot go back to it. But at that particular period it was an extremely important element in European development.

How can one really describe it? You see, one could not have spoken of it five hundred years earlier in the way it was spoken of in the fourth century A.D. For at that time there was still an instinctive clairvoyance, an ancient clairvoyance, there was knowledge of a super-sensible world, and one had to speak in a descriptive way out of this knowledge. The real spiritual world was always present in consciousness and was always behind such portrayals of it. Then that condition ceased.

It is a marked feature of Aristotle, for example, that this super-sensible world was for him only a tradition. He may have known something of it, but, as I have already said, in the main it was tradition for him. But the concepts which he received from the spiritual world still carried the impress of that world, an impress which was lost only in the third and fourth centuries A.D.

In Augustine we find no trace of the Gnosis; by his time it had quite disappeared. Thus we may say that the Gnosis is in its essence the abstract residuum of an earlier spiritual knowledge; it consists of naked concepts. What lived in it was a body of abstractions. We can see this already in Philo. And one can see abstractions in the ideas of the real Gnostics, too, but their teachings were abstractions of a spiritual world that had once been seen. By the fourth century A.D. things had come to the point when men no longer knew what to make of the ideas that formed the content of the Gnosis. Hence arose the dispute between Arius and Athanasius, which cannot really be reduced to a formula. The argument as to whether the Son is of the same nature and being as the Father, or of a different nature and being, is carried on in a realm in which the real content of the old ideas has been lost. The argument takes its course no longer with ideas, but merely with words.

All this formed the transition to the pure intellectualism which was to develop more and more, reaching western humanity just in the middle of the fifteenth century. By the time this intellectualism emerged, logic was something quite different from what it had been for Aristotle. For him, logic was, so to say, the residue of spiritual knowledge. He had made a compilation of what in earlier times had been experienced out of the spiritual world. By the middle of the fifteenth century the last scrap of consciousness of this spiritual world had vanished, and only the intellectual element remained; but now this intellectual element appears not as the residue of a spiritual world, but as an abstraction from the sense-world. What for Aristotle was a gift from the world above, was now taken to be an abstraction from the world below. And it was in essentials with

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If you take what I said yesterday about the ego-sense, the thought-sense, the word-sense and so on, you will come to the conclusion that in what we now experience through these senses in our ordinary human consciousness we are actually only dealing with pictures; otherwise there could not be those perpetual discussions which result inevitably from the characteristics of the present time. Indeed, a real understanding of the essential soul-life has for the time being been lost. An example of this is the way in which Brentano's attempt to write a psychology, a theory of the soul, failed ... something which he tried to do in all sincerity. Other people of course write psychologies, because they are less honest, less candid ... but he wanted in perfect candour to write a psychology that would be worth while, and he achieved nothing of any intrinsic value, because this could only have come from spiritual science, which he repudiated. Hence his psychology remained truncated, since he achieved so little of what he was really striving for. This failure of Brentano's psychology is an historic fact of profound significance. For the jugglery with all sorts of concepts and ideas that our psychological science pursues to-day was of course for Brentano something quite empty.

But now what we have here (see diagram) as the soul-life which is the outcome of the six upper senses, from the ego-sense to the sense of sight, all this was at one time filled with spiritual life. If we turn our gaze back to ancient times in Europe, back as far as Plato, all that afterwards became more and more devoid of spirituality, more and more intellectualised, was then filled with spirituality. We find there all that had been given to humanity in its evolution in a still more ancient time, in the time when the Orient had taken the lead as regards human civilisation; then men possessed a civilisation which was devoted to this soul-life, this true soul-life. So that we can say:

All these senses furnish experiences which nourish the spiritual life, when spiritual life is present in the soul. And what humanity developed in this respect was developed within the ancient eastern culture. And you understand that culture best when you understand it in the light of what I have just told you.

But all this has, so to say, receded into the background of evolution. The life of the soul then lost its spirituality, it became intellectualised, and that, as I said, began in the fourth century B.C. Aristotle's compilation of abstract logic was the first milestone on the path of this despiritualisation of human soul-life, and the development of the Gnosis brought about its complete descent.

Now we still have the other man:

And now a civilisation began that was based essentially upon the senses just enumerated. Even if you do not at first admit it, nevertheless it is so. For take the scientific spirit that emerged, the scientific spirit that tries to apply mathematics to everything. Mathematics, as I explained to you yesterday, comes from the senses of movement and of balance. Thus even the most spiritual things discovered by modern science come from the lower man. But modern scientists work above all with the sense of touch. You can make interesting studies to-day if you go into the sphere of physiology.

Of course, people talk about seeing, or about the eye, or about the sense of sight; but one who sees through these things knows that all the concepts that are used are somehow conjured from the sense of touch to the sense of sight. People work with things that are borrowed, smuggled in, from the sense of touch. People do not notice it, but in describing the sense of sight they make use of categories, of ideas, with which one grasps the sense of touch. What to-day is called sight in scientific circles is really only a somewhat complicated touching; and categories, concepts such as tasting or smelling, are sometimes brought in to help. We can see everywhere at work the way of grasping external phenomena which lies behind modern ideas. For modern anatomy and physiology have already discovered—or at any rate have a well-founded hypothesis—that modern thinking really has its roots in the sense of smell, in that thinking is bound up with the brain—thus not at all with the higher senses, but with a metamorphosis of the sense of smell. This characteristic attitude of ours in our grasp of the outer world is quite different from the relationship that Plato had. It is not a product of the higher senses, it is a product of the sense of smell, if I may put it so. I mean that to-day our perfection as man does not come from our having developed the higher senses, but from our having created for ourselves a modified, metamorphosed dog's muzzle.

This peculiar way of relating ourselves to the outer world is quite different from the way which befits a spiritual epoch. Now if we have to designate as oriental culture what was first revealed through the higher senses in ancient times, then what I have just depicted, in the midst of which we are now living, must be called the essence of western culture. This western culture is in essentials derived from the lower man.

I must again and again emphasise that there is no question of appraisal in what I am now saying; it is merely a statement of the course of history. I am certainly not trying to point out that the upper man is estimable and the lower man less estimable. The one is an absorption into the world, the other is not. And it does not help to introduce sympathy and antipathy, for then one does not reach objective knowledge. Anyone who wishes to understand what is contained in the Veda culture, the Yoga culture, must start from an understanding of these things, and must take this direction (see diagram, upper man). And whoever wishes to understand what is really to be found in its first beginnings, what has to be more and more developed for certain kinds of human relationships, what indeed in the nineteenth century has already reached a certain climax, has to know that it is particularly the lower man that is trying to emerge there, and that this emergence of the lower man is especially characteristic of the Anglo-American nature, of western culture.

A spirit specially representative of the rise of this culture is Lord Bacon of Verulam. In his Novum Organum, for instance, he makes statements—statements very easily misunderstood—that at bottom can have meaning only for superficial people. And yet what he says is extraordinarily characteristic. Bacon is in a certain respect both ill-informed and foolish, for as soon as he begins to speak of ancient cultures he talks nonsense; he knows nothing about them. That he is superficial can be demonstrated from his own writings. For instance, where he speaks about warmth—he is an empiricist—he gathers together everything that can be said about warmth, but one sees that he gets it all from notes of experiments. What he has to say about warmth, he did not find out for himself, but it has been pieced together by a clerk, a copyist, for it is a frightfully careless piece of work. Nevertheless Bacon is a milestone in modern evolution. One may dismiss his personality as of no interest, but yet through all his ineptitude and through all the rubbish that he again and again gives out, something continually gets through that is characteristic of the emergence of a culture that corresponds with what I have described here (see diagram, lower man). And humanity will not be able to emerge from the poverty of soul in which it is now living if it does not grasp that—for reasons which previous lectures will have made sufficiently clear—it was possible to live with the culture of the upper man, but it will not be possible to live with the culture of the lower man. For after all, man brings his soul with him into each new incarnation, a soul which has unconscious memories of earlier lives on earth. Man is ever and again urged towards what he has outlived. To-day he often does not know what it is that he is being driven towards. This urge consists in a vague longing; it is sometimes quite indefinable, but it is there. And it is there above all because one comes gradually to regard what belongs to this sphere (see diagram, lower man) as something objective, since it can be grasped in terms of laws. All that exists of a more traditional nature, and belongs to this sphere (see diagram, upper man) has, as regards its real nature, faded away into belief. And although people are at a loss how to attribute real existence to this moral content of the soul, and turn to faith as the only support for knowing anything about it, nevertheless they try to cling to it.

But, my dear friends, it is not possible for humanity nowadays to go on living with this cleavage in the soul. One can still argue that the evangelical antithesis, the opposition between faith and knowledge which has been elaborated particularly in the evangelical denominations, can be maintained as a theory; but it cannot be applied to life, one cannot live by it. Life itself gives the lie to such an antithesis. The way must be found to assimilate morality with that to which we ascribe real being, otherwise we shall always come to the point of saying: Natural necessity provides us with ideas about the beginning and the end of the earth; but when the end decreed by the scientists has arrived, what is to become of everything to which we ascribe human worth, of all that man attains inwardly, morally ... as to what is to become of that, how it is to be rescued from the perishing earth, all this has to be left to faith!

And it is interesting to note that it is just from this standpoint that Anthroposophy is attacked. Perhaps at this point I may be allowed to mention this attack, because it is typical; it does not emanate from one person, but from a number of people. They find that Anthroposophy claims to have a content of knowledge, and thus can be treated like scientific knowledge. Simpletons say of course that its content cannot be compared with scientific knowledge, that it is something else—well, that is self-evident, there is no need to mention it; but it can be treated in the same way as natural scientific knowledge. Many people also say that one cannot prove it. Those people have never made themselves acquainted with the nature of logical proof. But the main point is that people say that the things of which Anthroposophy treats ought not to be the objects of knowledge, for this would deprive them of their essential character. They must be objects of faith. For it is only in the fact that we know nothing of God, of eternal life, but only believe in these things, that their true value lies. And indeed such knowledge is assailed on the ground that it will undermine the religious character of these truths; for their sacredness is said to lie in the very fact that in them we believe something about which we know nothing. The very expression of our trust lies in our ignorance. I should very much like to know how men would get on with such a concept of trust in everyday life, if they had to have the same trust in those about whom they knew nothing as in those of whom they knew something ... at that rate one should no longer trust the divine spiritual powers when one gets to know them! Thus the essence of religion is supposed to consist in the fact that one does not know it, for the holiness of religious truths suffers injury when one converts those truths into knowledge.

