The Rudolf Steiner Archive

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.

My first sad and heavy duty is to acquaint you with the fact that our dear friend, the leader of the Munich Lodge, Fraulein Stinde, now belongs to those whom we have to reckon to-day as the ‘Sphere-Beings.’ She left this physical plane yesterday evening. It is not possible just now to speak about this extremely severe and significant loss to our society. As a beginning to our consideration for to-day I will merely say these few words concerning this event, which is so painful and important to us.

Fraulein Stinde belongs to those who are certainly known to the greater number of our friends. She belongs to those who have grasped our matters in the deepest depths of their hearts and have completely identified themselves with them. In her house (and that of her friend the Grafin Kalckreuth) I was able as early as 1903 to give the first intimate lectures in our sphere, which I had to give in Munich. And one may say that from this first occasion when Fraulein Stinde approached us, she united with our aims not only her whole personality but the whole power of her work, so valuable, so excellent and influential. She forsook the artistic calling which was previously so dear to her, in order to put herself and her powers entirely at the service of our work, and since then she has worked intensely for this, in a rare, objective, quite impersonal manner, both in narrower and wider circles. She was the soul of our whole work in Munich. And she was one of those souls, of whom one could say, that through the inner qualities of her being she gave the very best guarantee that in Munich itself, our aims would be able to develop in the best possible manner. You know what an immense task was laid on all those persons helping in Munich in those early years, through the performances of the Mystery Plays and everything connected with them. Fraulein Stinde and her friend Grafin Kalckreuth gave themselves up absolutely to this work, and above all, it may be said, with the understanding created by the profound nature of their studies, and by the will which may itself be born of this. I may perhaps point out that the intense labour which Fraulein Stinde accomplished, really very considerably exhausted her life-strength in later years. It must be admitted that the valuable life-force which was perhaps too rapidly used up of late, was devoted to our cause in the most beautiful and deeply satisfactory manner. Probably no one among those who knew her most intimately, could help feeling that this personality was one of our very best workers. It is true many of the activities of Fraulein Stinde have been misunderstood, and it is to be hoped that the sun-like force that proceeded from her personality will presently be recognised, even by those of our friends and followers who through prejudice have misunderstood her work. And those of our wider circle who could observe all she did for our cause, will, in common with those more closely connected with her, preserve the most faithful recollection of her. We are sure that in her case we may quite specially emphasise the mantram which must often be uttered during these days in connection with the departure of many of our friends from the physical plane. It may be especially emphasised with reference to Fraulein Stinde, that amidst the many attacks and oppositions which our cause encounters in the world, we reckon on the help of those in the spiritual-world—we reckon on those who have only changed the form of their existence, and who, in spite of their passage through the gate of death, are still truly united with us in soul, and are most significant and important co-workers. The many veils which surround those still incarnate in the physical body, gradually fall away, and the souls of these dear departed friends—of this we are sure—work in our midst, and we specially need their help. We need the help of those no longer assailed from the physical plane, those who have no longer to consider the limits of the physical plane. If we have the deep and earnest belief in the success of our cause in the civilisation of the world, it is because we have the full consciousness that those who formerly belonged to us, are still our best forces, that they work among us from the spiritual world with spiritual means. The trust in our cause that we require, will often be strengthened by the knowledge that we must thank our departed friends for being in our midst in order that, by uniting our forces with theirs, we can accomplish the labour which is laid upon us for the spiritual civilisation of the world. I should now like to continue the considerations which we began to develop in our last lecture. Such times as our own, in which the enigma of death approaches the human soul in so many different forms—and on this we laid stress in our last lecture—urges us quite specially to investigate what man is certainly able to acquire regarding the spiritual world. Times like our own, in which humanity is exposed to such severe trials, are destined for the very purpose of leading the human soul to inquire as to the beings of the spiritual world. For who does not see at each step in what is happening to-day—and is happening in the greater part of the civilised world—who does not see at almost every stage the great riddle of Life confronting him? And who does not feel that great connections lie concealed behind such events as those occurring around us to-day and which, as they occur, convulse the souls and hearts of men with pain and sorrow, though fill them also with hope and confidence? Certainly, he who beholds the events of the world with but a short-sighted vision, will judge such far-reaching events by those which immediately precede and follow them. But one who externally, without entering into