The Rudolf Steiner Archive

I have spoken of Franz Brentano at some length because the fact is immediately apparent that the first work of this important philosopher, published by his students from his estate, was a work about the life of Jesus, the teaching of Jesus. That provided the external point of contact. But I wanted something more profound with the presentation of this philosopher's life. I wanted to show, through a person who was not just a thinker, not just a scientist, but who was truly a seeker of truth as a whole human being, how a personality of this kind had to position itself in the spiritual life of the second half of the 19th century.

Franz Brentano was born in 1838, so he was a student at the very time when the scientific mentality was emerging within modern civilization. He was a student who, as you have seen, was a devout Catholic who, as a devout Catholic, held firmly to the spiritual world, but only in the way that was possible from Catholic religious practice and Catholic “theology.” This man, who had thus grown into a certain self-evident grasp of the spiritual world, of the immortality of the soul, of the existence of God and so on, did so as a scientist, and indeed as the most conscientious scientist imaginable, in the era when scientific thinking meant everything. So that, more than with any other personality, when one is familiar with Franz Brentano, one has the feeling that here is a person of deep spirituality who, however, in the face of the scientific attitude of the 19th century, did not rise to it, could not penetrate it to a real grasp of spiritual life. I do not actually know of any personality in modern times in whom the necessity for the anthroposophical world view emerges so characteristically. In the case of Franz Brentano, one would like to say: he actually only needed to take one or two steps further and he was with anthroposophy. He did not come to it because he wanted to keep to what was scientifically common practice. Franz Brentano, precisely because of what I described yesterday as the characteristic of his personality, even in his outward appearance, through the dignity of his demeanor, through the seriousness that was present in everything he uttered, already gives the impression that he could have become a kind of leading personality in the second half of the 19th century.

You may now rightly ask: But how is it that this personality has remained quite unknown in the broadest circles? Franz Brentano actually became known only to a narrow circle of students. All these students are people who received the most profound inspiration from him. This can still be seen in the work of those who are in turn the students of those students, for it is they who are actually still around today. Franz Brentano made a significant impression on a narrow circle. And most of the students in this circle are certainly so minded towards him that they perceive him as one of the most stimulating and significant people for centuries.

But the fact that Brentano has remained unknown in the widest circles is characteristic of the entire development of civilization in the 19th century. One could, of course, cite many personalities who, in one direction or another, are also representatives of intellectual life in the 19th century. But you could not find a personality as significant and as characteristic as Franz Brentano, no matter how hard you looked. Therefore, I would like to say: Franz Brentano shows that although natural science, in the form it took in the 19th century, can acquire great authority, it cannot exercise spiritual leadership within the whole of culture despite this great authority. For that, natural science must first be developed into spiritual science; then it has everything in it that can truly, together with spiritual science, assume a certain leadership in the spiritual life of humanity.

To understand this, we must today take a broader view. If we look back to the earliest times of humanity, we know that a kind of dream-like clairvoyance was present everywhere as a general human faculty. To this dream-like clairvoyance, the initiates, the initiates of the mysteries, added higher supersensible knowledge, but also knowledge about the sensory world.

If we were to go back to the very early days of human development, we would find no difference in the way the physical and the supersensible are treated. All spiritual life has proceeded from the mystery schools, which were basically churches and art institutions at the same time. But in the deepest sense, this spiritual life influenced all human life in the old days, including state and economic life. Those who were active in state life sought the advice of the mystery priests, but so did those who wanted to provide impetus in economic life. There was actually no separation between the religious and scientific elements in those ancient times. The leaders of religious life were the leaders of intellectual life in general and were also the people who set the tone in the sciences. But more and more, the development of humanity has taken shape in such a way that those currents of human life that originally formed a unity have separated. Religion has become separate from science, from art.

This happened only slowly and gradually. If we look back to Greece, we find that there was no natural science in our sense, and alongside it, for example, philosophy; rather, Greek philosophy also discussed natural science, and there was no separate natural science. But as philosophy in Greece emerged as something independent, the religious element had already separated from this philosophy. Although the mysteries were still the source of the deepest truths, in Greece, especially in later Greece, what the mysteries gave was already being criticized from the standpoint of philosophical reason. But religious revelation continued, and when the Mystery of Golgotha appeared, it was essentially religious revelation that set out to understand this mystery. Whatever understanding of theology still existed within European civilization during the first few centuries is no longer properly understood by people today; they refer to it disparagingly as 'gnosis' and the like. But there was a great deal of spiritual understanding in this gnosis, and there was a clear awareness that One must understand spiritual matters in the same way as one understands today, for example, gravity or the phenomena of light or anything else in the physical sense. They did not have the awareness that there is a science separate from religious life. Even on Christian soil, the first church fathers, the first great teachers of Christianity, were absolutely convinced that they were treating knowledge as something unified. Of course, the Greek separation of religious life was already there, but they included both the contemplation of the religious and the rational contemplation of the merely physical in the treatment of all spiritual matters. It was only in the Middle Ages that this changed. In the Middle Ages, scholasticism arose, which now made a strict separation - as I already pointed out yesterday - between human science and what is actual knowledge of the spiritual. This could not be attained through the application of independent human powers of knowledge; it could only be attained through revelation, through the acceptance of revelations. And more and more it had come to be that one said: Man cannot penetrate the highest truths through his own powers of knowledge; he must accept them as they are delivered by the church as revelation. Human science can only spread over what the senses give and draw some conclusions from what the senses give as truths, as I said yesterday.

Thus, a strict distinction was made between a science that spread over the sensory world and that which was the content of revelation. Now, for the development of modern humanity, the last three to five centuries have become extraordinarily significant in many respects. If you had told a person from those older times, when religion and science were one, that religion was not based on human knowledge, he would have considered it nonsense; for all religions originally came from human knowledge. Only it was said: If man confines himself to his consciousness, as it is given to him for everyday life, then he does not attain to the highest truths; this consciousness must first be raised to a higher level. From the old point of view, it was said just as one is forced to say today, for example, according to what I have presented in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds” and in the second part of my “Occult Science in Outline”: that man must ascend through special treatment of his soul abilities in order to gain higher knowledge. This was also said in ancient times. People were aware that with ordinary consciousness one can only recognize what is spread around man; but one can further develop this consciousness and thus arrive at supersensible truths. Thus in those ancient times one would not have spoken of a revelation reaching man somewhere without his own activity. That would have been felt to be nonsense. And so all the dogmas contained in the various church teachings originally come from such initiation truths. Today, people easily say: dogmas such as the Trinity or the Incarnation must have been revealed, they cannot be approached through human cognitive abilities. But originally they did arise out of human cognitive abilities.

And in the Middle Ages, people had progressed to a greater use of their intellect. This is characteristic, for example, of scholasticism, in that the intellect was used in a grand sense, but only applied to the sensual world, and that at this stage of human development one no longer felt capable of developing higher powers of cognition, at least not in the circles in which the old dogmas had been handed down as doctrines of revelation. Then they refused to pave the way for man to the supersensible world through higher powers of knowledge. So they took over what had been achieved in ancient times through real human knowledge, through tradition, through historical tradition, and said that one should not examine it with human science.

People gradually came to accept this attitude towards knowledge. They gradually got used to calling belief that which was once knowledge, but which they no longer dared to attain; and they only called knowledge that which is actually gained through human cognitive abilities for the sensual world. This doctrine had become more and more pronounced, especially within Catholicism. But as I already told you yesterday: basically, all modern scientific attitudes are also nothing more than a child of this scholasticism. People just stopped at saying that the human intellect could only gain knowledge about nature, and did not care about the supersensible knowledge. They said that man could not gain this through his abilities. But then it was left to faith to accept the old knowledge as handed-down dogmas or not.

After the 18th century had already proclaimed mere sensual knowledge and what can be gained from it through rational conclusions, the tendency emerged in the 19th century in particular to only accept as science what can be gained in this way by applying human abilities to the sensual world. And in this respect, the 19th century has achieved an enormous amount, and great things are still being achieved in the field of scientific research through the application of scientific methods.

I would like to say that the last public attempt to ascend into the spiritual world was made at the turn of the 18th to the 19th century by the movement known as German idealism. This German idealism was preceded by a philosopher like Cart, who now also wanted to express the separation between knowledge and belief philosophically. Then came those energetic thinkers, Fichte, Schelling, Flegel, and these stand there, at the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th century, like last mighty pillars, because they wanted to go further with the human capacity for knowledge than mere sensory knowledge and what can be deduced from it.

Fichte, Schelling and Hegel are very different from one another. Fichte started from the human ego, developed an enormous power precisely in grasping the human ego, and sought to conquer the world cognitively from the human ego. Schelling developed a kind of imaginative construction of a world view. This impetus in the imaginative construction of thoughts even brought him close to an understanding of the mysteries. Hegel believed in the thought itself, and he believed that in the thought that man can grasp, the eternal lives directly. It is a beautiful thought when Hegel said that he wanted to recognize the spirit and conquer it from the point of view of thought. But only those who grasp Hegel's general striving, this striving towards the spirit, can really taste him. For when one reads Hegel — most people soon stop reading, after all — he is, despite his belief in the spirituality of thought, a terribly abstract thinker when he expounds his ideas. And it is true that, although the impulse that lived in Hegel in terms of the spirit was an immensely strong one, Hegel gave mankind nothing but an inventory of abstract concepts.

Why was that so? It is indeed a tremendous tragedy that these robust, powerful thinkers, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, did not actually penetrate to spirituality.

This is because, in the general civilization of that time, humanity was not yet mature enough to really open the gates to the spiritual world. Fichte, Schelling and Hegel only got as far as thought. But what is the thought that lives in man in ordinary consciousness?

Do you remember what I said some time ago? When we follow a person's life from birth to death, we have the person before us as a living being; soul and spirit warm and illuminate what stands before us as a physical being. When the person has died for the physical world, then we have the corpse in the physical world. We bury or cremate this corpse. Just think what a tremendous difference there is for an unprejudiced human observer of life between a fully living human being and a corpse. If you can only grasp this difference with your heart, then you will be able to understand what the spiritual scientist has to say about another phase of life, when man is considered between death and a new birth, as he is as a soul-spiritual being in a spiritual world, how he develops there, how he, while growing old here on earth, becomes younger and younger in the spiritual world until the moment when he finds his way down to a physical embodiment. What lives in man can be grasped just as much with the higher spiritual powers as one can grasp what lives in a physical human being. And then one can ask oneself: What remains of it when the human being has been born, what presented itself to our view in the spiritual world above, before the soul-spiritual descended? What remains in the human being, perceptibly, are his thoughts. But these thoughts, which the human being then carries within himself here on earth through the physical body, are the corpse of the thoughts that belong to the human being when he lives between death and a new birth in the spiritual and soul world. The abstract thoughts we have here are quite a corpse compared to the living being that is in man between death and a new birth, just as the corpse is in the physical compared to the living person before he has died for the physical world.

Those who do not want to take the step of enlivening abstract thoughts allow nothing more to live in them than the corpse of what was in them before they descended to earth. And only this corpse of thoughts lived in Fichte, Schelling and Hegel, however magnificent these thoughts are. One would like to say: In ancient times, when religion, science and art were still one, something of the life that belongs to man in the spiritual world still lived on in earthly thoughts. Even in Plaio, one can perceive in the sweep of his ideas how something supermundane lived on in him. This is becoming less and less. People keep the knowledge of the supermundane as revelation. But otherwise the human being would not have been able to become free, he would not have been able to develop freedom. The human being comes more and more to have nothing but the corpse of his prenatal inner life in his thinking. And just as one sometimes finds in certain people, when they have died, an enormous freshness in the corpse for a few days, so it was with the corpse-thoughts of Fichte, Schelling and Hegel: they were fresh, but they were nevertheless just those corpses of the supersensible, of which a real spiritual science must speak.

But I ask you now: Do you believe that we could ever encounter a human corpse in the world if there were no living people? Anyone who encounters a human corpse knows that this corpse was once alive. And so someone who really looks at our thinking, our abstract, our dead, our corpse thinking, will come to the conclusion that this too once lived, namely before man descended into a physical body.

But this realization had also been lost to man, and so people were experiencing dead thinking, and they revered everything that came to them from living thinking as a revelation, if they still placed any value on it at all. This was particularly confirmed by the great advances in natural science that came in the period I have already mentioned, when Franz Brentano was young.

To the many peculiarities of Franz Brentano, I must add two more today. Yesterday I wanted to characterize the personality more, today I want to point out the development over time. Therefore, today's consideration must be somewhat more general.

In addition to all the qualities that I mentioned yesterday about this Franz Brentano, who grew out of Catholicism but then became a general philosopher, he had an immense antipathy towards Fichte, Schelling and Hegel. He did not rail against them as Schopenhauer did, because he had a better education; but he did use harsh words, only more delicately expressed, not in the same truly abominable tone as Schopenhauer's. But one must realize that a man who grows out of Catholicism into a new outlook cannot, after all, have any other attitude toward Fichte, Schelling and Hegel than Franz Brentano had. When one has outgrown scholasticism, one wants to apply to the sense world what for Hegel, for example, is the highest human power of cognition, thinking, and in the sense world, thinking is only an auxiliary means.

Just think: with this thinking-corpse one approaches the sense world, one grasps inanimate nature first. You cannot grasp living nature with this thinking anyway. This thinking corpse is just right for inanimate nature. But Hegel wanted to embrace the whole world with all its secrets with this thinking corpse. Therefore, you will not find any teaching about immortality or God in Hegel, but what you do find will seem quite strange to you.

Hegel divides his system into three parts:

logic, natural philosophy, and the doctrine of the spirit = art, religion, science

Logic is an inventory of all the concepts that man can develop, but only of those concepts that are abstract. This logic begins with being, goes to nothingness, to becoming. I know that if I were to give you the whole list, you would go crazy because you would not find anything in all these things that you are actually looking for. And yet Hegel says: That which emerges again in man when he develops being, nothingness, becoming, existence and so on as abstract concepts, that is God before the creation of the world.

Take Hegel's logic, it is full of abstract concepts from beginning to end, because the last concept is that of purpose. You can't do much with that either. There is nothing at all about any kind of soul immortality, about a God in the sense that you recognize it as justified, but rather an inventory of nothing but abstract concepts. But now imagine these abstract concepts as existing before there is nature, before there were people, and so on. This is God before the creation of the world, says Hegel. Logic is God before the creation of the world. And this logic then created nature and came to self-awareness in nature.

So first there is logic, which, according to Hegel, is the god before the creation of the world. Then it passes into its otherness and comes to itself, to its self-awareness; it becomes the human spirit. And the whole system then concludes with art, religion and science as the highest. These are the three highest expressions of the spirit. So in religion, art and science, God continues to live within the earth. Hegel registers nothing other than what is experienced on earth in everyday life. He actually only proclaims the spirit that has died, not the living spirit.

This must be rejected by those people who seek science in the modern sense, based on a scientific education. It must be rejected because, when one penetrates into nature with dead concepts, the matter does not go so that one remains with the abstractions. Even if you are so poorly educated in botany that you transform all the beautiful flowers into the number of stamens, into the description of the seed, the ovary and so on, even if you have such abstract concepts in your head, and then go out with a botany drum and bring back nothing but abstract concepts, at least the withered flowers are still there, and they are still more concrete than the most abstract concepts. And when you, as a chemist, stand in the laboratory, no matter how much you fantasize about all kinds of atomic processes and the like, you cannot help but also describe what happens in the retort when you have a certain substance inside and below it the lamp that causes this substance to evaporate, melt and so on. You still have to describe something that is a thing. And finally, when physicists in optics also draw for you how light rays refract and describe everything that light rays still do according to the physicists, you will still be reminded of colors again and again when that beautiful drawing is made that shows how light rays pass through a prism, are deflected in different ways. And even if all color has long since evaporated in the physical explanation of color, you will still be reminded of the colors. But if you want to grasp the spiritual with a completely abstract system of concepts and with completely abstract logic, then you have no choice but to use abstract logic. A person like Franz Brentano could not accept this as a real description of the spirit, nor could the other scholastics, because at least they still have tradition as revelation. Therefore, as a student in the mid-19th century, Brentano was faced with a truly irrepressible thirst for truth and knowledge, with an inner scientific conscientiousness that was unparalleled in his time, so that he could not receive anything from those who were still the last great philosophers of modern civilization. He could only accept the strict method of natural science. In his heart he carried what Catholicism with its theology had given him. But he could not bring all this together into a new spiritual understanding.

But what is particularly appealing is how infinitely truthful this human being was. Because – and this brings me to the other thing I mentioned – when we look at the human being as he is born into the physical world, as he makes his first fumbling movements as a child, as we first fumbling movements as a child, we see in an unskillful way the unfolding of what was tremendously wise before it descended into the physical world. If we understand spiritual science correctly, we say to ourselves: We see how the childlike head organism is born. In it we have an image of the cosmos. Only at the base of the skull do the earthly forces, as it were, brace themselves. If the base of the skull were rounded, as the top of the head is rounded, the head would truly be a reflection of the cosmos. This is something that human beings bring with them. We can certainly regard the head, when we consider it as a physical body, as a reflection of the cosmos. This is truly the case.

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I was criticized for mentioning an important fact in public, but without mentioning such facts, one cannot actually get to the world's interrelations: I have publicly stated that there is a certain arrangement of furrows in the human brain, certain centers are and so on. Even in these smallest details, this human brain is a reflection of the starry sky at the time when the person is born. In the head we see an image of the cosmos, which we also see externally with our senses, even though most people do not perceive its spiritual aspect. In the chest organism, in what mainly underlies the rhythmic system, we see how the roundness of the cosmos has already been somewhat overcome by adapting to the earth. But if you follow the chest organism with its peculiar formation of the spine with the ribs and sees how this thoracic organism is connected to the cosmos through breathing, then, even if only in a very altered form, something like an image of the cosmos can still be seen in the thoracic, in the rhythmic organism. But no longer in the metabolic-limb organism. There you cannot possibly see anything that is modeled on the cosmos. Now, the formation of the head is connected with thinking, the thoracic organism, the rhythmic organism with feeling, and the metabolic-limb organism with will.

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Why is it precisely the metabolism-limb organism, which is actually the most earthly part of the human being, that is the seat of the will? This is how it is connected: in the human head we have a very faithful image of the cosmos. The soul-spiritual has flowed into the head, into the formative forces. One could say that the human being learned from the cosmic forces before descending to earth and formed his head accordingly. He still forms the thoracic organism a little, but no longer the limb organism at all. The will is in the latter. So that when one looks at the human external organism, thinking must be assigned to the head, feeling to the middle man and willing to the metabolic-limb organism. But in what is really the lowest, the metabolism and the limbs, the spiritual also maintains itself best, so that in our thinking we have only a corpse of what we were before we descended. In our feelings we have a little more, but feeling, as you know, remains in a dream-like state, and the will, one no longer even notices with the ordinary consciousness. The will remains entirely in the unconscious, but in it there is still most of the life of what we were before we descended to earth. When we are developed as a child, most of our immortal soul is in our will. Now, most people do not have many scruples; they say: Man has the three soul powers within him, thinking, feeling and willing. You know, these three soul activities are listed as if they were present for ordinary consciousness, whereas in anthroposophy we first have to point out that actually only thinking is fully awake. Feeling is already like dreams in people, and people know nothing at all about willing. I must emphasize again and again: Even if we only want to raise an arm, the thought, “I am raising my arm,” flows into the organism and becomes will, so that the arm is actually raised. Man knows nothing of this, he sleeps through it in the waking state, just as he otherwise sleeps through things from falling asleep to waking up. So instead of saying: we have in us the waking thinking, the dreaming feeling, the sleeping willing, they say: we have thinking, feeling and willing, which are supposed to be on a par with one another.

Now imagine a person who has an infinite sense of truth and who works with modern science, that is, who only uses thinking. The modern natural scientist, whether he is using a microscope, looking at the cosmos through a telescope, or doing astrophysics with a spectral analyzer, always turns only to conscious thinking. Therefore, it became an axiom for Franz Brentano that all unconsciousness had to be rejected. He wanted to stick only to ordinary conscious thinking, and for this he did not want to develop higher cognitive abilities. What could we actually expect from such a person when he speaks of the soul, when he wants to speak as a psychologist? One might expect that he would not speak of the will at all in psychology if he sticks only to the conscious. One might expect that he would cross out the will entirely, be quite uncertain about feeling, and really treat only thinking correctly.

Other, more superficial minds have not come to this. Franz Brentano's psychology does not divide the soul faculties into thinking, feeling and willing, but into imagining, judging and into the phenomena of love and hate, that is, into the phenomena of sympathy and antipathy, that is, of feeling. You will not find any will in him at all. The right active will is absent from Brentano's psychology because he was a thoroughly honest seeker of truth, and he really had to admit: I just can't find the will.

On the other hand, there is something tremendously moving in seeing how infinitely sincere and honest this personality actually is. Will is absent from Brentano's psychology, for he separates judgment and imagination so that he now has three parts to the life of the soul; but judgment and imagination coincide in terms of the capacity of the soul, so that he actually has only two.

Now consider the consequence of what appears in Brentano. What does he have in reality i. in man? By becoming a modern natural scientist and not giving anything a value that does not present itself to conscious thinking according to the natural scientific method, he excludes volition from the human soul. And what does he thereby eliminate? Precisely that which we bring with us as living beings from our state before we descend into a physical body.

Brentano was confronted with a science that eliminated precisely the eternal in the soul for him. The other psychologists did not feel this. He felt it, and therefore there arose for him the tremendous abyss between what was once a doctrine of revelation that spoke to him of the eternal in the human soul, and what he could find alone according to his scientific method, which even cut away the volition and thus the eternal from the human soul.

Thus Brentano is a personality who is characteristic of everything that the 19th century was unable to give to humanity. The gates to the spiritual world had to be opened. And that is the reason why I have spoken to you about Franz Brentano, who died in Zurich in 1917, because in him I see the most characteristic of all those philosophers of the 19th century who already had a serious striving for truth But they were held fast by the fetters of the natural-scientific spirit, which did not want to rise to a spiritual comprehension of the world, and in this way show everywhere that the time has come when this spiritual conception is needed. What, after all, is the difference between what spiritual science in the anthroposophical sense really wants and the tragic striving of a man like Franz Brentano? That Franz Brentano, with tremendous acumen, has brought in the concepts that can be obtained from ordinary consciousness, and said: That is where you have to stop. But the knowledge is not complete; one strives in vain for real knowledge. But he was never satisfied with that; he always wanted to get out. He just could not get out of his natural science. And that remained so until his death. One might say that spiritual science had to begin where Brentano left off, had to take the step from ordinary consciousness into higher consciousness. That is why he is so extraordinarily interesting, indeed the most interesting philosopher of the second half of the 19th century, because in him the striving for truth was truly something personal. It must be said: if you want to study one symptom of what a person had to experience in the development of science and in the spiritual development of modern times, you can consider this nephew of Clemens Brentano, the philosopher Franz Brentano. He is characteristic of everything that a person has to seek and cannot find with the usual scientific method. He is characteristic of this because one must go beyond what he strove for with such an honest sense of truth. The more closely one looks at him, right down into the structures of his psychology, the more this becomes apparent. He is precisely one of those minds that show: humanity needs a spiritual life again that can intervene in everything. It cannot come from natural science. But this natural science is the fate of modern times in general, as it has become the fate of Brentano. For like the true modern Faust of the nineteenth century, Brentano sits first in Würzburg, then in Vienna, then in Florence, then in Zurich, wrestling with the greatest problems of humanity. He does not admit to himself that “we cannot know”, but he would have to if he were fully aware of his own method. He would actually have to say to himself: natural science is what prevents me from undertaking the path into the spiritual world.

But this natural science speaks a strong, authoritative language. And so it is also in public life today. Science itself cannot offer people what they need for their soul. The greatest achievements of the 19th and 20th centuries could not give people a kind of guiding spirit. And this scientific attitude is a strong obstacle due to its powerful authority, because wherever anthroposophy appears, science initially opposes it, and although science itself cannot give people anything, when it comes to anthroposophy, the question is: does science agree with it? — For even those who know little about science have the overriding feeling today that science is right, and if science says that anthroposophy is nonsense, then it must be right. As I said, people do not need to know much about science, because after all, what do the monistic speakers know about science? As a rule, they have in mind the general things that applied three decades ago! But they act as if they were speaking from the full spirit of contemporary science. That is why many people see it as an authority.

One can also see from Brentano's inner destiny the outer destiny, not the inner destiny of the anthroposophical world view, but its outer destiny.

This time I wanted to use a personal example to make it clear how what we now call anthroposophy had to grow out of the whole of spiritual life. After all, the objection is justified when it says: When such things are discussed, we are actually dealing with a narrower circle. One is considering individual scientific, philosophical or otherwise striving people who have not become known to the greater mass of humanity, and one actually then places oneself outside of what lives in the great masses of people. But you only need to look a little more impartially and you will not be able to see things in this way. One must only bear in mind that everything that lives as the content of the soul, and as the impulse for all the actions and omissions of the great masses of people, comes from the influence of certain leading personalities who may not have received any knowledge of what personalities of the kind we have been considering experience in their quiet study, as one says.

But one must bear in mind that in such personalities, time itself pulsates with their thinking and feeling, so that a larger number of people, and especially those who acquire a higher education, absorb what such personalities experience and then carry it back to the places where the leading personalities of humanity, who influence the masses, also educate themselves. So that, just by observing the experiences of people living in their quiet study, one can see what constitutes the impulses that will then live in the great masses of people at some time. We just do not usually recognize the channels through which these spiritual impulses pour into the great masses of people. And so, in the end, what lives in truth, in reality, in the culture of our time, can only be seen as we have seen it again in these days, and it is justified to say that out of the deepest spiritual experience of the nineteenth century, something like anthroposophy was bound to arise, because the spirit of the age, being what it was, actually crushed human souls, as we have just seen from the outstanding example of Franz Brentano.

And in order to generalize a little more about what I am actually trying to achieve with these observations, I would like to extend the observation to a somewhat wider circle.

We find Franz Brentano, still a devout Catholic, as a teacher of philosophy in Würzburg. After what I said yesterday and the day before, we can roughly imagine the philosophical problems that Franz Brentano, still thoroughly Catholic and with a keen intellect, presented from his lectern in Würzburg. He tried to explain everything with his keen intellect, but in the background, what he had received from Catholic theology always lived with him. Many an extraordinarily significant thought emerged from there. For example, the realization of the newer scientific theory of evolution was already alive in Franz Brentano, which is based on the fact that the human brain is not entirely dissimilar to the brain of the higher apes. This purely naturalistic theory of evolution drew the conclusion from this that there is a relationship between humans and higher mammals. Franz Brentano also accepted this assertion positively, just as he did not negate scientific knowledge in general, but accepted it positively. He said: Well, of course, natural science can show that the human brain is not very different from that of anthropoids. But if you look at the mental life of anthropoids and that of humans, you find an enormous difference. Above all, we find the difference that even the highest ape species cannot develop abstract concepts. Man can develop abstract concepts. So if, as Franz Brentano thought, the human brain is so similar to the ape brain, then it must be said that the thoughts that man develops for himself cannot come from the brain, because otherwise they would also have to come from the ape brain. We must therefore conclude that man has something that represents a special soul substance from which thoughts arise that anthropoids cannot grasp.

Thus it was precisely from the assimilation of scientific knowledge that Franz Brentano concluded the independence of the soul substance. This was still the case in the years from 1866 to 1870, when he was a teacher of philosophy in Würzburg, because in the background of what he developed philosophically was still what had remained for him as an overall view of the world from Catholic theology. However, when Franz Brentano later outgrew Catholic theology more and more and grew more and more into what was peculiar to him from the beginning, but which was initially still illuminated by Catholic theology, when he grew more and more into a merely scientific understanding of the phenomena of the soul, he lost the substance of the soul and could no longer say anything about it. His ability to perceive simply weakened when he wanted to rise from the mere socialization and separation of ideas to the problem of the inner soul life itself.

Now I have already told you that this scientific way of thinking, however much individual followers may resist it, is nevertheless nothing more than a straightforward continuation of scholastic thinking. Scholastic thinking has led to the statement: Revelation is about the supersensible world; the sensible world, with a few conclusions drawn from sense observation, can alone be the object of human knowledge. — And what was cultivated among the scholastics, that is, on the one hand, they took what was attainable only by human sense knowledge as a science, and on the other hand, what was available as knowledge of the supersensible world through revelation, that also developed in the further

throughout the sixteenth, seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, to such an extent that natural phenomena were observed according to the principles actually stated by the school, and the doctrine of revelation for science was simply dropped. Thus, in the sense that I have just expressed, modern natural science can be called a true child of medieval scholasticism, and therefore it should not surprise us when we see how people who continue to adhere to revelation, as Franz Brentano did in his youth and as Catholic scholars still do today, readily admit the validity of natural science, which is limited to the sense world alone, and hold fast only to the view that one must not strive after a knowledge that extends to the supersensible; for this supersensible must remain the object of the belief in revelation. Thus it is easy to imagine that natural scientists and Catholic theologians work together at an institution without any dispute arising over the area in which the Catholic theologian wishes to work and that which he concedes to the natural scientist. I would like to give an example of this.

Let us look at how Franz Brentano taught logic, metaphysics, ethics, and the history of philosophy in Würzburg from 1867 to 1870. Now, to make the matter quite clear to you, I would like to stay in the same place, in Würzburg, and visualize Brentano's lecture hall, around the year 1869, where he taught the subjects I I have just characterized, where he spoke of how, in addition to the similarity of the brain to that of higher apes, there must be a soul substance that ordinary thought in man brings forth.

Let us now take another chapter that he also presented at that time: On the Existence of God, on the Proofs of the Existence of God. There he presented in a sharp-witted way everything that the mind of man can bring forward for the existence of God, and of course he pointed out in the end that one can only approach this existence of God with human knowledge, that the truth about the existence of God must be given through revelation. Now let us vividly recall how Franz Brentano, with an ecclesiastical-Catholic sense, presented his metaphysics, his philosophy, to a large audience, taking full account of natural science, and how he approached the highest problems of man in this way, and let us go from Franz Brentano's lecture hall at the University of Würzburg to the lecture hall of the physiologist Adolf Fick. For at the same time that Brentano was lecturing on metaphysics and philosophy, Adolf Fick was lecturing on physiology in Würzburg.