That is what it comes to. If one pays any attention to the worthless scribbling that goes on, then every week one sees in print things that are reduced to nonsense if one analyses them into their original elementary constituents. To-day one must not ignore these things. I must again and again stress this, and I do not hesitate to repeat myself. For instance, when a respectable newspaper in Wurttemburg publishes an essay on Anthroposophy by a university lecturer who writes, “This Anthroposophy maintains that there is a spiritual world in which the spiritual beings move about like tables and chairs in physical space,” when a university don to-day is able to write such a sentence, we must leave no stone unturned to discredit him; he is impossible: nonsense in responsible quarters must not be allowed to pass. It is only when anyone is drunk that he sees tables and chairs move, and then only subjectively. And since Professor T. would neither admit that he was drunk when he wrote his authoritative article, nor that he was a spiritualist—for tables and chairs do move for spiritualists, even if not of themselves—then one is justified in saying that here we have an example of the most thoughtless nonsense. And by having written such nonsense, the Professor undermines confidence in all his knowledge.

To-day we must make it our bounden duty to treat such things with the utmost severity. And we shall become more and more entangled in the forces of decadence if we do not maintain this severity. We meet with utterly incredible things to-day, and the most incredible things get by, since we perpetually find excuse after excuse for the trickeries that are committed in so-called authoritative circles. To-day it is absolutely necessary to lay stress upon the importance of reaching clear ideas, full of content, in every sphere. And if one does this, then the doctrine of the separation between knowledge and faith cannot be maintained, for then it would be reduced to what I have just now pointed out.

But this distinction between knowledge and belief is something that has been brought about only in the course of history. It has come about partly for reasons which I have already mentioned, partly on account of something else. Above all, the following must be taken into consideration. To begin with, there is what came about in western Christianity in the first Christian centuries through the fusing of the Gnosis with the monotheistic Gospel teaching, and then there is the fusing of Christianity with the Aristotelianism that arose in the time of the Schoolmen—certainly in a highly intelligent way, but nevertheless merely as historical recollection. And this doctrine, the doctrine of the uniform origin of both body and soul through birth or conception, is a thoroughly Aristotelian doctrine. With the casting off of the old spirituality, with the emergence of pure intellectuality, Aristotle had already been divested of the notion of pre-existence, the notion of the life of the human soul before birth, before conception. This denial of the doctrine of pre-existence is not Christian; it is Aristotelian. It first became a dogmatic fetter through the introduction of Aristotelianism into Christian theology.

But at this point an important question arises—a question which can be answered to some extent from the substance of the lectures I have given here in recent weeks. If you remember much of what I have lately been saying, you will have come to the conclusion that the materialism of the nineteenth century is in a certain sense not wholly unjustified (I have repeatedly stressed this). Why! Because what confronts us in the human being, in so far as he is a physical-material being, is an image, a reproduction, of his spiritual evolution since his last death. What develops here between birth and death is not in fact the pure soul-spiritual; it is the soul-physical, a copy. Out of man's experiences between birth and death there is no possibility of acquiring a scientific conception of life after death. There is nothing which offers a possible proof of immortality, if one looks merely at the life between birth and death.

But traditional Christianity does look only at this life between birth and death, for it regards the soul as well as the body as having been created at the time of birth or conception. This viewpoint makes it impossible to acquire knowledge about life after death. Unless one accepts the existence of life before birth, knowledge of which can, as you know, be acquired, one can never obtain knowledge of life after death. Hence the cleavage between knowledge and belief as regards the question of immortality arises from the dogma which denies the life before birth. It was because men wanted to drop the knowledge of pre-natal life that it became necessary to postulate a special certitude of faith. For if, whilst denying pre-natal life, one still wishes to speak of a life after death, then one cannot speak of it as scientific knowledge.

You see how systematically ordered the dogmatic structure is. Its purpose is to spread darkness among mankind about spiritual science. How can that be done? On the one hand by attacking the doctrine of life before birth ... then there can be no knowledge about life after death, then men have to believe it on the basis of dogma. The fight for belief in dogma is waged by fighting against knowledge of life before birth.

The way dogma has developed since the fourth century A.D., and the way modern scientific notions have developed without interruption out of dogma—it is all extraordinarily systematic! For all these scientific ideas can be traced back to their origin in dogma, only they are now applied to the observation of external nature, and it can be shown how thereby the way has been paved for man's dependence upon mere belief. Because man will have some relationship to immortality, he is deprived of his knowledge—for he has been deprived of it—and then he is open to dogmatic belief. Then dogmatic belief can seek out its kingdom.

This is at the same time a social question, a question relevant to the evolution of humanity, a question that has to be clearly faced to-day. And it is the crucial test, not only of the value of modern culture, but also of the value of the modern scientific spirit, and of humanity's prospects of recovering the strength to rise, to climb up again.

This cleft in human nature of which I have been speaking also finds expression in everyday communal life. You find it in the relationship of two human capacities which even the most casual examination shows as belonging by their very nature to the life of both soul and body. You have on the one hand the faculty of memory, an important factor in soul-life, but bound up with the bodily life; and on the other hand a capacity less noticeable, because men give themselves to it more or less naively and uncritically—I mean the capacity for love. Let me say from the outset that, whether we are speaking about the being of man himself or of his relationship to the world, we must start from the reality and not from any preconceived idea. I have often made use of a somewhat trite illustration of what it means to proceed from ideas instead of from reality. Someone sees a razor and says, “That is a knife, a knife is used for cutting up food!” So he takes the razor for cutting up food, because it is a knife. Scientific conceptions about birth and death as they relate to man and animal are somewhat like this, though people are not generally aware of it, believing the subject to be a very learned one. Sometimes these ideas are even made to cover the plants. The scientists form an idea of what birth is, or what death is, just as one forms an idea of what a knife is, and then go on from that idea, which of course expresses a certain series of facts, to examine human death, animal death and even plant death, all in the same way, without taking into account that what is usually comprised in the idea of death might be something quite different in man from what it is in animals. We must take our start from the reality of the animal and the reality of man, not from some idea we have formed of the phenomenon of death.

We form our ideas about memory in somewhat the same way. It is particularly so when the concept of memory is applied indifferently to both man and animal, with the object of finding similarities between them. Our attention has been drawn, for example, to something that happened in the case of the famous Professor Otto Liebmann. An elephant, on his way to the pond to drink, is in some way offended by a passer-by, who does something to him. The elephant passes on; but when he comes back again, and finds the man still there, he spouts water over him from his trunk—because, so says the theoriser, he has obviously remarked, has stored up in his memory, the injury received.

The outer appearance of the thing is of course, seen from such a theoretical standpoint, very misleading, but not more so than the attempt to cut one's meat at table with a razor. The point is that one must always start from reality and not from ideas acquired from one series of phenomena and then transferred arbitrarily to another series. Usually people completely fail to see how widespread to-day is the error in scientific method I have just described.

The human faculty of memory must be understood entirely out of human nature itself. To do this one needs an opportunity of watching how the memory develops in the course of the development of the individual. Anyone who can make such a study will be able to note that memory expresses itself quite differently in the very little child from the way it expresses itself from the ages of six, seven or eight onwards. In later years memory assumes much more of a soul-character, whereas in the earliest years of a child's life one can clearly see to what a large extent it is bound up with organic conditions, and how it then extricates itself from those conditions. And if you look at the connection between the child's memories and his formation of concepts you will see that his formation of concepts is very dependent upon what he experiences in his environment through sense-perception, through all the twelve varieties of sense-perception that I have distinguished.

It is most fascinating, and at the same time extraordinarily important, to see how the concepts that the child forms depend entirely upon the experiences he undergoes; above all upon the behaviour of those around him. For in the years with which we are here concerned the child is an imitator, an imitator even as regards the concepts he forms. On the other hand, it will easily be seen that the faculty of memory arises more out of the child's inward development, more out of his whole bodily constitution—very little indeed out of the constitution of the senses and therefore of the human head. One can detect an inner connection with the way the child is constituted, whether the formation of his blood, the nourishment of his blood, is more or less normal, or whether it is abnormal. It will be readily remarked that children with a tendency to anæmia have difficulties in remembering; while on the other hand such children form concepts and ideas more easily.

I can only hint at these things, for in the last resort everyone, if he has been given the right lines to go upon, must seek his own confirmation of them in life itself. He will then find that it is from the head-organisation—that is, from the nerve-senses organisation—and thus from experiences arising out of perception, that the child forms concepts; but that the faculty of memory, interwoven as it were with the formation of concepts, develops out of the rest of the organism. And if one pursues this study further, particularly if one tries to discover what lies behind the very individual manner of memory-formation, how it differs in children who tend to a short, squat figure and in those who tend to shoot up, one will find a connection clearly indicated between the phenomena of growth as a whole and formation of the power of memory.

Now I have said on earlier occasions that the formation of the head represents a metamorphosis of the human being's organic structure, apart from the head organisation, in an earlier earth-life. Thus what we carry about in a particular earth-life as our head is the transformed body (apart from the head) of the previous earth-life, but especially the transformed metabolic-limb system; or what to-day is metabolic-limb man is transformed during the life between death and rebirth into the head-formation of the next earthly life. One must of course not think of it in a materialistic way; it has nothing to do with the matter that fills out the body, but with the relationships of forms and forces.

Thus, when we see that the child's faculty of forming concepts, his faculty of thought, depends upon his head-formation, we can also say that his capacity for thought is connected with his earlier life on earth.

On the other hand, what develops in us as the faculty of memory depends primarily on how we are able to maintain in a well-organised condition the metabolic-limb system of this present earth-life. The two things go together: one of them a man brings with him from his previous earth-life, and the other, the faculty of memory, he acquires through organising and maintaining a new organism.

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From this you will understand that ordinary memory, which we have primarily for use between birth and death and which we cultivate in connection with this earth-life, does not suffice to enable us to look back into the life before birth, to look back into our pre-natal life. Hence it is necessary—this is something I constantly emphasise when I am expounding the methodology of the subject—for us to acquire the ability to go behind this memory, to learn to understand clearly that it is something that is of service to us between birth and death, but that we have to develop a higher faculty which traces in a backward direction, entirely in the manner of memory, what has taken shape in us as the power of thought. Anyone who constructs an abstract theory of knowledge substitutes a word for a deed. For example, he says, “Mathematical concepts are a priori,” because they do not have to be acquired through experience, because their certainty does not have to be confirmed by experience; they lie behind experience, a priori. That is a phrase. And to-day this phrase is to be heard over and over again in the mouths of Kantians. This a priori really means that we have experienced these ideas in our previous earth-life; but they are none the less experiences acquired by humanity in the course of its evolution. The simple fact is that humanity is in such a stage of its evolution that most men, civilised men at any rate, bring mathematical concepts with them, and these have only to be awakened.