esoteric considerations, regards the course of cosmic events and compares earlier times with the present, will become conscious of how very much may be connected first with that, let us say, which in quite a different manner, runs its course later on in the Cosmos, as effect. Consider there are now many people who say: “The present events of the war are merely the results of external political opposition among the various nations and peoples.” Certainly, that is true, and there is no question of bringing forward anything in objection to the truth of such a conception in a limited sense; but, if we consider, for example, the wars which were waged in the beginning of the Middle Ages between the Central European peoples and those of South Europe and above all the peoples belonging to the Roman Empire, we must say that the wars which took place then in political strife also proceeded from the opposition, the political opposition which then existed; they had their causes in those oppositions in their immediate vicinity. These battles have now run their course. They have evoked certain configurations in the entire life of Europe. If we investigate but a little into history and consider what happened at that time through the battles of the Central European peoples with, let us say, the peoples of the Roman Empire, we shall come to the conclusion that out of the earlier configuration of the European World there has arisen a later one. But if we wish to estimate correctly the real point at issue, we must consider all the historical results. For these historical results which have occurred in Europe could not have arisen as they have, if those battles had ended the other way. And what was the consequence of this European History? The whole manner in which Christianity spread and grew in Europe is the result of it! And if we consider these deep connections we can say: In all that happened in the following centuries, the facts lie thus: the events of these centuries are karmically connected with their causes, the battles of those times. That means that the events to which we have alluded, are connected with the whole later configuration of the European World even in its spiritual relations. Just consider that in all its gravity, and you will admit that Christianity then spread in Europe and so fashioned itself, that through the youthful Germanic peoples opposing the Roman peoples who had now grown old, and through the uniting of their youthful forces with that which flowed into humanity as the announcement of Christianity, a certain European atmosphere was thereby created, into which the souls descending later were born. Thus the souls lived and developed in the following centuries, in accordance with these events. Thus we may say: If a man at that time had asserted: ‘How does that affect things? It is merely a political opposition between the nations of South and Central Europe,’ he would be right. But if another had said: ‘Just look, the configuration of the spiritual civilisation of all the following centuries will result from what is happening’—he also would be right, and in a much deeper sense. If we seek the immediate causes of anything by pointing to the opposing forces nearest at hand, we do not therewith touch on the entire gravity of the occurrence. The affairs of this world are all very intimately connected. And if we require inner strengthening in order, as it were, to find the right forces for the support of our work, we need only remind ourselves that in a still smaller circle than our present one, were once seated together those who, when Christianity was first announced represented its great Cosmic Truths. I have already often used this comparison. But we shall apply it yet again to-day. There was a time which we can describe as follows: We see the old Roman Empire. We see it with its old philosophy. We see it living entirely in the atmosphere of the old heathen philosophy. We see this Empire with the people who in a sense formed the upper classes. And there below, truly more underneath than our ‘under’ signifies to-day—literally underneath, in the catacombs under the earth, we see the first small handful of Christians, possessing something quite foreign to the world-culture up above, but which they carried so deeply in their hearts that its force became truly cosmically creative. Let us picture to ourselves these catacombs. There, underneath in the catacombs, with their thoughts directed to the Christ-impulse, were the first Christians—and above, over their heads, the Romans, who behaved quite differently from the first Christians. You know all that, I need not relate it further. But if you picture two centuries later, how different everything appears! That which was above is swept away, and that which was venerated underground in secret has found its way to the surface! Certainly, the times and the forms in which such doings occur change; but the essential remains. Concerning those who to-day advocate the external scientific and spiritual culture it may be said—though this is not to be taken literally—they feel themselves above, and call that which is striven for in our circles, the philosophy of a few sectarians, derived from a few abnormal minds. But he who really penetrates the nature of these conceptions of ours and who above all permeates himself with them, may have the assurance that here too some day what is kept under will be on the top. Here then our thoughts may dwell on the transformed world which will arise out of these difficult times of ours, on the spiritual which mankind must learn to grasp. For there hardly exists a greater similarity in historical evolution, than that between our own times and that which played its part in the epoch when the old Roman culture was still above, and Christianity, tended by a few faithful souls, was still below.