Now I would like to show you what a listener in Adolf Fick's lecture hall of physiology could hear, a listener who might have just been listening to philosophy at Franz Brentano's, out of such a mind as I have just characterized for you. The following idea was presented: I am only quoting, because what I am telling you now is contained almost word for word in the lectures that Adolf Fick later gave at the University of Würzburg. He said something that could be summarized in the following sentences: We consider, for example, warmth, which we first perceive through our sensation. When we touch a body, it seems warm or cold to us; we have sensations of warmth. But what corresponds to these sensations of warmth in the external world is a movement of the smallest parts of the bodies, that is, a movement that is carried out in the atoms and molecules or also by the atoms and molecules in space. If, for example, we look at a gas, then this gas must be enclosed in a space that is closed on all sides; but the atoms and molecules of the individual gas are present in it. However, they are not in a state of rest, but are floating back and forth, bumping into each other and into the walls. So everything in it is in motion and turmoil (see drawing). And if we touch with the surface of our skin what is only a movement inside, we have the sensation of warmth.

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This view was common in the natural sciences at the time; it was the view that emerged in particular from the work of Julius Robert Mayer, Helmholtz, Clausius and other natural scientists of the time. Jose, the English brewer who was also a naturalist, had discovered that water can be heated by a movement, for example, of a paddle wheel moving in the water. One could then measure how much work the paddle wheel does and how much heat is generated, and this gave one the opportunity to say: Heat is generated by movement, by mechanical work. This must therefore be nothing more than a transfer of the visible movements performed by the paddle wheel as it turns in the water; this is transformed into invisible movements, which, however, are then felt as heat. So heat was definitely understood as a kind of movement.

But now, in those days, it had been discovered that not only heat can be converted into motion, but that other forces of nature can also be converted into motion. And so a physiologist like Adolf Fick was able to announce at the time that all natural forces, magnetism, electricity, chemical forces, can be transformed into one another, that one can be converted into the other, that basically the only difference is that we perceive the different forms of movement with our senses in a different way. So if we disregard what we have within us in the way of sensations of warmth, light and so on, and look at what is outside in space, there is only movement everywhere. This physiologist then continued this observation by saying: Even when we look at the human body, the highest organism – and here Adolf Fick came into his actual domain, physiology – we cannot assume a special life force that sets the parts, the molecules of the human organism, in particular motion, but that which moves outside when we perceive heat, any kind of tension or electricity or magnetism, that is also active in the human body. He then explained how carbon burns to form carbonic acid, how hydrogen burns to form water, and how the oxygen that is absorbed causes the oxygen in the human body to be consumed by combustion. He then discussed how to determine how a certain amount of oxygen is absorbed and how a person releases heat. In those days, experiments had already been carried out with the calorimeter to determine how much heat is released by this or that animal, and they had also been carried out on humans, and it had been found that the results were inaccurate. But it was said that mistakes had been made in the experiments, and approximate figures had been found from which it emerged that what corresponded to the absorption of a certain amount of oxygen was then released as heat. It was assumed that some of what is processed internally is converted into muscle movement, that what is produced as heat in the human body through the combustion of carbon to form carbonic acid or hydrogen to form water, is represented by such movements in the human body. Man inhales oxygen. Hydrogen burns to water, carbon burns to carbonic acid. What makes man warm inside, but what he then radiates, is only the movement of his smallest parts. Only after the transformation of the forces do parts transform into what underlies muscle performance when a person not only radiates warmth but also does work with his muscles or even just moves his limbs. So that one can say: Man as a whole is a kind of complicated physical-chemical device that radiates warmth and does work through the inhaled oxygen.

Adolf Fick continued in a manner that he said: But if people continually breathe oxygen and consume the oxygen by using it as a combustion agent, it should have been noticeable long ago in the history of the Earth that the oxygen would have become less. But that is not the case. But this can also be explained because oxygen is always being produced. The plants are irradiated by the sun, and as the plants absorb the sunlight, they release oxygen. This in turn releases the oxygen. Man can breathe it in again. What humans and animals consume in oxygen is always produced again by the plant world.

Furthermore, Adolf Fick said in his lectures: At least the sun should get colder, since it radiates light and heat continuously. He then explained how one could calculate how much colder the sun should be. Julius Robert Mayer had already calculated this and had also shown that the sun should have cooled down long ago, that it could no longer radiate heat at all, given the amount it radiates. Therefore, Julius Robert Mayer assumed, and Fick presented it in his lectures, that comet masses, of which, according to Kepler's saying, there should be many more in space than fish in the ocean, would continually crash into the sun. When something impacts a body, new heat is generated. Through this continuous approach, the solar heat and thus also the sunlight are constantly being recreated. It was only, as Adolf Fick assured, an embarrassment because one would have to assume that such masses are always present. So one would have to assume that the masses that fly into the sun are thrown out again so that they can fly in again later. But he also found a way out of this by showing that according to the so-called second law of mechanical heat theory, it is not necessary for the heat of the sun to be always present, because it is a law of development, which, however, can be proven in the strictest sense – at that time Clausius had already published the second law of mechanical heat theory – that through the transformation of forces, forces are continually transformed into heat, but heat cannot be transformed back into forces, so that heat is always left over, so that ultimately everything that happens in the world must transform into states of heat that balance each other out. Then there will be nothing left of what happens in the world but the so-called heat death. And everything must end in this so-called heat death.

Thus Adolf Fick presented how the earth, with everything that happens on it, including man, develops into this heat death, and how all events in this heat death will one day come to an end. A strictly physical worldview!

We can imagine how Adolf Fick, the physiologist, presented this doctrine as a physical world view, while over in his lecture hall Brentano presented what I have just described to you. But now I would also like to tell you two conclusions from these two lectures. Let us assume that Brentano, in his lecture hall, once closed his lecture as follows: When we consider the scientific view of the development of the world, we must start from an initial stage that can be scientifically understood. We arrive at a final state, which today even science describes as the heat death. But all this is permeated and inspired by divine spiritual happenings. We are led to the beginning, where a creative act of God calls into being that which can then be observed scientifically. We come to the heat death, from which only a creative act of God can continue the evolution. — This is what Franz Brentano might have said as the conclusion of one of his lectures, and that is what he said.

Let us assume that the two lectures took place one after the other, not simultaneously, and that a student, after hearing Franz Brentano, went over to Adolf Fick to listen to the final lecture on physiology. What would he have heard there?

Well, I am just quoting, I am just saying what Adolf Fick himself said in those years, around 1869, at the same university where Brentano taught. He said, after he had preceded such considerations, as I have just explained to you now, in a whole series of lectures: We come to the point that once upon a time everything that happens around us and in us, in the heat of death, that is, in the end of the world. But if we can assume such an end of the world according to all the rules of natural science that we have now, if nothing is forgotten, if we must assume such an end of the world according to strict natural science, then it is inconceivable that this world did not also have a beginning; for one cannot imagine that a world that has existed from eternity with natural scientific events would not have long since reached the heat death. Since this heat death must therefore develop only after some time, this world must also have had a beginning, that is, Adolf Fick concluded, it must have originated from a creative act of God.

So you could go to a lecture by Franz Brentano in the Catholic theological philosophy department and hear the conclusion that I have just characterized, and then go to the physiologist – not one of the type of “fat Vogt” and the like, who just did not think things through, but to a physiologist who thought things through – and he said the same thing, only based on the principles of natural science.

This is an extremely interesting fact. It means that if one did not go further than pointing to a creative act of God from the point of view of natural science, one was entirely in line with what was being presented in the neighboring lecture hall from the perspective of Catholic theology.

What could a student do who had heard this view from Adolf Fick, who had heard, for example, how the world is physically constituted, but that it can even be proved that it emerged from a creative act of God? Adolf Fick would have simply told him: If you want to know something about this act of God, go to the other lecture hall where Catholic theology is being presented! A student would have felt that way in any case.

And now put yourself in the shoes of Franz Brentano. At the time, he was able to make such a final conclusion directly with his scientific mindset because what seemed certain to him about the supersensible world came from Catholic theology. Ten years later, it was no longer so. Ten years later, as I have described to you, he could no longer find the supersensible world fully based on the doctrine of revelation in the sense of Catholicism. That means in other words: if the listener went over from natural science to where he was supposed to hear the supplement that natural science itself demands, then the person who could no longer hold on to the old traditions of revelation could no longer tell him anything. And that was basically how it was when Franz Brentano lectured in Vienna. He had recently left the Church. He came to Vienna in 1874; in 1873 he had actually only completely left, although he had already inwardly disintegrated with the Church after the dogma of infallibility. But he was so attached to the Catholic Church that for many years he thought about the matter thoroughly.

Now we can no longer imagine that, as in the 1960s, a student could have gone from the lecture hall, let's say instead of Adolf Fick in Würzburg, from Brücke in Vienna or some other physiologist, because they all said the same thing, of course, he couldn't have gone to Franz Brentano and found the complement there. For with Franz Brentano he certainly heard extraordinary and interesting things about ethical and psychological problems, but nowhere did Brentano find the possibility of passing through direct knowledge to the supersensible. We see from this example in particular how the possibility of coming to the supersensible from the old spiritual culture disappears if one does not want to return to the old belief in revelation. This is the most important spiritual cultural fact of our time. For it is out of the moods that could be awakened by something like this that the souls of the leader-natures have grown. And it is through what these leader-natures have achieved that we have ended up in the cultural chaos of our time.

Now I would like to show you the problem from a different perspective. Among those who were still studying at the time when Franz Brentano was performing his brilliant deeds at the university, was Richard Wahle. In 1894, Richard Wahle wrote his book, which is actually much more important than is usually the case in philosophical circles: “The Whole of Philosophy and its End, its Legacies to Theology, Physiology, Aesthetics and State Pedagogy.” Anyone who looks at the development of intellectual life with an open mind must point to this book in particular as being an extremely significant phenomenon. I would like to briefly characterize the way in which Richard Wahle viewed the world. This view was born entirely out of what Richard Wahle undoubtedly received as powerful stimuli from Franz Brentano, and out of what else was available in terms of intellectual culture at the time.

Richard Wahle says: What do we actually experience of the world? Well, what we experience of the world is that “events” occur before us. I am standing there; the walls, the light, the lamps, the people appear before my eyes. I have to make these occurrences my personal experiences through my perceptions. There are occurrences everywhere that are given to me through perceptions. I carry nothing else within me but the perceptions of the occurrences. The world is a sum of occurrences that represent themselves to me through my perceptions. But let us look impartially at what we actually have. Do we ever have a table in front of us? We have an occurrence that is represented to us by the idea of the table. Do we have a person in front of us? We have an occurrence that is represented to us by the idea of the person. We have nothing but the representatives of occurrences. It is extraordinarily ingenious at the moment when one was so influenced by Franz Brentano that one perceived how he, as I told you yesterday, eliminated the will and only allowed the life of representation and, at most, the life of feeling to count. This life of representation only gives subjective representatives of occurrences. And what are these occurrences like? They are powerless, thoroughly powerless! For, let me give you a drastic example: the event of one person slapping another — it is an event or a sum of events — I don't know what is behind it! Richard Wahle says quite correctly in his way: We only have the events, represented by the subjective ideas. We cannot get to the primal factors. He fully admits that primal factors are hidden behind what we have as human beings, but we cannot get to them. Therefore, we come to nothing but agnosticism. We have to admit to ourselves that when one person slaps the other, my idea of the moving hand is powerless, that it is by no means sitting on the other person's cheek. I only have the idea. Wahle resolves everything that is accessible to man into subjective representations of events. Even what we perceive within ourselves are events that only emerge from within, instead of being given by events from outside. Again, we know nothing of the primal factors that are within ourselves. We don't even have a conception of which primal factors underlie the occurrence when my own hand rises from my thought, which is powerless and cannot itself give the other person a slap in the face. We don't know what factors underlie it, we don't know what underlies us. But we cannot possibly admit that the thought, which is given to us alone, gives the other a slap in the face, because thought is completely powerless, and if we take the greatest heroes in history, they are only given through subjective thoughts. Imagine, for example, Bismarck: he is only given as a subjective representative of events. The contents of his soul life, even of that of the greatest heroes, did not do the deeds. The deeds were done by the primal factors. But man does not penetrate to the primal factors.

In Brentano you see the striving out of a view that still strives towards reality, but towards a reality that is only given through the faith of revelation, towards the pure intellectualism of the life of representation, where he falters, so that he cannot even continue his “psychology” beyond the first volume. And you see how Richard Wahle, who comes from the same time direction, feels compelled to stick to the content of the intellect when faced with weak ideas. Everything becomes weak. Man only develops intellectual concepts and finally realizes that they are weak.

It was a significant experience for me when, after my first lecture in Vienna, Richard Wahle told me: I also have my ideas about the primal factors, but basically we are only a kind of gravedigger compared to the ancient philosophers. — Richard Wahle is a particularly harrowing example, for he was condemned to make the ultimate confession in the most spirited way: that man, from the newer culture, can gain nothing in his soul but something that is weak and anemic. I then quietly touched on the names of the teachers back when Wahle was still a student in Vienna, namely Zimmermann and Franz Brentano. He said, “Yes, at least they still dared to make claims, we can't even do that anymore.”

And look at what was published as a book in 1894: “The Whole of Philosophy and its End, its Legacies to 'Theology, Physiology, Aesthetics and State Pedagogy.” Theology! Should what is theological tradition be taken up again? Should man completely renounce the attempt to penetrate to the supersensible himself? Should we simply go back to what Franz Brentano had to leave in such a significant way? How, then, should the process take place whereby that which philosophy once offered is to pass in part to theology as a legacy? How should what philosophy has offered pass to physiology as a legacy?

Just think — physiology, in the sense of Adolf Fick, leads us to an act of creation by God at the beginning of evolution. This legacy would therefore not be able to provide anything satisfying. According to the demands of science in the present day, aesthetics would certainly not be accepted as something that is capable of somehow leading into the fields of truth. And state education? Well, it is quite understandable that someone who cannot establish a connection between themselves and the spiritual world appeals to those ideas that are created by people within human societies, that he wants to channel what should lead to action into state education education in the broadest sense; that everything that leads the human being, be he child or adult, to action, should be determined by state laws, that certain directions should be given to him by state laws. We see agnosticism in its most spirited, most energetic, most conscientious bloom in this book “The Whole of Philosophy and its End”.

And how could it have been otherwise? I want to express in a single image what I would now like to say. Philosophy, love of wisdom; one can only love something that one knows as a living thing. As long as one knew Sophia as something living, one could speak of Philosophia. Now that Sophia is supposed to be only an aggregate of everything possible that can be found in the universe in terms of the inanimate, the Philo also had to fade away.

Basically, this revolutionary Richard Wahle did the most consistent thing one could do in the field of philosophy. He simply stated what has become of philosophy under the influence of mere intellect. One can no longer love that. It must fall apart into indifferent things. It must have reached “its end.” After Sophia has died, there can be no more love for the dead Sophia, at most in memory. But then one could only write a story about the now deceased philosophy. One could dedicate a good memoir to it. Of course, the history of philosophy could still be written. One could still galvanize old systems. That has basically become the most common thing among the new philosophers. There have been New-Kantianers, New-Fichteans, Haeckelianers; everything that can remind one of the love for a dead lover has arisen. And if we consider the powerless and insipid subjective representations of the events, which are, however, the intellectualistic representations, then we will understand the whole course. But then we will also understand that in fact the old philosophical thinking has come to an end, must have come to an end.

That is why, in my book “Riddles of Philosophy”, after having presented the whole course of philosophy from the ancient Greek philosophers to the second half of the 19th century, I tried to show how what philosophy was must pass over into anthroposophy. The last chapter is therefore a sketchy presentation of anthroposophy.

The fact that one must proceed in this way, that in today's historiography of philosophy one must have anthroposophy as the last chapter, is not the result of subjective considerations, but of the objective course of historical development itself. And when we consider the most characteristic personalities of modern times, they force us to look at it this way. For, after humanity has really come to the anemic and powerless concepts that no longer contain any reality, after humanity has forgotten that these concepts are the corpses of what once was, before we descended from spiritual worlds into earthly life, it is necessary that we revive these concepts and ideas through meditation and concentration, by means of what you will find presented in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds.” And we are faced with the task of not stopping, as Franz Brentano did with the concepts of natural science, for example, but of taking them up and giving them life through the inner spiritual work that consists of meditation and concentration. And then the scientific conceptions of the most recent times will lead most surely up into the supersensible world. Then they will lead to the evolution of that method which is the method of anthroposophy; then the method of anthroposophy will develop out of natural science. This, in turn, can then imbue the anemic and powerless representatives of the events with essence, with life, because this essence, this life, must arise from the intellect itself for a humanity that has once advanced to the intellect.

And I would like to say: Franz Brentano also seems to me to be particularly characteristic when it comes to the more intimate aspects of the problem. When he was still a fairly young man, he wrote a letter to an acquaintance about meditation, because he was attached to the meditation that had been taught to him from his Catholicism, but which he never led to the independent development of an inner spiritual life. Franz Brentano wrote something like this about the meditation he had come to know: “I advise you not to give up meditation. He who leads only an active and not a contemplative, meditative life, lives only a quarter of life; three quarters of life must be lived by devoting oneself to meditative contemplation. Everything that can bring one close to God can only come from meditative contemplation. — Then he concludes with the characteristic sentence: “I would rather die than give up meditation.”

But it was a meditation that had been trained from ancient spiritual life. And we feel the tragedy of a personality who loves meditation so much and yet, because he is fettered by science, cannot develop into a free meditation that leads him to a renewed grasp of the spiritual and supersensible life. Perhaps it can be seen from this passage in the letter how Franz Brentano was led by an inner necessity to the gates of anthroposophy, but how he could not unlock them because he rejected everything that he believed should be rejected by the scientific attitude and way of thinking.

It is a simple fact that science has certain limits. If science does not merely say, “There is nothing more to be achieved,” but, in the words of Adolf Fick, Franz Brentano's colleague at the university, must say, “There is a creative act of God, a creative deed,” then one can also say, “Just as it is legitimate to make one's observations in the whole realm of the physical, it must also be possible to make these observations here.” The physical does not just set limits, but it points out that there is something that must also be considered positively. It is truly not a subjective arbitrariness when one points out these things today, when one points out the necessity of anthroposophy for general human culture, but rather: anyone who looks at the history of spiritual life without prejudice can see the necessity of anthroposophy precisely from it.

Suppose anthroposophy were recognized as a science. In that case, the Adolf Ficks would simply teach: This is as far as physical research goes; I cannot say anything about what comes after this, but there is a continuation, which is anthroposophical research. However, what will happen physically at the end of world evolution, something like the heat death, will only be seen in the right light when the whole evolution is considered as in my “Occult Wissenschaft im Umriß (Occult Science), where even the existence of Saturn is traced backwards to the beginning, where you also have the existence of nature at the beginning, consisting only of warmth, and then again the existence of Vulcan, also consisting of warmth. But the creative activity of the spirit is not only observed at the beginning and the end; throughout the entire process of evolution, the physical is always considered in connection with the spiritual forces and spiritual deeds of those spiritual entities that do not undergo physical embodiment. So of course it will not be the case that the anthroposophical and the physical stand side by side, but rather that the two will permeate each other. When, for example, we consider individual physical facts, we will have to hear a great deal about the spiritual forces that are at work in the physical world. Then we shall no longer speak merely of occurrences and unknown factors, but we shall speak of how, in what appears as occurrences, we can find the unknown primal factors not only at the beginning and end of the development, but throughout the entire development.

I would like to make this clear to you with the help of an image. Suppose you have a mirror and you see what I have just described. We can stick with the sensualization, even though it is somewhat drastic. You see in the mirror what I have described, namely one person slapping the other across the face. There you have the whole process in the mirror image. You certainly have images, and you will not be able to say that this image is so powerful that it slaps the other image. But that is more or less how the philosopher of modern times must think about his ideas. They are powerless like the mirror images. One mirror image cannot slap the other. But the philosopher, Richard Wahle, for example, goes further in a very spirited way. He says: We cannot get to the original factors, even if I have two people in front of me, so to speak, one of whom is slapping the other one. I only have the idea of this, and the idea of person A cannot give person B a slap in the face. And I cannot get to the original factors, to what actually gives the slap in the face.

This image helps to make it quite clear: the reflection of A cannot give the reflection of B a slap in the face. But look clearly at the reflections, and you will see all kinds of movements. You will not, however, think that this image here has been particularly hurt by the slap in the face; nor will you be able to feel any real sympathy for this image because it has received a slap in the face. But just keep looking! Look at the face of this picture afterwards, after it has received the slap, and you will find something in this face that would be inexplicable if it were merely a picture without strength or vitality.

In other words, philosophy had come to a point in Richard Wahle where it could only speak of events, but could not read into them, because all the old atavistic clairvoyance, which alone made reading possible, had been lost. You read into the image of the person who gets slapped, into the forms that the face takes, that it points to primal factors. If you open a book, you read in it, if you know how to read, without being able to say: Yes, I don't see the primal factors. — Because what you read does lead you to a certain understanding of the primal factors. We must learn to read again in what the phenomena are. We can readily admit that in the intellectual age only the representations of the events are there; but if we are able to approach these subjective representations with inner strength, then we will understand how to read them again. Then we will not become Kantians, but we will become anthroposophists who say to themselves: Of course, we cannot gain anything about the original factors from the representations that are immediately available to us. But if we know how to read the world, then we will gradually work our way through the events to an understanding of the pre-factors.

But this can only happen if we bring inner strength into our soul life again. And this can only be achieved through the paths indicated in meditation and concentration and so on. We may say, then, that modern philosophy has expressed and squeezed out of itself everything that gives life to the intellect. It was the fault of human beings that they could not find the way into the supersensible worlds, and we must learn from the time in which these human beings lived to strive for such an inner development that this way into the supersensible worlds can be found again.

This is what I wanted to discuss with you today, through a somewhat detailed historical examination of the second half of the 19th century. Through this examination, I wanted to prepare some things that I will then expand on in the next lectures.

The purpose of last week's lectures was to provide a certain historical perspective, showing how especially deeper-disposed personalities had to struggle with the currents of the 19th century, and in particular, how the contemporary scientific way of thinking prevented deeper natures from finding their way into the spiritual world. When we make observations directed at the personal, as we have done in relation to Franz Brentano, we can see much more intimately, in the inner soul struggles of human beings, in what has taken place in the spirit, what the great struggles and currents of the time are, than when we characterize only in the abstract. In the last issue of our journal 'Das Goetheanum', I pointed out how Franz Brentano, who, starting from Catholicism and immersing himself in the scientific mentality, got stuck, so to speak, in the physical-earthly, no longer found his way back into the spiritual, as he faced another personality who actually - albeit with some modification - suffered the same fate. That is Nietzsche's personality.

Just as one can show in the case of Brentano how the natural-scientific world view took hold of him and never let go of his devout Catholicism, and how one can show how this characterizes the entire course of his philosophical development, one can show something similar in the case of Nietzsche. It can be shown that Nietzsche, starting not from Catholicism but from a different spirit, was also held back by natural science within the physical-sensual, just as he could not, like Brentano, rise into the spiritual, but then his fate took a similar but still different path.

Brentano immersed himself in the spirit of natural science as early as the 1860s, and we have seen how the dogma of infallibility, as a wave of fate bearing down on him from outside, so to speak, then completely alienated him from his church. Nietzsche, who is a few years younger, went through a similar process of development in the 1870s. He did not start out from Catholicism. He actually started from an antique-like artistic world view, from what the modern human being develops as a world view when he absorbs more of the Greek way of looking at the world in his youth. And it can be said that Nietzsche was as passionate about the Greek way of looking at the world and about an artistic world view in general as Brentano was about Catholicism. He believed that in Richard Wagner and his art he found a renewal of Greekness. And just as Brentano had participated in all Catholic practice and had completely absorbed himself in everything that Catholic worship can evoke within a person, so Nietzsche immersed himself in Wagner's art, in which he believed he saw a resurrection of what the Greek way of looking at the world was. This is how he wrote his first writings, and this is how he experienced the irruption of the scientific way of thinking into his soul in the 1870s.

Before that, he was filled with the view that great human ideals are given to man in an independent spiritual sphere, that man can place these great ideals, the moral, the religious ideals, before his soul, that he finds in them the possibility of rising above the physical-human. And Nietzsche finds words of extraordinary enthusiasm and high flight to describe man's assimilation of ideals. Then the scientific view comes over him. And he feels he must increasingly imbue himself with the thought that the physical in man, in its broadest sense, also produces the ideals as results. It is unsettling for him to have to abandon the old belief that ideals are something independent, something rooted in an independent spiritual world, that ideals actually emerge as the results of what bodily-physical processes are. Nietzsche, so to speak, submerges with all that lives in his ideas as ideals into the physiology of human nature. What had previously seemed divine and spiritual to him now seems merely human, even all too human. He used to see how man has devoted himself to idealistic worlds, how he has elevated himself above base nature by devoting himself to them. Now he believed he recognized that man's lower nature develops only one kind of drive, becoming more and more powerful, and that the holding up of ideals is nothing more than a means of intensifying the inner power in man. In short, Nietzsche strove to explain all ideals as a kind of illusion of physiological processes in the broadest sense. He did not, however, conceive of these physiological processes in man in as philistine a way as today's natural science; but he wanted to regard ideals as a result of physiological, physical processes in the broadest sense. And so, for him, ideals became something that clouds the minds of people who do not see through them, while those who see through them are enlightened about the fact that ideals, like ordinary urges, arise from the physiological foundations of the human being and are only intended to bring the physical nature of the human being more and more powerfully to bear in the broadest sense.

Of course, this is a somewhat radical and retouched description, but it essentially reflects what had such a devastating effect on Nietzsche, especially when he believed that he had come to the conclusion that conscience, too, can only be explained from a physiological basis.

It is only that the natures of the two personalities are different: Brentano is a subtle mind, attuned to imagination, to cognition; he uses the natural-scientific method to create, as it were, an instrument with which he then wants to dissect human mental life in a subtle way, just as natural science dissects physical life. But this instrument becomes blunt at the moment when he wants to approach the real spiritual world. Nietzsche, when he comes to the conclusion that, according to the opinion of natural science, the physiological is the basis of everything, or at least according to its consequences, forms an instrument for himself that is not a fine analytical knife, like Brentano's, but a hammer, robust enough to get everything that is spiritual out of the physical, even physiologically. With this instrument, which is now robust enough to transform the moral and the ideal into the physiological, he grinds the intellectual to dust. He titled one of his writings: “Twilight of the Idols, or How to Philosophize with a Hammer.”

Brentano shrinks from the spiritual, as it were. Nietzsche crushes the spiritual. Basically, anyone who looks at the inner cultural history of the most recent times must find a profound similarity between these two personalities, despite all their differences. And yet, in the very latest writing of which I spoke to you recently, Brentano has a short chapter on Nietzsche in which he shows that he has nothing but mere rejection for Nietzsche. He calls him a belletristic, dazzling mayfly. He compares him to Jesus and finds that Nietzsche is a caricature of Jesus. One cannot help but say: It is strange that a man of such extraordinary refinement as Franz Brentano did not develop a way of penetrating, even to some extent, into the experiences of another mind that was so similar to his in character and destiny, as I have described.

But this is a general phenomenon of our time and only highlights, with excellent examples, what people are like today. They do not live in each other, they live apart. I have often emphasized that they pass each other by without understanding, and that is also a social phenomenon of our time. People pass each other by, even the strongest seekers of truth. Other people do it too, but with such outstanding personalities, what appears as significant symptoms is actually a general phenomenon of our time. Why do people pass each other by without understanding? We so urgently need the possibility of mutual understanding! Today we so urgently need the possibility that someone penetrates both Nietzsche and Brentano, or for that matter Haeckel, David Friedrich Strauß and so on, in order to show how these different personalities look at the world from the most diverse points of view. But only the spiritual-scientific view, the one that really ascends to the spirit, can achieve such a view that delves into the individual personal points of view. And that is precisely the reason why people do not understand each other: that they do not ascend to the spirit. We must seek the reason why a personality like Brentano, in the mere natural science, remained stuck, in the mere natural science, why he could not create a bridge to another personality, who basically had a very similar fate to his own. Only a spiritual deepening will be able to penetrate the most diverse points of view. But for this, a penetrating study of the human being, a penetrating knowledge of the human being, is necessary. For what do such personalities, who are seized by the scientific methodology of the 19th century, like Brentano and Nietzsche, ultimately face?

One day they are confronted with the fact that, as honest seekers of knowledge and truth, they have, on the one hand, the physical world and the excellent scientific methods for penetrating into it; on the other hand, a spiritual world. Of course, people like Nietzsche and Brentano did not go so far as the superficiality that many today display, who do not even see this spiritual world as the great opposite of the physical world. They see the physical world, they see the spiritual world, but there is no bridge between the two. They see what man wants by virtue of his basic nature; they see the will that is based on instincts and impulses, and they attempt to explain these impulses and instincts from the physiological nature of man, how they accumulate, as it were, into volition. But then they notice that a spiritual world erects ideals above them, which are to be striven for; they notice the 'should' in relation to the 'wanting', and they find no bridge between the 'wanting' and the 'should'. A person like Brentano becomes a psychologist, a scientist of the soul. Physiology is, after all, to a certain extent complete. But he wants to examine the phenomena of the soul. He wants to imitate natural science by investigating the phenomena of the soul. At first he is not at all certain whether he has soul phenomena, because in a sense science denies this. Brentano is actually only certain that there are soul phenomena because he was a devout Catholic for so long, not out of any scientific knowledge.

This dichotomy is terrible in the soul of these people: the spiritual world, the physical world, and no bridge between the two. How do you get from one to the other? The moral ideals are there. But it is not possible to understand how what the moral ideals want can take hold of the human muscles, how it can lead people to action. For science merely says how muscles and bones move according to physical laws, but not how the ought is reflected in the movement of muscles and bones.