There is of course an important pedagogic difference between the process of awakening mathematical concepts and that of imparting such thoughts and ideas as have to be acquired through external experience, and in which the faculty of memory plays an essential role. One can also, especially if one has acquired a certain power of insight into the peculiarities of human evolution, distinguish clearly between two types of growing children—those who bring much from their previous earth lives and to whom it is therefore easy to communicate ideas, and others who have less facility in the formation of ideas but are good at noticing the qualities of external things, and therefore easily absorb what they can take in through their own observation. But in this the faculty of memory is at work, for one cannot easily learn about external things in the way in which things have to be taught in school. Of course a child can form a concept, but he cannot learn in such a way as to reproduce what he has learnt unless a clear faculty of memory is there. Here, in short, one can perceive quite exactly the flowing together of two streams in human evolution.

Now what is it exactly that lies behind this! Just think—on the one hand you have the human being shaping his concept-forming faculty through his head-organisation. Why does he do that? You have only to look at the human head-organisation with understanding to say why.

You see, the head-organisation makes its appearance comparatively early in embryonal life, before the essentials of the rest of the organisation are added. Embryology furnishes definite proof of what Anthroposophy has to say about human evolution. But you need not go so far, you need only look at the adult man. Look at his head-organisation. To begin with, it is so fashioned as to be the most perfect part of the human organisation taken as a whole. Well, perhaps this idea is open to dispute; but there is another idea that cannot be gainsaid, if only one looks at it in the right way; that is the idea that we are related to our head in experience quite differently from the way we are related to the rest of our organism. We are aware of the rest of our organism in quite a different way from the way we are aware of our head. The truth is that our head effaces itself in our own soul-life. We have far more organic consciousness of the whole of the rest of our organism than we have of our head. Our head is really the part of us that is obliterated within our organisation.

Moreover this head stands apart from the relationships of the rest of our organism with the world, first of all through the way the brain is organised. I have often called attention to the fact that the brain is so heavy that it would crush everything that lay beneath it were it not swimming in the cerebral fluid, thereby losing the whole of the weight that a body would have that was made of brain fluid and was the same size as the brain; thus the brain loses weight in the ratio of from 1,300 or 1,400 grammes to 20 grammes. But this means that while the human being, in so far as he stands on the earth, has his natural weight, the brain is lifted out of this relationship with gravity in which the human being is involved. But even if you do not stress this inward phenomenon, but confine yourself to what is external, you might well say that in the whole way in which you bear your head, in the way you carry it through the world, it is like a lord or lady sitting in a carriage. The carriage has to move on, but when it does so, the lord or lady sitting in it is carried along without having to make any exertion. Our head is related to the rest of our organism somewhat in this way. Many other things help to bring this about. Our head is, so to speak, lifted out of all our other connections with the world. That is precisely because in our head we have in physical transformation what our soul, together with the rest of our organism, experienced in an earlier earth-life.

If you study the four principal members of the human organisation in the head—physical body, ether body, astral body and ego—it is really only the ego that has a certain independence. The other three members have created images of themselves in the physical formation of the head. Of this, too, I once gave a convincing proof: On this occasion I should like to lead up to it by telling a story, rather than in a theoretical way.

I once told you that many years ago, when circumstances had brought about the foundation of the Giordano Bruno Society, I was present at a lecture on the brain given by a thoroughgoing materialist. As a materialist, of course, he made a sketch of the structure of the brain, and proved that fundamentally this structure was the expression of the life of the soul. One can quite well do that.

Now the president of the society was the headmaster of a grammar-school, not a materialist, but a hide-bound Herbartian. For him there was nothing but the philosophy of Herbart. He said that, as a Herbartian, he could be quite satisfied with the presentation; only he did not take what the lecturer had drawn, from his standpoint of strict materialism, to be the matter of the brain. Thus when the other man had sketched the parts of the brain, the connecting tissues and so on, the Herbartian was quite willing to accept the sketch; it was quite acceptable to the Herbartian, who was no materialist, for, said he, where the other man had written parts of the brain, he needed only to write idea-complexes, and instead of brain fibres he only had to write association fibres. Then he was describing something of a soul-nature—idea-complexes—where the other was describing parts of the brain. And where the other drew brain-fibres, he put association-fibres, those formations that John Stuart Mill had so fantastically imagined as going from idea to idea, entirely without will, automatically, all kinds of formations woven by the soul between the idea-complexes! One can find good examples of that in Herbart also.

Thus both men could find a point of contact in the sketch. Why? Simply because the human brain really is in this respect an extraordinarily good imprint of the soul-spiritual. The soul-spiritual makes a very good imprint of itself on the brain. It certainly has had time during the period between death and new birth to call into existence this configuration, which then so wonderfully expresses its soul-life in the observable plastic formations of the brain.

Let us now pass on to the psychological exposition given by Theodore Ziehen. We find that he also describes the parts of the brain and so on in a materialistic way, and it all seems very plausible. It is also extremely conscientious. One can in fact do that; if one looks at man's intellectual life, the life of ideas, one can find a very exact reproduction of it in the brain. But—with such a psychology one does not get as far as feeling, still less as far as will. If you look at such a psychology as Ziehen's, you will find that feeling is nothing more than a feeling-stress of the idea, and that will is entirely lacking. The fact is that feeling and will are not related in the same way to what has already been formed, already been given shape. Feeling is connected with the human rhythmic system; it is still in full movement, it has its configuration in movement. And will, which is connected above all with the plastic coming-into-existence and fading-away which take place in metabolism, cannot portray itself in reflected images, as is possible with ideas. In short, in the life of ideas, in the faculty of ideation, we have something of soul-life that can express itself plastically, pictorially, in the head. But there we are in the realm of the astral body; for when we form ideas, the entire activity of ideation belongs to the astral body. Thus the astral body creates its image in the human head. It is only the ego that still remains somewhat mobile. The etheric body has its exact imprint in the head, and the physical body most definitely so of all. On the other hand, in the rhythmic system there is no imprint of the astral body as such, but only of the etheric and physical bodies. And in the metabolic system only the physical body has its mirror-image.

To summarise, you can think of the matter in this way. In the head you have physical body, etheric body and astral body, in such a way that they are portrayed in the physical; that in fact their impression can be detected in the physical forms. It is not possible to understand the human head in any other way than by seeing it in these three forms. The ego is still free in relation to the head.

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If we pass on to the rest of the human organisation, to the breathing-system, for instance, we find the physical and etheric bodies have their imprints within it; but the astral body and the ego have no such imprints; they are to a certain extent free. And in the metabolic-limb system we have the physical body as such, and the ego, astral body and etheric body are free. We have not only to recognise the presence of one of these members, but to distinguish whether it is in the free or the bound condition. Of course it is not that an astral body and an etheric body have no basis in the head; they permeate the head too. But they are not free within it, they are imprinted in the head-organisation. On the other hand, the astral body, for example, is quite free throughout the rhythmic system, particularly in the breathing. It acts freely. It does not merely permeate the system, but it is actively present within it.

Now let us put two things together. The one is that we can affirm a connection between the faculty of memory and the organisation outside the head; the other is that we have to look outside the head also for the feeling and willing organisations. You see we are now coupling together the feeling world of the soul and the world of memory. And if you take note of your own experience in relation to these two things, you will discover that there is a very close connection between them.

The way in which we can remember depends essentially on the way we can participate in things, on how far we can enter into them with that part of our organisation which lies outside the head. If we are very much head-men, we shall understand a great deal, but remember little in such a way that we grow together with it. There is a significant connection between the capacity for feeling and the faculty of memory. But at the same time we see that the human organisation apart from the head, in the early stages of its development, becomes more like the head. If you take the embryonal life, then, to begin with, the human being is practically all head; the rest is added. When the child is born—just think how imperfect is the rest of the organisation in comparison with the head! But it is attached to the head. Between birth and death the rest of the organisation becomes more and more like the head-organisation, and shows this notably in the emergence of the second teeth. The first teeth, the so-called milk teeth, are derived more from the head-organisation. It will be easy to demonstrate this anatomically and physiologically when suitable methods are applied. To spiritual scientific investigation it is unquestionable. In the second teeth the entire man plays his part. The teeth which are derived more from the head-organisation are cast out. The rest of the man assists in the formation of the second teeth.

In fact, in the first and second teeth we have a kind of image translated into the physical—an image of the formation of concepts and memory respectively. The milk teeth are formed out of the human organism rather in the way concepts are formed, except that concepts of course are translated into the sphere of the mental life, whereas the second teeth are derived out of the human organism more in the way the faculty of memory is derived. One only has to be capable of recognising these very subtle differences in human nature.

When you grasp such a thing as this, then you will of course see that one can really understand the structure of matter—particularly when it comes to organic life—only if one understands it in its spiritual formation. The thorough-going materialist looks at the material man, studies the material man. And anyone who starts from the reality and not from his materialistic prejudices, will at once see in the child that this human head is formed out of the super-sensible, through a metamorphosis of his previous earthly life, and then he sees that the rest is added out of the world into which the child is now transplanted; the rest is added, but that too is formed out of the spiritual, out of the super-sensible of this world.

It is important to pay attention to such a view. For the point is that we should not speak abstractly of the material world and of the spiritual world, but we should acquire an insight into the way the material world originates in the spiritual world; an insight, so to speak, into the way the spiritual world is imaged in the material world. Only we must not thereby remain in the abstract, but must enter into the concrete. We must be able to acquire an insight into the difference between the head and the rest of the organism. Then in the very forms of the head we shall see a somewhat different derivation from the spiritual world, compared with what we see in the rest of the organism. For the rest of the organism is added to us entirely in the present earth-life, whilst the head organisation, down to its very shape, we bring with us out of our previous earth-life. Whoever reflects upon this will see the folly of such an objection to Anthroposophy as has again recently been made, in a debate which took place in Munich, by Eucken—so highly respected by many people despite his journalistic philistinism. By putting forward the foolish idea that what one can perceive is material, Eucken raised the objection that Anthroposophy is materialistic. Naturally, if one invents such a definition, one can prove what one will; but anyone who does so is certainly ill-acquainted with the accepted method of proof. It is a question of grasping how the material, in its emergence from the spiritual, can be regarded as bearing witness to the spiritual world.

Again—and to-day I can only go as far as this—if you grasp the connection between the birth of memory and the forces of growth, you will thereby recognise an interplay between what we call material and what in later life, from seven to eight years of age onwards, develops as the soul-spiritual life. It really is a fact that what shows itself later in more abstract intellectual form as the faculty of memory is active, to begin with, in growth. It is really the same force. The same method of observation must be applied to this as is applied, let us say, when we speak of latent heat and free heat. Heat which is free, which is released from its latent condition, behaves externally in the physical world like the force which, after having been the source of the phenomena of growth in the earliest years of childhood, then manifests itself in the inner life as the force of memory. What lies behind the phenomena of growth in earliest childhood is the same thing as what later makes its appearance in its own proper form as the faculty of memory.

I developed this more fully in the course of lectures given here in the Goetheanum last autumn.¹ You will see how one can discover along these lines an intimate connection between the soul-spiritual and the bodily-physical, and how therefore we have in the faculty of memory something which on the one hand appears to us as of a soul-spiritual nature, and on the other hand, when it appears in other cosmic connections, manifests as the force of growth.