I should like to point out—if I may do so without seeming narrow-minded through a too exact and pedantic reference to these things, for in these days we should be very broad indeed—that it is especially good to hold before the soul as imaginative pictures our own epoch and that of the Rome at the first appearance of Christianity.

Now, many who to-day oppose what we call Spiritual Science, cannot fail to feel the entirely different nature of that which Spiritual Science must advocate, in contradistinction to that which is otherwise upheld among the so-called ‘normal’ people of to-day. And here we need only observe, if we wish to understand this correctly, how the first announcement of Christianity was completely opposed to that which was upheld among the Romans, the normal men of those times: with such a thought we must make ourselves acquainted, for it is again and again leveled against us that with the accepted means of cognition man cannot reach worlds such as those with which we are concerned. We must really so grasp the more intimate work in our groups as to be able to say: This life in our groups is not useless. It is not without significance to this cause of ours, that we should meet together in such groups, and again and again renew, not only acquaintance with the theoretical results of our doctrine, which is not of importance, but also renew our warm feelings and sensations for the actual things and beings of the spiritual world. Thereby we accustom ourselves to that manner of psychic sensing and feeling which above all makes it possible for us to take up spiritual truths in a different way from those who are unprepared. In our group meetings there must occasionally be imparted to you something from the higher and later parts of spiritual knowledge. We cannot always start afresh from the beginning. But this intimacy within the life of the groups must make it possible for a number of our friends to take into themselves, into their souls, such things as I pointed out in the last lecture, namely, the special manner of verifying our spiritual knowledge, and of taking it into oneself. We cannot verify these things in the same manner as man does in the external world when he contacts things with his eyes: but he who has a feeling for such facts as I pointed out last time, will, even if he does not himself see into the spiritual world, feel that through the mutual support of spiritual truths the value of these truths is intensified. Therefore I shall yet again draw attention to the very significant fact that on the one side, through many years of study, the definite point of view is reached, that a third of our life between birth and death—in time—is again lived through after death; while now on the other side a quite different point of view is discovered—namely, that in reality we experience our sleep life in a special form during the time we call Kamaloka, and that this time also occupies a third of the life on the physical plane. These two points of view are quite independent of each other and have been discovered from different starting points. We have also shown on other occasions how, from three or four different points of view, one always comes to the same conclusion. Thus do the truths support each other. But for this, we must ourselves acquire the right feeling. This will produce something like a natural elemental feeling for the truth of this spiritual knowledge. I must often appeal to this, otherwise I could not give out the later and higher truths in the various group-meetings.