The point is that, however perfect the scientific method may be, this scientific century was basically helpless when it came to the human being. You simply could not examine the human being. It did not occur to anyone that the human being is a threefold being, in the way I have described in the last sections of my book 'Von Seelenrätseln' (The Riddle of the Soul). It was not possible to arrive at the conclusion that the human being can be divided into a nervous-mental human being, which naturally fills the whole human being but is mainly localized in the head; into a rhythmic human being, which in turn permeates the whole human being but is mainly concentrated and localized in the respiratory and circulatory organs; and finally into the metabolic human being of the limbs, which is the remaining human being. This is such a profound fact that everything that is to lead to an understanding of the human being must be linked to it. Of course, one must not say that the three parts of the human being are the head, chest and limbs. I have already said that the human being is a nerve-sense being everywhere, only this is primarily expressed in the head. But look at this head. It is so formed that we cannot but be filled with ever deeper admiration when we consider the structure, especially the nervous structure, of the human head. Within the world of physical phenomena, there is nowhere to be found any real reason why the human head, especially in its inner parts, should be formed precisely as it is.

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This is where the realization I have often spoken of here occurs. The human head is modeled on the cosmos in its outer form, if you disregard the base of the head. It is actually spherical in shape (see drawing). Its form is taken from the cosmos. All the cosmic forces in the mother's body also work together to first create the human head during embryonic development. If we look at this spiritually, we see that the human being's soul and spirit live in a spiritual world before the person descends into physical earthly existence, first connecting with the cosmic forces and only then taking hold of the forces of heredity. The actual spiritual-soul-man first forms out of the ether of the world and only then goes to the physically ponderable matter that is offered to him in his mother's body. So actually this head is formed out of the cosmos, and what has descended from man out of spiritual-soul worlds to earth is imagined from this cosmic formation. Therefore, in the physical world, no one understands the structure of the human head who does not explain it in spiritual terms, saying: the human head is an image, an immediate imprint of the spiritual. These wonderful convolutions of the brain, everything that can be discovered physiologically in the human head, is as if it were crystallized spirit, spirit present in material form. The human head is, as a physical body, an immediate image of the spirit.

If someone were to sculpt the spirit as such, they would actually have to study a human head permeated by spirit. Of course, if they are a model artist, they will not capture anything special; but if they are not a model artist, but create from the spiritual, then they will achieve a wonderful image of the innermost nature of the cosmic spiritual forces when they create the human head. What is present in the human head is intuition, inspiration, imagination of cosmic spirituality. It is as if the Godhead itself had wanted to create an image of the spiritual and had placed the human head on it. It is therefore basically comical when people seek images of the spirit, while they have the best, the most magnificent, the most powerful image of the spirit, but precisely the image of the spirit, not the spirit itself, in the human head.

The opposite is the case with the human being with limbs. If you contrast the human being with limbs, they are only attached to the earth. They have only one sense as an attachment to the earth. The arms are somewhat lifted out of the earthly. In animals, those limbs that are arms in humans are also still attuned to the heaviness of the earth. But essentially, the nature of the human limbs is thoroughly organized around the forces of the earth. Just as the human head is a reflection of cosmic spirituality, so what we encounter in the human limbs shows us how the spirit is bound to the forces of the earth. Just study the shape of a human leg with a human foot! If you want to understand it in a plastic way, you have to understand the forces of the earth. Just as you have to understand the highest spirituality if you want to grasp the human head, so, in order to understand the form of the limbs, you have to study what binds the human being to the earth, what presses him to the earth, what causes the human being to be able to walk along the earth and to sustain himself in space within the forces of gravity. All this must be studied, the whole way the earth affects a being that relates to it in this way, as man does. Just as one must study the spirit in order to understand the human head, so one must study the physical of the earth with its forces in order to understand the human being in terms of his limbs and metabolism.

But this has a very significant consequence. Only when one looks into the human being in this way, when one is able to see the human head as it were, in the crystallized, all-encompassing spiritual world, and when one sees in the lines of gravity and again in the lines of momentum, in which the earth turns, the origins of the formations of the human limbs, when one sees through dynamically, in the effect of the forces, the way in which the human being is formed and built, only then can one form an opinion about it.

Two things can play a major role in the human soul that are, to a certain extent, opposed to each other. One is what I would call doubt, and the other is what I would call conviction. One could perhaps also find other, even more succinct words. But you will all feel that we have a kind of polar opposite of the soul when we speak of doubt on the one hand and conviction on the other. Imagine what happens when a person is seized by doubt on the one hand and conviction on the other, and this happens on a more intense level. Try to visualize yourself being seized by doubt about something, even if it is only a matter that is occupying you intensely. It does not have to be a great cosmic truth or a great cosmic riddle, just a matter that interests you greatly. You must go to bed with this doubt. Imagine tossing and turning, feeling restless, and unable to find peace of mind. And then try to visualize how something flows into your soul as a soothing conviction, bringing an inner calm, how, as it were, a warmth of soul can fill you completely. In short, if you really look at the matter impartially from within, you will be able to visualize before your soul the opposite natures of doubt on the one hand and conviction on the other.

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What is the difference in relation to the essence of the human being? The human head is modeled out of the cosmic ether from what we were in the spiritual world; the human head is a pure replica of the most human, namely the spiritual human being. Doubting ideas come to the head, but they find no place in the head. The head does not absorb them. They have to pass through the head down to the nature of the limbs. In the nature of the limbs, they combine with everything that becomes grainy in the human material being, that becomes so that it permeates this human material being grainily, that thus takes on an atomistic nature. Doubting ideas pass through him as if our head were permeable to them. The blood first absorbs these doubting ideas, then they are carried down into the whole organism, preferably absorbed by the metabolism, and only then handed over to the nervous system, and they live in all that is atomistic in human nature, that is, granular, salty. They connect with it very intimately. The body absorbs the doubting ideas, and they pass through the head. Only when one understands this special kind of human head, and that the matter of the head is not suitable for doubting ideas, because the head is an image of the truth itself, from which we come when we descend from the spiritual into the physical , we understand: just as light passes through a transparent glass, so do doubting ideas pass through our head and take hold of the other part of the nervous system and disturb our metabolism. The head only takes in doubting ideas to the extent that it itself is a matter of metabolism. But it passes them through its special nervous organization and only takes in convincing ideas.

The convincing ideas find related structures everywhere when they enter the human head. They find accommodation everywhere in the nervous system. They settle in the human being's head first and go out into the rest of the body not through the blood but through the nervous system, which is in a kind of destructive process, so that they pass directly into the whole of the rest of the human being in their spirituality. But they find accommodation in the head, they fill the head. And in the head, from the spirituality of the head form, also from the inner formation, they receive their suitable form for the whole person and therefore work as if they were intimately related to the person, as if the person himself would live in them inwardly, as if they were the person himself. One would like to say: In the convincing representations, the head of the person forms something that is particularly appropriate for the person.

Study the human embryo and you will see that the head forms first, then the rest of the organism; for it is from the head that the forces that form the rest emanate. When you take convincing ideas into your head, it is like this spiritually: they are first taken up spiritually in the head, and the head then sends them to the rest of the human being. Just as the other person is physically reproduced in the embryo according to the human head, so here the spiritual of the convictions and ideas of the other person is radiated, and a person arises from it in a spiritual way from the convincing ideas (left drawing, red). An inner image of a person radiates in that person. And whatever radiates in the form of convincing ideas in a person connects with everything that permeates the person like warmth. Just as the doubting images seize everything granular, everything atomistic, so the convincing images seize the warmth flowing through the body, the first link of the etheric that permeates the whole human being, and do not enter further into the physical.

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Try to imagine the presence of doubting and convincing ideas in human nature, and you can grasp the truth of the matter in immediate life every time you feel and experience the beneficial effect of a convincing idea and the torturous effect of doubting ideas.

I have often said that the spirit of language is a spirit that works rationally. And if you ascribe the natural embryo to procreation (drawing on the right, white), you are not at all surprised that this formation is attributed to conviction (on the left, red). We must not regard these things as mere coincidences. They are the deeds of the ruling genius of language, which knows more than the individual human being. I know that today's linguistic science regards this as a gimmick. But once one really looks into the workings and weaving of the ruling language genius, one will regard much of today's philology and linguistics as gimmicks.

But now consider what it all means. You get a picture of how two soul experiences, doubt and conviction, continue to work in the physical person. They provide an absolutely comprehensible bridge from the soul and spirit to the physical. You see a physical person, and through his physical corpuscles in his body you can see the shimmering and undulating of his soul and spiritual experiences: this person is a skeptic, this one a doubter. You can see how the doubting spirit vibrates on in the soul and in the body through the inner structure of the material. You look at the other person, in whom the warmth flows through the limbs in a calm manner, and you see in this calm flow of warmth the physical expression of devotion to one's convictions. You see the spiritual directly expressed in the physical. Only then do you begin to understand the physical. Today's chemist and physicist says when he analyzes the human being: Inside there is lime, phosphorus, oxygen and nitrogen, carbon. Yes, you will never find anything spiritual in oxygen and nitrogen and carbon and hydrogen. Of course Du Bois-Reymond is quite right when he says: A number of oxygen and nitrogen and carbon atoms can be completely indifferent to how they lie and move. Yes, if you look at the substance in the body only as carbon, oxygen and so on, then it is like that. But if you know how a substance works that is receptive to the spirit in the most diverse ways, that is in the main an immediate image of spiritual essence, that is otherwise incorporated into the earth, so that the earthly holds there, which is driven through the head as doubting ideas, then the possibility of thinking ceases. It is not the same in our brain for a number of carbon, nitrogen atoms, and so on, as they lay and moved, as they lie and move. There we see how it matters to the substance whether the heat current flows into it or whether salt formation is at work in it, so that the body develops a tendency to develop a granular structure. These are two contradictions that express themselves in the material and that originate from the spiritual. It is actually the case that we did not end up with materialism in the 19th century because people did not know the spirit. The spirit in its most filtered form was best known in the materialistic age, because all previous ages did not actually have the spirit in its purest form; they always mixed material into the images of the spirit that they formed; they were images in which material was always mixed. Only the age of natural science has brought pure spiritual conceptions. But what the age of natural science had to neglect is just the knowledge of matter in reality, of spirit in matter. What has brought us materialism is the insufficient knowledge of the material nature of the world, the lack of insight into the spiritual weaving and working in the material. Science has become materialistic through ignorance of the material effects. Because people did not know how the spirit works creatively, they imagined this spirit as more and more abstract and abstract. As a result, the moral ideal finally became something that one could not even ask about, because it did not even have the materiality to fly around in space. It was no longer there at all. If you tried to grasp it, it was rather like trying to breathe in an element that is not there. The people of the 19th century seem like someone trying to breathe under the recipient of an air pump! When they gasp for moral ideals, for example, they are not there; they would like to have them, but they are not there because no one wanted to develop a concept of the workings of the spiritual soul in the physical body. Hence all the curious theories arose about the interaction of the physical and the bodily with the soul and spiritual, which were all fabrications, while real knowledge can only be gained by looking closely at the facts.

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When we have become familiar with how doubt and conviction permeate and interweave human nature, then we are able to become acquainted with that which we have come to know in man and in turn to know it in the world. We have in the world the sphere of material creation. We see, for example, how matter must form itself in grains out in the world, how it crystallizes. Once we have become familiar with how doubt takes hold of the granularity in us in the organism, we then learn to see doubt outside of us. We look at the mountain (white) that forms with its granular rock; but at the same time we find that the same thing is happening in the mountain that we are getting to know as doubt within us (red), and we get to know the creative power of doubt. The doubt within us makes us grainy because we are human and not nature. Doubt outside in nature has the right effect. When that which works outside in nature moves in us, it causes the wrong. By stepping on the rocks, you are stepping on the physical manifestation of what the deity sends out as doubt so that the world can become grainy. And again, when you study your convictions with a warm sense of being imbued, then you are in that which is being created. So when you think that basically the warmth is to be sought in the womb of the creative forces of the world, then you find that what is cosmic conviction works out of warm matter.

Get to know these things in truth within yourself, then you will also learn to judge the agents out there in the cosmos in the right way. If you see what is crumbling and crumbling away out there, so that we have, so to speak, the first preparation for the atomization of our earthly existence in the universe, as emanations of world doubt, then you will learn to understand much in cosmic existence. And conversely, if you are able to look into the cosmic with conviction, then you will get to know much of the Creative. But these are things by which I only wanted to hint to you how one must first know man in order to have any prospect at all of knowing the cosmic existence.

Well, you see, for Brentano in the 1860s and for Nietzsche in the 1870s, the methods of natural science were there; they found carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, phosphorus, some sulfur, and so on in the brain. There was really nothing spiritual to be recognized in it. And if one applied the method that had led to this to the spirit, then of course one could come to nothing but either the spiritual impotence that Brentano came to, or the wearing down of the spiritual that Nietzsche, who was more of a will nature, came to. But both were subject to the same fate, namely that they could not reach the spiritual from the physical, because they could not find the spiritual in the physical, and therefore did not perceive the spiritual as something powerful enough to bring forth the physical.

Thus, such minds were faced with a physical nature that actually had no meaning because it contained nothing spiritual, and with a spiritual nature that had no power, no might. That is the fate of the most significant minds that in the second half of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century faced matter without meaning, faced the spirit without power.

Historians have spoken of ideas in history. This is mind without power. You really cannot put cultural instruments into the hands of ideas, through which culture arises, or through which historical events arise at all; ideas as abstractions are powerless, this is mind without power. In contrast to this is nature, which one studies only in its unspiritual matter: matter without meaning.

You will never find the bridge if you invent the absurdity on one side: matter without sense, and on the other side the un-spirit: spirit without power. Only when one finds the strength in the spirit, the strength in the conviction to drive the warmth through the body because the human being is organized in such and such a way, only when one finds the strength in the doubt to push through the head because there is no affinity with the head and to wear down the rest of the human being internally so that it disintegrates into a granular structure , that is, only when one finds in the spirit that which has the power both to dissolve the granular structure through warmth and to form it in the salt formation process, then one finds a matter in which meaning is, because then the powerful spirit works in such a way that what appears in matter is meaningful. And so we have to look for matter with meaning and spirit with power.

This is what such minds as Brentano and Nietzsche, in their tragic fate, also point to in their personalities.

It is, after all, something that should be taken into account that a meeting was convened some time ago by the opponents of the things presented at the Vienna Anthroposophical Congress, at which a wide variety of speakers spoke out of the materialistic sense of the present and that at the end a particularly materialistically minded physician summarized the various speeches in a slogan that was intended to represent a kind of motto for the opponents of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science: the battle against the spirit. — It is simply the case that today there are people who see the battle against the spirit as a real motto.

When such a word is uttered, one is reminded again and again of how many people, well-meaning people, there are in the present day who, in the face of what is prevailing in the civilized world, are actually caught in a kind of sleep state, who do not want to hear where things are heading. They consider things of the greatest importance to be insignificant phenomena of the times, the opinion of one person or another, whereas it is in fact the case that today a striving that is present in the real progress of human development is clearly asserting itself. And actually all those who can muster an understanding for such a cause should also be most intensely involved with it in their hearts in order to truly muster it.

I have now tried to show, by taking two personalities as examples, how deeper natures in particular were placed in the newer currents of thought. I have contrasted these two personalities, Franz Brentano and Nietzsche, to show how, from the most diverse sides, people who are initially oriented towards the spiritual are, as it were, submerged in the contemporary scientific way of thinking. If we consider personalities who have shared the fate I have outlined, we may perhaps be more deeply moved than if such things are presented only in the form of an abstract description.

In the case of Brentano, I wanted to illustrate how a personality who grew up in an education shaped entirely by Catholicism retained for life, on the one hand, what Catholic Christianity had implanted in its soul in terms of an affinity for the spiritual world. In Franz Brentano, who was born in 1838 and thus lived during the time when the scientific way of thinking of the nineteenth century flooded all human research and spiritual striving, we see what lives on from very old currents of world view.

If we look at young Brentano, who studied in Catholic seminaries in the 1850s and 1860s, we find that his soul was filled with two things that guided him in a certain way. One is the Catholic doctrine of revelation, to which he stood in a position that theologians of the Catholic Church have held since the Middle Ages. The Catholic revelation about everything spiritual is traditionally received. One finds oneself in a kind of knowledge of the supersensible worlds that has come to man through grace. For Brentano, the other element was connected with this, through which he first wanted to understand what he had received through the Catholic doctrine of revelation. That was Aristotelian philosophy, the philosophy that was still developed in ancient Greece. And until the mid-sixties, perhaps even a little longer, Brentano's soul lived in a way that was entirely in keeping with the spirit of a medieval scholastic: one must accept what man is meant to know of transcendental worlds as revealed by the Church, and one can apply one's thinking to the study of nature and life according to the instructions of the greatest teacher for this research, according to the instructions of the Greek philosopher Aristotle.

These two things, Aristotelianism and Catholic revelation, were indeed connected in the spiritual life of the medieval scholastics, who regarded them as compatible. This continued in Franz Brentano. He was only shaken in such a view by what then confronted him as the scientific method, so strongly shaken that when he took up his post as a private lecturer in Würzburg, he established as a main thesis the proposition that in all philosophy it must be done as in natural science. And then he wanted to found a psychology, a doctrine of the soul, in which the life of the soul would be considered in the same way that natural science considers external natural phenomena.

It is therefore fair to say that this man underwent a very radical change. He wanted to combine knowledge gained through revelation with knowledge gained through reason, which is limited only to earthly things. He thus demanded that science can only be what is formed according to the pattern of scientific methodology. One should really stop and think about what such a radical change really means.

What I would like to draw your attention to first is that, up until this change, medieval scholastic thinking still seems to be present in an extraordinary personality. This continues to have an effect, as it does today in many contemporaries who are honestly Catholic, as it basically exists, albeit in a slightly different form, in many honest confessors of the Protestant faiths. If I quoted Nietzsche, it was because, although Nietzsche did not have a survival of medieval scholasticism in his soul, something else lived on in his soul, namely, what emerged during the Renaissance as a kind of reaction to scholasticism. Nietzsche had a kind of Greek wisdom of art that formed the basis for his entire world view. He had it in the same way that the men of the Renaissance had it. But these men of the Renaissance by no means already had the urge and the inclination not to recognize the spiritual in its reality. They sensed, they still felt the reality of the spiritual. So that something from ancient times also survived in Nietzsche's soul. And he, too, as I told you yesterday, had to immerse himself in the scientific view of the 19th century and completely lost what connected his soul to a spiritual world.

The implications of this point to some tremendously significant riddles for the true seeker of truth in the present day. Let us take the two streams of spiritual thought that penetrated the life of the soul, as they lie in medieval scholasticism. Let us visualize what is actually present. I would like to do it in the following way. Within medieval scholasticism, we have a number of, let us say, doctrines about the supersensible world, for example about the Trinity of the original spiritual being, about the incarnation of Christ in the body of Jesus of Nazareth. series of doctrines that must be said to relate not to the sensual but to the supersensible world, which in very ancient times were once found by people who were then initiates, initiates. For one must not imagine, of course, that something like the doctrine of the Trinity or the Incarnation was simply invented by someone to deceive people. These doctrines are rather the results of the experiences of former initiates. That they were regarded as a supernatural revelation is only a later conception. Such doctrines were originally found by way of initiation. Later on, however, it was no longer admitted that one could undergo such an initiation and arrive at the conception of the Trinity oneself, for example.

There were such conclusions, which the medieval scholastic admitted to the knowledge of reason, which touched the supernatural; only the view of the supernatural was not admitted. But reason was admitted, through which one could not understand the real knowledge of revelation, but through which one could approach something like the existence of God or the beginning of the existence of the world. These truths, which could be found through reason, were called preambula fidei, and could then form a basis for penetrating to that which could not be explored by reason, but which was said to be the content of revelation.

Now, having juxtaposed these two currents of thought, of knowledge, let us place ourselves in the mind of a person who juxtaposed them in his own soul. During the period in which scholasticism flourished, what lived in a scholastic was by no means the evil that uninformed people tell of today, but at a certain time in medieval development it was simply what was required by the development of humanity. One could not have had any other view at that particular time. Today, of course, things have changed. Today, we have to find different ways to knowledge and to human soul activity than those that were at home in scholasticism. But that is why one should still try to penetrate this scholasticism with understanding. And you can only do that if you now ask yourself: How did the knowledge of revelation stand in the soul of an honest scholastic, alongside the knowledge of reason that was directed towards natural phenomena and towards one-sided conclusions of reason from natural phenomena? How did these two things stand side by side?

What did such a scholastic want, and with him all his believers, all who were honestly Catholic, when he put himself in the frame of mind that was in line with revelation, when he said: What the dogmas give must not be looked at, looking at it is not possible; one must accept it as a revelation? The scholastic attempted to evoke a certain mood of soul in relation to the supersensible world. He was completely imbued with the fact that this supersensible world exists and stands in an intimate relationship to that which lives in man as soul. But he did not seek a path of knowledge in man in order to come directly through his own personality to that which stands as the supersensible world in an intimate relationship to man.

Imagine this mood. It was the mood towards, I would say, a known unknown, towards an unknown acquaintance, towards someone you should worship and revere, but to whom you should still be shy, so that you do not, so to speak, open your eyes to him.

Next to it stood the knowledge of reason. Scholastic reason was an extraordinarily astute one, something that has not been achieved again later. One would wish – I have also said it here several times – that people who do natural science or science in general today would only learn to think as sharply as the scholastics were able to think. It was a rational knowledge that only denied itself the right to go beyond certain limits: knowledge by revelation on the one hand, rational knowledge on the other. But if we now compare the knowledge by revelation and the rational knowledge of the scholastics with similar structures of today, then a great difference becomes apparent.

The scholastic said to himself: You dare not intrude with your knowledge into the realm from which you are only supposed to have revelations. You dare not intrude into a vision of the Trinity, into a vision of the Incarnation. But in the revelation that he received through his church, ideas of the Trinity and ideas of the Incarnation were given. They were described. People said to themselves: knowledge does not penetrate to these things, but one can think about them if one reflects on these things in the sense of what has been revealed. You cannot say of the medieval scholastics that they had a mere dark mystical feeling of the supernatural. It was not that. It was a thinking that was already trained in plastic ideas and that grasped the content of Revelation. They thought about the Trinity, they thought about the Incarnation. But they did not think as one thinks when one arrives at a conclusion oneself, but as one thinks thoughts that are revealed to one.

You see, that too still corresponds to a certain fact of higher knowledge. There are still people today who have certain atavistic clairvoyant views, as you might call them, who have dream-like imaginations. There are people who, for example, can rise in such atavistic clairvoyant imaginations to the point of visualizing the events of Atlantis. That still exists today. Don't think that there are no thoughts in what such people have as clairvoyant imaginations. Such seers often have much more plastic thoughts than our strange logicians, who learn to think from today's schooling. Sometimes one would like to despair of the logic of those who learn to think from today's schooling, while one need not despair of the logic that simply reveals itself atavistically and clairvoyantly; for this is often very strictly developed.

Thus, even today it can be shown that thinking is already present in that which is truly revealed supersensibly for human observation. This was also the case in medieval scholasticism. It is only in recent times that thought has been eradicated from the content of revelation, so that today faith seeks to distil not only knowledge but also thinking out of its content. The medieval scholastics did not do that. They did extract the knowledge, but not the thinking. Therefore, if you take the dogmatics of medieval scholasticism, you will find a very highly developed system of thinking.

This lived on in a man like Franz Brentano. That is why he could think. He could grasp thoughts. This can be seen even in the rudiments of his psychology, in which he only got as far as the first volume. There you can still see that he has a certain inner plasticity of thought formation, even though he constantly steps on his own feet in a terrible way and thus does not make any progress. As soon as he has any thought about a psychological construct - and he has such - he immediately forbids himself to think about the things. This prohibition is something extraordinary today. I have told you how an extraordinarily brilliant man, who wrote the important book 'The Whole of Philosophy and its End', told me in Vienna himself recently: 'I have my thoughts about what stands behind mere events as the primal factors.' But scientifically he forbids himself to have these thoughts. One could easily imagine, hypothetically of course, that a scientifically trained person today would suddenly become clairvoyant through a miracle, and that he would fight against this clairvoyance in the worst possible way. One could easily imagine this hypothetically because the authority of knowledge that clings to the external is enormous. So that was one thing that lived in the soul of the medieval scholastic: a specifically formulated content of revelation. On the other hand, there was a rational knowledge that was based on nature, but it was not yet the same as our present-day knowledge of nature. To substantiate this, just open a book of natural history, for example by Albertus Magnus; you will probably find descriptions of natural objects as they are described today – but they are described differently than they are today – but alongside that, you will still find all kinds of elemental and spiritual beings. Spirit still lives in nature, and it is not the case that only the completely dry sensual evidence is described as natural history and natural science. These two things live side by side, a content of revelation, in the face of which one prohibits oneself from knowing, but which one nevertheless thinks, so that the human spirit still attains it in its thoughts, and a content of rational knowledge, which still has spirit, but which also still has something that one must look at if one wants to have it before oneself in its reality.

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Knowledge of nature has developed out of medieval scholasticism. One branch of scholasticism, knowledge by reason, has developed further and become the modern view of nature. But what has happened as a result? Imagine the thoughts of a scholasticist regarding knowledge of nature quite vividly. There is still spiritual content in them. What do these spiritual contents protect the medieval scholastic natural scientist from?

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Perhaps I can illustrate this schematically. Suppose this here was such a medieval scholastic with his longing for revelational knowledge at the top and his longing for knowledge of nature at the bottom. But in the knowledge of nature, he has the spiritual. I'll let some red pass. He has thinking in the knowledge of revelation. I'll let some yellow pass. Where does this rational knowledge actually want to go? It wants to go out to the objects, to the things around us. The thoughts you have want to snap into place with the objects. You don't want to recognize just any plant, you want to form a concept of the plant, without you counting on it: the concept snaps in there, it wants to snap in. But with the scholastic, the spiritual content, which still permeates his rational knowledge, prevents him from really snapping in down there. It doesn't snap completely, it is, as it were, thrown back a little. What does it not snap into? When today's intellectualistic rational knowledge snaps into external nature, when it snaps fully into it, it actually snaps fully into the Ahrimanic. What then does the spirituality of the medieval scholastic mean in relation to his rational knowledge? That basically, he wants to approach nature with this rational knowledge as if it were something that burns a little. But he feels the burning and shrinks back again and again: nature is sin! He guards himself against Ahriman! But further development has brought this: in the nineteenth century it has thrown out of all spiritual rational knowledge, and with that rational knowledge snapped into the Ahrimanic.

And what does rational knowledge, which has snapped into the outer Ahrimanic, say? It says: the world consists of atoms, atomic movement is the basis of all scientific knowledge. It explains warmth and light as atomic movements, it explains everything in the external world as atomic movements, because that satisfies our need for causality.

In 1872, Da Bois-Reymond gave his famous lecture in Leipzig on the limits of knowledge of nature. It is the lecture in which the rational knowledge of scholasticism has advanced so far that all spirituality has been thrown out; and with the motto “Ignorabimus” the spirit of man should snap into the Ahrimanic. And Du Bois-Reymond describes very vividly how a human mind that now has an overview of everything that swirls as atoms in the universe no longer sees green and blue, but only perceives atomic movements everywhere. It feels no warmth, but wherever there is warmth, it feels that movement of which I spoke to you here eight days ago. He suppresses everything in his mind that has to do with colors, temperatures, sounds, etc. He fills his head with an understanding of the world that consists only of atoms. Imagine: the whole world as imagined by someone who thinks in terms of atoms. He has it all figured out in his head: the moment Caesar crossed the Rubicon, there was a certain constellation of atoms in our cosmos. Now he only needs to be able to set up the differential equation, and so, by continuing the calculation, he finds the next constellation, and the next, and so on. He can calculate the most distant future. Du Bois-Reymond called this the Laplacean mind because it was also an ideal of Laplace. So there we have, in 1872, a description of an intellect that comprehends the world universally, that comprehends everything as atomic motion, and all you need to do is know the differential equations and then integrate them, and you get the world formula.

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But what has actually been achieved as a result? What has been achieved is that one has learned to think as Ahriman can think, what the Ahrimanic ideal of thinking is. One can only recognize the full significance of what is happening in our time when one knows what it actually is. The Ignorabimus speech will go down in the history of the development of the modern spirit, but its true significance will only be recognized when we are in a position to show that here the one branch of the scholastic school of thought has actually snapped into the Ahrimanic. You see, the scholastic, so to speak, kept his knowledge in suspense. It did not quite reach what is out there. He always withdrew with his knowledge before Ahriman. That is why he had such a need to develop truly ingenious concepts; because ingenious concepts still have to be developed through human effort. When it comes to conducting experiments, well, then you only need human endeavor to put the apparatus together and so on, but the kind of astute thinking that scholasticism had is not needed.

This meant a very important turning point when one was once snapped into the Ahrimanic. Because what you see outside as the sensual phenomena of the world, as your sensual environment, that is only there as long as the earth is there. It perishes with our planet. What lives on are the thoughts that snap in outside. When something is conceived that is in line with Laplacean thinking, or what Du Bois-Reymond presented as an ideal of natural scientific thinking, it means not only that it is conceived, but that these are real thoughts that snap into place outside. And when everything we see with our senses on earth has perished, these thoughts can live on, if they are not eradicated beforehand. Therefore, there is a real danger that, if such a way of thinking becomes general, our earth will change into a planet corresponding to the materialists' conceptions. Materialism is only a mere doctrine as long as it does not become reality. But the Ahrimanic powers strive to make the thoughts of materialism so strong and widespread that the only thing left of the earth are atoms.

If we say today that we have to explain everything in terms of atoms, that is an error. But if all people start to think that everything has to be explained in terms of atoms, if all people put on Laplacian minds, then the earth will really consist of atoms. It is not true from primeval times that the earth consists of atoms and their components, but humanity can bring this about. That is the essential thing. Man is not merely predisposed to have wrong views, but wrong thoughts create wrong realities; when wrong thoughts become general, realities arise.

This danger from Ahriman has already manifested itself today. The other danger in the knowledge of revelation was sought to be avoided by the medieval scholastic, who still had the knowledge of revelation clothed in thoughts. It was concrete thoughts that grasped the content of the revelation. The dogmas were gradually thought through so little that people came to drop them altogether in general. One should indeed drop what is not understood. This is fully justified on the one hand, and if people can no longer follow the dogmas to the point of seeing them, it is natural that they drop them. But then what do they come to? Then they arrive at the most abstract of thoughts of dependence on some quite indefinite eternal or infinite. Then thoughts are no longer vividly formed that carry the content of the Revelation within them, but only some kind of dependence on some kind of infinite is felt in dark mysticism. Then the content of the thought disappears. This path has also been taken in recent times. It is the path that leads to the Luciferic. And just as surely as the path of knowledge through reason in modern times has led to the Ahrimanic, just as surely the other path can lead to the Luciferic.