We find just the opposite when we consider the human capacity for love, which shows itself on the one hand to be entirely bound up with the bodily nature, and which on the other hand we can grasp, exactly like the faculty of memory, as the most soul-like function. So that in fact—this I will explain more fully in later lectures—in memory and love you have capacities in which you can experience the interplay between the spiritual and the bodily, and which you can also associate with the whole relationship between man and the world.

In the case of memory we have already done this, for we have related ideation with previous earth-lives, and the faculty of memory with the present earth-life. In later lectures we shall see that we can experience the same thing as regards the capacity for love. One can show how it is developed in the present earth-life, but passes over through the life between death and rebirth into the next earthly life.

Why are we making a point of this? Because to-day man needs to be able to make the transition from the soul-spiritual to the bodily-physical. In the soul-spiritual we experience morality; within the physical-bodily we experience natural necessity. As things are seen to-day, if one is honest in each sphere one has to admit that there is no bridge between them. And I said yesterday that because there is no such bridge, people make a distinction between what they call real knowledge, based upon natural causality, and the content of pure faith, which is said to be concerned with the world of morality—because natural causality on the one hand, and the life of the soul-spirit on the other, exist side by side without any connection. But the whole point is that in order to recover a fully human consciousness, we need to build a bridge between these two.

Above all we must remember that the moral world cannot exist without postulating freedom; the natural world cannot exist without necessity. Indeed, there could be no science if there were not this necessity. If one phenomenon were not of necessity caused by another in natural continuity, everything would be arbitrary, and there could be no science. An effect could arise from a cause that one could not predict! We get science when we try to see how one thing proceeds from another, that one thing proceeds from another. But if this natural causality is universal, then moral freedom is impossible; there can be no such thing. Nevertheless the consciousness of this moral freedom within the realm of soul and spirit, as a fact of direct experience, is present in every man.

The contradiction between what the human being experiences in the moral constitution of his soul and the causality of nature is not a logical one, but a contradiction in life. This contradiction is always with us as we go through the world; it is part of our life. The fact is that, if we honestly admit what we are faced with, we shall have to say that there must be natural causality, there must be natural necessity, and we as men are ourselves in the midst of it. But our inner soul-spiritual life contradicts it. We are conscious that we can make resolutions, that we can pursue moral ideals which are not given to us by natural necessity. This is a contradiction which is a contradiction of life, and anyone who cannot admit that there are such contradictions simply fails to grasp life in its universality. But in saying this we are saying something very abstract. It is really only our way of expressing what we encounter in life. We go through life feeling ourselves all the time actually at variance with external nature. It seems as if we are powerless, as if we must feel ourselves at variance with ourselves. To-day we can feel the presence of these contradictions in many men in a truly tragic way.

For example, I knew a man who was quite full of the fact that there is necessity in the world in which man himself is involved. Theoretically, of course, one can admit such a necessity and at the same time not trouble much about it with one's entire manhood. Then one goes through the world as a superficial person and one will not be inwardly filled with tragedy. Be that as it may, I knew a man who said, “Everywhere there is necessity and we men are placed within it. There is no doubt about it, science forces us to a recognition of this necessity. But at the same time necessity allows bubbles to arise in us which delude us with hopes of a free soul-life. We have to see through that delusion, we have to look upon it as hot air. This too is a necessity.”

That is man's frightful illusion. That is the foundation of pessimism in human nature. The man who has little idea of how deeply such a thing can work into the human soul will not be able to enter into the feeling that this contradiction in life, which is absolutely real, can undermine the whole soul, and can lead to the view that life in its inmost nature is a misfortune. Confronted by the conflict between scientific certainty and the certitude of faith, it is only thoughtlessness and lack of sensitivity that prevent men from coming to such inner tragedy in their lives. For this tragic attitude towards life is really the one that goes with the plight of soul to which mankind can come to-day.

But whence comes the impotence which results in such a tragic attitude to life! It comes from the fact that civilised humanity has for centuries allowed itself to become entangled in certain abstractions, in intellectualism. The most this intellectualism can say is that natural necessity deludes us by strange methods with a feeling of freedom, but that there is no freedom. It exists only in our ideas. We are powerless in the face of necessity.

Then comes the important question—is that truest? And now you see that the lectures I have been giving for weeks actually all lead up to the question: “Are we really powerless? Are we really so impotent in the face of this contradiction?” Remember how I said that we have in our lives not only an ascending development, but a declining one; that our intellectual life is not bound up with the forces of growth, but with the forces of death, the forces of decay; that in order to develop intelligence we need to die. You will remember how I showed here several weeks ago the significance of the fact that certain elements with specific affinities and valencies—carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, sulphur—combine to form protein. They do so not by ordinary chemical combination, but on the, contrary by becoming utterly chaotic. You will then see that all these studies are leading up to this—to make it clear to you that what I have told you is not just a theoretical contradiction, but an actual process in human nature. We are not here merely in order, through living, to sense this contradiction, but our inner life is a continual process of destruction of what develops as causality in outer nature. We men really dissolve natural causality within ourselves. What outside is physical process, chemical process, is developed within us in a reverse direction, towards the other side. Of course we shall see this clearly only if we take into consideration the upper and the lower man, if we grasp by means of the upper man what emerges from metabolism by way of contra-mechanisation, contra-physicalisation, contra-chemicalisation. If we try to grasp the contra-materialisation in the human being, then we do not have merely a logical, theoretical contradiction in ourselves, but we have the real process—we have the process of human development, of human becoming, as the thing in us that itself counteracts natural causality, and human life as consisting in a battle against it. And the expression of this struggle, which goes on all the while to dissolve the physical synthesis, the chemical synthesis, to analyse it again—the expression of this analytic life in us is summed up in the awareness: “I am free.” What I have just put before you in a few words—the study of the human process of becoming as a process of combat against natural causality, as a reversal of natural causality—we shall make the subject of forthcoming lectures.

• 1. Grenzen der Naturerkenntnis, 27th Sept. to 2nd Oct., 1920 (Translated as "The Boudaries of Natural Science.)

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If we want to fathom the meaning of the materialistic age we need to research how the combination of important fundamental forces add up to the development of mankind. Next we need consider human evolution from a specific angle today. I will link these to various things I have already mentioned recently and reach a clear outcome.

I have often referred to the importance of the time period in an individual's development which co-insides with the change of teeth around the seventh year of life. The change of teeth indicates that certain forces present and active in the organism up to this time no longer exercise their actions as is the case up to the seventh year. From the moment the stage of dentition begins or is taking place the human being goes into a state of metamorphosis. What appears with the pushing out of the second set of teeth is something which had been working in the human body already. When they appear as if freed out of the body then the appearance is by contrast more like a soul force. We discover by researching this appearance, that up to the seventh year a soul force is active within the human being and to a certain extend finds its conclusive work done with the change of teeth. When we develop the inclination and ability to observe such things we will come to see how the child's entire soul constitution is metamorphosed, how precisely from this moment in life the ability arises to construct defined concepts similar to the way other soul abilities occur. Where had these soul qualities been before the change of teeth? They were in the body and were active there. That which later would become spiritual was working in the body.

Here we arrive at quite a different observation regarding the cooperation between the soul-spiritual and the bodily aspects in contrast to how they are depicted by abstract psychological representations, which refers to a psycho-physical parallelism or to an alternate interaction between soul and body. We arrive at a true observation of what works in an important way during the first seven years of the human organism. We gradually see something which is hidden up to the moment it becomes freed to work as a soul force. We only need to develop an ability to observe such things to become aware how a certain process of power gradually works into the bodily aspect during the first seven years of life and how from this moment onwards reappear as something soul-spiritual. Then we also realise what the actual activity within the human body, at least in part, is during the first seven years of life.

When we find ourselves in the condition in life which takes place between falling asleep and waking, something happens which I have just described, in two conditions following upon one another in a meaningful way. We can also observe that a child sleeps in a certain way which is different to the one he or she will become after the change of teeth. It is as if the difference is not apparent, but it is there. The child up to his seventh year is in a state of sleep—a state in which its soul is intrinsically within the state of falling asleep and waking—unable to transmit the same forces which he later sends as soul forces because these forces are related to the physical, to the corporeal organism. As a result the child doesn't send sharply outlined concepts into his state of sleep. It sends very few sharply defined concepts and even less outlined imaginations but these indistinct representations have the peculiar ability to encompass the soul spiritual reality in a better way than through sharply defined representations.

This is something important, the sharper the outlines of our concepts in daily life, the less these concepts are able to enter our sleep condition, understanding realities from there. As a result of this the child often in fact brings a particular knowledge of spiritual reality out of its sleeping condition. This ceases in the same way as I described in the forces being freed during the change of teeth, sharply outlined concepts now come to the fore and can influence sleep life. These sharply outlined concepts subdue to a certain extent the view on spiritual realities as we live between falling asleep and waking.

What I have just said can be proved through supersensible sight which develops the power I have often described which can be found in my “Occult Science” and in my book “Knowledge of the Higher Worlds.” When clairvoyant sight attains the power of imagination, when each image appears, as we know, as having a spiritual reality as foundation, then we gradually come to behold spiritual realities amidst the condition of sleeping and waking, and then we can evaluate the difference between a child's sleep before his seventh year and its sleep after turning seven. We can see how to some extent insight is eased regarding what in our imagination we have clarified regarding observation of spiritual realities in whose proximity we are between falling asleep and waking up.

When the change of teeth has come about, the development of puberty starts within the soul element, which can be grasped to a certain degree through imagination. Through simply experiencing our imagination we can see what is forming in the soul.

Man acquires simply through the imaginative experience that which is formed in the soul. The experience I have mentioned regarding the conditions between falling asleep and waking is only one of the experiences which can be made through imaginative knowledge. Under these interesting conditions which take place in the child between dentition and puberty, we see how there is actually a strong struggle taking place in the becoming of the human being. The fight to a certain extent in this period of life is between the ether body and the astral body which undergoes a particular transformation towards puberty. When we consider the physical correlation corresponding to this condition of a struggle, then we can say that it's during this period of the child's life when there is a struggle between growing forces and those forces which appear through physical inspiration, through breathing. This is a very important process in inner development, a process which has to be studied time and again. A part of what becomes freed up for the soul during dentition, are growing forces. Of course a considerable part of these growing forces remain in the body and see to growth, while a part of this is freed during dentition and come to the fore as soul forces.

The growing forces working on in the child resists against what appears essentially in the respiratory process. What now appears in the breathing process could not essentially appear before. The respiratory process is certainly present in the child but as long as it has the forces rising from dentition, so long will nothing in the child happen which is actually as striking, as meaningful as what later takes place between breathing and the physical body. The greatest part of our development depends upon the breathing process. As a result Oriental exercises focus particularly on the breathing process while the human beings who live into the breathing exercises actually come into contact with their inner organisation, brings physicality into an inner movement which is related to perception of the spiritual world.