Last time we drew attention to the fact that the right connection of our Ego-consciousness between death and rebirth is, as it were, kindled through that panoramic review of our last earth-life which takes place after death. We go over our life again in a kind of tableau. You must quite clearly understand what a man there really beholds. We are here accustomed to stand on the physical plane, forming, in a sense, a kind of central point of our cosmic horizon, and we see the world around us which makes an impression on our senses. In normal life on the physical plane, we do not look into ourselves, we turn our gaze outwards. Now, if we want to form an idea of the life immediately following death, it is important to keep in mind that this gaze on the panorama of life is absolutely different from the perception we are accustomed to use on the physical plane. On the physical plane we look out of ourselves and regard the world as our environment. ‘We are here, we look outwards, and not into ourselves.’ Immediately after death we have a few days in which our field of vision is filled with that which we have undergone between birth and death. We then look within from the circumference to the centre. We regard our own life in its chronological course. Whereas we usually say: ‘Here are we and everything else is outside us’ ... immediately after death we have the consciousness that this distinction between us and the world does not exist. For we look from the circumference on to our own life, which for these few days is our world. In ordinary perception on the physical plane we behold hills, houses, rivers, trees, etc., so, in the same way, we see that which we have undergone in life from a certain personal standpoint, as our own immediate world. And because we see it, that gives the starting point for the maintenance of the Ego through the entire life between death and rebirth. It is that which strengthens and invigorates the soul, so that between death and rebirth it always knows: ‘I am an Ego!’ Here in physical life we realise our Ego through the fact—which I have often pointed out—that we stand in a certain relation to our body. Consider: if you reflect closely on a dream you will say: In the dream you have no clear feeling of the Ego, but often a feeling of separation. That is because man here on the physical plane only really feels his Ego through contact with his body. You can represent it very crudely thus: If you move your finger through the air—there is nothing there! Move it further—there is still nothing. When you touch something, however, in coming against something, you know of yourself, you become aware of yourself. We are thereby made aware of our Ego. Not the Ego itself is aroused—the Ego is a Being—but the consciousness of the Ego. The opposition makes us aware of our Self. Thus we are Ego-conscious in the physical body because of our living in it. For this reason we have received the physical body. In the life between death and rebirth we have an Ego-consciousness, because we have received the forces which proceed from the vision of the previous life. We come to a certain extent in contact with that which the world of space gives us and thereby win our Ego-consciousness for the life between birth and death. We come in contact with that which we ourselves have experienced between birth and death in the last life, and thereby have our Ego-consciousness for the life between death and rebirth.

There now follows the quite different life which occupies a third of the time of the life between birth and death, and which is usually called the Kamaloka life. This life follows. It is of such a nature that we may say a widening of our vision appears. While during the first few days our vision is really directed only to our self, to our past life, not to the personality—this, as time goes on, becomes quite different. Certainly the power of knowing oneself as an Ego remains. But there now appears, and you can gather for yourselves, from the lectures and books, what I am about to say—there now appears something quite peculiar, to which man has first to accustom himself, because the whole method of perceiving in that world is quite different from what it is here on the physical plane. A great part of that which man has to undergo after death consists in inwardly accommodating himself to a different mode of perception. Here we have nature around us. What we here regard in the physical world as nature is absolutely nonexistent in that world which is ours between death and rebirth. To see nature here we have our physical eyes, ears, and the whole physical apparatus of perception. And this nature as it exists with its fullness of colour and other characteristics could not be perceived by other, different organs of perception. Therefore we are endowed with a physical body, that we may be able to perceive nature. After death, in the place of what is here around us as nature, we have around us the spiritual world which we describe as the world of the hierarchies and world of pure being, of pure soul. Not matter or substance or objects which have colour, but pure being. That is the essential point. Therefore naturally the astonishment is greatest for those souls who denied the spirit while here in physical life. For those, who deny the spirit and believe nothing of the spiritual, are placed in a world which they have denied, and which is completely unknown to them. They have compulsorily to live in a world whose existence they actually refused to admit.