And now look again at a mind like Franz Brentano's in the sense I have described. Franz Brentano approaches nature with this attitude: Just don't touch Ahriman! - and to the supersensible world: Just don't touch Lucifer! — So just don't become atomistic, just don't become a mystic. With this attitude he approaches natural science, which is such a powerful authority that he submits to it. He describes the phenomena of the soul in terms of the scientific method. If he had approached the subject from a more superficial point of view, as many of today's psychologists do, he would have written a doctrine of the soul inspired by Ahriman, a kind of psychology, a 'doctrine of the soul without a soul'. He could not do that. Therefore, he abandoned the attempt after the first volume, and did not write the following volumes – there should have been four – because something in him did not allow him to grasp the idea of rushing headlong into the purely Ahrimanic.

And take Nietzsche. Nietzsche was likewise seized by natural science. But how did he take up natural science? He did not really care much about the individual methods, but only looked at the natural scientific way of thinking in general. He said to himself: All that is spiritual is based in the physiological, is a “human, all too human” thing. What should actually be divine-spiritual ideals are an expression, a manifestation of the human, of the all-too-human. He rejected the very kind of knowledge that can be found in Brentano: knowledge through reason. He allowed the will to become active in him. And, as I said yesterday, he wore down the ideals, he wore down the spiritual. This is the other phenomenon where a personality, as it were, approaches the Ahrimanic, but strikes against it. Instead of snapping, he strikes. He also wants to develop atomism, but he strikes against a wall.

And so we see how such minds develop their particular soul mood in the 19th century because they come so very close to what plays into our knowledge as Ahrimanic powers. That is the fate of such minds in the 19th century: they come so incredibly close to Ahriman. And then they either end up in a situation like Brentano's, where they shyly retreat at the very boundary and do not advance at all with their knowledge, or they start lashing out like Nietzsche. But it is the Ahrimanic power that brought its waves to knowledge in the 19th century, which then had an effect on the 20th century. And one should understand that. And the original spirits who personally experienced this still half-masked encounter with Ahriman in the 19th century had a tragic fate behind them. But the students now received the prepared thoughts. These thoughts live in them. The Ahrimanic power has already formed the thoughts. The first original spirits recoiled; the pupils received the incomplete ahrimanic thoughts. These are now at work in them: 'Fight against the spirit', against the spirit that just does not want to surrender the earth to the ahrimanic powers, hatred of the spirit, fight against the spirit!

Today we must see this as a real connection. It lives today as a mood of the times, as a state of mind. We must understand it in order to truly grasp how necessary it is to assert a truly spiritual world view in all the different cultural forms in which such a world view must be lived.

The last lectures here were essentially devoted to an examination of the way in which we have to think about the present time consciousness. I then tried for the last time to reach back into earlier periods and to draw attention to the fact that what now lives in the souls has actually been preparing itself within Western civilization for a very long time. Today I would like to highlight some episodes from the immediate present that may draw your attention to how a spiritual life must necessarily arise out of the general consciousness of the times, simply out of the necessity inherent in the development of humanity. We can say: Wherever we observe man, whether in the West of present civilization, in the Middle or in the East, everywhere, on closer examination of the times, it can become clear to us how, without the onset of a spiritual impulse, things simply can no longer go on.

Today, we want to take a look at the last fifty years of Central European spiritual development, so as to prepare for tomorrow and the day after tomorrow, by considering the characteristics of the beginning and the end. I will do this symptomatically. I will characterize some things at the beginning and at the end of these last fifty years.

If we go back to the beginning of the 1870s, we find a wide range of spiritual phenomena that indicate the state of the human soul at the time. I will highlight a few of these spiritual phenomena. In 1872 and 1873, for example, there was a sensational novel that was closely related to the trends of the time. These things are actually forgotten for the younger people in our time, but the novel I mean is one that did indeed capture the imagination in an extraordinarily incisive way fifty years ago. I am talking about Paul Heyse's “Children of the World”. Paul Heyse, who was a famous writer of novellas at the time, wanted to use this novel to depict a number of personalities in their lives, all of whom were already imbued with a certain vague religiosity, but who had at the same time fallen away from some religious denomination or other. So, the children of God, whom, I might say, Paul Heyse saw in the traditional terminology of belonging to some denomination, he wanted to contrast with the children of the world, who belonged to no denomination, who, as they were said at the time, were without religious affiliation, but who nevertheless had a certain tendency towards embracing a religious belief. Now I do not want to talk too much about this novel itself, but I would like to draw attention to how such a work, which thus portrays people who are undenominational, made an impression in those days.

I have often mentioned my old friend and teacher Karl Julius Schröer before. He had the peculiarity of following intellectual phenomena as they made their impact in broader social life. Karl Julius Schröer characterized the effect of Paul Heyse's “Children of the World” by saying that it was extraordinarily strange how this novel was passed around fifty years ago, how it interested everyone, interested in how this novel actually gave people the idea that they had never thought about before: that they had no connection to any positive religious belief and that their religious search did not stop at any particular religious belief. And Schröer made the extraordinarily interesting comment at the time that people who had previously taken part in the religious practices of their church, who had thus gone along with their old religious practices, the customs of their church, out of habit, that such people said that this work actually expresses their innermost convictions. And then Schröer concludes with a sentence that is actually interesting: that in the face of such an apparition, religious disputes appear as an anachronism, as something that no longer fits into the present – he is referring to the present at the beginning of the 1970s – because people have already moved beyond them in their thinking. But as I said, although all this is true, we must still say: the people who are described there have lost all connection with any of the existing faiths, but there is a certain trait in them that allows them to find some kind of religiosity. They just can't find it. They go through the world without any religious affiliation, unable to find a connection to a spiritual world through religious feeling.

If we now look from such a phenomenon, which took place more within the literary-belletristic life, into the lecture halls, we find that it is roughly the same time in which the conviction of an extraordinary number of people within science was expressed by Du Bois-Reymond with the “Limits of Natural Knowledge”, which I have already mentioned frequently. In this famous lecture, which Du Bois-Reymond gave in 1872, it is stated that certain knowledge is only possible if one follows and penetrates the external phenomena of nature through experiment and observation, to a kind of mathematical-mechanical thinking about the structure of the world, to a kind of mechanism, an atomistic mechanism of the world. Science does not go beyond such a comprehension of the world, everything else must be left to faith. But if one had asked the people who spoke in this way at the beginning of the 1970s, such as Du Bois-Reymond in his “Grenzen des Naturerkennens” (The Limits of Natural Knowledge), how people should now seek their way into spiritual worlds in a religious way, no answer would have been forthcoming. There would only have been a comment, very similar to the comments made by the people in Paul Heyse's “Children of the World” who are described as having no religious affiliation.

Now it must be said that all those people who took part in the life that one calls educated, who absorbed something of scientific thought, who adopted something from other schools of thought, who lived in that time, were actually all more or less in a certain frame of mind. Whether they continued to practice their old religions or not depended essentially on old habits, on all kinds of prejudices and the like, and not on a strict and rigorous assertion of what the Zeitbewußtsein would have given to souls. In the last fifty years, people have actually lived in an indefinite, fickle relationship to the spiritual world. But we can also find something similar in other areas. A few years before the publication of Heyses “Children of the World” and Du Bois-Reymonds “Limits of Natural Knowledge”, the famous art writer Herman Grimm published “The Invincible Powers”, which is also a novel. In it, the prejudices and differences between social classes that dominate people in Western civilization are presented as invincible powers. And in an interesting way, this novel contrasts the differences in class and rank within Western civilization with what developed from certain, I would say unhistorical, habits in America as a new life, as a life that did not have to struggle in the same way with class differences and class prejudices. And it is interesting how Herman Grimm, at the end of the 1860s, that is, also about half a century ago, describes how, despite everything, European man, despite all his liberalism, despite all his humanism, does not have the strength to truly overcome class differences. These are insurmountable forces for him.

If you want to go deeper and ask yourself: Why are such things insurmountable forces for the European man? then one cannot get any other answer than this: because thinking, which in the case of the European has assumed a certain passive character, the thinking that I have characterized when, for example, I spoke about Richard Wahle, that thinking extends only to “events” and does not want to go into the primal factors, that therefore does not want to grasp forces but only wants to grasp appearances, because this thinking has dominated precisely the decisive people in the last fifty years. With such thinking, which has no power in itself, which is actually only a thinking, one might say, in powerless thought images, with such thinking one simply cannot overcome what has arisen in reality as class differences and class prejudices. What was needed was a thinking imbued with reality, a thinking permeated by reality. And this thinking permeated by reality, which once created the differences in social standing, which once created everything socially real, this dynamic thinking, in contrast to mere descriptive thinking, has actually been completely lost to people within European civilization over the last fifty years. It was absent from their science, which was therefore based only on observation and experiment; but it was also absent from their lives, so they continued to reproduce what had arisen from old habits based on old class prejudices. They did not think about it any further. Because if they had wanted to think about it, they would have needed active thinking. And when the proletarian class began to consider class differences, then this weak thinking, which contains no dynamism, was completely abandoned. It was said: these class differences do not come from forces that would have been within human thinking, but only from economic, physical forces. A conclusion was simply drawn.

There you have the situation at the starting point of our modern intellectual life fifty years ago. And now I want to present to you a work that was published recently and that is characteristic of our time, namely Werfel's “Mirror Man”. There you have something that has been born out of certain forces of our time, just as the “Children of the World” or the “Invincible Powers” were born out of the time of fifty years ago.

So what is the situation for people like Werfel today? In recent decades, this weak and anemic thinking has been at work. People have somehow sought something of a religious context, of a connection with a spiritual world, but nothing has emerged. But human nature cannot remain one-sided in the long run. It can do so in the development of world history for about fifty years, but then a reaction of human nature begins again. In a certain way, it wants to strive for something more powerful – if we stick with the last fifty years – than the powerless and insipid thinking was. Now, quite a few contemporary works already bear witness to this striving for a more powerful grasp of reality, but Werfel's 'Spiegelmensch' is particularly illustrative of this.

Werfel's “Mirror Man” compels us to speak about the present in this way: for long enough, people have sought their way in an indefinite, weak and impotent manner to something that makes man a full human being in the first place. Now an indefinite inner feeling asserts itself on the paths that have been taken in the last fifty years and which are actually not paths at all, but slippery passageways on which one continually slips. Nothing can really be achieved on these slippery passageways; one must get some iron into one's blood again. From such a striving for the times, something like this “mirror man” has emerged. Let us sketch with just a few lines what is depicted in this “mirror man”. It is not my intention to sin against the artistic by characterizing what is in this mirror man. But that is not the point at all; rather, we will see immediately afterwards that what I am about to say also touches on the artistic.

We see here a half-grown human being who has grown tired of the outer life as it can be led today. He takes leave of this outer life and now actually wants to become human. For he admits to himself that within the ordinary life, as we live it today, both in Asian and European and American civilization, one cannot really become human. You get up in the morning, have breakfast and do something to maintain yourself within the social order, you eat lunch or receive your guests and say things that perhaps need not be said, that ultimately do not aim to achieve much more than to make the lips move, that are not idle; you take your guests for a walk or whatever else you do today. You can't become a person in such company – I'm not quoting verbatim, I'm just characterizing. It is necessary to try a different path if you want to become a person. And so this “hero” – to use the old aesthetic style – tries to become a person by seeking admission to a monastery. But he is told that this is something extraordinarily difficult. I do not want to characterize the details, but only point out what is important to me today. He is therefore informed that it is something extraordinarily difficult and that, above all, he must be clear about the fact that he has to go through three stages of knowledge. In the first stage of knowledge, he would have to become clear about the human being's position in the world, insofar as this position is contained in the human ego itself. So this life in the ego and this striving to overcome the ego as the first level of knowledge. The second view of the world would consist in the fact that, after one begins to shed the ego in a certain sense, one no longer sees the world from one's prejudiced point of view, as one used to do before, when one had not even begun to shed the ego. And the third vision would be where man would truly penetrate into the world and its reality, not as seen by man living in his ego. He is told this. And he is admonished in the appropriate way not to want such an incarnation too urgently. He is made aware of the difficulties. But he does not back down.

So he is initiated in the appropriate way. The initiation takes place – I will mention only the essentials – by being led into solitude for the night, into a room where only a monk watches over him. And there, after he has initially abandoned himself to his thoughts, he falls into a brief sleep, from which he very soon believes he will wake up. And now he finds himself in the room whose one wall has a mirror on it. In this mirror he sees himself, and he is amazed at what is meant. It is meant that when one, after a collection of thoughts and after such a strong decision as this person has made, steps in front of his own reflection, one sees oneself in a different way. So it is actually pointed out that the person is only now beginning to see himself. The mirror image looks so similar to him, but yet again somewhat different. And by doing what must follow from such a surprising experience: by striking the mirror, believing that he has wounded himself, the mirror man steps out of the mirror towards him, that is, that of him which, in a certain respect, is himself and yet again not himself.

Now the person has arrived at the first step of knowledge. He must get used to not only going through the world as a person without ego consciousness, but also to having that which is himself and yet not completely himself, his mirror-person, accompany him. In the company of this mirror-man, who now tempts him to do all kinds of things in the outer world, lies a new encounter with world phenomena, with his own deeds, in that he finds himself precisely in the presence of his own ego.

Now, I do not want to go into the details. The person in question is actually lying in bed, but he goes through what he can go through according to his previous experiences of external world experiences and external actions. These are not always very nice. But how someone describes something like that depends on their own taste. You can see from the way the author describes things how he feels about such a case. People also experience the world according to their tastes. So we are led through the experiences of the world. Just as Mephisto in Faust has something of the driving force, this mirror man is now always the driving force, and he is led from event to event, being made to do many wrongs. Everything appears to him in a new light, because he has looked into the mirror and seen himself. He now sees one thing after another in the world. He sometimes sees things as they appear to him because he is an ego-person, and sometimes as they appear to him after he is already able to see his reflection. He becomes more and more familiar with the phenomena of the world. In the process, he comes out of his ego more and more. The mirror-man, who is rather slight at first, becomes fatter and fatter. This is a polar-parallel phenomenon, which is not uninteresting. And so this person now lives through the world by experiencing in a different way what he could have experienced earlier, now that he has seen his own self. And in the end he has become so entangled in the experiences of the world that he has to become his own judge, condemning himself to death, which is again very characteristic. He finds that he cannot really live in the world.

When he entered the monastery, he realized that it is impossible to live in today's society if you want to become a human being. This has increased to such an extent that now, when he has become his own judge, he condemns himself to death. And now he awakens. In a sense, he awakens from the execution of his own death sentence. He is again in the same room where he was. Now he looks at the mirror again. But by looking now, he notices, for example, that the mirror does not reflect a procession of monks passing by. Earlier, when he looked into the mirror, he saw himself and everything in front of the mirror. But now a procession of monks is passing by and is not reflected. He realizes from this that he is not standing in front of a mirror now, but that the mirror has become a window. He looks through it and sees out into the wide world, sees the landscape. He has attained the third vision. Now he sees the world, whereas at the beginning he saw only what the mirror gave. Because he had the mirror man at his side, he saw what he had seen before in a different way. But now, as it were, he sees through the surface of things - that is how it is presented - out into the free reality. It is, of course, implied that he now also sees out into the spiritual reality.

So we have a trilogy before us: the first is the mirror, the third is, let us say, the window. The mirror has become the window. So there we have the two polar opposite views of the world. At first, everyone sees in the other 'their own reflection', sees only what they already have within themselves in the other, where they are caught up in their own ego, and thus sees only their own reflection everywhere in their neighbor or in anything they see in nature. Finally, after breaking through the mirror, they no longer see the mirror, but through the surface of things into the spiritual. And in between

where the two merge into one another:

1. The mirror
2. One into the other
3. The window

Now, I would like to point out two characteristic features of this drama. The first is this: we see that there is a desire to depict a person in the process of rising to a certain religious connection with another world. That the first part, the mirror, is short, one can forgive, because it is very interesting to see how the person lives into an insight into his own ego, so that this ego becomes so concrete to him that it now accompanies him through his experiences in the world. The middle part is quite detailed, and a great many experiences are described. In order to find these appealing at all, one must have a taste, one could even say sometimes, distaste, for them. But as I said, everyone has to do it according to their own taste. In any case, this part, where one looks into the experiences of the world, is very long. But the third part is quite short, and what is seen out there is actually only hinted at, I would say symbolically, by looking through the window; nothing real comes into view. It is quite short, this third part. That is the one peculiarity I would like to emphasize. But the other peculiarity is this: one must recognize that here is the most beautiful expression of the striving to pour strength and energy into thinking. But one also sees that the modern man, of the kind that Werfel is, cannot do that at first. Why? Yes, it is very peculiar. When I had finished reading this drama – and I read with the greatest interest, I must say, because it is extremely significant for our present spiritual life as represented by individual personalities – I had to say the following to myself: the process is as follows: 1. Der Spiegel; 2. Eins ins andere; 3. Das Fenster. But one could also read the whole thing backwards from front to back. Of course, it would have to be rewritten, but one could also read the whole thing backwards from front to back. Because why? It is entirely possible to understand the matter in such a way that one says to oneself: the way a person initially relates to the world is how things appear to him. He is no different from the things. He has not awakened to his sense of self. He stands before the window, looks out into the world. Now we could say that the old monk, to whom he has now come and to whom he says that he can no longer bear it, that everything is always only inside, what he sees through the window, that he wants to find himself – that the old man now says to him: Yes, there are three views to go through. The first view shows us the world without our finding our ego in it. We lose ourselves to the world. The second view allows us to gain something of the ego, and then, gradually, a multitude of beings comes towards us from the world. The world is brought to life, spiritualized. We used to see it as spiritless, now the world is spiritualized. Everywhere, from every being, from plants, animals, clouds and so on, something spiritual comes towards us. Many spiritual beings come towards us in this second part. In the third part, we wake up. We step in front of the window, we look out. But we see everything anew, because now we see the real world for the first time. The window has been transformed into a mirror, the human being has come to himself. He unites all these mirror beings that have come to meet him in the world of plants, animals, clouds; they are in his only self, which has become cosmic to him. And now, by recognizing himself, he actually sees the cosmos for the first time.

You could easily describe the whole thing backwards, the last part of the trilogy first, then the middle part, then the part with which it started. That is extremely interesting, because it is precisely this that makes this drama particularly characteristic of the present. What is the peculiarity of intellectualism?

Yes, the peculiarity of intellectualism is this: you can start with the idea anywhere and stop anywhere, and you can assert one thing and you can assert another – I have emphasized this many times. In terms of thought, you can prove anything, in terms of thought you can refute anything. Intellectualism, which is nothing more than a system of vapid and feeble thoughts, allows you to start anywhere and go somewhere, but you will stop at a certain point. But you can also start at this latter point and go the other way.

Today, one can be a very clever person and a gross materialist, because materialism can be quite well proven in an intellectual way. And if one is purely intellectual, one can, in the way it happened after our anthroposophical congress in Vienna at a meeting, one can, from the standpoint of today's monism, quite intellectually lead the fight against the spirit. One can prove very well that materialism is right. But one can also want to be a spiritualist and prove this just as well. All these things, as long as one lives only in the intellectual, can be proved quite well, and they have the appearance of tremendous cogency, these intellectualistic discussions.

And so it is in our time. People do not suspect, as they become entangled in spiritualism, materialism, realism, idealism, that they are becoming entangled in the intellectual spirit. They rightly feel: this can be firmly proven. They are the creatures of intellectualism. Because it is indeed true that things can be proved, that is why it is so dismal when one is obliged today to seriously discuss something based on reality, and then 'free discussion' is set up. One person says this, another says that, a third says something else. Basically, if you are just a little bright, you can say: they are all right. Of course, they are all equally wrong. The whole point of the talk is, after all, that one or the other sees what a tremendous swindle of one's own self it is to live in intellectualism, because with intellectualism, everything can be easily proven. The only thing that matters is that one has immersed oneself long enough in some direction or current, in some sect or party or something else, then one can quite rightly say: Yes, that's all clear; the other one who claims the opposite is an idiot. - Certainly, but the other one can just as easily prove that the first one is an idiot and his own claim is correct. Today, with the configuration that intellectual life has attained, this is perfectly possible and is taken for granted. And so it is a matter of course that one can write such a piece today without arriving at a real spiritual insight. The fact that Werfel is not approached proves that nothing significant is seen through the window; the spiritual insight would only begin if something significant were seen through the window. But if you merely describe three steps, and then, after describing how he woke up and looked out, you do not describe what he sees, if you make so many concessions to the general consciousness that you can write such a “Mirror Man” and still say something reasonable in response to something like “Occult Science in Outline” or “How to Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds” or the like: If one has to say that one would not be in one's right mind if one accepted it, and if one can only say: Yes, the person in question has arrived at the window, but I am wary of seeing what one sees when looking out through the window, then one is simply not yet ready to immerse oneself in the real spiritual life, then one is simply completely stuck in intellectualism.

That is why I was allowed to speak in this way. Of course, one would not have the right to give a philosophical critique of a work of art. But I did not give a philosophical critique at all; what I said is just as much an artistic view. Because it happens to you, you read a trilogy, read it with the utmost interest. Afterwards, when you're done, you suddenly feel upside down! It's an uncomfortable feeling, and to get back on your feet again, you would have to rewrite the whole story from back to front. It would take a very long time before you could finally work your way back to your feet, to your footing. Yes, it is quite true that one is also artistically cheated by becoming aware: in there is the spinning wheel of intellectualism, while the work of art must indeed make a beautiful impression. You cannot reverse that. Try to turn Goethe's “Faust” around, to start writing from the back to the front. You cannot! A work of art cannot be turned around. Here in this work you can, because the intellectualism predominates, because it has not penetrated to the real looking. Intellectualism has indeed received the vague, unconscious feeling that there must be juice and strength in the thoughts, but in reality neither juice nor strength has entered, there is nothing in it. There is only a pattern of a more real inner experience in it. And so we see just from something that is really full of spirit, which is extremely significant in terms of what our time can bring forth, where the path must go.

For fifty years it has been the case that people actually feel: they must go in the direction of something spiritual, but they would avoid the real path. So they take something out of all kinds of old traditions, like the three-part path and the like. But it is characteristic that today they take up this three-part path; you can find it in all kinds of books that describe some old atavistic clairvoyant paths.

As long as one refrains from accepting what one sees when looking through the window, this story of “mirror” and “one into the other” and “through the window” can very easily still be part of our spiritual life. It is easy to describe if one only has such general ideas about it. But as long as you stop at that, you still can't get out of intellectualism, which holds the people of the present day captive with a tremendous magic.

I have pointed out this intellectual element in our time in the most diverse forms. I have pointed out how one could get into all kinds of branches in the Theosophical Society, and there were great schemes, races and rounds, whole world systems and all kinds of things were built up in wonderfully intellectual forms - all intellectual! On the other hand, when it was a matter of characterizing the structure of the human being, there was a scheme: physical man: dense physical matter; etheric body: finer matter; astral body: even finer; kama manas: even finer; manas: even finer, ever finer and finer. Yes, but only from the intellectual point of view! This thinning out did not stop at all! But it is just purely intellectual. Just as you can always turn a wheel, you can, if you just stick to the intellectual, let matter become thinner and thinner. And so we had an intellectualized theosophy, and so we have here an intellectualized poetry that even borders on mysticism and that will certainly be admired by a great many of our contemporaries, and rightly so, because one can see from such poetry how the striving of our time is again turning towards something spiritual.

But my judgment is not an unartistic one. When I look at this mirror man who accompanies the hero throughout his entire evolutionary life, this mirror man is something completely different than Mephisto in relation to Faust. There is life in Faust. You know, I once showed how Mephisto is ultimately only the other side of Faust, like Wagner. “You resemble the spirit you comprehend, not me.” You resemble Wagner, you resemble Mephisto, and so on. But there is life in it. But it is not yet life when the self jumps out of the mirror, is initially frail and then becomes fatter and fatter as the person himself grows more and more out of life.

In short, what dominates from beginning to end is the inanimate, the abstract. The abstract can always be turned around. And because nowhere in the artistic work can one feel a full-blooded, intense contemplation, but everywhere one sees only thought-patterns blown up into images, one feels an unartistic quality. And it is strange that in the present day, this is often defended by saying: Anthroposophy, yes, that is only the pursuit of ideas, and that is not artistic. But in Anthroposophy, the aim is to gain insight, only one must really be prepared for this insight. One must look through a window and see something. But here, the actual artistic is called something that has not quite hatched, that is just about to hatch from the egg, but is content to remain in the egg. You know what I mean, that the chicken does not really hatch from the egg to live in the world. It is as if man wants to begin a journey of knowledge, but still avoids the spiritual world in all its concreteness and certainty. I don't want to say how the egg feels when the chicken just can't get out! But isn't it true that it is just the same with such intellectual products that don't really get out.

This is not to say anything against the value of such things. In the sense of the present I actually see something of the very first order in this mirror-man. But from a higher point of view it must be characterized and placed in the spiritual life, in the whole cultural life of the present, as I have tried to sketch it.

Today I would like to add a somewhat more extensive consideration about cosmic observation to our reflections. We, as human beings, must be thoroughly aware that we live on earth in the time that passes between birth and death, and that we consider everything that makes an impression on us, in the narrower and broader sense, with our senses and also with our intellect, but only from the point of view of our earthly residence. We often become aware of how much we are bound to this earthly abode by our external physical body. We learn already in school that a human being can only live if he breathes the air that surrounds him and that consists of a certain mixture of oxygen and nitrogen. Man is completely dependent on this air for his vital functions. We only need to consider how different our physical life would be if, for example, there were more oxygen in the air around us than there actually is. Let us assume that there were more oxygen in the air, then we would live faster, that is, we would have a much shorter lifespan on earth calculated by years. Time would be compressed, so to speak, and our lifespan would have to be shorter. This is basically just a very rough approximation. We can imagine that our entire human organism would be different if every single thing in our environment that has an influence on us were to be changed just a little. Such a consideration is indeed often made today. People are becoming aware of their physical dependence on their environment. However, at most one is only very clearly aware in the abstract that man also has a soul-spiritual being, and basically one never has such precise ideas about this spiritual-soul being as one has about the physical-bodily being. The physical-corporal aspect of our organization is so well known that one can say how differently abundant oxygen in the air would affect a person. Regarding the spiritual-soul being, one does not think so much, thoughts that would go something like this: If this spiritual-soul being were different from what it is, could it then be on earth between birth and death?

Just as our body is adapted to the amount of oxygen in the air, and how many other things in our body are adapted to the conditions that are just near the earth's surface, so too is our soul and spirit perfectly adapted between birth and death to what is immediately at the earth's surface. And when one becomes fully aware of this, then one will also be able to say: Just as the human being could not live as an earthly human being out there, just a few miles from the earth's surface, so too would the human soul, with its thinking, feeling and willing, not be able to live in a different way in other than earthly conditions, just as it lives in the earth's environment. Elsewhere, in a different position to the earth, it would have to be organized differently again as a spiritual-mental being. Just as the human body would derive no benefit from its lungs, once they were organized, if they were miles away from the earth's surface, so the human soul, with its thinking, feeling and willing, as it develops in earthly life, would be unable to function under other than earthly conditions.

One could not get any clear idea of these things at all if it were not possible for those people who seek an inner soul development to come to different soul experiences than are the case in ordinary thinking, feeling and willing. You all know from the descriptions in my book 'How to Know Higher Worlds' that one can arrive at quite different soul moods and dispositions, that one can arrive at a quite different soul content. One can arrive at a soul content that not only has ordinary thinking but also imagination, that lives in pictures instead of thoughts. One can go further and arrive at inspiration. Just as our lungs, with the air, perform their inhalation in relation to the physicality of the air, so too can one, so to speak, inspire and breathe in the spiritual and soul substance of the spiritual and soul substance spread throughout the world. And just as the lungs, when they inhale oxygen, draw their life from this oxygen, as the whole human body draws its life from this oxygen, so too the human soul draws its life from the inspirations that take place when such higher knowledge is acquired. And it is the same with the further level of knowledge, with intuition.

Then the soul rises to a completely different inner content. Then it experiences something essentially different. But this different experience is connected, as you know, with what can be called a soul-like going out of the body. We no longer feel so within our body when we ascend to imagination, inspiration and intuition as we feel when we are in ordinary earthly life. It is then with the spiritual-soul being just as if, for example, the lungs were transformed into an organ that breathes light instead of air. Then it could indeed live a few miles outside the earthly with the organism to which the lungs belong. Now, in the physical that is not possible at first, at least not for a human being, but it is possible for the spiritual and soul in us when we leave our body and then experience imagination, inspiration and intuition in our soul, we actually leave the earthly point of view, we already come to the point of view that we had before we descended into a physical body. We come through the fact that we ascend to imagination, inspiration and intuition, actually from an earthly view of the world to a cosmic view of the world. We are just simply no longer on earth, but we look at the earthly from a different point of view.

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This is not of great significance when it comes to observing human souls. However, it is of great significance when it comes to getting to know the spiritual in the cosmos itself. I will make this clear to you in a schematic drawing. Imagine that here is the earth, the human being on earth. Man sees the elements in his earthly surroundings. We can call them solid, liquid and gaseous. He perceives the fiery, the warm. But then what immediately belongs to the earth's surface ceases. By perceiving the fiery, the warm, man already rises to the perception of the earth's surroundings. He enters the light-filled realm, into that which we call the light ether. It is indeed our special characteristic that we can perceive the light ether through our looking, our seeing. But when imaginative perception occurs in a person, then he does not feel standing here on earth and letting his gaze wander out into the light ether, but then he actually feels as if he were perceiving and looking at the whole from the outside (drawing, red).