As we said, before the start of dentition, what breathing actually wants to affect in us fails to become active in the body. Now the battle starts between the growing forces retained in the body against the forces penetrating through the breathing processes. The first meaningful process appearing as a result of the physical breathing processes is puberty.

This connection between breathing and puberty is not yet being examined by science. It is, however, definitely present. We actually breathe in what brings on puberty, which also gives us the further opportunity to step into a relationship in the widest sense between the world and loving surroundings. We actually breathe this in. In every process of nature there's also a spiritual process. In the breathing process exists not only the spiritual but also the soul spiritual. This soul spiritual process permeates us through breathing. It can only penetrate when the forces have become ensouled, forces which formerly worked up to the change of teeth and stopped at this point. What wanted to stream in through the breathing process can now take place.

However, again they come into opposition—a war—of what comes out of the growing processes and what is still a growth process, coming from ether forces in other words. This war is evident between the ether forces rising from the ether body and their correlation found in the material, in the metabolism and blood circulation as astral forces. Here the metabolic system plays into the rhythmic system. We can schematically say: we have our metabolic system but this plays into our blood rhythm; the metabolic system I depict here in white (weiß) and the circulation system playing into it: red (rot) in the drawing. This is what streams from the ether body upwards between the ages of seven to fourteen.

The astral body works against it. We have the inward streaming of the rhythmical in the physical correlation which comes from breathing and the war takes place between the blood circulation and the breathing rhythms in blue (blau). This is what is happening in that period of life.

To speak somewhat vividly in perhaps a radical image: between about the ninth and the tenth year in the life of every child, what had been planned before and appeared as skirmishes before the actual main battle, now goes over into the main battle. The astral and ether bodies direct their chief attack during the ninth and tenth year of life.

As a result this period in time is so important for educators to observe. It is simply so, that teachers, educators and instructors need to give their full attention to something—which may appear differently in nearly each person—taking place in this moment in time.

Here something exceptional can be seen in each child. Some temperamental qualities move into an evident metamorphosis. Marked ideas appear. Above all this is the moment in time where one could start—while before it had been good to not let the child distinguish between the Ego (Ich) and the outer world—allowing this distinction between the Ego and the outer world to come to the fore. While it had been preferable before to use fairy tale imagery to the child, how processes of nature were like human processes, by personifying and clarifying, now the child may be educated about nature in a more instructive manner.

Stories of nature, even in their most elementary forms, should actually only from this moment be presented to the child because the child, as it starts with its first period of life, feels its Ego clearly, while it had just sensed its Ego before. This is a clearly outlined concept, a more or less sharply outlined term linked to the Ego which appears at this time. The child first learns at this moment to really distinguish itself from the surroundings. This corresponds to a definite counter streaming of the breathing rhythm with the circulatory rhythm, the astral and the ether bodies.

There are two sides to this within the human being. On the one side it is present in the condition between waking up and falling asleep. For this state I have just made indications. In the condition between falling asleep and waking, something different presents itself. When we have made progress in Imagination and developed Inspiration somewhat, we may evaluate what happens through Inspiration during the breathing process which has its physical correlation, we discover only at this moment in time—for one child it will be a little earlier, for another a bit later but on average between nine and ten—there is a liberation of the I and the astral body from the physical body during sleep. The child namely becomes intimately connected with his physical and etheric bodies even during asleep. From this time the I lights up as an individual being when actually the I and astral body are not participants of the functions of the ether and physical bodies.

If a child dies before this moment when life had led it up to its fifth, sixth and even into its eighth, ninth year, it still has something which hasn't separated much from the soul spiritual world which is experienced between death and a new birth; so that children relatively easily are pulled back into the soul spiritual world and to some extent only attach something to life which they completed with conception or birth, that an actual cutting off from a new life, if we consider this kind of death, is only really there when children die after this point. Their connection to a certain extent to a new life will be less intensive than the life before. Here clearly conditions are experienced as I've described in “Theosophy” where children who have died earlier are thrown back and then piece life together from what they experience to the life they had led up to their conception or up to birth. One should even say: what we have before us in the child up to the time between his ninth and tenth year of life shows there is much less separation between the soul-physical and the soul-spiritual than in the later human being. Later a person is much more of a dualistic being than the child. The child has the soul-spiritual incorporated into his body and this works into the body. As a duality the soul-spiritual appears opposite the bodily soul element only after this illustrated time. One should say: from this moment the soul-spiritual is less concerned by the bodily element than it had been concerned before. The child as a bodily being is far more of a soul being than the older person. The body of the child is even permeated by the soul forces of growth because it still retains soulful forces even when the largest part of dentition has taken place.

Thus we can say that this battle I have depicted calms down gradually from about the twelfth year onwards and with sexual maturity the astral body takes its full entitlement in the human constitution. That which loosens itself from the human being, which to some extent now is less concerned with the physical is that which the human being takes again with him or her through the gate of death on dying. As we've said, the child in its earlier years is more thrown back to its former life; human beings after this period in time are separated from their former life. What is released here holds within it a seed which allows it to pass through the gate of death. One can really penetrate these things with imaginative knowledge and one can discern particularities precisely. One can point out how the forces rising here lead to sharply defined concepts—which however diminish spiritual realities in whose presence we are during sleep—and make the human being into an independent being.

As a result of the human being cutting off, diminishing the spiritual realities, the human being again becomes the spirit amongst spirits who he must be when he goes through the gate of death. The child always slips, I might say, into spiritual realities; the later human being detaches himself from these spiritual realities and becomes consistent in himself. Admittedly, what becomes consistent can only be seen clearly with imaginative and inspired knowledge, but it does exist in people. This process happens anyhow, as I've indicated yesterday. When human beings don't allow spiritual science to work on them, then it is already so: what is released—particularly during this age in which we receive such materialistic concepts and intellectual ideas, where already at school intellectualism and materialism are imported, because our school subjects are presented materialistically—what is released here is organised in an ahrimanic direction. Because we are asleep in our will even during the day, what becomes released here are trapped by our instincts. We educate ourselves in order to master our instinctive lives by absorbing spiritual scientific concepts.

Intellectuals, materialists or sensualist have an opinion about these concepts, they say these spiritual scientific concepts are fantasy, there's nothing real in them compared with reality. What they mean with “reality” is only what can be perceived by the senses. This is not what is meant by these concepts at all. Everything which appears as concepts in my “spiritual science” does not refer to the outer sense world, it wants to describe the supersensible world. Should these concepts be accepted thus, then they are taken up in a supersensible way even though one can't yet see into the supersensible. Concepts are taken up which are suitable for the supersensible world and not applicable to the senses, physical world, and one thus breaks free from the physical sensory world, in other words, instincts.

This education however is necessary in the human race; without it humankind will enter more and more into social chaos. The actual results—it is like I said yesterday—the actual results of intellectualism and materialism in science, the actual outcome of our present day scientific leaning is a social condition which is chaotic and rising in such an alarming manner in Eastern Europe.

As I said, with logic you can't derive Bolshevism from Bergson's philosophy or from Machsher Avenarius's philosophy; but plain logic brings you closer to deriving it. This is something which present day mankind must look at clearly; dualism has developed in the last centuries between nature observation and the moral world of ideas. On the one side we have the observation of nature which only works with the necessity, as I've often pointed out, to being strictly exact and wanting to link everything to definite connections and causalities. This kind of nature observation creates a worldly structure, builds hypotheses about the beginning and the end of the earth.

Here you stand before what the human being experiences in religious and moral ideas. This is completely torn away from what lives in the observation of nature. This is why people strive so hard to justify the moral-religious content through mere faith. The moral-religious content has been elevated to a system whose content must stand for itself which to some extent should not be allowed to be ruined by anything else, like how outer nature is described, what a person may feel, how the one influences the other. Our present day nature observation, as it exists in its newest phase, where optics and electrodynamics merge, draws by necessity the imagination of the death of warmth to itself. Then the earth with all its people and animals will die and then no human soul will develop despite all its moral ideals. This earth's demise is ensured by the Law of Conservation of Matter, of the Conservation of Energy: through this Law of the Conservation Of Energy the result is the death of the earth, the death of all human souls just like materialists consider the death of the soul as connected to the death of the human body. Only when we are absolutely clear in our mind that what lives in us as morality, what permeates us as religious ideas, form a seed within us, a seed containing a reality, just as the seed of a plant unfolds into a plant the following year, only then can we know that the start of this seed is for a future natural existence and that the earth with everything it contains, visible, audible, perceptible to our senses, does not depend on the law of conservation of energy but that it dies, falls away from all human souls who then carry the moral ideals through as new natural events, into the Jupiter-, Venus-, and Vulcan existence; only when we are clear that Heaven and Earth will perish but My word, the Logos, which develops in the human soul, will not perish—when we are clear, literally clear about these words, only then can we speak of moral and religious content of our human souls. Otherwise it is dishonest. Otherwise we put to a certain extent morality in the world and adhere to another certainty than the natural certainty. If we are clear in our minds that the words of Christ are true, that a cosmos originates from morality, wrested free from the death shroud when this cosmos disintegrates, then we have a world view which indicates morality and naturalness in its metamorphosis.

This is essentially what must penetrate present day humanity because with the schooling of natural thinking developed over the last decades, it is impossible to also accomplish the most essential social concepts which we need. Something must live in the social concepts which recognise morality at the same time in its cosmic implications. The human being must once again learn that he or she is a cosmic being. Earlier the social affairs which needed to be organized on the earth round was not understood; before it had been acknowledged that human beings are connected with cosmic intentions, with cosmic entities.

This is what is felt by people in our age who experience the whole tragedy in their souls, who have come from the abyss between the natural scientific notion and the moral view which we have. Probably only a few slightly sense the implications of this abyss, but it must be crossed over—to say this literally: “Heaven and Earth will perish but my Word will not perish.” This means, what sprouts in the human soul will enfold, just as the earth will perish.

One can't be an avid supporter of the Law of Conservation of Energy and believe at the same time that the moral world indicates eternity. Only to the degree with which courage is found to establish and view the world through the view of nature, will a way be found out of this chaos of the present. This way out can only be found when human beings decide, once again, but now fully conscious, to revert back to that wisdom which once was experienced in the old mysteries in an instinctive way. If humanity makes the decision to consciously penetrate the spiritual world it is an objective possibility, my dear friends. Since the end of the 19th Century a wave from the spiritual world wants to enter our physical world. I could say, it storms in, it is there. Mankind only needs to open their hearts and their senses, and human hearts and human souls will be spoken to. The spiritual world has good intentions, but humanity is still resisting. What was experienced in the second decades of the 20th Century in such a terribly way, ultimately is the bracing of humanity against the inward thrusting wave from the spiritual world. However one could say, it is at its worst, just where scientific minds turn against the streaming in from the spiritual worlds. One should not however, once materialistic and intellectual thinking habits have been withdrawn, now introduce some sort of form which would rule, which could be acquired from the spiritual world.