Thus we are encompassed by a spiritual environment of pure being, of pure soul. And now gradually emerge souls, fashioning themselves out of this universal soul-world, for at first there are souls everywhere—souls whom we do not recognise. We know they are all souls, but we do not recognise them individually; and gradually the individual souls appear more distinctly and concretely. And especially at this time appear those souls with whom we have lived here on the physical plane, the souls of men with whom we have lived here. While we face this fullness of souls we learn to know among whom we are: this soul is so and so, that soul is someone else, and so on. We make acquaintance with these souls. First of all we must recognise the fact that the whole relation in which we stand to the world then, between death and rebirth, is essentially different, in yet other respects to the relation in which we stand here on the physical plane. Here we say that the world is outside us; after death we have really the consciousness that the world is within us. Just imagine that for a moment here, on the earth, you were to dissolve entirely, that you were to vanish into vapour. The vaporous cloud which is you spreads out more and more and only ceases to spread further when it reaches the firmament. It expands, but it can get no further. Let us consider for a moment the firmament as a being. You then feel yourself as this firmament and now see everything within it; thus you stand outside with your consciousness and see the world inside. You feel yourself in such a way that everything that appears is within you. Just as here a pain is inside us, in like manner after death beings appear in us as inner experience. That brings about the infinite intimacy of the experiences between death and rebirth, the fact of being so bound together with them that we actually have them as our own inner experiences. And here there is a certain distinction. Consider such a soul as I have instanced, which one begins to recognise and of which all one can know at first is: ‘Yes, it is there, but it has no form. It is not yet perceptible, but it is there.’ To make it perceptible one has to accomplish an inner activity, an activity somewhat like the following: Let us suppose ourselves placed in the spiritual. If I feel behind me something which I do not see, the following idea arises in me: It is there, but I must accomplish an activity in order to get some conception of it. I may say it is comparable to touching a thing so as to get an idea of it. This inner activity is necessary if the imagination is to appear. I know the being is there, but I have first to create the imagination by uniting myself inwardly with the being. That is the one way in which man can perceive souls. The other manner is this: that one does not oneself accomplish this inner activity with such intensity, but it arises of its own accord. It appears without one's having very much to do with it. It is somewhat like our perception of something here, only of course it is transferred into the spiritual. And this distinction can exist between two souls. Of the one, man receives a perception through being very active himself; of the other, through an imagination arising out of itself. You only need be attentive to recognise this distinction. For if you become acquainted with a soul that requires more activity to be perceived; that is the soul of one who has died. But a soul that appears more of its own accord is a soul which is incarnate here on the earth in a physical body. These distinctions are really there. Man stands—with a few exceptions, which we can mention at the proper time—man stands in union after death both with the souls who have died and those who are still here on earth. And the distinction lies in a man's knowing which kind of soul he has to deal with; he knows he must be active or passive, according to the way in which there arises the imagination of the soul which he faces.

Now, there is one idea, one characteristic, which has indeed been expressed many times already, but which we will once more bring forward in connection with the life which occupies a third of the earth-life just elapsed, and which we are accustomed to call the life in Kamaloka. If you are living here on the earth and somebody strikes you, you are aware of it. You perceive it, and say: he has struck me. And as a rule it makes a difference whether somebody hits you, or whether you hit him, and if you hear something said by someone, you have not the same experience as when you yourself say something. All this is quite reversed in Kamaloka life, in which we live our life backwards between death and rebirth. To use this rough illustration it is then as follows. If you have given anybody a blow in life, you feel what the other person felt through the blow. If you have injured another through a word, you experience the feeling you caused him. Thus you feel the experience of the other soul. In other words, you experience the results brought about by your own deeds. We experience in this journey backwards everything which other people have experienced through us during our life here, between birth and death. If you have lived here between birth and death with many hundreds of men, these men have experienced something through you. But here in physical life you cannot feel that which those others felt and experienced through you, you only experience what they make you go through. After death this is reversed, and it is essential that we should experience everything in this review which others have suffered through us. Thus we undergo the effects of the last earth existence, and the task of these years really lies in our experiencing them. Now, while we are undergoing these effects, the experience is transformed in us into forces, and it happens in the following manner: Suppose I have offended a man, who has thereby suffered bitterly. During Kamaloka I now experience this bitterness myself. I go through it as my own experience. And while I now experience it, it makes good in me the force which must work as opposition; that is, while I undergo this bitterness, I create in myself the force to wipe away from the world this bitterness. I thus realise all the effects of my deeds and thereby absorb the force to wipe them away. And during this time in Kamaloka—which lasts a third of the earth-life—I absorb all the forces which may be expressed as an intense longing in the now disembodied soul, to remove everything which destroys perfection by retarding the soul's evolution. If you ponder over this you will see that man himself makes his own Karma, that is, that he has in himself the wish to become such that everything undesirable may be wiped out. Thus is Karma prepared, during this particular time. We incorporate into our souls the force which we must take up between death and rebirth, in order to bring about in the next incarnation that configuration of our life which we are able to regard as the right one. This is how Karma is created. In order to understand these things aright—not only theoretically but so to grasp them that they may penetrate deeply into our forces of feeling and willing—we must be clear that the whole mode of feeling common to the dead is absolutely different from that of the living. The living may very easily say, ‘I pity this or that dead man because he has to suffer something from which he cannot escape!’ But suppose he has terribly wronged another and can do nothing to put it right, you may perhaps feel sorry for the dead man, but that is quite uncalled for; for he desires nothing more than to be able to evolve the forces whereby he can balance the wrong. That is the very thing which he regards as precious. You would thus be wishing that he should not reach what he himself most longs for. To attain this he must undergo all the aforesaid suffering, for the positive develops out of the negative. Through insight into that which we have done, we develop the power of making compensation.