Particularly in relation to what I am discussing here, it is possible to speak quite definitely about how this happens. If you are standing on the earth and let your gaze wander freely into the cosmos, then by day you are looking into the light everywhere. By night you look up at the starry sky. There you make use, if I may say so, of the perceiving power of your eye. But the power of will is also constantly directed at this perceiving power of your eye. You actually use this power of will in earthly seeing only for the adjustment of the eye. But when you ascend to imaginative cognition, this willpower is trained more and more, especially for the individual senses. You feel how you, as it were, step out into space through your eyes and increasingly come to look at the cosmos from the outside.

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You do not have to believe that what I am describing here consists of your eye becoming huge, and then growing all the way over, and that you then look at the cosmos from the outside as you now look at the cosmos from the inside. You do not achieve this through the power of perception, but precisely through the will becoming clairvoyant. It is an experience in which the will expands, but in which you yourself are present. In this case you also look at the stars from the outside, as a person, when he is in the spiritual world as a soul, also looks at the stars from the outside, from where there are no more stars, not from the etheric region, but from the astral region, from which one can say that there is still space, and from which one can also say that there is no more space. It does not make much sense to speak of what I have just indicated as if there were still space. But one feels as if one had space within oneself. But then you do not see any stars. You know you are looking at the stars, but you do not see any stars, you see images. You actually see images everywhere within the stellar space. It suddenly becomes clear to you why in the old days, when people depicted spheres, they didn't just paint stars, but pictures.

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But now imagine looking through these pictures. Then you become aware that forces radiate down to Earth from all these pictures; only that these forces radiate together. If you look at a radiant star from here, from the Earth, you have the feeling that the rays diverge. If you look at it from outside, you have the feeling that the rays, the light effects that emanate from the pictures, are not only light effects but also power effects, and that they go together. These power effects go as far as the earth. And what do they do there? Yes, you see, they form the shape of the plants, for example. And the one who looks imaginatively says: the lily is a plant form on earth that was created in this form and shape by this group of stars. Another, a tulip shape, was created by another group of stars.

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And so you see what is on earth as plant cover (green), as if it were really painted by the starry sky. It is actually the case that the form of the plant body is determined, created, by the cosmos. And now you can easily understand: if you look further in, if you see the fixed stars out there, then closer to the earth you see the planets Saturn, Jupiter, Mars and so on. They are moving. The fixed stars show you the constellations at rest, which give the plants their shape. But the moving planets send down forces of movement. It is these that the plants first draw out of the root, then make them grow higher and higher, and so on. Just as the shape of the plants is formed from the fixed starry sky, so the movement is formed from the movement of the celestial bodies closer to the earth. Only what takes place in the plant itself, this metabolism, that, for example, the plant absorbs carbonic acid, assimilates it, as they say, and secretes the carbon, so that it forms its carbon body, that is from the forces of the earth itself. We can therefore say: When we look at the plant in its entirety, its form is from the starry sky, its growth is from the planetary movement, and its metabolism is from the earth.

These are things that are regarded as foolishness by those who call themselves true scientific minds today, but they are the very reality. For he who regards the plant in its growth and form as it is done today, resembles one — I must here use a simile that I have often applied — who looks at a magnetic needle that points with one side to the north, with the other side to the south, and who now says: This is due to the magnetic needle, that one point points to the north, the other to the south. It is not due to the magnetic needle, but natural science naturally assumes that the whole earth is a great magnet, that it attracts the one point to the north and the other to the south. In natural science, the whole earth is used to explain the direction of the magnetic needle. But in the same way, if you want to explain the whole form of the plant, you have to use the whole universe. The plant is formed out of the whole universe. It is simply an awful absurdity that the same people who, for example, use the whole earth to explain the direction of the magnetic needle, want to explain the plant only in terms of its cells and their forces. Just as the magnet needle can only be understood when it is placed in the whole magnetic context of the earth, so can plants only be understood when they are placed in the whole cosmic context, when one comes to say: Here I am walking across a region, let us say, of central Europe; for this central Europe, during the time of flower growth, these constellations have a particular significance; hence the plants of this area grow here, because the heavens cause certain plants to grow on the earth in a particular area.

If we wish to observe plants from this point of view, if we go as far as the form, then we must actually take the whole Cosmos to help us. With the animals we need go only as far as the constellations of the zodiac. I have already spoken about this. The stars outside the zodiac have no influence on animals. The animal has thus already become more independent, no longer depends in its organic formation on the whole cosmos, but only on what is in and under the zodiac.

Man has become even more independent, because only the planets influence him, not in so far as he is a soul, but in so far as he is a physical organism. Only where it passes over into the moral, into the soul, must we go beyond the planetary influence, as was done in the older, really good views of astrology, not in today's lay and amateurish ones, which are still behind. But from all this you can see that one must say, in a certain way, but always only to the extent that one takes the external into account: this applies to the plant. For the animal, the form is connected with the zodiac, the growth with the planetary movement and the metabolism with the earth.

If we go up to the human being, then we can no longer ascribe his form to any constellation, but only to the whole universe as such; we can only say: the sphere; not to the individual constellations, but to the whole sphere. I have therefore said on one occasion – and it has already been printed – that in a certain sense the human brain is a reflection of the whole starry sky, not of a single group of stars. Thus, the sphere for form. For growth, in a certain sense, planetary motion too, but now the entire planetary motion, not individual planets, as it is for the plant, for the animal; and for metabolism, again, the earth.

Plant:

Form, starry sky
growth, planets
metabolism, earth

Animal:

Form, zodiac
growth, planets
metabolism, earth

Human being:

form, sphere
growth, planet
metabolism, earth

What was the progress in the development of knowledge? Basically, until the time of the Mystery of Golgotha, no one who came into consideration with regard to knowledge doubted the things I have just discussed. Even if this ancient knowledge was not the fully conscious knowledge that we are striving for today through anthroposophy, for example, there was still a kind of dream-like but clairvoyant knowledge in those ancient times, at least up to the Mystery of Golgotha. And those people who were recognized as knowing something about the world had no doubt at all that when they looked at a plant blossom, they had to relate it to some configurations in the starry sky. And so with other things.

Then this knowledge increasingly disappeared during the first four centuries after the Mystery of Golgotha. After the great eradication of ancient knowledge - I have often described this eradication - only those insights remained that were handed down into the Middle Ages, were often distorted, and are now recorded in old books and are still enjoyed by some people who do not want to take refuge in the new knowledge but always want to look back to the old.

The realization that we are now consciously embracing, the cosmic realization of everything that appears here on our earth as a form, this cosmic realization that we are striving for today, was not present in conscious clairvoyance, but it was present in a certain way. It dawned on people more and more. And then, after man had devoted himself for some time to the artistic shaping of the word in drama, to the thought in dialectics, to the sound and word connection in rhetoric, to the contemplation of number in arithmetic, to the contemplation of form in geometry, after man had devoted himself to this artistic training of the human soul forces for several centuries, the world view emerged that no longer searches out there in the universe, that no longer asks: What is out there that a lily blossom or a tulip blossom can arise on earth? Instead, a worldview emerged that only calculates the present position of the stars, the size of the stars, which only mathematics can explain, which at most accepts mechanics and physics as astrophysics when the stellar world, when the extraterrestrial comes into consideration.

If there is the earth here and a mole in the earth here, the mole has a certain view of the world. But there is not much of the sun in this world view. In more recent times, people have lost the opportunity to look up from the lily blossom, from the tulip blossom into the starry sky, just as the mole does not have the opportunity to look up beyond the darkness of the earth. And there, human beings are stuck in the earth, water, air and fire. At most, they look out into the light like an earthworm does when it comes out during a rain shower and perhaps perceives something of the scant light out there. With regard to the spiritual world, humanity has gradually become entangled in a kind of mole existence. For only what man can find in his own inner being, the mathematical connections, he seeks outside in the cosmos; but he does not seek the concrete and spiritually real outside in the cosmos. One could say that the experience of freedom could only come to man through leading this mole-like existence for a while, through looking at the lily and no longer knowing that a picture of heaven is reflected in the lily; through looking at the tulip and no longer knowing that a picture of heaven is reflected in the tulip. In this way he has turned his powers more inward, and has attained the experience of freedom. But today we have reached the point where we must again grasp the spiritual universe in the eye of our soul. That which for centuries appeared only as the mathematical, mechanical structure of space must again appear to the soul's eye as a spiritualized cosmos. One can truly say: For centuries, humanity in the civilized world has led a spiritual life of privation, albeit for the purpose of cultivating human freedom; for everything that is experienced in the progress of humanity has meaning. But one must see through this meaning, one must not stop at one stage of development, but one must go along with the development and must be clear today: Now that humanity has developed the experience of freedom in its earthly mole-like existence, it must turn again to the contemplation of the spiritual, the spiritual world, not only the mathematical world.

But try to imagine vividly what I am dealing with now. It is really as if it had become dark in the soul in relation to the first four centuries after Christ, as if people had previously looked out and seen the light of the Spirit in the cosmos, figuratively speaking. There was just enough time, because this vision of the soul lasted for another four centuries after the Mystery of Golgotha, even if it became increasingly duller and duller, for the event of Golgotha, the Christ event, to still be viewed spiritually in the first centuries. Only the literature that refers to this spiritual view of the Christ event has also been eradicated. After all, there is nothing of this literature left except what the opponents wrote. Man faces the Mystery of Golgotha in such a way that, apart from the simple, seemingly simple accounts of the Gospels, he does not have the great accounts that the spiritualists of the first four centuries still gave. He has only the accounts of the opponents. We have about as much of the greatest portrayals of the mystery of Golgotha as posterity would have of anthroposophy if it only read the writings of Kal/ly. I think one would not get a very adequate picture. You always have to bear in mind how these first four centuries worked to eradicate precisely the most intense insights that were still available when one looked out into the cosmos and knew that the Christ came to earth from a spiritual cosmos. One had to understand the spiritual cosmos in order to be able to understand how the Christ came to earth from the spiritual world and embodied himself in a human being. Then nothing remained, because humanity immersed itself only in the earthly, as the memories of the Mystery of Golgotha. The memories were passed down from generation to generation. And what was passed down as a memory was called a revelation, and it was sought to comprehend it with the intellectualism that was emerging more and more.

What is it then that is our task today in the face of these things? It is our task to learn to look out into the universe again and to be able to see spirit everywhere, not just by immersing ourselves in ourselves and wanting to experience the spiritual there, but by being able to experience the spirit in all the forms of the cosmos outside of us. That is our right, that must happen again. We must again penetrate into the luminous spirit of the whole cosmos, then we will also see the Mystery of Golgotha in a new light.

I have shown you how, in the last third of the nineteenth century, this merely confessional adherence to the Mystery of Golgotha was actually no longer present. I have told you that a spirit like Kar} Julius Schröer said as early as the beginning of the seventies: The religious issues are actually an anachronism. He believed that people are already striving for something completely different, for a different kind of piety, for a different kind of connection with the spiritual world. But it has essentially taken these last fifty years for only weak attempts to be made, such as the one I mentioned in Werfel's “Mirror Man.” But now one sees that individual people are drawn to rediscover their connection with the spiritual world. But do not think that this connection with the spiritual world can be easily found. It cannot be easily found for the reason that today what is called science has acquired terrible authority, and is practised everywhere as official science. But it has emerged from these secret activities. I do not mean this in a derogatory sense. Please do not think that I am criticizing the times by speaking of 'moles'. I am just trying to characterize. I really do not want to say anything derogatory, because basically, since the 15th century, great things have been achieved by these cosmic moles, who are called human beings.

If you do not believe this, then study the geography of moles or earthworms from a spiritual scientific point of view. This is a dream-like geography, but it is magnificent; it is just not suited to man. And if you were to study the geography of plants! The plant does not even dream in its etheric body, but what can be discovered in the etheric body is truly more magnificent than what can be learned at a faculty today. So, I do not mean any disrespect when I say: a mole existence, because I value it highly.

But the world is evolving, and now is the time for us to reconnect with spiritual perception, with spiritual insight. People cannot continue to live without immersing themselves in this spiritual insight. And now one must become quite clear how these things have actually worked in the last fifty years. And here I would again like to present a characteristic personality. Sometimes one can study personalities much more precisely than one can describe more impersonal and abstract, in terms of how things develop in relation to human cultures and their progress.

In these past reflections, I have referred you to Brentano and Nietzsche in order to show you, by way of what human souls have gone through, how evolution actually was. Today I would like to show you something more from the other side, how a person has been understood by his fellow human beings.

In the 1820s, on July 22, 1822, a certain Gregor Mendel was born (we are celebrating his 100th birthday today). I mentioned him the other day when I said that, while we were in Vienna, articles about Gregor Mendel appeared everywhere because his 100th birthday is approaching. This Gregor Mendel was born the son of a farmer in a Silesian village, studied with great difficulty and very good progress, and was ordained a priest in Moravia at the age of twenty-four. He thus became a Catholic priest. Gregor Mendel was an exceptionally good student, as they say, both as a grammar school student and even at the seminary. It was common practice in Austria at the time – it was in the forties or fifties of the last century – for particularly well-behaved, hard-working students to be given scholarships by their convents. They were then sent to university to be trained as secondary school teachers, because almost all positions in the grammar and secondary modern schools - I also mentioned this recently when I described our trip to Vienna - were filled by monks or priests. In Austria, priests taught at the schools that are called secondary schools here, up to and including university.

He was sent to Vienna to study mathematics and the exact natural sciences. After three years of study, you then had to take the teaching examination at that time. Mendel registered for the teaching examination, apparently thinking that because he had always received such excellent grades, it would be just as easy to pass the examination. He failed the teacher training examination, had to repeat it, and failed again, so that he could not repeat it a third time; because if you fail twice in such an important matter, you cannot continue.

Through all kinds of circumstances, as it once was in old Austria, a school principal somewhere in Moravia once said: Well, we don't have anyone else who has come through and gotten a good report card; but we need a teacher, so we'll just hire Gregor Mendel. And so he became a secondary school teacher for fifteen years. There is no denying that he nevertheless became one of those secondary school teachers who were sent to these higher schools as priests.

But then he particularly indulged his love of science, conducting a large number of experiments on the way inheritance occurs, especially in plants. He collected plants, planted plants, those, let's say, that have a reddish flower, and those that have whitish flowers. Then he allowed those that had reddish flowers to fertilize those that had whitish flowers, and then he got plants with nothing but reddish flowers, which were daughter plants. But in the second generation it was different. There was a certain number of reddish flowers, whitish flowers, mottled flowers, and so on. In short, Gregor Mendel said to himself: I must seek the atoms, the actual atomistic in the plant world, in the organic world in general. Those who are familiar with the development of intellectual life know how much thought was given to inheritance in those days. There are an enormous number of inheritance theories. But Gregor Mendel did not pay much attention to these inheritance theories. Instead, he planted his pea plants and observed how inheritance takes place when he allows a white pea to be fertilized by a reddish one. He to see if he got a red, white or mottled pea, and in this way he determined over generations how, for example, the color is formed, how inheritance is formed at all under different conditions, proportions and the like in peas.

Yesterday I described the time – it was in the 1960s – when all of this came about, which I have described, which worked in Herman Grimm's “Unüberwindlichen Mächten”, in Paul Heyses “Kinder der Welt”, in Du Bois-Reymonds “Grenzen des Naturerkennens” and so on from the most diverse sides. In Mendel's case, it worked in such a way that he established the conditions of inheritance.

The examiners at the two teaching exams were at least concerned enough about Gregor Mendel to fail him twice, and to give him the certificate: Completely unsuitable to teach any science to high school or secondary school students! — The other people, the later ones, were no longer concerned about Gregor Mendel at all. The books he wrote about the laws of inheritance are pretty much gathering dust in the libraries. Nobody cared about them anymore.

But for about twenty or twenty-five years, you can find that people cared more and more about Gregor Mendel. They dug up his laws of inheritance. Because now we are facing a very special phase of science. In the epoch in which Herman Grimm wanted to show how human intellect cannot overcome class prejudices because it is not powerful, in the epoch in which Du Bois-Reymond pronounced his “Ignorabimus”, in which Paul Heyse wrote his “Children of the World”, thus in the epoch in which reason, intellect, has become increasingly powerless and sapless, but where there was nevertheless a tendency towards a new piety among non-denominational people, which has now lasted for fifty years. At the same time, efforts were being made everywhere to develop atomism to de-soul science, and Gregor Mendel also endeavored to discover botanical and zoological atomism. He tried to compose each plant according to its inheritance from red and white flowers, from large and small, from thick and thin flowers, to see how thick and thin, red and white flowers, once they are there, remain as unchanging as atoms remain unchanging. Back then, people said, for example: in carbonic acid we have coal and in hydrocarbon we have coal. Hydrocarbon is something completely different from carbonic acid, but in both there is coal. The atoms that are there as coal are the same in carbonic acid and in hydrocarbon.

Mendel said: I have a red pea flower, and I have a white pea flower. Now the children that are born may be red. But now the children in turn have children, some of whom are red, some of whom are white, and some are mottled, speckled with red and white. And now it continues again: they have children, and among these there are again red, white and mottled ones, and so on. - Now we have the atomistic approach in relation to plants. If we look only at the color, red and white, then where the peas are red, only the white is hidden; it is also inside, only hidden. But with the further children, there it comes out again, just as the carbon is in the carbonic acid and in the hydrocarbon, in substances that are quite different from each other. That is the essential thing in the atoms, the carbon is here and is there; that is the same everywhere, the solid, the eternal atoms. The eternal atoms in plants, which are passed on by inheritance, are the colors, but also, for example, whether the plant is thick or thin, large or small; but the white is preserved, it is only sometimes hidden. Just as oxygen is present in water, so here the white is hidden in the red children and comes to light again when it has the opportunity.

Gregor Mendel was truly a great man, because he sought out what was then considered appropriate for the time, atomism for the inanimate world, in the right place, for the plant world, in line with the thinking of his time. He also made very interesting observations about the animal world, although he failed his teaching exams twice. He did all that, but at the time, no one paid any attention.

Then came the time when the discovery of radium and so on blew apart the atomism in the inanimate world. Recently, a rectorate speech was given in Berlin that seems to have dealt with this very nicely: you can't stick to the old atomism anymore. But people can't catch their breath quickly. Now they are losing their breath when they no longer have atomism. It no longer works in physics, and it doesn't really work in chemistry either. So, after Gregor Mendel had been gathering dust for a long time, his laws of inheritance were excavated, and today you can find everywhere that people are talking about Mendelism, that Mendelism is mentioned as something of the very first rank in the theory of inheritance, one hundred years after his birthday. The centenary of Gregor Mendel is now being celebrated in learned academies everywhere.

It is an interesting life: the priest, who remained unnoticed during his lifetime and who failed his teaching exams twice, has nevertheless achieved something that a large number of academies around the world are celebrating as a very first intellectual accomplishment. In the case of Brentano, I have shown you the man from within, how he viewed the world, how he felt about the Vatican Council and the dogma of infallibility. In the case of Nietzsche, I have tried to show you something similar. In the case of Gregor Mendel, I wanted to show you more how others viewed him. Because it is, after all, interesting that the learned body twice failed him in his teaching exams, that he then remained completely unnoticed and now rules the world in terms of the so-called laws of inheritance. What is that? Basically, it is nothing more than the emergence of the last phase of intellectualism and, indeed, something else, which I would like to talk about tomorrow. But the emergence of intellectualism, the last gasps of intellectualism, which is so closely linked to atomism, can be seen in the relationship between the world and Gregor Mendel and also the world and Mendel today.

I truly have no desire to take anything away from Gregor Mendel's fame. On the contrary, I have taken this opportunity today to introduce you to a truly great man, so that you will think of this great man here too. He is a great man. But it is precisely by studying the inner and outer destinies of great men that we can study the further development of humanity. It is not the small men, but the great ones, with whom one must study this, and Gregor Mendel is a great man, and you can be assured that I am more pleased that he is being celebrated today in all kinds of scientific academies than that I am pleased that he failed twice. You can believe that. But the fate of Gregor Mendel is extremely interesting. And I would like to say: this current clinging to atomism in the organic world is extremely characteristic of our time and actually belongs to all the phenomena that I wanted to describe to you in these days, which I examined yesterday from a different point of view and which I presented to you today from the point of view of Mendelism, for the centenary of Johann Gregor Mendel.

My dear Friends,

The things I shall have to explain to-day may be apparently a little far removed from our more concrete studies of Anthroposophy. They are however a necessary foundation for many other perceptions which we need—a foundation on which we shall afterwards have to build in our more intimate considerations.

There is a certain inherent difficulty for our human power of knowledge and understanding when we speak of the physical bodily nature of man on the one hand, and the soul-and-spirit on the other. Man can gain ideas about the physical and bodily with comparative ease, for it is given to him through the senses. It comes out to meet him, as it were, from his environment on all sides, without his having to do very much for it himself—at any rate so far as his consciousness is concerned. But it is very different when we come to speak of the soul-and-spirit. True, if he is open-minded enough, man is distinctly aware of the fact that such a thing exists. Men have always received into their language designations, words and phrases referring to the soul-and-spirit. The very existence of such words and phrases shews after all, for an open-minded consciousness, that something does exist to draw man's attention to the reality of soul-and-spirit.

But the difficulties begin at once when man endeavours to relate the world of things physical and bodily with the world of soul and spirit. Indeed for those who try to grapple with such questions philosophically, shall we say, the search for this relationship gives rise to the greatest imaginable difficulties. They know that the physical and bodily is extended in space. They can even represent it spatially. Man forms his ideas of it comparatively easily. He can use all that space with its three dimensions gives to him, in forming his ideas about things physical and bodily. But the spiritual as such is nowhere to be found in space.

Some people, who imagine they are not materialistically minded—though in reality they are all the more so—try to conceive the things of the soul and spirit in the world of space. Thus they are led to the well-known spiritualistic aberrations. These aberrations are in reality materialistic, for they are an effort to bring the soul and spirit perforce into space.

But quite apart from all that, the fact is that man is conscious of his own soul-and-spirit. He is well aware of how it works, for he is aware that when he resolves to move about in space his thought is translated into movement through his will. The movement is in space, but of the thought no open-minded, unbiased thinking person can assert that it is in space. In this way the greatest difficulties have arisen, especially for philosophic thinking.

People ask: How can the soul-and-spirit in man—to which the Ego itself belongs—work upon the physical and bodily which is in space? How can something essentially unspatial work upon something spatial?

Diverse theories have arisen on this point, but they all of them labour more or less under the difficulty of bringing the soul-and-spirit, which is unspatial, into relation with the physical and bodily, which is spatial. Some people say: In the will, the soul-and-spirit works upon the bodily nature. But in the first place, with ordinary consciousness, no one can say how the thought flows into the will, or how it can be that the will, which is itself a kind of spiritual essence, manifests itself in outer forms of movement, in outer activities.

On the other hand the processes which are called forth by the physical world in our senses—i.e., in the bodily nature—are also processes extended in space. Yet inasmuch as they become an experience in soul and spirit, they are transformed into something non-spatial. Man cannot say out of his ordinary consciousness, how the physical and spatial process which takes place in sense-perception can influence the non-spatial, the soul-and-spirit.

In recent times, it is true, men have sought refuge in the conception, to which I have often referred, of ‘psychophysical parallelism.’ It really amounts to a confession that we can say nothing of the relation of the physical and bodily to the soul-and-spirit. It says, for example: The human being walks, he moves his legs, he changes his position in external space. This is a spatial, a physical-bodily process. Simultaneously, while this is taking place in his body, a process of soul-and-spirit is enacted—a process of thought, feeling and will. All that we know is that when the physical and bodily process takes place in space and time, the process of soul and spirit also takes place. But we have no concrete idea of how the one works upon the other. We have psycho-physical parallelism: a psychical process takes its course simultaneously with the bodily process. But we still do not get behind the secret—whose existence is thus expressed—that the two processes run parallel to one another. We gain no notion of how they work on one another. And so it is invariably, when men try to form a conception of the existence of the soul-and-spirit.

In the 19th Century, when the ideas of men were so thoroughly saturated with materialism, even this question could arise:—Where do the souls sojourn in universal space when they have left the body? There were even men who tried to refute spiritualism by proving that when so and so many men are dying and so and so many are already dead, there can be no room in the whole world of space for all these souls to find a place of abode! This absurd line of thought actually arose more than once during the 19th Century. People said, Man cannot be immortal, for all the spaces of the world would already have been filled with their immortal souls.

All these things indicate what difficulties arise when we seek the relation between the bodily and physical, clearly spread out as it is in space, and the soul and spirit which we cannot in the first place assign to the spatial universe.

Things have gradually come to this pass; our purely intellectualistic thinking has placed the bodily-physical and the soul-and-spirit sharply and crudely side by side. For the modern consciousness they stand side by side, without any intermediary. Nor is there any possibility of finding a relation on the lines along which people think of them to-day. The man of to-day conceives the spatial and physical in such a way that the soul has no conceivable place in it. Again, he is driven to conceive the soul-qualities so sharply separated from the physical and bodily, that the absolutely unspatial soul-and-spirit, as he conceives it, cannot possibly impinge at any point upon the physical. ...

This sharp contrast and division was however only developed in the course of time. We must now begin again from an altogether different angle of approach, which is only made possible once more by taking our start from what anthroposophical spiritual science has to say.

In the first place, anthroposophical science must consider the nature of the will. To begin with, straightforward observation shews undoubtedly that the will of man follows his movements everywhere. Moreover, the movements man accomplishes externally in space when he moves about, and those too which take place within him in the fulfilment of his everyday functions of life, in a word, all the activities of man in the physical world-are in the three dimensions of space. Hence the will must also go everywhere, wherever the three dimensions extend. Of this there can be no doubt.

Thus if we are speaking of the will as of an element of soul-and-spirit, there can be no question but that the will—albeit a thing of soul and spirit—is three-dimensional. It has a three-dimensional configuration.

We cannot but think of it in this way:—When we carry out a movement through our will, the will adapts itself and enters into all the spatial positions which are traced, for example, by the arm and hand. The will goes with it everywhere, wherever the movement of a limb takes place. Thus after all we must speak of the will as of a quality of soul which can assume a three-dimensional configuration.

Now the question is, do all the soul-qualities assume this three-dimensional configuration? Let us pass from the Will to the world of Feeling. To begin with, we can make the same kind of observation. Considering the matter with the ordinary everyday consciousness, man will say to himself, for example: ‘If I am pricked by a needle on the right-hand side of my head, I feel it; if I am pricked on the left-hand side I feel it also.’ In the everyday consciousness he can, therefore, be of opinion that his Feeling is spread out over his whole body. He will then speak of Feeling as having a three-dimensional configuration in the same sense as the Will. But in so doing he gives himself up to an illusion. It is not really so. The fact is, at this point there are certain experiences which every man can have in his own nature, and from these we must take our start today. Our considerations will have to be somewhat subtle, but spiritual science cannot really be understood without subtlety of thought.

Consider for a moment what it is like when you touch your own left hand with your right. You have a perception of yourself thereby. Just as in other cases you perceive an outer object, so do you perceive yourself when you touch your right hand with your left hand-say with the several fingers one by one.

The fact to which I am referring appears still more distinctly when you consider that you have two eyes. To focus an object with both eyes you have to exert your will to some extent. We often do not think of this exertion of the will. It comes out more strongly when you try to focus a very near object. You then endeavour to turn your left eye towards the right and your right eye towards the left. You focus an object by bringing the lines of vision into contact, just as you bring your right and left hands into contact when you touch yourself. From these examples you can see that it is of some importance for man, with respect to his orientation in the world, to bring his left and right into a certain mutual relation. By the contact of the hands or the crossing of the lines of vision we can thus become aware of an underlying fact which is of deep significance. Though the everyday consciousness does not generally go farther than this, it is possible to continue very much farther along this line of study.

Suppose we are pricked by a needle on the right-hand side of our body. We feel the prick. But we cannot really say so simply ‘where’ we feel the prick-meaning by ‘where’ some portion of the surface of our body. For unless the several members of our organism stood in a living mutual relationship to one-another,—unless they were working one upon the other—our human nature, body and soul together, would not be what it is. Even when our body is pricked, let us say, on the right-hand side, there is always a connection established from the right-hand side to the central plane of symmetry. For any feeling or sensation to be brought about, the left half of the body must always enter into relation with the right.

It is comparatively easy to realise—if this be the plane of symmetry, seen from in front—that when the right hand touches the left the mutual feeling of the two hands is brought about in the plane of symmetry. It is comparatively easy to speak of the crossing of the lines of vision from the two eyes. But there is always a connecting line in every case—whenever we are pricked, for example, on the right-hand side;—the left half of the body crosses with the connecting line from the right. Without this process, the sensation would never come about. In all the surging waves of feeling and sensation, the fact that we have a right and a left half of the body—the fact that we are built symmetrically—plays an immense part. We always relate to the left-hand side what happens to us on the right. In a vague groping way something reaches over in us from the left, to cross with what is flowing from the right.

Only so does Feeling come about. Feeling never comes about in space, but only in the plane. Thus the world of Feeling is in reality spread out, not three-dimensionally, but two-dimensionally. Man experiences it only in the plane which as a plane of section would divide him into two symmetrical halves.

The life of Feeling is really like a painting on a canvas—but we are painting it not only from the one side but from both. Imagine that I here erect a canvas, which I paint from right to left and from left to right, and observe the interweaving of what I have painted from the one side and the other. The picture is only in two dimensions. Everything three-dimensional is projected, so to speak, into the two dimensions.

You can arrive at the same idea in a somewhat different way. Suppose you were able to project on to a flat surface shadow-pictures of objects on the right-hand side and on the left. On the flat expanded wall you then have shadows of left- and right-hand objects. So it is with our world of Feeling. It is two-dimensional, not three-dimensional. Man is a painter working from two sides. He does not simply feel his way into space. Through his three-dimensional will he projects on to a plane in shadow-forms, in pictures, the influences of feeling which meet him in the world of space. In his life of feeling, man lives in a picture drawn two-dimensionally through his body-only it is for ever being painted from both sides. Thus if we would seek the transition from Will to Feeling in ourselves—as human beings in the life of soul—we must pass from the three-dimensional into the two-dimensional.