In relation to this the intellectual-materialistic wave it had its peak, its impact in the second half of the 19th Century. Obviously materialism prepared this long in advance. I have repeatedly referred to its actual worldly historic beginning: what lived in Hellenism as materialism was only a prelude, somewhat in Democritus and in change. Its world historical importance only gradually developed from the 15th Century. It developed slowly, certainly, but it still, when the actual dogmatic tradition was relinquished, I might say, allowed a feeling for a spiritual world's existence within the physical, that the spiritual world can be grasped but not registered through mere intellectual gestures.

Today some who do not see the essence of it, point out with a certain nostalgia to not that far back in time, positivism and materialistic thoughts actually shamed the human being who was regarded as completely inhuman. After that, basically only in the second half of the 19th Century they came to view humankind as completely inhuman, wiping out the specifically human. Thus they avenged themselves by claiming that the human being had thoroughly educated itself in a relatively total abstract way of thinking, as it appeared in the renewed version of the Theory of Relativity. As a result it is always interesting and one should take responsibility for it, that there are still singular minds who refer back to the time when even materialistically orientated minds considered that anything pertaining to people should be dealt with through the mind.

Certainly, a thoroughly intellectual and positivistic mind was Auguste Comte but he wasn't alive in the end of the 19th Century when people were completely excluded from human observation even though, where intellectualism and materialism only became external nature's concepts—but only the outer nature concept, where a human being no longer considered his own humanity in relation to it, that even his own human qualities were thought of as being in the images of nature. Thus it is interesting if we can read what the English thinker Frederick Harrison, briefly wrote about Auguste Comte. He said: I'm thinking about a concise remark by Auguste Comte which he made more than sixty years ago. Auguste Comte, the positivist, the intellectualist who was still somewhat touched by the spirituality of olden times, already saw that in the future the human being will be completely omitted. Despite his positivism, despite his intellectualism it displeased him to what he referred to and what he had been creating, which only came about in the last third of the 19th Century so he hadn't seen it: our modern doctors, said Comte, appear to be essentially animal doctors. He meant, so Harrison continues, that they often, more particularly with women, are treated like horses or cows.

Comte stressed that an illness should be observed from more than one side, that it contains a spiritual element and occasionally even a prominent kind of spiritual element, thus the human doctor should just as much be a philosopher of the soul as an anatomist is to the body. He claimed that true medication would have two sides. From this basis—Harrison adds—he would reject Freudian one sidedness. Harrison continues—how this Comtian point of view has developed further and how people have gradually degenerated to the point of view where people are treated like horses and cows and how this has gradually made human doctors into animal doctors. Everything is relative—this is already contained in the kernel of the theory of relativity. The main teaching of Auguste Comte had a better basis and a more thorough philosophical depth and life than Einstein, he said.—It is always refreshing when one can still today hear such a statement, because we live in the age where the scientific mind opposes everything which comes from a spiritual side, namely what wants to transport the mind in human life, in human action and particularly in important areas such a medical activities.

If we ask ourselves: what is it then, which makes materialism and intellectualism so attractive for today's science? Look for yourself how things are taking place. Consider how our education is set up to hardly involve the teachers in the child's whole organization. The teacher is far too comfortable, and has personally been raised far too comfortably to really delve into the intricacies of child development, like I have depicted today again. Such things would rather not be bothered with—because what would be required? It would call for not shying away from every transition in daily life while living a delusion, to a life which is quite different, where our knowledge becomes reality.

This transformation of people, this otherness, this change pertaining to knowledge is shied away from today; people do not want it. People want to comfortably rise to higher truths which can only be the highest abstractions because to reach abstraction can be done with a certain comfort. This way no inner changes are needed in order to reach it. However, to come to a real life content, how it forms the basis of our outer sensory content, can't be attained when at least concepts aren't changed which have no significance for ordinary sense life, whose meaning one can only penetrate with a power coming from within and working outward. People are put into life which also stretches into the supersensible world, and in our age it relies on this supersensible world being elucidated in a healthy way. When I said yesterday that the materialistic-intellectual point of view doesn't just include a few scientifically educated people, even with a scientific education, but that they are popular beliefs in the simplest people still connected to ancient beliefs, then it must be said: it is urgent and necessary that whatever flows into our overall life in popular form should also contain information of the spiritual world.

Presently overall characteristic attributes can be found everywhere where the effort is made to introduce Anthroposophical spiritual science into areas of life. In medicine, in religion, the social life, everywhere the introduction of anything non-sectarian should be made: Anthroposophically orientated spiritual science, which comes to the fore with the same scientific earnest with which it had been introduced since the middle of the 15 Century as scientific, is to be fully recognized.

When a child has grown up and has had the luck to have undergone some higher learning, what becomes apparent today? These young people, doctors, theologians, philologists, lawyers, will not become anything else; they will not be converted but stay as they are and only accept abstractions applicable to their science. If an attempt is made to offer them some knowledge of the world then they immediately withdraw particularly into this comfortable life of abstraction in which they desire to continue living—but which is leading towards chaos. Thus we can observe an interesting symptom arising which I want to single out. On occasion where the Nurnberg main preacher Geyer held seemingly many lectures at various places, it can be noticed: here people suspect, mainly scientific people suspect that an attempt is being made to introduce Anthroposophically orientated spiritual science into their lives. This the people don't want. Even well minded people don't want it. They sense that here they must re-adjust their views in relation to their entire scientific orientation, here they must think quite differently about their own basic beliefs. As a result when something appears which challenges their own basic beliefs, they revert to their comfortable abstract criticism. So we discover already at the start of the Geyer lectures a quote by the topmost Medicinal Council psychiatrist Kolb, director of the mental hospital and nursing institution in Erlangen, but also a person who should be able to greet with inner satisfaction and joy anything available in this area where spiritual science can fruitfully bring clarification into the psychological areas and is fruitfully elucidated.

Spiritual science goes along a healthy path while the psychiatrist follows it in a morbid way. Psychiatry can only become healthy if it is enlightened in all areas, in all its details if it is based in the healthy manner of anthroposophical spiritual science. Through this the psychiatrist should rise up, letting his psychiatry be permeated by spiritual science; because this psychiatry has basically become nothing other than psycho-pathology. This is a terrible thing at the present—this psychiatry. What does the psychiatrist do? He doesn't sense how the rays of light which can come to him through anthroposophical spiritual science can clarify psychiatry. Instead, he positions spiritual science as he does psychiatry at present that means, he uses the same measure for both. Even if he means well by doing so it becomes something extraordinarily interesting because we can compare it to looking at our faces in a garden mirror ball—if you have a pretty face you will still see the beauty, but it is broken up in squares. Naturally spiritual science will thus appear checkered if it is opposed in full force even by someone with good intentions. It is always interesting to read a bit of what Dr Kolb, the principal medical psychiatrist, always meaning well, has to say:

“The famous Anthroposophist Rudolf Steiner I see ...” excuse me, I must read this—“a genial but extraordinarily imbalanced personality with some understandable striking traits according to psychiatric knowledge. The principal preacher Geyer from Nurnberg appears to base his teachings on Steiner. I have twice heard a public lecture like this from many highly respected clergy. The lecture as a piece of art, was charming. I would consider it an atrocity to pick this blue flower of poetry, which was served so gracefully, and the blue haze”—the blue appears to be less critical than the haze—“in which he brings us closer to Steiner's painted age clouded by critical colour. Now as psychiatrist I must say: the `clairvoyance' of Steiner is nothing other than ordinary thinking which is influenced by a kind of self-hypnosis when a genial and what I would like to accept as...”—after this it becomes quite different!—“an ethically high-standing personality with glowing scientific and general education, highly informed about the present religious-philosophic teachings, as Steiner is, to some extent see into your brain and offer the content of the brain as `Anthroposophy,' yet amongst a multitude of fantastic traits much which is good, noble and morally high standing, perhaps isolated valuable scientific thoughts can be found.”

Now I ask you, just listen to this: ordinary thinking, influenced by Anthroposophy, sees into the brain and what is seen in the brain, is presented as Anthroposophy! Please, take this genial quote from this psychiatrist: therefore everything perceived by looking into the brain is also a bit influenced by auto suggestions!

“When however his teaching up to now are thrown to be people from the pulpit, then fewer genial people, without previous training, will preach about the marvelling products of his `clairvoyance.'”

They have actually done quite well, these untrained people! It is in fact as if this psychiatrist, whose anthroposophical thoughts are influenced by auto-hypnosis which he sees in the brain, actually lives completely outside the actual world.

“As occultism is similar to communism with a fatal attraction on the mentally weak, on immature youth, the prematurely old aged, on dreamers, on hysterics, above all on psychopaths, the insecure, the sick liars and swindlers, so we will experience that demoralized through war, death and misery and worry about the future we have become susceptible for the rise of `Prophets' similar to those historical deeds of the Munster Anabaptists we read with horror. The Catholic church is greatly merited by rejecting Steiner with complete lucidity and sharpness.” This `lucidity and sharpness' you read near a living person here!—“and I would like as Protestant to ask every single spiritual Protestant heartily, to test the danger of the demise of our church into a dreary and dangerous sect before it becomes a dangerous temptation of ideally orientated Christians with pathological traits strongly recommending Steiner's teachings.”

This lesson was received by the principal preacher Geyer from the topmost Medicinal Council psychiatrist Dr Gustav Kolb, director of the mental hospital and nursing institution in Erlangen.

You see how the state of mind of a person is constituted who has completely accepted the thinking habits of the modern scientific spirit. Please, just consider for a bit, just for my sake meditate over what appears when a person, instead of directing his gaze to the outer world, directs himself through Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition and brings sharply into focus what is in my `occult science,' letting this gaze turn inward and depict the human brain, as if influenced by auto hypnosis. Isn't it true that what the psychiatrist is describing is madness! This depiction actually rises from a psychiatric base! Yet one must say that such a man as Gustav Kolb is well meaning and discovers that the blue haze should not be dissected by other critical colours; because he finds it barbaric to oppose the blue flower introduced by the priest Geyer. So from the one side he is even benevolent but he is really a typical representative of modern science.

This is the situation which can definitely be hoped for and expected from by modern science towards anthroposophically orientated science. Therefore it must always be mentioned that active, spiritual science orientated collaborators are needed, in every shop, found on every corner, who are revealed in this way and then drawn into the right light in which they are moved when there is a reference to, first of all, present day science being unable to be different from what it is, and secondly: brain instead of Anthroposophy.