Thus we may say that at the end of this Kamaloka period a man has already determined, in accordance with his last life and its recapitulation, how he will enter the next incarnation in his existence; and in what relation he will stand to this or that person in order to compensate this or that. There we actually determine our Karma for the life we are to enter.

The first part of our time is spent in assimilating from the spiritual world the forces through which we can build up humanity in general, and through which we can form for ourselves a body suitable for our own individuality. First we have the plan of our Karma. Then we must fashion the human body to this end. That requires a much longer time, and takes place later on. Now, you can see from this that the essential of the time in Kamaloka lies in the fact that it gives us the possibility of ethically preparing our next incarnation in the right manner. We must be quite clear that each following incarnation depends on the earlier ones. We see how our following incarnations are prepared. And we see that the entire mode of a man's life depends on the way in which he went through his former life. The objection is raised by persons who have not yet fully considered the matter, that this contradicts a man's freedom. I will return to this later—it does not contradict freedom.

If we thus observe individual persons in life we find that they are very, very different; no matter how many men there are on the earth, they are all different. Yet one may distinguish categories. There are, for instance, men who so behave that from their earliest youth we can see that as individuals they are specially suited for this, or that. As you know, there are such people. Even in childhood we can predict that they will accomplish some definite purpose. They thrust themselves into it, as it were. They possess activity. They have a special task, because they develop force for this end. Others we find who are interested in many things but have no definite inclination to any one thing. They take up many things. Perhaps later in life they may come to a definite task which is not specially suited to them; they might perhaps have been able to do something else quite as well. In short, people are quite different one from another in reference to the way in which they act in life. And this really makes life possible. There are men, for example, who enter life, and who do not seem to have much to do, externally. But they need only speak a word or two to have an influence on people. Such men work more through their inner being. Others work more externally. That is intimately connected with the manner in which they have lived through their previous incarnation. There are persons who die in early youth—before the age of thirty-five—in order to have these very limitations. Such men with regard to their death in this incarnation are in a quite different position from those who die after the age of thirty-five. One who dies before the age of thirty-five still stands nearer to the world from which he descended at birth. This thirty-fifth year is an important boundary. One then crosses a bridge, as it were. The world out of which a man has descended then withdraws, and he produces a new spiritual world from his inner being. It is important that we should distinguish this. And now suppose a man dies before the age of thirty-five. On reincarnating, those forces develop in him which he did not use in the years which would have followed his thirty-fifth year. Such men, who before the thirty-fifth year go through death in this way in one incarnation, thereby economise for the next incarnation certain forces, which would have been exhausted if they had lived till fifty, sixty or seventy years of age. The forces which they thus saved are added to those with which they incarnate in the next life. Thereby such souls are born into bodies through which they are in a position, especially in their youth, to confront life with strong impressions. In other words: when such souls, who in their last incarnation died before the thirty-fifth year, reincarnate again, everything makes a strong impression on them. They are deeply stirred by things, they enjoy things deeply, they have living feelings and are easily urged to impulses of will. They are those who take a strong position in life, and who receive a mission. A man does not die without cause before his thirty-fifth year; he will thereby receive a quite definite mission in his next life. These things are complex, and death before the age of thirty-five may also bring about other things—it is not absolute law, for these are only examples. But when a man dies after thirty-five it happens that in his next life he does not receive such strong impressions from the things in his surroundings. He cannot easily be stirred or roused. He becomes acquainted more slowly but more intimately with things, and he thus prepares himself for a life in his next incarnation in which he will work more through his inner nature, without being so definitely guided to a special task in life. He will so stand in life, that he would perhaps have preferred some other task, and is diverted from it in order to accomplish something perhaps absolutely against his will. Because through the previous earth incarnation he had accustomed himself to work more delicately, he can now be used in a wider sphere. And if a man—I have already mentioned this case earlier—if a man is led in very early youth through the gate of death, let us say in his eleventh, twelfth, or thirteenth year of life, he then has but a short time in Kamaloka. But he remains very, very near the world which he forsook at physical birth. Everything appears different. After a life ending with the twelfth year, there follows the usual retrospect during the first days after death, but it takes place in such a manner that it appears more from outside. Whereas if a man dies at the age of fifty, sixty or seventy, he himself must do much more to bring about this retrospect. It must be brought about by his own activity. And because they have to experience this life after death in so many various ways, men are thereby differently prepared for their next life. It may be that in one life a man is especially active. Now, if an especially active man is summoned from life at an early age, it would then occur that in his next life his Karma would appoint him to a quite definite task in life, which he would certainly accomplish. He would be as if predestined. If, however, a man is especially active in one life and lives to a good old age, these forces are then intensified inwardly. He has then in his next life a more complicated task. Outer activity withdraws, and there appears in the soul the necessity to evolve inner activity.