But this will already give you a different spatial relationship of the soul-quality which is expressed in feeling, than if you merely say of the soul-life that it is unspatial. The plane has two dimensions, but it has no ‘space.’ Take any plane in the outer world—the blackboard for example. In reality it is a solid body, it has a certain thickness. But an actual plane, though it is in space, is not in itself spatial. ‘Space’ must always be of three dimensions; and only our Will enters into this three-dimensional space. Feeling does not enter into the three dimensions of space. Feeling is two-dimensional. Nevertheless it has its own relations to space, just as a shadow-picture has. In saying this, I am drawing your attention at the same time to a fact of very great importance, which is not at all easy to penetrate with clear perception, because with his everyday consciousness man has little inclination as a rule to perceive the peculiar nature of his world of Feeling.

The fact is that the world of Feeling is always permeated by the Will. Think only for a moment of this: If you really receive on the right-hand side of your body the prick or sting of which we spoke just now, you do not immediately sever the Feeling from the Will. You will certainly not patiently receive the sting. Quite apart from the fact that you will probably reach out in a very tangible way, striking out pretty intensely with your Will into the three dimensions of space ; inwardly too there will be a defensive movement which does not appear externally but shews itself in all manner of delicate disturbances of the blood and the breathing. The defensive movement which we make, when, stung by a gnat, we reach out with our hand, is only the crudest and most external aspect. Of the finer aspect—the inner defensive movement which we perform in the motion of the blood and breathing and many another inward process—we are generally unaware. Hence we do not distinguish what the Will contributes from the content of Feeling as such.

The real content of Feeling is in fact far too shy, far too elusive. We can only get at it by very careful meditation. If however you can exclude, from the Feeling as such, all that belongs to the Will, then as it were you shrink together from the right and left and you become the plane in the middle. And when you are the central plane, and like a conscious painter you record your inner experiences on this plane, then you begin to understand why the real world of Feeling is so very different from our ordinary, everyday experience.

We can indeed experience this plane-quality, this surface-quality of Feeling. But it needs to be experienced meditatively. We must feel all the shadow-likeness of our feelings as against the robust outer experiences in three-dimensional space. We must first prepare ourselves for this experience, but if we do so we can really have it, and then we gradually come near the truth that Feeling takes its course in two dimensions.

How shall we characterise Thinking? To begin with we must admit with open and unbiased mind how impossible it is to speak of a thought as if it were in space. A thought is really nowhere there in space. Nevertheless the thought must have some relation to space, for undoubtedly the brain—if not the instrument—is at least the foundation of our Thinking. Without the brain we cannot think. Thus our Thinking takes its course in connection with the activity of the brain. If Thinking had nothing to do with space, we should get the following curious result: If you were able to think well as a child of 12, your head having now grown beyond the position in which it was when you were 12 years old, you would have grown out of your Thinking. But that is not the case. As we grow up, we do not leave our Thinking behind. The very fact of growth will serve to indicate that even with our Thinking we are somehow in the world of Space.

The fact is this. Just as we can separate out the world of Feeling—the world of inner experience of our Feelings—by learning gradually to perceive our plane of symmetry, so too we can learn to experience our Thinking meditatively, as something that only has extension upward and downward. Thinking is one-dimensional. It takes its course in man in the line.

In a word, we must say: The Will takes on a three-dimensional configuration, the Feeling a two-dimensional and the Thinking a one-dimensional configuration.

When we make these inner differentiations of space, we do not arrive at the same hard-and-fast transition as the mere intellect. We are led to perceive a gradual transition. The mere intellect says : The physical is three-dimensional, spatially extended. The soul-and-Spirit has no extension at all. From this point of view no relationship can be discovered between them. For it goes without saying, there is no relationship between that which has extension and that which has none. But when once we perceive that the Will has a three-dimensional configuration, then indeed we find that the Will pours itself out everywhere into the three-dimensional world. And again, when once we know that Feeling has a two-dimensional configuration, then we must pass from the three dimensions to the two, and as we do so we are led to something which still has a relationship to space, though it is no longer spatial in itself. For the mere plane—the two-dimensional—is not spatial, but the two dimensions are there in space; they are not entirely apart from space. Lastly, when we pass from Feeling to Thinking we pass from the two dimensions to the one. Thus we still do not go right out of space. We pass over gradually from the spatial to the unspatial.

As I have often said, it is the tragedy of materialism that it fails to understand the material-the material even in its three-dimensional extension. Materialism imagines that it understands the material, substantial world, but that is precisely what it does not understand. Many things of real historic importance emerged in the 19th century, which still present an unsolved riddle to the ordinary consciousness. Think only of the great impression which Schopenhauer's philosophic system, The World as Will and Idea, made on so many thinking people. There is something unreal in the Idea, says Schopenhauer. The Will alone has reality. Why did Schopenhauer arrive at the idea that the world only consists of Will? Because even he was infected with materialism. Into the world in which matter is extended three-dimensionally, only the Will pours itself out. To place the Feelings too into this world, we must look for the relationship which obtains between the three-dimensional object and the two-dimensional image on the screen. Whatever we experience in our Feelings is a shadow-picture of something in which our Will too is living in its three-dimensional configuration. And what we experience in our Thinking consists of one-dimensional configurations. Only when we go right out of the dimensions—that is to say, when we pass to the dimensionless point,—only then do we arrive at our I or Ego. Our Ego has no extension at all. It is purely point-like, ‘punctual.’

So we may say, we pass from the three-dimensional to the two-dimensional, to the one-dimensional and to the ‘punctual.’ So long as we remain within the three-dimensional, there is our Will in the three dimensions. Our Feeling and our Thinking are also there within them, only they are not extended three-dimensionally. If we leave out the third dimension and come down to the two dimensions, we only have the shadow of outward existence, but in the shadow is extended that element of soul-and-spirit which lives in our Feeling. We are already getting more away from space. Then, when we go on to Thinking, we come away from space still more. And lastly when we pass on to the Ego, we go right out of space.

Thus we are led out of space, as it were piece by piece. Now we see that it is meaningless merely to speak of the contrast between the soul-and-spirit, and the physical and bodily. It is meaningless, for if we wish to discover the relation between the soul-and-spirit and the physical and bodily, we must ask: How are things which are extended in three-dimensional space (our own body, for example) related to the soul as a being of Will? How is the bodily and physical in man related to the soul as a being of Feeling? The bodily and physical is related to the soul as a being of Will in such a way that one would say, it is saturated by the Will on all sides, in all dimensions, just like the sponge is saturated by water. Again, the bodily and physical is related to the Feeling, like objects whose shadows are thrown upon the screen. And when we pass from Feeling to the quality of Thought, then we must indeed become strange painters—for we must paint on to a line what is otherwise existing in the two dimensions of the picture.

Ask yourselves the following question. (It will indeed make some demands on your imagination.) Suppose that you are standing face to face with the ‘Last Supper’ by Leonardo da Vinci. You have it before you in the surface. The whole thing is two-dimensional—for we need not take into account the thickness of the colours. The picture which you have before you is essentially two-dimensional.

But now imagine to yourselves a line, drawn through the middle from top to bottom of the picture. This line shall represent a one-dimensional being. Imagine that this one-dimensional being has the peculiar quality that Judas, let us say, is not indifferent to him. He feels Judas in a certain way. He feels him more where Judas inclines his head in that direction, and where Judas turns away he feels him less. Likewise this one-dimensional being feels all the other figures. He senses them differently according as the one figure is in blue and the other in a yellow colour. He feels all that is there, to the left and to the right of him. All that is present in the picture is livingly felt by this one-dimensional being.

Such in reality is our Thinking within us. Our Thinking is a one-dimensional being of this kind, and only partakes in the life of the remainder of our human being inasmuch as it is related to the picture which divides us into the left- and right-hand man. Via this two-dimensional picture, our Thinking stands in relation to the world of Will with its threefold configuration.

If we wish to gain an idea of our being of soul-and-spirit (to begin with without the Ego; only in so far as it is willing, feeling and thinking) we must conceive it not as a mere nebulous cloud. We must regard the soul and spirit, as it were diagramatically. There it appears, to begin with, as a cloud, but that is only the being of Will. It has the constant tendency to become pressed together; thereby it becomes a being of Feeling. First we see a cloud of light. Then we see the cloud of light creating itself in the centre as a plane, whereby it feels itself. And the plane in turn strives to become a line. We must conceive this constant process—cloud, plane and line as an inwardly living form. It constantly tends to be a cloud, and then to squeeze together from the cloud into the plane, and then to elongate into the line. Imagine the plane that becomes a line and then a plane again and then again a cloud in three dimensions. Cloud, plane line; line, plane, cloud, and so on. Only so can you imagine graphically what your soul is in its inner being, its inner nature and essence. An idea that remains at rest will not suffice. No idea that remains at rest within itself can reproduce the essence of the soul. You need an idea with an inner activity of its own. The soul itself, as it conceives itself, plays with the dimension of space. Letting the third dimension vanish, it loses the Will. Letting the second dimension vanish, it loses the Feeling. And the Thinking is only lost when we let the first dimension vanish. Then we arrive at the point, and then only do we pass over to the Ego.

Hence all the difficulty in gaining a knowledge of the soul. People are accustomed only to form spatial ideas. Hence they would like to have spatial ideas—however diluted—of the soul's nature. But in this form they only have the element of Will.

Unless we make our thinking inwardly alive and mobile we can reach no conception of the soul-and-spirit. If we wish to conceive a quality of soul-and-spirit, and our conception is the same in two successive instants, we shall at most have conceived a quality of Will. We must not conceive the soul-and-spirit in the same form in two successive moments. We must become alive and mobile-not by moving from one point in space to another, but rather by passing from one dimension to another. This is difficult for the modern consciousness. Hence even the most well-meaning people—well-meaning for the conception of spiritual things—have tried to escape from Space by transcending the three dimensions. They come to a fourth dimension. They pass from the three-dimensional to the four-dimensional. So long as we remain within the mathematical domain, the thoughts which we arrive at in this way are quite in order. It is all perfectly correct. But it is no longer correct when we relate it to the reality. For the peculiar thing is, that when we think the fourth dimension in its reality, it eliminates the third. Through the fourth dimension the third dimension vanishes. Moreover, through the fifth dimension the second vanishes, and through the sixth the first vanishes, and we arrive at length at the point.

When we pass in reality from the third to the fourth dimension, we come into the Spiritual. We eliminate the dimensions one by one, we do not add them, and in this way we enter more and more into the Spiritual.

Through such ideas we gain a deeper insight too into the human form and figure. For a more artistic way of feeling is it not rather crude how we generally observe a human being, as he places himself with his three dimensions into the world? That after all is not the only thing. Even in ordinary life we have a feeling for the essential symmetry between the left and right halves of the body. And when we thus comprise the human being in his central plane, we are already led beyond the three dimensions. We pass into the plane itself. And only thereafter do we gain a clear conception of the one dimension in which he grows. Artistically we do already make use of this transition, from three to two and on to one dimension. If we cultivated more intensely this artistic perception of the human form, we should find more easily the transition to the soul's life. For you would never be able to feel a being, unsymmetrically formed, as a being of united and harmonious Feeling.

Look at the star-fish. It has not this symmetrical form. It has five rays. Of course you can pass it by without any inner feeling. But if you perceive it feelingly, you could never say that the star-fish has a united feeling-life. The star-fish cannot possibly relate a right-hand to a left-hand side, or grasp a right-hand with a left-hand member. The star-fish must continually relate the one ray to one or two or three, or even to all four remaining rays. What we know as Feeling cannot live in the star-fish at all.

I beg you to follow me along this intimate line of thought. What we know as Feeling comes from the right and from the left, and finds itself at rest in the middle. We go through the world by placing ourselves with our Feeling restfully into the world. The star-fish cannot do so. Whatever the star-fish has, as influence of the world upon itself, it cannot relate it symmetrically to another side. It can only relate it to one, or two, or to the third or fourth ray. But the first influence will always be more powerful. Thus the star-fish has no Feeling-life at rest within itself. When, as it were, it turns its attention to the one side, then by the whole arrangement of its form it will experience: ‘You are raying out in that direction, thither you are sending forth a ray.’ The star-fish has no restfulness in feeling. It has the feeling of shooting forth out of itself. It feels itself as raying forth in the world.

If you develop your feelings in a more intimate way, you will be able to experience this even as you contemplate the star-fish. Observing the end-point of any one ray and relating it to the creature as a whole, in your imagination the star-fish will begin to move in the direction of this ray, as it were a streaming, wandering light. And so it is with all the other animals which are not symmetrically built, which have no real access of symmetry.

If man would only enter into this more intimate way of Feeling—instead of giving himself up entirely to the intellectual, merely because in the course of time he had to become an intellectual being,—then indeed he would find his way far more intimately into the world.

It is so also in a certain sense for the plant world, and for all things that surround us. True self-knowledge takes us ever farther and farther into the inwardness of things.

I have said on many occasions that at the time when medieval culture had reached its prime, two streams of spiritual life were flowing through the ripest souls in European civilisation—streams which I have described as knowledge through revelation and knowledge acquired by reason, as we find it in Scholasticism. Knowledge through revelation, in its more scholastic form, was by no means a body of mystical, abstract or indefinite thought. It expressed itself in sharply defined, clear-cut concepts. But these concepts were considered to be beyond the scope of man's ordinary powers of cognition and must in every case be accepted as traditions of the Church. The Church, by virtue of its continuity, claimed the right to be the guardian of this kind of knowledge.

The second kind of knowledge was held to be within the scope of research and investigation, albeit those who stood wholly within the stream of Scholasticism acknowledged that this knowledge acquired by reason could not in any sense be regarded as knowledge emanating from the super-sensible world.

Thus when medieval culture was at its prime, it was realised that knowledge no longer accessible to mankind in that age must be preserved as it were by tradition. But it was not always so, for if we go back through the Middle Ages to the first Christian centuries we shall find that the characteristics of this knowledge through revelation was less sharply emphasised than they were in medieval culture. If one had suggested to a Greek philosopher of the Athenian School, for instance, that a distinction could be made between knowledge acquired by reason and knowledge through revelation (in the sense in which the latter was understood in the Middle Ages), he would have been at a loss to know what was meant. It would have been unthinkable to him that if knowledge concerning super-sensible worlds had once been communicated to a man by cosmic powers, it could not be communicated afresh. True, the Greeks realised that higher spiritual knowledge was beyond the reach of man's ordinary cognition, but they knew too that by dint of spiritual training and through Initiation, a man could unfold higher faculties of knowledge and that by these means he would enter a world where super-sensible truth would be revealed to him.

Now a change took place in Western culture between all that lived in the centuries when Greek philosophy came to flower in Plato and Aristotle, and the kind of knowledge that made its appearance about the end of the fourth century A.D. I have often referred to one aspect of this change by saying that the Mystery of Golgotha occurred in an age when very much of the old Initiation-wisdom was still living in men. And indeed there were many who applied their Initiation-wisdom and were thus able, with super-sensible knowledge, to realise the significance of the Event on Golgotha. Those who had been initiated strained every nerve to understand how a Being like the Christ, Who before the Mystery of Golgotha had not been united with earthly evolution, had passed into an earthly body and linked Himself with the evolution of man. The nature of this Being, how He had worked before His descent to the earth—such were the questions which even at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha men were trying to answer by means of the highest faculties of Initiation-wisdom.

But then we find that from the fifth century A.D. onwards, this old Initiation-wisdom which had lived in Asia Minor, Northern Africa, in Greek culture, had spread over into Italy and still further into Europe, was less and less understood. People spoke contemptuously of certain individuals, saying that their teachings were to be avoided at all costs by true Christians. Moreover, efforts were made to obliterate all that had previously been known of these individuals.

It is strange that a man like Franz Brentano should have inherited from medieval tradition a hatred of all that lived in personalities like Plotinus, for example, of whom very little was known but who was regarded as one with whom true Christians could have no dealings. Brentano had allowed himself to be influenced by this hatred and vented it on Plotinus. He actually wrote a polemical thesis entitled Was für ein Philosoph manchmal Epoche macht, and the philosopher is Plotinus, who lived in the third century A.D. Plotinus lived within the streams of spiritual life which were wholly exhausted by the time of the fourth century A.D. and which in the later evolution of Christendom people tried to cast into oblivion.

The information contained in text-books on the history of philosophy in regard to the outstanding figures of the early Christian centuries is usually not only scanty in the extreme but quite incapable of giving any idea of their significance. Naturally it is difficult for us in modern times to have any true conception of the first three or four centuries of Christendom—for example, of the way in which the impulses living in Plato and Aristotle were working on and of thought which had in a certain respect become estranged from the deeper Mystery-wisdom, although this wisdom was still possessed by certain personalities in the first three or four centuries after the coming of Christ.

Very little real understanding of Plato is shown in modern text-books on the history of philosophy. Those of you who are interested should read the chapter on Plato in Paul Deussen's History of Greek Philosophy, and the passage where he speaks of the place assigned by Plato to the Idea of the Good in relation to the other Ideas. Deussen says something like this: Plato did not admit the existence of a personal God because, if he had done so, he could not have taught that the Ideas subsist in and through themselves. Plato could not acknowledge God as a Being because the Ideas are primary and subsistent. True—says Deussen—Plato places the Idea of the Good above the other Ideas, but he did not thereby imply that the Idea of the Good stands above the others.—For what is expressed in the Idea of the Good is, after all, only a kind of family-likeness which is present in all the Ideas.—Such is Deussen's argument.

But now let us scrutinise this logic more closely. The Ideas are there. They are subsistent and independent. The Idea of the Good cannot be said to rule or direct the other Ideas. All Ideas bear a family-likeness but this family-likeness is actually expressed through the Idea of the Good. Yes—but whence are family-likenesses derived? A family-likeness is derived from stock. The Idea of the Good points to family-likeness. What can we do except go back to the father of the stock!

This is what we find to-day in famous histories of philosophy and those who write them are regarded as authorities. People read such things and never notice that they are out-and-out nonsense. It is difficult to imagine that anyone capable of writing such absurdities in connection with Greek philosophy could have anything very valuable to say about Indian wisdom. Nevertheless, if we ask for something authoritative on the subject of Indian wisdom to-day we shall certainly be advised to read Paul Deussen. Things have come to a pretty pass!

My only object in saying this is to show that in the present age there is little real understanding of Platonic philosophy. Modern intellectualism is incapable of it. Nor is it possible to understand the tradition which exists in regard to Plotinus—the so-called Neo-Platonic philosopher Plotinus was a pupil of Ammonius Saccas who lived at the beginning of the third century A.D. It is said that Ammonius Saccas gave instruction to individual pupils but left nothing in writing. Now the reason why the eminent teachers of that age wrote nothing down was because they held that wisdom must be something living, that it could not be passed on by writing but only from man to man, in direct personal intercourse. Something else—again not understood—is said of Ammonius Saccas, namely that he tried to bring about agreement in the terrible quarrels between the adherents of Aristotle and of Plato, by showing that there was really no discrepancy between the teachings of Plato and Aristotle.

Let me try to tell you in brief words how Ammonius Saccas spoke of Plato and Aristotle. He said: Plato belonged to an epoch when many human souls were treading the path to the spiritual world in other words when there was still knowledge of the principles of true Initiation. But in more ancient times there was no such thing as abstract, logical thought. Even now (at the beginning of the third century A.D.) only the first, elementary traces of this kind of thinking are making their appearance. In Plato's time, thoughts evolved independently were unknown. Whereas the Initiates of earlier times gave their message in pictures and imaginations, Plato was one of the first to change these imaginations into abstract concepts and ideas. The great spiritual picture to which Plato tried to lift the eyes of men was brought down in more ancient times merely in the form of imaginations. In Plato, the imaginations were already concepts—but these concepts poured down as it were from the world of Divine Spirit. Plato said in effect: the Ideas are the lowest revelation of the Divine-Spiritual. Aristotle could no longer penetrate with the same intensity into this spiritual substance. Therefore the knowledge he possessed only amounted to the substance of the ideas, and this is at a lower level than the picture itself. Nevertheless, Aristotle could still receive the substance of the ideas in the form of revelation. There is no fundamental difference between Plato and Aristotle—so said Ammonius Saccas—except that Plato was able to gaze into higher levels of the spiritual world than Aristotle.—And thereby Ammonius Saccas thought to reconcile the disputes among the followers of Aristotle and Plato.

We learn, then, that by the time of Plato and Aristotle, wisdom was already beginning to assume a more intellectual form. Now in those ancient times it was still possible for individuals here and there to rise to very high levels of spiritual perception. The lives of men like Ammonius Saccas and his pupil Plotinus were rich in spiritual experiences and their conceptions of the spiritual world were filled with real substance.

Naturally one could not have spoken to such men of outer Nature in the sense in which we speak of Nature to-day. In their schools they spoke of a spiritual world, and Nature—generally regarded nowadays as complete and all-embracing—was merely the lowest expression of that spiritual world of which they were conscious.

We can form some idea of how such men were wont to speak, if we study Iamblichus, a man possessed of deep insight and one of the successors of Ammonius Saccas. How did the world appear to the soul of Iamblichus? He spoke to his pupils somewhat as follows:—If we would understand the universe let us not pay heed to space, for space contains merely the outward expression of the spiritual world. Nor let us pay heed to time, for only the illusory images of cosmic reality arise in time. Rather must we look up to those Powers in the spiritual world who are the Creators of time and of the connections between time and space. Gazing out into the expanses of the cosmos, we see how the cycle, repeated visibly in the Sun, repeats itself every year. But the Sun circles through the Zodiac, through the twelve constellations. It is not enough merely to observe this phenomenon, for three hundred and sixty heavenly Powers are working and weaving therein, sending forth the Sun-forces which flood the whole universe accessible to man. Every year the cycle is repeated. If these Powers alone held sway, there would be three hundred and sixty days in a year. But there are, in fact, five additional days, ruled by seventy-two sub-heavenly Powers, the planetary Spirits. I will draw (on the blackboard) this pentagonal figure, because one to five is the relation of seventy-two to three hundred and sixty. The five remaining days in the cosmic year which are abandoned, as it were, by the three hundred and sixty heavenly Powers, are ruled by the seventy-two sub-heavenly Powers. But over and above the three hundred and sixty-five days, there are still a few more hours in the year. And these hours are directed by forty-two earthly Powers.—Iamblichus also said to his pupils: The three hundred and sixty heavenly Powers are connected with the head-organisation of man, the seventy-two sub-heavenly Powers with the breast-system (breathing-process and heart) and the forty-two earthly Powers with the purely earthly system in man (e.g. digestion, metabolism).

In those times the human being was given his place in a spiritual universe, whereas nowadays we begin our physiological studies by learning of the quantities of carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, sulphur, phosphorus, lime-stone, etc., within the human organism. We relate the human being to a lifeless nature. But Iamblichus would have taught how the organism of man is related to the forty-two earthly Powers, the seventy-two sub-heavenly or planetary Powers, and the three hundred and sixty heavenly Powers. Just as to-day man is said to be composed of earthly substances, in the time of Iamblichus he was known to represent a confluence of forces streaming from the spiritual universe. Great and sublime was the wisdom presented in the schools of learning in those days, and one can readily understand that Plotinus—who had reached the age of twenty-eight before he listened to the teachings of Ammonius Saccas—felt himself living in an altogether different world. He was able to assimilate some of this wisdom because it was still cultivated in many places during the first four centuries after the Mystery of Golgotha. With this wisdom men also tried to understand the descent of the Christ into Jesus of Nazareth and the place of Christ in the realms of the spiritual Hierarchies, in the great structure of the spiritual universe.

And now let me deal with another chapter of the wisdom taught by Iamblichus. He said: There are three hundred and sixty heavenly Powers, seventy-two planetary Powers, forty-two earthly Powers—in all, four hundred and seventy-four Divine Beings of different orders. Look to the far East—so said Iamblichus—and you will there find peoples who give names to their Gods. Turn to the Egyptians and to other peoples—they too name their Gods. Phoenicians, Greeks, Romans—all will name their Gods. The four hundred and seventy-four Gods include all the Gods of all the different peoples: Zeus, Apollo, Baal—all the Gods. The reason why the peoples have different Gods is that one race has chosen twelve or maybe seventeen Gods from the four hundred and seventy-four, another race has taken twenty-five, another three, another four. The number of racial Gods is four hundred and seventy-four. And the highest of these Gods, the God who came down to earth at a definite point of time, is Christ.

This wisdom was well suited to bring about reconciliation between the different religions, not as the outcome of vague sentiment but of the knowledge that the different Gods of the peoples constitute, in their totality, one great system—the four hundred and seventy-four Gods. It was taught that all the choirs of Gods of the peoples of ancient times had reached their climax in Christianity and that the crown of wisdom was to understand how the Christ Being had entered through Jesus of Nazareth into His earthly activity.

And so, as we look back to an earlier Spiritual Science (which although it no longer exists in that form to-day, indeed cannot do so for it must be pursued now-a-days in a different way), the deepest respect grows up within us. Profound wisdom was taught in the early Christian centuries in regard to the super-sensible worlds. But knowledge of this spiritual universe was imparted only to those who were immediate pupils of the older Initiates. The wisdom might only be passed on to those whose faculties of knowledge had reached the stage where they were able to understand the essence and being of the different Gods.

This requisite of spiritual culture was recognised everywhere in Greece, in Egypt and in Asia Minor. It is, of course, true, that remnants of the ancient wisdom still existed in Roman civilisation. Plotinus himself taught for a long time in Italy. But a spirit of abstraction had crept into Roman culture, a spirit no longer capable of understanding the value and worth of personality, of being. The spirit of abstraction had crept in, not yet in the form it afterwards assumed, but adhered to all the more firmly because it was there in its earliest beginnings.

And then, on the soil of Italy at the beginning of the fourth century A.D. we find a School which began to oppose the ancient principle of Initiation, the preparation of the individual for Initiation. We see a School arising which gathers together and makes a careful record of everything originating from ancient Initiation-wisdom. The aim of this School—which lasted beyond the third on into the fourth century—was to perpetuate the essence of Roman culture, to establish historical tradition as against the strivings of individual human Beings. As Christianity began to find its way into Roman culture, the efforts of this school were directed to the elimination of all that could still have been discovered by means of the old Initiation-knowledge in regard to the presence of Christ in the personality of Jesus.

It was a fundamental tenet of this Roman School that the teaching given by Ammonius Saccas and Iamblichus must not be allowed to pass on to posterity. Just as in those times there was a widespread impulse to destroy the ancient temples and altars—in short to obliterate every remnant of ancient Heathendom—so, in the domain of spiritual life, efforts were made to wipe out the principles whereby knowledge of the higher world might be attained. To take one example: the dogma of the One Divine Nature or of the Two Divine Natures in the Person of Christ was substituted for the teaching of Ammonius Saccas and Iamblichus, namely, that the individual human being can develop to a point where he will understand how the Christ took up His abode in the body of Jesus. This dogma was to reign supreme and the possibility of individual insight smothered. The ancient path of wisdom was superseded by dogma in the culture of the Roman world. And because strenuous efforts were made to destroy any teaching that savoured of the ancient wisdom, little more than the names of men like Ammonius Saccas and Iamblichus have come down to us. Of many other teachers in the Southern regions of Europe not even the names have been preserved. Altars were destroyed, temples burnt to the ground and the ancient teachings exterminated, to such an extent indeed that we have no longer any inkling to-day of the wisdom that lived in the South of Europe during the first four centuries after the Mystery of Golgotha.

Again and again it happened, however, that knowledge of this wisdom found its way to men who were interested in these matters and who realised that Roman culture was rapidly falling to pieces under the spread of Christianity. But after the extermination of what would have been so splendid a preparation for an understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha, it was only possible to learn of the union of Christ with Jesus in the form of an abstract dogma laid down by the Councils and coloured by the Roman spirit. The living wisdom was wiped out, and abstraction, albeit working on in the guise of revelation, took its place.

History is well-nigh blank in regard to these things, but during the first centuries of Christendom there were a number of men who were able to say: “There are indeed Initiates—of whom Iamblichus was one. It is the Initiates who teach true Christianity. To them, Christ is Christ indeed, whereas the Romans speak merely of the ‘Galileans.’ ” This expression was used in the third and fourth centuries A.D. to gloss over a deep misunderstanding. The less men understood Christianity, the more they spoke of the Galileans; the less they knew of the Christ, the more emphasis they laid on the human personality of the ‘Galilean.’

Out of this milieu came Julian, the so-called Apostate, who had absorbed a very great deal from pupils of men like Iamblichus and who still knew something of the spiritual universe reaching down into every phenomenon of Nature. Julian the Apostate had heard from pupils of Iamblichus of the spiritual forces working down into every animal and plant from the three hundred and sixty heavenly Powers, the seventy-two planetary Powers and the forty-two earthly Powers. In those days there were still some who understood what was, for example, expressed in a most wonderful way in a deeply significant legend related of Plotinus. The legend ran: There were many who would no longer believe that a man could be inspired by the Divine Spirit and who said that anyone who claimed to have knowledge of the Divine-Spiritual world was possessed by a demon. Plotinus was therefore carried off to the temple of Isis in Egypt in order that the priests might determine the nature of the demon possessing him. And when the Egyptian priests—who still had knowledge of these things—came to the temple and tested Plotinus before the altar of Isis, performing all the ritual acts still possible at that time, Lo! instead of a demon there appeared the Godhead Himself!

This legend indicates that in those times men still acknowledged that at least it was possible to prove whether a good God or a demon was possessing a human being.

Julian the Apostate heard of these things. But on the other side there came insistently to his ears the words of a writing which passed into many hands in the Roman world during the first Christian centuries and was said to be a sermon of the Apostle Peter, whereas it was actually a forgery. In this document it was said: Behold the godless Hellenes! In very creatures of nature they see the Divine-Spiritual. This is sinful, impious. It is sacrilege to see the Divine-Spiritual in Nature, in animal and in plant. Let no man be so sinful as to believe that the Divine is present in the course of the Sun and Moon.—These were the things that dinned in the ears of Julian, now from one side, now from another. A deep love for Hellenism grew up within him and he became the tragic figure who would fain have spoken of Christianity in the light of the teachings of Iamblichus.

There is no telling what would have come to pass in Europe if the Christianity of Julian the Apostate had conquered instead of the doctrines of Rome, if his desire to restore the Initiation-training had been fulfilled the training whereby men could themselves have attained to knowledge of how the Christ had lived in Jesus and of His place among the other racial Gods. Julian the Apostate was not out to destroy the heathen temples. Indeed he would have been willing to restore the temple of the Jews at Jerusalem. His desire was to restore the heathen temples and he also had the interests of the Christians at heart. Truth and truth alone was his quest. And the great obstacle in his way was the School in ancient Rome of which I have spoken—the School which not only set out to exterminate the old principle of Initiation but did in fact succeed in exterminating it, wishing to put in its place recorded traditions of Initiation-wisdom.