Really, we must free ourselves from preconceived ideas in order to make it possible today, to convince the occasional person permeated by these modern scientific habits, to change. The joy several of our short minded followers often have that the occasional person can be converted, is a misplaced joy. It is concerned with unprejudiced humanity being penetrated by what anthroposophic spiritual science offers and then grimly facing the characteristics of modern science where it turns into nonsense, even when well meant. We are confronted today with immense seriousness. Therefore it must ever and again be stressed that at least among us many who sense this earnestness must rise instead of merely sitting and listening for a bit with the pleasure of hearing anthroposophic truths, but should rather want to permeate anthroposophic orientated spiritual science into every part of active life and also have the courage and energy to step forward where it is needed. I draw your attention repeatedly to what opposes spiritual science, with all the possible grotesque, ridiculous, deceitful and good-natured impotent forms it assumes. The battle which is fought against this, is even more sparse. It has to be done for the salvation of the further evolution of humanity. Healing must come through the modern spirit of science—as you know, where it is entitled, it is also appreciated by spiritual science—because it wants to set itself up in those areas of which it understands nothing, making it sick.

Also known as: The Ego as Experience of Consciousness, lecture 4 of 5, or Pythagoras, Galileo and Goethe. Lecture 10 of 11 from the lecture series: Human Evolution, Cosmic Soul, Cosmic Spirit.

The views which have to be developed in anthroposophical Spiritual Science in order to comprehend man and the world are more easily understood if we study the changes that have taken place in the mental outlook of man through the centuries. If we tell people to-day that in order really to know something about the nature of man, quite a different outlook is necessary from that to which they are accustomed, their first reaction will be one of astonishment and, for the moment, the shock will make them put aside all such knowledge. They feel that one thing at least remains constant, namely, man's spiritual or mental attitude to the things of the world. This is very evident in the outlook of many teachers of history at the present time. They declare that, so far as his mental attitude is concerned, man has not fundamentally changed throughout history and that if this were otherwise there could really be no history at all. They argue that in order to write history it is essential to take the present mental attitude as the starting-point; if one were obliged to look back to an age when human beings were quite differently constituted in their life of soul, it would be impossible to understand them. One would not understand how they spoke or what they did. Historical thought, therefore, could not comprise any such period. From this the modern historian infers that human beings must always have possessed fundamentally the same frame of mind, the same mental outlook as they possess to-day.—Otherwise there could be no history.

This is obviously a very convenient point of view. For if in the course of historic evolution man's life of soul has changed, we must make our ideas plastic and form quite a different conception of former epochs of history from that to which we are accustomed to-day.

There is a very significant example of a man who found it inwardly and spiritually impossible to share in the mental attitude of his contemporaries and who was forced to make such a change in his whole outlook. This significant example—and I mention his name to-day merely by way of example—is Goethe.

As a young man Goethe necessarily grew up in the outlook of his contemporaries and in the way in which they regarded the world and the affairs of human beings. But he really did not feel at home in this world of thought. There was something turbulent about the young Goethe, but it was a turbulence of a special kind. We need only look at the poems he composed in his youth and we shall find that there was always a kind of inner opposition to what his contemporaries were thinking about the world and about life.

But at the same time there is something else in Goethe—a kind of appeal to what lives in Nature, saying something more enduring and conveying much more than the opinions of those around him could convey. Goethe appeals to the revelations of Nature rather than to the revelations of the human mind. And this was the real temper of his soul even when he was still a child, when he was studying at Leipzig, Strassburg and Frankfurt, and for the first period of his life at Weimar.

Think of him as a child with all the religious convictions of his contemporaries around him. He himself relates—and I have often drawn attention to this beautiful episode in Goethe's early life—how as a boy of seven he built an altar by taking a music-stand and laying upon it specimens of minerals from his father's collection; how he placed a taper on the top, lighting it by using a burning-glass to catch the rays of the sun, in order, as he says later—for at seven years he would not, of course, have spoken in this way—to bring an offering to the great God of Nature.

We see him growing beyond what those around him have to say, coming into a closer union with Nature, in whose arms he first of all seeks refuge. Read the works written by Goethe in his youth and you will find that they reveal just this attitude of mind. Then a great longing to go to Italy seizes him and his whole outlook changes in a most remarkable way.

We shall never understand Goethe unless we bear in mind the overwhelming change that came upon him in Italy. In letters to friends at Weimar he speaks of the works of art which conjure up before his soul the whole way in which the Greeks worked. He says: “I suspect that the Greeks proceeded according to those laws by which Nature herself proceeds, and of which I am on the track.”—At last Goethe is satisfied with an environment, an artistic environment enfilled with ideas much closer to Nature than those around him in his youth. And we see how in the course of his Italian journey the idea of metamorphosis arises from this mood of soul, how in Italy Goethe begins to see the transformation of leaf into petal in such a way that the thought of metamorphosis in the whole of Nature flashes up within him.

It is only now that Goethe finds a world in which his soul really feels at home. And, if we study all that he produced after that time, both as a poet and a scientist, it is borne in upon us that he was now living in a world of thought not easily intelligible to his contemporaries, nor indeed to the man of to-day.

Those who embark upon a study of Goethe equipped with the modern scholarship acquired in every kind of educational institution from the Elementary School to the University, and with habitual thought and outlook, will never understand him. For an inner change of mental outlook is essential if we are to realise what Goethe really had in his mind when, in Italy, he re-wrote Iphigenia in Greek metre, after having first composed it in the mood of the Germanic North. Nor is it possible to understand Goethe's whole attitude to Faust until we realise the fundamental nature of the change that had taken place.

After he had been to Italy, Goethe really hated the first version of Faust which he had written earlier. After that journey he would never have been able to write the passage where Faust turns away from the

... heavenly forces rising and descending,
Their golden urns reciprocally lending,

where he turns his back upon the macrocosm, crying: “Thou, Spirit of the Earth art nearer to me.” After the year 1790 Goethe would never have written such words. After 1790, when he set to work again upon his drama, the Spirit of the Earth is no longer ‘nearer’ to him; he then describes the macrocosm, in the Prologue in Heaven, turning in the very direction from which, in his younger days he had turned away. When he speaks in suitable language of heavenly forces ascending and descending with their golden urns, he does not inwardly say: “Thou Spirit of the Earth art nearer,” but he says: Not until I rise above the earthly to the heavenly, not until I cease to cleave to the Spirit of the Earth can I understand Man.—And many other passages can be read in the same sense. Take, for instance, that wonderful treatise written in the year 1790, on the Metamorphosis of the Plants (Versuch, die Metamorphose der Pflanzen zu erkennen). We shall have to admit that before his journey to Italy Goethe could never have had at his command a language which seems to converse with the very growth and unfolding life of the plants. And this is an eloquent indication of the place of Goethe's soul in the whole sweep of evolution. Goethe felt a stranger to the thought of his time the moment he was obliged inwardly to ‘digest’ the result of contemporary scientific education. He was always striving for a different kind of thinking, a different way of approaching the world, and he found it when he felt that he had brought to life within him the attitude of the Greeks to Nature, to the World, to Man.

The modern physicist rejects Goethe because he lives in the very world which was so alien to Goethe in his youth. But, when all is said and done, it is more honest to reject than to express hollow agreement. Goethe could never fully find his way into the view of the world which had grown up since the fifteenth century. In his youth he was opposed to it, and after his Italian journey he let it pass, because he had gained something else from his intimacy with Greek culture.

What, then, is it that has permeated man's conception of the world and his view of life since the fifteenth century? It is, in reality, the thought of Galileo. This kind of thought tries to make the world and the things of the world comprehensible through measure, number and weight. And it simply was not in Goethe to build up a conception of the world based upon the principles of measure, number and weight.

That, however, is only one side of the picture. There is a certain correlative to what arises in man when he views the world according to measure, number and weight. It is the abstract concept—mere intellectualism. The whole process is quite evident: The application of the principles of measure, number and weight in the study of external Nature since about the middle of the fifteenth century runs parallel with the development of intellectualism—the bent towards abstract thinking, the tendency of thought to work chiefly in the element of reason. It is really only since the fifteenth century that our thinking has been so influenced by our partiality for mathematics, for geometry, for mechanics.

Goethe did not feel at home either with the principles of measure, number and weight as applied to the world, or with purely intellectualistic thought.

The world towards which he turned knew little, fundamentally speaking, of measure, number and weight. Students of Pythagorean thought will easily be misled into the belief that the world was viewed then just as we view it to-day. But the characteristic difference is that in Pythagorean thought, measure, number and weight are used as pictures—pictures which are applied to the cosmos and in close relation always with the being of man. They are not yet separated from man. And this very fact indicates that their application in Pythagorean thought was not at all the same as in the kind of thought that has developed since the middle of the fifteenth century. Anyone who really studies the writings of a man like John Scotus Erigena in the ninth century will find no trace of similarity with our method of constructing a world out of chemical and physical phenomena and theorising about the beginning and ending of the world on the basis of what we have learnt by measuring, counting and weighing. In the thought of John Scotus Erigena, the outer world is not so widely separate from man, nor man from the outer world. Man lives in closer union with the outer world and is less bent upon the search for objectivity than he is to-day. We can see quite clearly how all that unfolded in Greek culture since the age of Pythagoras manifested in later centuries and above all we can see it in a man like John Scotus Erigena. During this era the human soul lived in a world of absolutely different conceptions, and it was precisely for these conceptions that Goethe was driven to seek by a fundamental urge connected with the deeper foundations of his life of Soul.

We can have no clear idea of what this really means unless we consider another historical fact to which little attention is paid to-day. In my book Ratsel der Philosophie I have spoken of this historical fact in one setting and will approach it to-day from a different angle.

We men of modern times must learn to make a clear distinction between concept and word. Not to make this distinction between what lives in abstract reason and what lives in the word can only pervert our clarity of consciousness. Abstract reason is, after all, a universal principle, universal and human. The word lives in the several national tongues. It is not difficult to distinguish there between what lives in the idea or concept, and in the word.

We shall not succeed in understanding such historical records of Greek culture as still remain extant, if we imagine that the Greeks made the same distinction as we make between the concept and the word. The Greeks made no sharp distinction between concept or idea, and word. When they were speaking it seemed to them that the idea lived upon the wings of the words. They believed that the concept was carried into the word itself. And their thinking was not abstract and intellectualistic as our thinking is to-day. Something like the sound of the word—although it was inaudible—passed through their souls, sounding inaudibly within them. The word—not by any means the abstract concept—was imbued with life. Everything was different in an age when it would have been considered altogether unnatural to educate the minds of the young as we educate them to-day. It is characteristic of our civilisation—although we seldom give any thought to the matter—that a large majority of our boys and girls between the ages of ten and eighteen are engaged in absorbing Latin and Greek—dead languages. Can you imagine a young Greek being expected to learn the Egyptian or Chaldean languages in the same way? Such a thing is absolutely unthinkable! The Greek not only lived in his speech with his thinking, but to him speaking was thinking. Thinking was incarnate in speech itself. This may be said by some to have been a limitation, but it is a fact nevertheless. And a true understanding of the legacy that has come to us from Greece can only consist in a realisation of this intimate union between the concept or idea, and the word. The word lived in the soul of the Greek as an inward, inaudible sound.