Thus the life of man is complex as it develops from incarnation to incarnation. We shall continue these considerations in the next lecture. Now, I should like to conclude by saying one thing: When you face a whole epoch such as ours, in which in a relatively short time an exceptional number of men are led in abnormal fashion through the gates of death, then through this something quite exceptional is being prepared. And it was necessary that this should be prepared. You see each year how the time of blossoming comes to the world in intervals. If you look back in history you can also say that even there the blossoms appear at intervals. A great time of blossoming was the epoch of Lessing, Herder, Schiller, Fichte, Goethe. It is as if there was then a gathering of geniuses for a time, and it then ceased. And thus the world progresses in leaps. Such intervals of genius are recorded, and then these things change again. In the spiritual realms too, we have a blossoming, a special sprouting, at intervals. Now, in our days we have an interval of decay in the physical realm. Here you have again two things which you can place as pictures, side by side, and which as pictures are tremendously significant. Great physical decay—which is the seed for a later significant spiritual blossoming. Things have always two sides. From this standpoint, ever seeking again and again force and consolation—but also gaining confidence in our hopes—let us once more repeat in reference to our times, and from the consciousness of our spiritual science:

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.

Those days in which we have been able to meet together we have devoted to throwing light from one point of view or another on the connection between the life of man here on the physical plane and the life he leads between death and rebirth, as well as on the connection between the individual successive earth-lives through which man passes. We have seen that when the attempt is made to go deeper into these relations the investigation becomes very complicated; but, in reality, only then does it become fruitful for us, for it can then give many conclusions concerning the details of the riddles and questions of Life. We wish to go further into these considerations; in order to do this, we must to-day begin by penetrating a little into the structure of man, with which we are already acquainted, but which we must go over once again with reference to certain qualities necessary for the following considerations.