When the moment had arrived, it was easy to arrange for the thrust of the Persian spear which caused Julian's death. It was then that the words were uttered which have never since been understood, not even by Ibsen, but which can be explained by a knowledge of the traditions of Julian's time: ‘The Galilean has conquered, not the Christ!’ For at this moment of death it was revealed to the prophetic vision of Julian the Apostate that henceforward the conception of Christ as a Divine Being would fade away and that the ‘Galilean,’ the man of Galilean stock would be worshipped as a God. In the thirtieth year of his life Julian the Apostate had a pre-vision of the whole of subsequent evolution, on into the nineteenth century, by which time theology had lost all knowledge of the Christ in Jesus.

Julian was ‘Apostate’ only in regard to what was to come after. The Apostate was indeed the Apostle in respect of spiritual realisation of the Mystery of Golgotha.—And it is this spiritual realisation that must be quickened again in the souls of men.

Newer geological strata always overlay those that are older and the newer must be pierced before we can reach those that lie below. It is sometimes difficult to believe beneath what thick layers the history of human evolution lies concealed. Thick indeed are the layers spread by Romanism over the first conceptions of the Mystery of Golgotha! Through spiritual knowledge it must again be possible to penetrate through these layers and so rediscover that old wisdom which was swept away from the domain of spiritual life just as the heathen altars were swept away from the physical world.

Egyptian priests declared that Plotinus bore a God within him, not a demon. But in the West the dictum went forth that Plotinus was assuredly possessed by a demon. Read what has been said on the subject, including the thesis by Brentano which I have mentioned, and you will find the same. According to the Egyptian priests, a God and not a demon was living in Plotinus, the philosopher of the third century A.D. But Brentano states the contrary. He declares: Plotinus was possessed by a demon, not by a God!

And then, in the nineteenth century, the Gods became demons, the demons Gods. Men were no longer capable of distinguishing between Gods and demons in the universe. And this has lived on in the chaos of our civilisation.

Truly these things are grave when we see them as they really are. I wished to-day to speak of one chapter of history and from an absolutely objective standpoint, for what comes to pass in history is after all inevitable. Necessary as it was that for a season men should remain without enlightenment about certain mysteries, enlightenment must ultimately be given, and—what is more—received.

We have often drawn attention to the fact that the spiritual life of the first four Christian centuries has been completely buried, that everything written today about the views and knowledge of human beings living at the time of the mystery of Golgotha and during the four centuries thereafter is based on sources which have come to us essentially through the writings of the opponents of gnosticism. This means that the “backward seeing” of the spiritual researcher is necessary to create a more exact picture of what actually took place during these first four Christian centuries. In this sense I have recently attempted to present a picture of Julian the Apostate.¹

Now, we cannot say that the following centuries, as presented in the usual historical descriptions, are very clear to people today. What we could call the soul life of the European population from the fifth on into the twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth centuries remains completely unclear in the usual historical portrayals. What do we find, then, basically represented in these usual historical portrayals? And what do we find even if we look at the writings of facile, so-called dramatists and authors, writers such as Ernst von Wildenbruch,² whose writings are, in essence, nothing more than the family histories of Louis the Pious or other similar personages, garnished with superficial pageantry, and then presented to us as history?

It is extremely important to look at the truth concerning European life during those times when so much of the present originated. If we want to understand anything at all concerning the deeper streams of culture, including the culture of recent times, we must understand the soul life of the European population in those times. Here I would like to begin with something which will, no doubt, be somewhat remote from many of you; we need, however, to address this subject because it can only be seen properly today in the light of spiritual science.

As you know there is something today called theology. This theology—basically all our present day European theology—actually came into being—in its fundamental structure, in its inner nature—during the time from the fourth and fifth centuries after Christ through the following very dark centuries up to the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, when it was brought to a certain conclusion through scholasticism. From the point of view of this theology, which was really only developed in its essential nature in the time after Augustine, Augustine himself could no longer be understood; or, at best, he could barely be understood, while all that preceded him, for example, what was said about the mystery of Golgotha, could no longer be understood at all.³ Let us consider the essence of this theology which developed precisely during the darkest times of the Middle Ages, darkest, that is, for our external knowledge. Above all, it becomes clear to us that this theology is something entirely different from the theology that came before it—if indeed what came before can be called theology. What theology had been before was actually only transplanted like a legacy into the times in which the theology I have just characterized arose. And you can get an impression of what earlier theology was like if you read the short essay on Dionysius the Areopagite in this week's edition of the Goetheanum,⁴ There you will find a portrayal of the way in which human beings related to the world in the first Christian centuries, a way altogether different from that which came to prevail by the time of the ninth, tenth, and following centuries.

In contrast to the later, newer theology, the old theology—the theology of which Dionysius the Areopagite was a late product—saw everything that related to the spiritual world from within and had a direct view of what happens in the spiritual worlds. If we want to gain insight into the way adherents of this old theology actually thought, into the way the soul of this theology inwardly regarded things, then once again we can really only do so with the methods of present-day anthroposophical spiritual science.

We then come to the following results. (Yesterday, from another point of view I characterized something very similar.)⁵

In the ascent to Imagination, in the entire process of climbing, ascending to imaginative knowledge, we notice more and more that we are dwelling suspended in spiritual processes. This “hovering” in spiritual processes with our entire soul life we experience as if we were coming into contact with beings who do not live on the physical plane. Perceptions from our sense organs cease, and we experience that, to a certain extent, everything that is sense perception disappears. But during the whole process it seems as if we were being helped by beings from a higher world. We come to understand these as the same beings that the old theology had beheld as angels, archangels, and archai. I could, therefore, say that the angels help us to penetrate up into imaginative knowledge. The sense world “breaks up,” just as clouds disperse, and we see into what is behind the sense world. Behind the sense world a capacity that we can call Inspiration opens up; behind this sense world is then revealed the second hierarchy, the hierarchy of the exusiai, dynamis, and kyriotetes. These ordering and creative beings present themselves to the inspired knowledge of the soul. And when we ascend further still, from Inspiration to Intuition, then we come to the first hierarchy, the thrones, cherubim, and seraphim. Through immediate spiritual training we can experience the realities that the older theologians actually referred to when they used such terms as first, second, and third hierarchy.

Now, it is just when we look at the theology of the first Christian centuries, which has been almost entirely stamped out, that we notice the following: in a certain way that early theology still had an awareness that when man directs his senses toward the usual, sensible, external world, he may see the things in that world and he may believe in their existence, but he does not actually know that world. There is a very definite consciousness present in this old theology: the consciousness that one must first have experienced something in the spiritual world before the concepts present themselves with which one can then approach the sense world and, so to speak, illuminate it with ideas acquired from the spiritual world.

In a certain way this also corresponds to the views resulting from an older, dreamlike, atavistic clairvoyance, under the influence of which people first looked into a spiritual world—though only with dreamlike perceptions—and then applied what they experienced there to their sense perceptions. If these people had had before them only a view of the sense world, it would have seemed to them as if they were standing in a dark room with no light. However, if they first had their spiritual vision, a result of pure seeing into the world of the spirit, and then applied it to the sense world—if, for example, they had first beheld something of the creative powers of the animal world and then applied that vision to the outer, physical animals—then they would feel as though they were walking into the dark room with a lamp. They would feel that they were walking into the world of the senses and illuminating it with a spiritual mode of viewing. Only in this way was the sense world truly known. This was the consciousness of these older theologians. For this reason the entire Christology of the first Christian centuries was actually viewed from within. The process which took place, the descent of Christ into the earthly world, was essentially seen not from the outside but rather from the inside, from the spiritual side. One first sought out Christ in spiritual worlds and then followed him as he descended into the physical, sensible world. That was the consciousness of the older theologians.

Then the following happened: the Roman world, which the Christian impulse followed in its greatest westward development, was permeated in its spiritual understanding with an inclination, a fondness, for the abstract. The Romans tended to translate perceptions, observations, and insights into abstract concepts. However, the Roman world was actually decaying and falling apart while Christianity gradually spread toward the west. And, in addition, the northern peoples were pushing from the eastern part of Europe into the west and the south. Now, it is remarkable that, at the very time Rome was decaying and the fresh peoples from the north were arriving, a college was created on the Italian peninsula, a collegium concerning which I spoke recently, which set for itself the task of using all these events to completely root out the old views and modes of seeing, to allow to survive for posterity only those writings which this college felt comfortable with.⁶

History reports nothing concerning these events; nevertheless, they were real. If such a history did exist, it would point out how this college was created as a successor to the pontifical college of ancient Rome. Everything that this college did not allow was thoroughly swept away and what remained was modified before being passed on to posterity. Just as Rome invented the last will and testament as a part of its national economic order so that the dispositions of the individual human will could continue to work beyond the individual's life, so there arose in this college the desire to have the essence of Rome live on in the following ages of historical development if only as an inheritance, as the mere sum of dogmas that had been developed over many generations. “For as long as possible nothing new shall be seen in the spiritual world”—so decreed this college. “The principle of initiation shall be completely rooted out and destroyed. Only the writings we are now modifying are to survive for posterity.” If the facts were to be presented in a dry, objective fashion they would be presented in this way. Entirely different destinies would have befallen Christianity—it would have been entirely rigidified—had not the northern peoples come pushing into the west and the south. These northern peoples brought with them their own natural talent, a predisposition entirely different from that of the southern peoples, the Greeks and the Romans—different, that is, from that earlier southern predisposition that had originated the older theology.

In earlier times at least, the talent of the southern peoples had been the following: Among the earlier Romans and even more among the earlier Greeks there were always individuals from the mass of the people who developed themselves, who passed through an initiation and then could see into the spiritual world. With this vision the older theology arose, the theology that possessed a direct perception of the spiritual world. Such vision in its last phase is preserved in the theology of Dionysius the Areopagite. Let us consider one of the older theologians, say from the first or second century after the mystery of Golgotha, one of those theologians who still drew wisdom from the old science of initiation. If he had wanted to present the essence, I would like to say, the principles of his theology, he would have said: In order to have any relationship to the spiritual world, a human being must first obtain knowledge of the spiritual world, either directly through his own initiation or as the pupil of an initiate. Then, after acquiring ideas and concepts in the spiritual world he could apply these ideas and concepts to the world of the senses. Those were more or less the abstract principles of such an older theologian. The whole tendency of the older theological mood predisposed the soul to see the events in the world inwardly, first to see the spiritual and then to admit to oneself that the sensible world can only be seen if one starts from the spiritual. Such a theology could only result as the ripest product of an old atavistic clairvoyance, for atavistic clairvoyance was also an inner seeing or perception, though only of dreamlike imaginations.

But to begin with, the peoples coming down from the north had nothing of this older theological drive, that, as I said, was so strong in the Greeks. The natural abilities of the Gothic peoples, the Germanic, did not allow such a theological mood to rise up directly in the soul in an unmediated way. To properly understand the drive that these northern peoples brought into the development of Europe in the following ages (through the Germanic tribes, the Goths, the Anglo-Saxons, the Franks, and so forth) we must resort to spiritual scientific means, for recorded history reports nothing of this. Initiates, able to see directly into the spiritual world in order to survey from that vantage point the sense world, could not arise from within the ranks of these peoples storming down from the north because their inner soul disposition was different. These peoples were themselves still somewhat atavistically clairvoyant; they were actually still at an earlier, more primitive stage of humanity's development. These peoples—Goths, Lombards, and so forth—still brought some of the old clairvoyance with them. But this old clairvoyance was not related to inner perceptions—to spiritual perceptions, yes—but rather to spiritual perceptions of things outer. The northern peoples did not see the spiritual world from the inside, so to speak, as had the southern peoples. The Northerners saw the spiritual world from the outside.

What does it mean to say that these peoples saw the spiritual world from the outside? Say that these people saw a brave man die in battle. The life in which they saw this man spiritually from the outside was not at an end for them. Now, with his death, they could follow him—still from the outside spiritually speaking—on his path into the spiritual world. They could follow not only the way this man lived into the spiritual world but also the ways in which he continued to be active on behalf of human beings on the earth. And so these northern peoples could say: Someone or other has died, after this or that significant deed, perhaps, or after his having been the leader of this people or that tribe. We see his soul, how it continues to live, how (if he had been a soldier) he is received by the great soldiers in Valhalla, or how he lives on in some other way. This soul, this man, is still here. He continues to live and is actually present. Death is merely an event which takes place here on the earth. Such an experience, having come with the northern peoples, was present in the fourth and fifth on through the twelfth and thirteenth centuries before being essentially buried. This was the perception of the dead as actually always present, the awareness that the souls of human beings who were greatly venerated were still present, even for earthly human beings. They were even still able to lead in battle. People of that time thought of these souls as still present, as not disappearing for the earthly. With the forces given them by the spiritual world these souls continued, in a certain sense, the functions of their earthly lives. The atavistic clairvoyance of the northern peoples was such then, that, as they saw the activities of people here on the earth, they also beheld a kind of shadow world directly above people on earth. The dead were in this shadow world. One needed only to look—these people felt—to see that those from the last and next to last generation actually continue to live. They are here, we experience community with them. For them to be present we need only to listen up into their realm.

This feeling, that the dead are here, was present, was incredibly strong, in the time that followed the fourth century, when the northern culture mixed with the Roman. You see, the northern peoples took Christ into this way of perceiving. They looked first at this world of the dead, who were actually the truly living. They saw hovering above them entire populations of the dead, and they beheld these dead as being actually more alive than themselves. They did not seek Christ here on the earth among people walking in the physical world; they sought Christ there where these living dead were. There they sought him as one who is really present above the earth. And you will only get the proper feeling concerning the Heliand, which was supposedly written by a Saxon priest, if you develop these ways of perceiving.⁷ The descriptions in the Heliand follow these old German customs. You will understand the Heliand's concrete description of Christ among living human beings only if you understand that actually the scenes are to be transplanted half into the kingdom of shadows where the living dead are dwelling. You will understand much more, if you truly grasp this predisposition, this ability, which came about through the mixing of the northern with the Roman peoples.

There is something recorded in literary history to which people should actually give a great deal of thought. However, people of the present age have almost entirely given up the ability to think about such clearly startling phenomena found in the life of humanity. But pursuing literary history, you will find, for example, writings in which Charlemagne (742–814) is mentioned as a leader in the Crusades. Charlemagne is simply listed as a leader in the Crusades.⁸ Indeed, you will find Charlemagne described as a living person again and again throughout the entire time that followed the ninth century. People everywhere called upon him. He is described as if he were there. And when the crusades began, centuries after his death, poems were written describing Charlemagne as if he were with the crusaders marching against the infidels.

We only understand such writings properly if we know that in the so-called dark centuries of the Middle Ages, the true history of which is entirely obliterated, there was this awareness of the living multitudes of the dead, who lived on as shadows. It was only later that Charlemagne was placed in the Untersberg. Much later, when the spirit of intellectualism had grown strong enough for this life in the shadows to have ceased, then Charlemagne was transplanted into the Untersberg (and, as another example, Frederick Barbarossa, the Holy Roman Emperor, into Kyffhaeuserberg).⁹ Until that time people knew that Charlemagne was still living among them.

But wherein did these people, who atavistically saw the dead living above them, wherein did these people seek their Christianity, their Christology, their Christian way of seeing? They sought it in this way: they directed their sight toward what results when a living dead person like Charlemagne, who was revered in life, came before their souls with all those who were still his followers. And so through long ages Charlemagne was seen undertaking the first crusade against the infidels in Spain. But he was seen in such a way that the entire crusade was actually transplanted into the shadow world. The people of that time saw this crusade in the shadow world after it had been undertaken on the physical plane; they let it continue working in the shadow world—as an image of the Christ who works in the world. Therefore, Christ was described riding south toward Spain among the twelve paladins, one of whom was a Judas who eventually betrayed the entire endeavor.¹⁰ So we see how clairvoyant perception was directed toward the outside of the spiritual world—not, as in earlier times, toward the inside—but rather now toward the outside, toward that which results when one looks at the spirits from the outside just as one looked at them earlier from the inside. Now, the splendor of the Christ event was reflected onto all the most important things that took place in the world of shadows.

From the fourth to the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries there lived in Europe the idea that people who had died, if they had accomplished important deeds in life, arranged their afterlife so as to enable themselves to be seen with something like a reflected splendor, an image, of the Christ event. One saw everywhere the continuation of the Christ event—if I may express myself so—as shadows in the air. If people had spoken of the things they felt, they would have said: Above us the Christ stream still hovers; Charlemagne undertook to place himself in this Christ stream and with his paladins he created an image of Christ with the twelve apostles; the deeds of Christ were continued by Charlemagne in the true spiritual world.

This was how people thought of these things in the so-called dark time of the Middle Ages. There was the spiritual world, seen from without, I would like to say, as if imaged after the sense world, like a shadow picture of the sense world (whereas in the earlier times, of which the old theology was only a weak reflection, the spiritual world was seen from within). For merely intellectual human beings the difference between this physical world and the spiritual world is such that an abyss exists between the two. This difference did not exist in the first centuries of the Middle Ages, in the so-called Dark Ages. The dead remained with the living. During the first period after their death, after they had been born into the spiritual world, especially outstanding and revered personalities underwent a novitiate to become saints.

For the people of those times to speak of these living dead as if they were real personalities after they had been born into the spiritual world—this was not unusual. And you see, a number of these living dead, especially chosen ones, were called to become guardians of the Holy Grail. Specially chosen living dead were designated as guardians of the Holy Grail. And the Grail legend could never be completely understood without the knowledge of who these guardians of the Grail actually were. To say: “Then the guardians of the Grail weren't real people” would have seemed laughable to the people of that time. For they would have said: Do you who are only shadow figures walking on the earth really believe that you are more real than those who have died and now are gathered around the Grail? To those who lived in those times it would have appeared laughable for the little figures here on the earth to consider themselves more real than the living dead. We must feel our way into the souls of that time, and this is simply how those souls felt. Their consciousness of this connection with the spiritual world meant much for the world, and much for their souls. They would have said to themselves: To begin with, the people here on the earth consist of nothing more than what they are, right now, directly here. But a human being of the present will only become something proper and good if he takes into himself what one of the living dead can give him.

In a certain sense, physical human beings on the earth were seen as though they were merely vehicles for the outer working of the living dead. It was a peculiarity of those centuries that one said: If the living dead want to accomplish something here on earth, for which hands are needed, then they enter into a physically incarnated human being and do it through him. Not only that, but there were, furthermore, people in those times who said to themselves: One can do no better than to provide a vehicle for human beings who were revered while living on the earth and who have now become beings of such importance in the realm of the living dead that it is granted to them to guard the Holy Grail. And the view existed among the people of those times that individuals could dedicate themselves to the Order of the Swan. Those people dedicated themselves to the Order of the Swan who wanted the knights of the Grail to be able to work through them here in the physical world. A human being through whom a knight of the Grail was working here in the physical world was called a Swan.

Now, think of the Lohengrin legend.¹¹ When Elsa of Brabant is in great need, the swan comes. The swan who appears is a member of the Knights of the Swan, who has received into himself a companion of the circle of the Holy Grail. One is not permitted to ask him about his secret. In that century, and also in the following centuries, princes such as Henry I of Saxony were happiest of all when, as in his campaign into Hungary, he was able to have this Knight of the Swan, this Lohengrin, in his army.¹²

But there were knights of many kinds who regarded themselves primarily as only outer vehicles for those from the other side of death who were still fighting in the armies. They wanted to be united with the dead; they knew they were united with them. The legend has actually become quite abstract today. We can only evaluate its significance for the living if we live into the soul life of the people alive at that time. And this understanding, which, to begin with, looks simply and solely upon the physical world and sees how the spiritual man arises out of the physical man and afterward belongs to the living dead, this understanding ruled the hearts and minds of that time and was the most essential element in their souls. They felt that one must first have known a human being on the earth, that only then can one rise to his spirit. It was really the case that the whole understanding was reversed, even in the popular conceptions of the masses, over against the older views. In olden times people had looked first into the spiritual world; they strove, if possible, to see the human being as a spiritual being before his descent to earth. Then, it was said, one can understand what the human being is on earth. But now, the following idea emerged among these northern peoples, after they had mixed with Roman civilization: We understand the spiritual, if we have first followed it in the physical world, and it has then lifted itself out of the physical world as something spiritual. This was the reverse of what had prevailed before.

The reflected splendor of this view then became the theology of the Middle Ages. The old theologians had said: First one must have the ideas, first one must know the spiritual. The concept of faith would have been something entirely absurd for these old theologians, for they first recognized the spiritual before they could even begin to think of knowing the physical, which had to be illumined by the spiritual. Now, however, when in the world at large people were starting from the point of view of knowing the physical, it came to this, even in theology. Theologians began to think in this way: For knowledge one must start with the world of sense. Then, from the things of the senses one must extract the concepts—no longer bring the concepts from the spiritual world to the things of sense, but now extract the concepts from the things of sense themselves.

Now imagine the Roman world in its decline; and then imagine, within that world, what still remained as a struggle from the olden time: namely, the fact that concepts were experienced in the spiritual world and then brought to meet the things of the senses. This was felt by such a man as Martianus Capella, who in the fifth century wrote his treatise, De Nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii, wherein he wrestled still to find within the spiritual world itself that which was becoming increasingly abstract in the life of ideas.¹³ But this old view went under because the Roman conspiracy against the spirit—in that college or committee I have told you about—had destroyed everything representing a direct human connection with the spirit. We see how that direct connection gradually vanished. The old vision ceased. Living in the old conception a human being knew: When I reach over into the spiritual world angels accompany me. If they were Greeks they called them “guardians.” A person who went forth on the path of the spirit knew he was accompanied by a guardian spirit.

That which in ancient times had been a real spiritual being, the guardian, was grammatica, the first stage of the seven liberal arts, at the time when Capella wrote. In olden times men had known that which lives in grammar, in words and syntax, can lead up into imagination. They knew that the angel, the guardian, was working in the relationships between words. If we read the old descriptions, nowhere would we ever find an abstract definition. It is interesting that Capella does not describe grammar as the later Renaissance did. To him grammar is still a real person. So, too, rhetoric at the second stage is still a real person. For the later Renaissance such figures became mere allegories—straw figures for intellectual concepts. In earlier times they had also been spiritual perceptions that did not merely edify as they did in Capella's writings. They had been creative beings, and the entry that they had initiated into the spirit was felt as a penetration into a realm of creative beings. Now with Capella they had become allegories; but nevertheless, at least they were still allegorical. Though they were no longer stately, though they had become very pale and thin, they were still ladies: grammatica, rhetorica, dialectica. They were very thin and weak. All that was left of them, as it were, was the bones of spiritual effort and the skin of concepts; nevertheless, they were still quite respectable ladies who carried Capella, the earliest to write on the seven liberal arts, into the spiritual world. One by one he made the acquaintance of these seven ladies: first the lady grammatica, then the lady rhetorica, the lady dialectica, the lady arithmetica, the lady geometria, the lady musica, and finally the heavenly lady astrologia, who towered over them all. These were certainly ladies, and as I said, there were seven of them. The sevenfold feminine leads us onward and upward, so might Capella have concluded when describing his path to wisdom. But think of what became of it in the monastery schools of the later Middle Ages. When these later writers labored at grammar and rhetoric they no longer felt that “the eternal feminine leads us onward and upward.” And that is really what happened: Out of the living being there first came the allegorical and then the merely intellectual abstraction.

Homer, who in olden times had sought the way from the humanly spoken word to the cosmic word, so that the cosmic word might pass through him, had to say: “Sing me, O muse, of Peleus' son, Achilles.” From the stage when a spiritual being led a person on to the point in the spiritual world at which it was no longer he himself but the muse who sang of the wrath of Achilles, from that stage to the stage when rhetoric herself was speaking in the Roman way, and then to the mingling of the Roman with the life that came downward from the north—was a long, long way. Finally, everything became abstract, conceptual, and intellectual. The farther we go toward the east and into olden times the more we find everything immersed in concrete spiritual life: the theologian of old had gone to the spiritual beings for his concepts, which he then applied to this world. But the theologian who grew out of what arose from the merging of the northern peoples with the Roman said: Knowledge must be sought here in the sense world; here we gain our concepts. But he could not rise into the spiritual world with these concepts. For the Roman college had thoroughly seen to it that although men might angle around down here in the world of sense, they could not get beyond this world. Formerly men had also had the world of the senses, but they had sought and found their concepts and ideas in the spiritual world; and these concepts then, helped them to illuminate the physical world. But now they extracted their concepts out of the physical world itself, and they did not get far—they only arrived at an interpretation of the physical world. They could no longer reach upward by an independent path of knowledge. But they still had a legacy from the past. It was written down or preserved in traditions embodied and rigidified in dogmas. It was preserved in the creed. Whatever could be said about the spirit was contained therein. It was there. They increasingly arrived at a consciousness that all that had been said concerning the realms above as a result of higher revelation must remain untouched. The revelations could no longer be checked. The kind of knowledge that can be checked now remained down below—our conceptual life must be obtained here in the physical world.

So in the course of time what had still been present in the first dark centuries of the Middle Ages persisted merely as a written legacy. For it had become quite another time when the medieval, atavistic clairvoyance of the Saxon “peasant,” as he is called (though, as the Heliand shows, he was, in any case, a priest, born of the peasantry) still existed in Europe. Simply looking at the human beings around him this Saxon peasant-priest had the faculty to see how the soul and spirit goes forth at death and becomes the dead and yet alive, living human being. Thus, in the train of those that hover over the earthly realm, he describes his vision of the Christ event in the poem, the Heliand.

But what was living here on the earth was drawn further and further down into the realm of the merely lifeless. Atavistic clairvoyant abilities came to an end, and people now only sought for concepts in the sense world. What kind of a view and attitude resulted? It was this: There is no need to pay heed to the super-sensible when it comes to knowledge. What we need is contained in the sacred writings and traditions. We need only refer to the old books and look into the old traditions. Everything we should know about the super-sensible is contained there. And now in the environment of the sense world, we are not confused if for knowledge we take into account only the concepts contained in the sense world itself.

More and more this consciousness came to life: The super-sensible is preserved for us and will so remain. If we want to do research we must limit ourselves to the sense world. Someone who remained entirely within this habit of mind, who continued, as it were, in the nineteenth century this activity of extracting concepts out of the sense world that the Saxon peasant-priest who wrote the Heliand had practiced, was Gregor Mendel.¹⁴ Why should we concern ourselves with investigations of the olden times into matters of heredity? They are all recorded in the Old Testament. Let us look, rather, down into the world of sense and see how the red and the white sweet peas will cross with one another, giving rise to red, white, and speckled flowers and so forth. Thus you can become a mighty scientist without coming into conflict or disharmony with what is said about the super-sensible, which remains untouched. It was precisely our modern theology, evolved out of the old theology along the lines I have characterized, that impelled people to investigate nature in the manner of Gregor Mendel, whose approach was that of a genuine Catholic priest.

And then what happened? Natural scientists, whose science is so “free from bias,” subsequently canonized Gregor Mendel as a saint. Although this is not their way of speaking, we can describe Mendel's fate in these terms. At first they treated him without respect; now they canonize him after their fashion, proclaiming him a great scientist in all their academies. All this is not without its inner connections. The science of the present time is only possible inasmuch as it is constituted in such a way as to regard as a great scientist precisely one who stands so thoroughly upon the standpoint of medieval theology! The natural science of our time is through and through the continuation of the essence of scholastic theology—its subsequent proliferation, its diversification. It is the continuation into our time of the scholastic era. Hence it is quite proper for Johann Gregor Mendel to be subsequently recognized as a great scientist; that he is, but in the good Catholic sense. It made good Catholic sense for Mendel to look only at sweet peas as they cross with one another, it was following Catholic principle, because all that is super-sensible is contained in the sacred traditions and books. But we see that this does not make sense for natural scientists, none in the least—only if they are bent on stopping short at the stage of ignoramuses and giving themselves up to complete agnosticism would it make any sense to limit research to the sense world.

This is the fundamental contradiction of our time. This contradiction is what we must be attentive to. For if we fail to look at these spiritual realities we shall never understand the source of all the confusion, of all the contradictions and inconsistencies, in the endeavors of the present day. But the easygoing comfort of our time does not allow people to awaken and really to look into these contradictory tendencies.

Think what will happen when all that is said about today's world events becomes history. Posterity will get this history. Do you think they will get much truth? Certainly not. Yet history for us has been made in this very way. These puppets of history, which are described in the usual textbooks, do not represent what has really happened in human evolution. We have arrived at a time when it is absolutely necessary for people to learn to know what the real events are. It is not enough for all the legends to be recorded as they are in our current histories—the legends about Attila and Charlemagne, or Louis the Pious, where history begins to be altogether fabulous. The most important things of all are overlooked in these writings; for it is really only the histories of the soul that make the present time intelligible.

Anthroposophical spiritual science must throw light into the evolving souls of human beings. Because we have forgotten how to look into the spiritual, we no longer have any history. Anyone of sensibility can see that in Martianus Capella the old guides and guardians who used to lead people into the spiritual world have become very thin, very lean ladies. But those whom historians teach us to know as Henry I, Otto I, Otto II, Henry II, and so on—they appear as mere puppets of history, formed after the pattern of those who had grown into the thin and pale ladies, after grammar, rhetoric, dialectic, and the others. When all is said and done the personalities who are enumerated in succession in our histories have no more fat on them than those ladies.

Things must be seen as they really are. Actually the people of today should be yearning to see things as they are. Therefore, it is a duty to describe these things wherever possible, and they can be described today within the Anthroposophical Society. I hope that this society, at least, may some day wake up.