When the human soul is constituted in this way, it is quite impossible to observe the world after the manner of Galileo, that is to say, in terms of measure, number and weight. Measure, number and weight simply are not there, they do not enter into the picture. As an external symptom only, it is significant that the physics, for example, taught to nearly every child to-day would have been regarded as miracle by the Greeks. Many of the experiments we explain to-day in terms of measure, number and weight would have been looked upon as pure magic in those days. Any history of physics tells us as much. The Greek did not enter into what we call ‘inorganic Nature’ in the way we do to-day. The very nature of his soul made this impossible because he did not pass on to abstract thoughts as we have done ever since the time of Galileo.

To live in the word as the Greeks lived in the word meant that instead of making calculations based on the results of experiments, they observed the changes and transformations taking place unceasingly in the life of Nature. Their attention was turned not to the world of minerals but chiefly to the world of the plants. Just as there is a certain affinity between abstract thought and the comprehension of the mineral world, so there is an affinity between the Greek attitude to the word and the comprehension of growth, of life, of constant change in living beings. When we conceive of a beginning and an ending of a mineral Earth to-day and build up our hypotheses, these hypotheses are an image of what we have measured, counted, weighed. We evolve a Kant-Laplace theory, or we conceive of the entropy of the Earth. All these things are abstractions, derived from what we have measured, counted and weighed.

And now, by way of contrast, look at the Greek cosmogonies. One feels that the ideas here are nourished and fed by the very way in which the vegetation shoots forth in spring, by the way it dies in autumn—growing up and then vanishing. Just as we construct a world-system out of our concepts and observations of the material world, so did the Greeks construct a world-system from observation of all that is revealed in vegetation. In short, it was from the world of the living that their myths and their cosmogonies originated.

The arrogant scientist of modern times will say: ‘Yes, but that was all childish. We are fortunate in having got beyond it. We have made such splendid progress.’ And he will look upon all that can be obtained by measuring, counting and weighing as something absolute. But those who are less prejudiced will say: Our way of viewing the world has developed out of the Greek way of looking at the world. The Greeks formed a picture of the world by contemplating the realm of the living. We have intellectualism—which is also a factor in the education of the human race—but out of our way of viewing the world, based as it is on the principles of measure, number and weight, another must unfold.

When Schiller had conquered his former dislike of Goethe and had become closely acquainted with him, he wrote a characteristic and significant letter in which he said: Had you been born as a Greek, or even only as an Italian, the world for which you are really seeking would have been about you from early youth.—I am not quoting literally but only according to the sense. Schiller perceived how strongly Goethe's soul longed for Greece. Goethe himself is an example of the change that can be wrought in a mind by entering into the spirit of Greece with understanding. Goethe's attitude to the thought of Greece was quite different from his attitude to the period since the fifteenth century, and this is the point in which we are more interested to-day. In our age, men live in the intellect and, their knowledge of the world is derived, for the most part, from the intellect; the phenomena of the world are measured, numbered and weighed. But this age of ours was preceded by another, when the intellect was far less such that the word was alive within him; he heard the word inwardly as ‘soundless’ tone. Just as an idea or a concept arises within our minds to-day, so, in those times, the word lived as inward sound. And because the content of the soul was itself living, men were able to understand the living world outside.

We can, however, go still further back than this. Spiritual Science must come to our aid here, for ordinary history can tell us nothing. Any history written with psychological insight will bring home to our minds the radical difference between the mental attitude of the Greeks and our own, the nature of the human soul before, say, the eighth century B.C. outer history can tell us nothing. Such documents as exist are very scanty and are not really understood. Among these documents we have Iliad and the Odyssey but they, as a rule, are not considered from this point of view. In still earlier times the life of soul was of a nature of which certain men, here and there, have had some inkling. Herder was one who expressed his views on the subject very forcibly but he did not ever work them out scientifically. In short, the period when men lived in the word was preceded by another, when they lived in a world of pictures. In what sense can speech, for example, and the inner activity of soul revealed in speech, be said to live in a world of pictures? Man lives in pictures when the main factor is not so much the content of the sound, or the nature of the sound, but the rhythm, the shaping of the sound—in short the poetic element which we to-day regard as something quite independent of speech itself. The poet of modern times has to give language artistic form before true poetry can come into being. But there was an age in the remote past when it was perfectly natural to make speech poetic, when speech and the evolving of theory were not so widely separated as they were later on, and when a short syllable following a long, two short syllables following a long, or series of short syllables repeated one after the other, really meant something. World-mysteries were revealed in this poetic form of speech, mysteries which cannot be revealed in the same fulness when the content of the sound is the most important factor.

Even to-day there are still a few who feel that speech has proceeded from this origin and it is worthy of note that in spite of all the confusing elements born of modern scholarship such men have divined the existence of something which I am trying to explain to you in the light of Spiritual Science. Benedetto Croce was one who spoke in a most charming way of this poetic, artistic element of speech in pre-historic or practically pre-historic times, before speech assumed the character of prose.

Three epochs, therefore, stand out before us.—The epoch beginning with Galileo, in the fifteenth century is an age of inner intellectual activity and the world outside is viewed in terms of measure, number and weight. The second and earlier epoch is that for which Goethe longed and to which his whole inner life was directed, after his Italian journey. This was the age when word and concept were still one, when instead of intellectuality man unfolded an inwardly quickened life of soul, and in the outer world observed, all that lives in constant metamorphosis and change. And we also look further back to a third epoch when the soul of man lived in an element by which the sounds of speech themselves were formed and moulded. But a faculty of soul functioning with quickened instinct in a realm lying behind the sounds of speech perceives something else in the outer world. As I have already said, history can tell us little of these things and the historian can only surmise. But anthroposophical Spiritual Science can understand thoroughly what is meant, namely, the Imaginative element of speech, the instinctively Imaginative element which precedes the word. And when he possesses this faculty of instinctive Imagination man can perceive in outer Nature something higher than he can perceive through the medium of word or idea.

We know that even to-day, when it has become thoroughly decadent, oriental civilisation points to former conditions of life in its heyday. We realise this when, for example, we study the Vedas or the Vedanta philosophy. Moreover we know that this age, too, was preceded by others still more ancient. The soul of the oriental is still pervaded by something like an ethereal element, an element that is quite foreign to the Western mind and which, as soon as we attempt to express it in a word, is no longer quite the same. Something has remained which our word ‘compassion’ (Mitleid) can only very poorly express, however deeply Schopenhauer may have felt about it. This compassion, this love for and in all beings—in the form in which it still exists in the East—points to a past age when it was an experience of infinitely greater intensity, when it signified a pouring of the soul's life into the life of feeling of other sentient beings. There is every justification for saying that the oriental word for ‘compassion’ signifies a fundamental element in the life of soul as it was in the remote past, an element which expresses itself in an inward sharing in the experiences of another, having a life of its own, manifesting not only in a process of metamorphosis as in the plant, not only in a process of coming-into-being and passing away, but as an actual experience in the soul.

This inward sharing in the experiences of another is only possible when man rises beyond the idea, beyond the sound as such, beyond the meaning of the word, to the world where speech itself is shaped and moulded by Imagination. Man can have a living experience of the plant-world around him when the word is as full of life as it was among the Greeks. He shares in the life of feeling of other beings when he experiences not only the world of the living but the sentient life of other beings and when he is inwardly sensitive not only to speech but to the artistic element at work in the shaping of speech.

That is why it is so wonderful to find reference in certain mythological poems to this primeval phenomenon in the life of the soul. It is related in connection with Siegfried, for example, that there was a moment when he understood the voice of the birds—who do not utter words but only bring forth a consequence of sound. That which in the song of birds ripples along the surface like the bubbling of a spring of inner life, is also present in everything that has life. But it is precisely this element which imprisons the living in an interior chamber of the soul and in which we cannot share when we are merely listening to a word that is uttered. For when we listen to words, we are hearing merely what the head of another being is experiencing. But when we inwardly grasp what it is that flows on from syllable to syllable, from word to word, from sentence to sentence in the imaginative shaping of speech, we grasp that which actually lives in the heart and mind of another. As we listen to the words uttered by another human being, we can form an opinion about his capabilities and faculties; but if our ears are sensitive to the sound of his words, to the rhythm of his words, to the moulding of his words, then we are hearing an expression of his whole being. And in the same way, when we rise to a sphere where we understand the process wherein sound itself is moulded and shaped—although it is a process empty alike of concept and of word, unheard and simply experienced inwardly—we experience that from which feeling itself arises. When we thus begin to realise the nature of an entirely different life of soul in an age when audible speech was accompanied by living experience of rhythm, measure and melody, we are led to an epoch more ancient than that of Greece. It was an epoch when the mind of man was not only capable of grasping the process of metamorphosis in the world of the living, but of experiencing the sentient life connected with the animal creation and of beholding in direct vision the world of sentient being.

If we study the civilised people in the age which stretches back from the eighth century B.C. to about the beginning of the third millennium B.C., we find a life of soul filled with Imaginative instinct, prone by its very nature to experience the sentient life of all beings.

Modern scholarship, with its limited outlook, tells us that the ancients were wont to personify the phenomena of Nature. In other words, a highly intellectual element is attributed to the human soul in olden times and, the comparison often drawn is that a child who knocks himself against the corner of a table will strike the table because he personifies it, thinks of it as being alive.

Those who imagine that a child personifies the table as a living being which he then strikes, have never really gazed into the soul of a child. For a child sees the table just exactly as we see it, but he does not yet distinguish between the table and a living thing. Nor did the ancients personify the phenomena of Nature in this sense; they lived in the element by which speech is shaped and moulded and were thus able to experience the sentient life of other beings.

This, then, has been the way in which the souls of men have developed during the period beginning about the third millennium B.C. and lasting until our own time: from super-speech, through speech, to the age of intellectuality; from the period of experience of the life of feeling in other beings, through the age of sharing in the processes of growth and ‘becoming’ in the outer world, to the time when attention is concentrated on the principles of measure, number and weight. Only when we picture this process quite clearly shall we be able to realise that in order to penetrate into the nature of things in an age when we try to probe everything with the conscious mind, we must deliberately adjust ourselves to an entirely new way of viewing the world around us. Those who imagine that the constitution of the human soul has never fundamentally changed but has remained constant through the ages, regard it as something absolute, and think that man would lose himself irretrievably if the essential nature of his soul were in any way to undergo change. But those who perceive that changes in the constitution of the soul belong to the natural course of evolution will the more easily realise that it is necessary for us to transform our attitude of soul if we are to penetrate into the nature of things, into the being of man and into the nature of the relation of man to the world in a way fitted to the age in which we are living.