• 1. Julian, the Apostate (332–363), Roman Emperor (361–363). Steiner is referring to his lecture of July 16, 1922 (GA213). Cf. Rudolf Steiner: Occult History (Lecture Four), Building Stones for an Understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha (Lecture Seven), World History in the light of Anthroposophy (Lecture Six).
• 2 . Ernst von Wildenbruch (1845–1909), German writer, author of historical dramas, novels, and verse.
• 3 . St. Augustine, Bishop of Hippo (354–430). Early Latin church father. Exerted tremendous influence on later Christian thought. Cf. Rudolf Steiner: Christianity as Mystical Fact, Building Stones for an Understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha, (Lecture Seven).
• 4 . Steiner is here referring to an essay by Günther Wachsmuth on Dionysius the Areopagite and the doctrine of the hierarchies that appeared in Das Goetheanum, July 23 and July 30, 1922.
• 5 . Lecture of July 22, 1922 (GA213).
• 6 . Lecture of July 16, 1922 (GA213).
• 7 . Heliand, a poem in alliterative verse on the Gospels written between 825 and 835 A.D.
• 8 . E.g., Pèlerinage de Charlemagne (eleventh century), Gran Conquista de Ultramar (thirteenth century).
• 9 . Charlemagne (724–814), King of France and Roman Emperor. The Untersberg is a mountain ridge, full of caves, near Salzburg, Austria. Frederick Barbarossa (Redbeard) or Frederick I (1123–1190), Holy Roman Emperor. Esteemed by Germans as one of their greatest kings.
• 10. Peers of Charlemagne's court.
• 11. Lohengrin, a knight of the Grail, son of Parsifal. Led by a swan to rescue Princess Elsa of Brabant, he then marries her. When she asks his name, in violation of her pledge, he must return to the Grail Castle without her. Tale ascribed to Wolfram von Eschenbach (c. 1285–90); basis for Richard Wagner's opera, Lohengrin (1847).
• 12. Henry I (c. 876–936), first German king from the House of Saxony, campaigned in Hungary in 933.
• 13. Martianus Minneus Felix, Latin author of the fourth-fifth century, author of The Marriage of Philology and Mercury, the encyclopædic work in verse and prose that introduced the Seven Liberal Arts to the Middle Ages.
• 14. Johann Gregor Mendel. Augustinian priest and botanist, creator of Mendelian genetics. Mendel did his famous breeding experiments in the monastery garden in 1856. Results published 1866. Not widely recognized until after 1910.

My dear Friends, This evening, when to my deep satisfaction I can be with you again after long absence, let our first thoughts be once more directed to the fields where the great events of our time are taking place, where so many of our dear brothers in humanity have to enter with their own life and soul for what the tasks of this time are requiring of them:

Spirits ever watchful, Guardians of their souls!
May your vibrations waft
To the Earth-men committed to your charge
Our souls' petitioning love:
That, united with your power,
Our prayer may helpfully radiate
To the souls it lovingly seeks.

And for those who in consequence of these events have already passed thro' the gate of death:

Spirits ever watchful, Guardians of their souls!
May your vibrations waft
To the Men of the Spheres committed to your charge
Our souls' petitioning love:
That, united with your power,
Our prayer may helpfully radiate
To the souls it lovingly seeks!

And that Spirit whom we are seeking thro' the deepening of Spiritual Science—the Spirit with whom we desire to unite, who descended on to the Earth and passed thro' earthly Death for the salvation of mankind, for the healing, progress and freedom of the Earth—may He be at your side in all your difficult duties.

N.B.—These Meditations were repeated at the beginning of each Lecture of this Course.

After a long absence I am able to be again in your midst, and I should like especially to devote the three lectures of this week to directing our gaze to a knowledge of the spiritual world, which stands more or less in close connection with those significant and deeply incisive events of our time which touch us so deeply. Our attention should not be turned immediately to the events themselves, but to what perhaps in everyone, in the feeling of us all, is connected with these events, like riddles, like uneasy questions concerning the destiny of man and the Cosmos. Our attention must be turned to this: to that wider destiny of the human soul, to which it is subject in that region of Cosmic existence to which the gaze of Spiritual Science is also directed, and which is not limited to earthly material existence. We are very much tempted at this time to knock at the door through which the human being passes when he forsakes this earthly body. We are urged towards that to which the human being can look up when he needs higher consolation, a deeper source of strength than can be obtained from material life. In how many ways does the voice of the spiritual world cry in these times to our hearts, even to those who do not wish to penetrate into the spiritual world, but whose hearts are nevertheless the windows into the spiritual world. How clearly and in how manifold a way does the spiritual world knock at these windows in our days. It is therefore fitting that we should once again bring together, from a special point of view, many things which we are able to know concerning this spiritual world.

One thing must be admitted by anyone who transcends the narrow prejudices of materialism (those prejudices which altogether deny the existence of a spiritual world). The view of those who do not deny the existence of a spiritual world but merely maintain that man can learn nothing of it by human means, goes somewhat further. If one does not stand at the standpoint of the absolute materialist, but has been so ripened by life as to admit at least the existence of a spiritual world—and this stage may soon be reached—even if such an one denied the possibility of knowing anything of it, he is not far from the thought that the knowledge which can be assimilated and the results which can be acquired through the ordinary material world, must indeed be trivial compared with that which spreads out as a wider kingdom in the spiritual world lying behind the physical-sensible. Certainly there are in our days narrow-minded materialistic souls who would enclose the entire human being in such narrow limits that man would have to be regarded as little higher than the animal, and belonging entirely to the animal-evolution. Certainly, there are such men. But they will become ever fewer; and, as we have often seen even Natural Science does not now admit these prejudices. And if one only begins by admitting that in the human being there is something which transcends external nature, very soon knowledge will arise of how trivial and limited is that which the physical-sensible world embraces, when compared with the greatness and might of the whole universe. And if we then study man himself, and become conscious of that which lives and can live in him, we cannot do otherwise than say: “No matter how far the spiritual world may extend, however great its kingdom, man is a kind of microcosm in himself.” However much a man may hold it as unproven; yet, he in his being, extends to the whole kingdom of the spiritual world. Although to sense-perception, those depths of the soul into which the deeper parts of the spiritual world extend may be concealed, they do extend into the human being. Man does not only consist of physical body, of a combination of external physical forces and substances, he is also a product of the entire Cosmos, a veritable microcosm. And much that we have striven and sought after, was intended to show, in detail, how far man is a product of the spiritual world, and how far in him are really to be sought, not only the forces of this earth, but we might also say those of all the heavens. If this thought is once grasped, it will be clear that by means of ordinary knowledge, we can really know but very little of man. Through ordinary science we know certain things concerning the laws of nature—which knowledge we acquire between birth and death. But even a very little penetration into spiritual science—not enough to be termed knowledge but enough to throw light upon life's riddles—will make us realise that, if we are to understand the human being, we must apply ourselves to something very different from the little external science that we can acquire between birth and death through the external means of the body, through the external senses and the understanding bound to the brain.

Now, let us unite this thought with another, with the thought which goes as a main thread through all our considerations: the thought of repeated earth-lives. That which probably most astonishes those who have busied themselves a little with our views, is this thought of repeated earth-lives, and that the time which we pass here between birth and death is relatively so short, compared with the time which we pass in the spiritual world between death and rebirth. From many different points of view we have stated that as a rule the time which man has to pass between death and rebirth is much, much longer than the relatively short time between birth and death here in physical life. There is a connection between the two thoughts which I have just expressed: that the little which we here acquire between birth and death, in the way of knowledge and fruits of life, stands to the spiritual wealth of the cosmos with which man is connected, in about the same ratio as the short time between birth and death stands to the longer time between death and rebirth. For in reality, it will occur to you from the many considerations which we have developed, that it is the task of the human soul between death and rebirth to assimilate quite other knowledge and forces from those we acquire here in our physical life.

Really, one can say, my dear friends, that when we enter physical earth-life, when we descend from the spiritual world and incarnate in the body given us by our ancestors through heredity, it is then our duty to have ready all the forces and all the fine ramifications of those forces which we require for the purpose of organising this body of ours. You know that our body, as we receive it, is born of our parents. But with this body our psychic-spiritual being unites, and this being has previously passed a long time in the spiritual world between death and rebirth. Could one see—if one were for a moment justified in making the hypothesis—what this external human being can become merely through the forces of heredity, through the forces peculiar to the substance bestowed on us by our parents, we should see that with these forces alone man cannot become what he is. Through these forces which represent our external physical existence, and into these substances and groups or organs, we must pour that which we as souls bring, into the form which we receive from our parents; and out of the abstract soul-substance we form the individual person we are.

As I have said: it is a foolish hypothesis, but we may make use of it, to make things clear: let us think for once what might have arisen if you all were merely born of your parents. Let us leave Karma out of consideration, and leave out of account the fact that we are, of course, born into definite families; and let us only regard physical heredity. Then you would all be alike as human beings. You would only have the general human physical character. That you are quite definite individuals, that so many individual beings sit here before us, rests on the fact that the general human form, even in its finest principles, is fashioned by the spiritual individuality which descends from the spiritual world and enters into that which is given by father and mother.

To that end, just as we must have fingers to grip an object in the physical world, just as we must perceive an object in order to grasp it—even as we must have the necessary organs and also must have learnt to grasp a thing—so must we have learnt to attach ourselves to all the different organs which form our body physically. We have all got ears, but we each hear in our own way. We all have eyes, but we see individually. For the external organs this is least perceptible; in the inner behaviour of man it is more striking. Thus we must insert our psychic-spiritual essence into all these quite general organs, and fashion them individually. We must learn to know the forces, the inner psychic-spiritual formations, so that what we receive through inheritance as ears, nose, eyes, brain, etc., we can fashion individually. That means that when at birth we enter the physical world we must have knowledge, and not only knowledge but practical possibilities of using it. This wonderful structure of man, how little do we really know of it through external science? We must inwardly learn the whole subtle structure of the brain, because we have to organise it inwardly. And all these spiritual-psychic processes, everything which makes it at all possible for us to be men in a human body between birth and death, all this we have to acquire for ourselves. Just as we have to acquire abilities for ourselves in life, so we must also acquire between death and rebirth the power of being men in physical life. We must keep this in view. It must be quite clear to us, and then we shall be able to form an idea of what we do not know of man through mere physical knowledge, but which we must realise through that other knowledge which we have to assimilate in a practical form between death and rebirth. But we know that what we shall assimilate between death and rebirth is built on to all that we have assimilated in earlier earth-lives. And so, just as in a certain sense our physical life here is regulated between birth and death, so too is our life between death and rebirth regulated. We enter physical life as one might say, half sleeping, dreaming, as small children. We cannot at once develop memory, this development we have first to learn. If, however, we examine things more closely, we find that during the time before we develop memory, certain relations to the outer world are acquired. The child first gropes and then learns to grasp. Thus certain things are acquired systematically. The child learns much during this time, much more than is usually supposed. Then again each single epoch of life so runs its course that the later epochs are based on the earlier ones. Not only is the structural formation of man built up here between birth and death—but his life also. And his life between death and rebirth is similarly ruled and regulated. In this respect—to become aware how regulated this life of ours is—we need only bring to mind one thing that we have long known.

We have often emphasised the fact that for our soul-life here in physical existence we need a conception of our Ego, which once acquired—in the second, third and fourth year of life, that time to which we can go back in memory—should never leave us. In a man with whom to a certain extent this Ego-thread is broken, a disturbance of the soul's equilibrium takes place. There are such people, as I have often mentioned, but they are really suffering from a severe psychic illness. It may happen that a man is suddenly torn away from the connection with his Ego. He does not remember his earlier life. He may, for instance, go to the station, and buy a ticket for some place or another. His reason functions quite normally. At the intervening stations he does everything necessary, in quite a reasonable way. But he does not remember anything that previously took place. His inner life only extends to the point when he resolved to buy a ticket and make the journey. He travels all over the world with his mind and reason quite in order. Then comes a moment when he knows: he is he. Till then, his soul-life was extinguished as regards memory. The understanding may be in order, although the memory is extinguished. The Ego is wrenched away and the man suffers from a severe psychic illness. I myself had an acquaintance who while occupying a relatively high post was suddenly seized by such an illness. He suddenly had the impulse to travel, after having forgotten everything about himself and who he was. He traveled, as one might say, blindly through the world from one place to the other, and found himself again in his native city, in an asylum for the homeless. Then it suddenly came back to him who he was. The interval was passed quite rationally, but was not connected with the rest of his life. The illness befell him a second time—but this time he committed suicide while still in that state of consciousness in which the memory was dissociated from the Ego.

Now, you see, just as in the life between birth and death the Ego must be a continuous thread, which may not at any time during daily life lose the possibility of remembering what has happened since that point in childhood to which one can go back, so must it be also in the life between death and rebirth. There, too, we must always have the possibility of preserving our Ego. Now this possibility is given us, and it is given us through the fact that the first days after death are passed in the manner we have often described. Immediately after death a man has before him, as in a mighty picture, the life which has just run its course. For several days he goes back over his whole past life, but always so that the whole life is there before him. It lies before him as in a great panorama. Now, of course, if observed more closely, it turns out that these days in their review of the past life, are as it were endowed with a certain power of observation. In a sense we regard the life during these days from the standpoint of the Ego. We see in particular everything in which our Ego was interested. We see the relations which we have with a person, but we see them in a connection with the results we ourselves obtained from them. Thus we do not regard things quite objectively, but see all that has borne fruit for ourselves. Man sees himself everywhere as the centre. And that is extremely necessary. For from these days when he thus sees everything which has been fruitful for him, arises that inner strength and force which he needs in the whole of his life between death and rebirth, in order there to be able firmly to retain the thought of the Ego. For we owe the power of being able to retain the Ego between death and rebirth to this vision of the last life; the power to do so really proceeds from this. And I must again specially emphasise this, even if I have said it before—the moment of death is of extraordinary significance. Death is something which most distinctly has two totally different aspects. Regarded here from the physical world it certainly has many sad aspects, many painful sides. But we really only see death here from the one side; after our death we see it from the other. It is then the most satisfying and most perfect occurrence that we can possibly experience, for there it is a living fact. Whereas here death is a proof of how frail and transitory the physical life of man is—when seen from the spiritual world it is actually a proof that the spirit continually wins the victory over everything non-spiritual, that the spirit is ever the life, the eternal, ever-unconquerable life.

Death is precisely the proof that in reality there is no death, that Death is a Maya, an illusion. Herein lies the great difference between the life from death to rebirth and our life here from birth to death. For as you know, no man can with ordinary physical means of cognition remember his own birth. No one can prove his own birth by personal experience, for he has not seen it himself. One's birth is something which cannot be seen by the human eye here in physical life. It lies before the time which we can remember. Birth is never included in our recollection. Death, however—and it is thereby distinguished from birth as regards its significance after death—death stands before our spiritual vision as the greatest, most significant, living and perfect event in our life between death and rebirth. For death is precisely the means by which we retain our Ego-consciousness after death. And just as little as it is possible in physical life to remember our birth, is it necessary and self-evident in the life between death and rebirth, that the great moment, when the spirit separates from the body should, during the whole time we pass in the spiritual world, always stand before our psychic-spiritual gaze. For from this death flows to us, in connection with what we have experienced here, the force we need to feel ourselves as ‘I.’ We might say: “If we were unable to die we could never experience a spiritual Ego. For we owe the possibility of experiencing a spiritual Ego to the fact that we can die physically.” Thus lie the facts for our Ego. The Ego is strengthened and invigorated through our experiencing those first days after death, in which we are still within our etheric body. Then the etheric body is laid aside and we experience—retrospectively—the preceding life; this we call the passage of the human soul through the soul-world; a life lasting longer than that shorter life which lasts only a few days, and which immediately follows physical death. Now, the opinion is very prevalent that a person who can look into the spiritual world immediately beholds everything. I have often corrected this. Nothing produces such humility as true insight into the spiritual world. For one may look for a very long time, and the investigation of the single facts of the spiritual world is really a long, long labour, and is accomplished by means of forces of the spiritual world. It is mere prejudice to believe that anyone who looks into the spiritual world can immediately give information about everything. Just as here in the physical world things are investigated gradually, in the course of time, so is it in the spiritual life; things have to be investigated little by little. And now I should like to touch on a point which must appear important to some of those here present: that is, the absolute agreement of the different spiritual facts as they gradually come to light, as they continually arise in new forms. Even to those who do not yet see into the spiritual world, this may be a proof of the truth of that for which a true and genuine investigation is striving. In my Occult Science I have given, from different standpoints, a definite time to the periods of the life between death and rebirth. I should now like to bring forward yet another standpoint which I did not quote in my Occult Science for a simple reason, which I will not conceal from you, so that you may see that Spiritual Science is striven for here in an honourable and upright manner: for the simple reason that at that time I did not yet know these facts myself, but was only able to discover them later. There is a certain connection between the spiritual life which can be developed here on the physical plane, and the spiritual life between death and rebirth. You already know that we pass our physical life here in waking and sleeping. On the one hand we have a full consciousness in the waking state, and then for the normal man an unconscious condition sets in, in the time between sleeping and waking.

Now you know also from what has been set forth in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and its Attainment that this sleep-life may be lit up by consciousness, that it is possible to look into that which happens between falling asleep and waking up. If we can attain to this, and learn more and more of the life which man passes here in sleep, we really learn to know an amazing kingdom of Life. In this unconscious condition between falling asleep and waking up a vast and amazing kingdom of human life flows by unperceived by the normal human existence. A great deal goes on then. And that which very soon strikes us, in this sleep-life, is that it is much more active than the life between waking and sleeping. During sleep we are within our Ego and astral body, and have as it were, our physical body and etheric body outside us. Now, even this external life is an active one, with many people a very active life indeed. It appears so active to us because we do not take all the inactivities which exist in this outer life much into consideration. Really, if everything in this external life had to proceed from our own initiative, we should be greatly astonished how differently everything would take place.

Just consider—you get up every morning, you hardly form the resolution to get up, you do it from habit; and you do not really come to a closer knowledge of what it signifies to be so connected with the whole Cosmic-ordering, that you pass your life at definite times in one or other of these two conditions of waking and sleeping, and have to regulate your life accordingly. How many people think of this? It all goes on as a matter of course. And now try for once, to consider how much goes on in this way, so that in a sense, we go through life like automata. You will then come to recognise that there is a great deal more inactivity in the life between waking and falling asleep, but great activity in the life between sleeping and waking. There a complete and tremendous activity takes place. It is an interesting fact that people who are relatively indolent in external life between waking and sleeping are just the busiest between sleeping and waking. Man is then extremely active, only he knows nothing of this in ordinary life. If we examine more closely into that which drives the soul, that is, the Ego and astral body, we find that this activity is really intimately connected with the whole existence of man, though in our journey through life we consciously take but very little of it with us. We do not work upon all our life as it approaches us externally. I should like to give an apt instance of this. Just consider, you are now hearing this lecture, which lasts perhaps one hour. Really, without wishing to offend any of the dear friends sitting here, I may say: it would be possible to hear infinitely more in the words of this lecture than the different friends sitting here, are hearing. Indeed, it would be possible to gather much more from all I am saying, than I know myself. But what I mean is this—and I am only saying this in illustration of the above—you will go home presently, go to bed and sleep, and wake up tomorrow morning. And in the time between your sleeping and waking—quite unconsciously, of course, as regards the normal consciousness—you will work upon much of what you are now in a position to hear. You will work upon it a great deal in your next sleep and perhaps also during the following nights. One sees souls labouring between sleeping and waking in quite a different fashion at what they have absorbed. And even if it occurred that someone had listened very inattentively, and had merely been somewhat receptive, yet through that receptivity he would draw into his soul the spiritual powers and impulse in the lecture. And that would be worked upon during sleep, and transformed into what we require not only for the rest of life up till death, but beyond death. Thus we work over our whole life as it transpires by day between our waking and sleeping. Everything we experience by day we work upon during the night. Thus as it were, we learn lessons which we need for all the rest of our life here, and beyond death into the next incarnation. When we are asleep, we are our own prophetic transmuters of our life. This sleep-life is full of tremendously deep riddles, for it is much more deeply connected with what we experience, than is the external consciousness, and we work at it all from the standpoint of its fruitfulness for the following life. What we can make of ourselves through what we have experienced, is the object of our labour in the time between sleeping and waking. Whether we become stronger and more powerful in our soul, or perhaps have to reproach ourselves, we labour at all our experiences so that they become life-fruit. You see from this, that the life between sleeping and waking is really enormously significant, and that it goes deeply into the whole riddle of man.

Now, perhaps one day the spiritual investigator forms the intention—we may even say the purpose—of comparing this life of sleep with another, a super-sensible life, and he decides to compare it with those days which take their course during the life of Kamaloka. And note here, though this can only be seen by clairvoyance, that whereas here in life we can recollect all that we have experienced in our day-life, after death—after the time of the life-tableau is past—we obtain a memory of all our nights. This is an important secret which is revealed to us. We remember all our night-life. This review so presents itself that we really live backwards starting from the last night passed here in life, passing to the preceding one, and so on. In this way we experience the whole life again backwards, but as seen from the night-aspect. One experiences again in this retrospective recollection, what one has unconsciously thought and investigated. One really goes back through one's life, but not from the day-aspect. How long does that last approximately? Now remember that we sleep away about one-third of our life. As you know, there are people who naturally sleep much more. But on an average we sleep away a third of our life. Therefore this retrospect also lasts about one-third of our earth-life, because we experience the nights. Just think how wonderfully that agrees with the other points of view which have been elucidated. We have always said that the life in Kamaloka lasts about one-third of one's life. And when we take the above into consideration, we again see that it must be a third. Thus do these things harmonise. The details always fit in. That is the wonderful thing in spiritual investigation—one learns to know a fact, and when that is settled, one presently learns it again from another aspect.

It is always like the case of a man who climbs a hill from which he sees something first from one side and then from another side, yet the essential points are always the same. So that one can say: Here in earth-life between birth and death our life is so experienced that it is always torn away from us, it is always broken off by the night-life; and we only remember the day-life, the things we have experienced by day. But in the night-life we do more than remember them; we work upon them and transform them, as stated above. And what we cannot remember now, we remember during the Kamaloka life. That is an important connection, and from this you will grasp many things which perhaps could not be understood otherwise. Just consider, especially in our present time, how many relatively young men pass through the gates of death. I have already stated from many points of view the significance this has for the collective life of humanity. But let us first look at the two divisions which we have just characterised. (We will come on to other things in the course of these lectures.) Let us first consider the life in the etheric body which lasts only a few days, during which a man has his life tableau before him, and then we shall consider the life of the soul in the soul-world. In going through the previous life from the night-side we shall easily be able to see why the spiritual investigator must say that even these two periods of life between death and rebirth are different for a man who has gone relatively early through the gates of death; one who dies at a later age has different experiences. This concerns us very closely because so many now are dying at a relatively early age. You see it is really the case that the separate sections which I have distinguished are of great significance for our life here in the physical world. I have given these divisions of life thus: the first extends to the seventh year, to the change in dentition; the next to the fourteenth year, the time of puberty; another extends to the twenty-first year and so on; in periods of seven years. And if you earnestly consider what lies in these phases of life you will see that the thirty-fifth year becomes an important epoch. Till then we are, as it were, in a state of preparation, whereas later we have ended the preparatory stage and built up our life on the basis of what has been prepared up to the thirty-fifth year. This thirty-fifth year of life is of very great significance. Till then, not merely the bodily growth continues, but also the growth of the soul; for the soul of a man really grows.

Now, it must decidedly be emphasised that much of the ripened condition of life can only be attained after the thirty-fifth year. And if we consider this thirty-fifth year of life from another point of view, it will appear still more significant to us. You see, if we place these seven-year epochs of life before the soul, we first have the building up of the physical body to the age of seven, and the building up of the etheric body to the age of fourteen. From the fourteenth to the twenty-first year there is fashioned and organised what we call the astral body; then the sentient soul to the age of twenty-eight, the rational or intellectual soul to the age of thirty-five, and the self-conscious or spiritual soul to the age of forty-two. And then we come to spirit-self, which is a kind of evolving back again to the astral body, and so on. The further epochs of life do not progress in periods of seven years, but irregularly, for they will only evolve to regularity in the future. Thus, unless thwarted by the errors of education, a certain regularity is followed up to the thirty-fifth year. Now, we may be especially struck by the deeper significance of the entire development of life, when we observe people who die at these different epochs of life. Suppose—merely as an instance—that we follow the soul of an eleven, twelve, or thirteen-year old boy or girl, who goes through the gate of death at that early age. In accordance with what I have already described, it follows in such a case that the etheric body—which would theoretically have been able to care for the full life of the child—has these unused forces still within it. In general it happens, that man during the whole life between birth and death really prepares himself for death: he really makes himself ready for death. In reality our whole life is a preparation for death, in so far that we continually labour at the destruction of the body. If we could not destroy it we could never attain to perfection. For we purchase the perfection, as it were, with the destruction of the outer physical body. Now, when a boy of thirteen goes through the gate of death, he does not accomplish the long work of destruction, which he might have been able to do. He does not fulfil everything he might have done. This expresses itself in a noteworthy manner. If we follow such a soul, we find it in the spiritual world, after a certain time, a relatively short time, between death and rebirth, in what I might call a most noteworthy society. We find it among those souls who are so preparing themselves for their next life that they will soon have again to descend to the earth. These are the souls who will soon incarnate. Among these then, live such souls as pass through the gate of death at the age of eleven, twelve, or thirteen. They are placed among them. And if we look more closely into these connections it turns out, strange to say, that these souls who are soon to enter their earth-life, require that which these other souls can bring up to them from the earth to give them the strength they on their part require to enter a physical body. Thus the souls of the young form a strong help to those others who must soon descend to the earth. Young children who are quite normal, who have no prominent spiritual life, but are merely intelligent, are normally able to give certain assistance, which can no longer be given by one who dies in later years. He, too, has his task, each one must accommodate himself to his own Karma, and we should not on this account wish to die at this or that age, for we all die at the age permitted by our Karma. Thus the help a soul can offer to the souls awaiting incarnation cannot be given by one who dies in later years. That rests in the fact that during the first half of life a soul stands nearer to the entire spiritual world, in one sense, than in the second half of life. Yet in another sense this is not the case. But in a certain sense we do stand nearer to the spiritual world in the first half of our life. In fact the whole life so runs its course that the longer we live in the physical body the further we are from the spiritual world. A child of one year still stands very close to the spiritual world. When it forsakes the physical plane it is soon in the spiritual world. This is the case up to the fourteenth year; till then a child so lives in the physical body that it can easily enter the world of souls who are seeking an early incarnation. This is connected with the fact that even in the tableau, one who dies very young has different experiences from those of one who dies in later life.

Thus the thirty-fifth year of life is an important boundary. If a man dies before the thirty-fifth year, he first experiences the life-tableau, and then goes backwards through the night-life. But during this entire experience of the spiritual world, he sees—as it were ‘through a glass darkly,’ as if he were seeing it through the life-pictures—that spiritual world which he forsook on being born. His perspective still extends to the spiritual world. But if he has passed this thirty-fifth year then it is quite different. He no longer beholds that wherein he himself was before birth. That is one of those things which particularly strikes one now, when so many die young. For this looking back at the spiritual world still retains a certain significance up to the thirty-fifth year. Of course after the fourteenth, fifteenth, or sixteenth year it is no longer such a direct vision, but even from then to the thirty-fifth year, if death occurs, it is as if the spiritual life was everywhere reflected in the retrospective life-picture. If one dies quite in infancy, there is naturally not much experience of life to go back over—one can almost immediately look into the spiritual world. If a child dies at the age of thirteen, he has a retrospective tableau, but immediately behind that lies the spiritual world. He can still see the spiritual world clearly. If death takes place later, the spiritual world is not perceived so distinctly, but it is contained in what one sees as one's own life. Up to the thirty-fifth year we are still connected with that spiritual world from which we descended. One who dies before the age of thirty-five, experiences even in the first period of the life in which he sees the life-picture, and then in the retrospective journey through the soul-world, that he really is in a kind of homeland which he forsook at birth. He has the direct feeling of coming back home into the world from which he descended. This is of tremendous importance. For each one who dies thus is, in one sense, as you see, immediately placed more easily into the spiritual world than one who dies later. Out of his post-mortem survey he carries far more spirituality into his next life between birth and death. And those young men who die in such numbers in our present age, will from this standpoint become important bearers of spiritual truths and spiritual knowledge when they descend to earth again in their next incarnation. Thus we see that the terrible suffering which is poured over the world is nevertheless necessary for the course of existence as a whole. For the blood which now flows will be the symbol of a certain refreshing of spiritual life at a particular time in the future, and this is necessary for the whole evolution of humanity. Then will the souls, who now go through the gate of death so early, descend again; but most of them will descend different from what they would have been had they reached the limits of life in material existence, and then died. It is Cosmic Wisdom which now calls away a number of souls, that they may be allowed to perceive even in their retrospective tableau and experiences, deep spiritual secrets connected with the earth. That, too, is Cosmic Wisdom, for these souls are thus filled with that which they will behold in stronger form when they come to see it again; they will have been strengthened by the shorter earth life which they have undergone. That is the true Wisdom of the Cosmos. And so we must say that much of what rightly gives us pain when we are only able to regard it from the standpoint of earthly existence, shows us its redeeming side when we observe it from the standpoint of spiritual vision. Thus it is with the whole of life. Certainly, my dear friends, earthly pain cannot be at present avoided through such a consideration. It must be experienced. For that is the very condition for its compensation. If we did not experience it in the physical world it could never be compensated. But although we must suffer many things in the physical world, there are nevertheless moments in which we can place ourselves at the standpoint of the spiritual. Then we shall recognise that much of that which must appear to us as painful from a lower point of view is a tribute which must be offered to the higher spiritual worlds and the wise beings therein, in order that the evolution of the whole Cosmos and of human existence may go forward not in a one sided manner, but in every direction. The expiation for much suffering must be achieved, and to this end the suffering itself must first be endured. Spiritual science cannot indeed spare us that, but it can teach us to lay it on the altar of existence, to seek the compensation, and to recognise the Wisdom of the Cosmos, in spite of all the pain which for higher ends it must cause. This is what spiritual science can give us as a precious unction for the whole human existence. Thus from this standpoint also and right from the feelings which spiritual science can arouse in us, let us regard the powerful events of our time, and say again that which we have often repeated here:—

From the fighters' courage,
From the blood of battles,
From the mourners' suffering,
From the people's sacrifice,
There will ripen fruits of Spirit
If with consciousness the soul
Turns her thought to Spirit Realms.