Now you will have seen from the various cycles, lectures and books, that we live here on earth as human beings in a quite definite epoch of the earth's evolution; and from the whole spirit of our consideration we have been able to gather that there is an inner purpose, a certain inner significance in the fact that we carry our souls through all these different epochs of the earth's evolution. From the descriptions which have been given, you will already have seen that not merely the external life, but the whole life of man here on earth is naturally different in the various epochs. We shall for the present only consider the life of the soul. The life of the soul was different—if we consider only the Post-Atlantean epochs—in the old Indian, old Persian, Egypto-Chaldean or the Greco-Latin age, and it is again different in our time. We carried our souls through all these epochs. In all of these epochs our souls sought bodies (most of us more than once in the same epoch) which gave them the possibility of taking up the world in the way best adapted to the forces of that particular epoch. If you remember what has been said about the peculiarities of the soul-life in the various epochs, you will be able to acquire a still more accurate insight. For example: when we regard the life of the first Post-Atlantean epoch, we find that the human soul during its life on earth was then chiefly occupied in working out the interaction of its own being with the etheric body; thus, as it were, experiencing in the right manner that which can be experienced here in the earth-life by a soul interacting chiefly with the etheric body. Then in the second Post-Atlantean period the soul went through everything which can be experienced through the interchange with the astral body. In the third Post-Atlantean epoch of civilisation the soul lived through everything that can be experienced through interaction with the sentient soul; in the fourth epoch of civilisation it experienced the interaction with the rational or intellectual soul, and we in our time go through everything which can be experienced by means of the interaction with the conscious or spiritual soul. The soul, according to its experience while working in the different epochs on the various principles of human nature, makes a greater or less individual progress in the general development of the world. Man has completely different experiences during these different epochs; as regards the relation of his soul to the entire Cosmos, he changes absolutely. We must already have some idea of this, from what has previously been said. Thus we, in our epoch, are living in the conscious or spiritual soul, and the whole civilisation of our fifth epoch is devoted to teaching the whole human soul, the entire human Ego, to form such connections with the world as are possible with a self-conscious soul. In our epoch we gain our experience through adapting our forces to the conscious or spiritual soul.

Now, it is possible to look at the whole matter from another point of view. By what means does it come about in the general cosmic relations that one lives in the conscious or spirit-soul? As man, one naturally lives, not only in the spiritual soul, but also in the other principles of the human nature. In a narrower sense, in our age we build chiefly those capacities which humanity is at present acquiring—by our life in the spiritual soul—for through the medium of that principle we live in our Ego, in the physical life between birth and death. The Greek in the fourth Post-Atlantean period was not so entirely dependent on his physical body as we are. The Greek lived still more of an inner life in his body. This caused him to work in the rational or intellectual or mind-soul, (*Mind-soul in the old English sense: ‘I have a mind to do this.’) and he was thus in a position to fill out his physical body in quite a different manner than is possible to us. Each movement of the hand, for instance, produced a much stronger inner feeling in the Greek than in the body of to-day. External science cannot enter into these things, but they exist nevertheless. When he bent his arm the Greek felt the swelling of each single muscle, he felt the angle it formed. That is why the Greek as a sculptor was in a position to create quite differently. The present-day sculptor works from a model. He beholds the model and works accordingly. Not so the Greek. He had an inner feeling of the form of the arm, of the physiognomy, etc., and this to him was inner experience. But man when he lives in the consciousness soul is now torn out of that which can be experienced in the physical body. He has, as it were, penetrated more deeply into his physical body, he has become more closely united with it than the Greek could be, but he has, through this, become insensible to all that the physical body gives. He makes use of the organs of the physical body in a higher sense than did the Greek. The Greek could not see certain shades of colour, as we see them to-day, because he was not so much within the physical body as we are to-day. If you re-read Homer you will be able to notice that he mentions few colours. Everything is changed in like manner. Man allies himself more closely with his physical body, but he does not experience so much his own inner being in this physical body. Rather must one say that instead of perceiving his inner being in the physical body, he contacts the external world more. In short, there is a struggle for the capacities of the physical body, whereas in Greece there was rather a struggle for form. Thus we can say: we build up the consciousness soul because with our Ego we bring about a certain inner relation with our physical body, because we work our way so deeply into the physical body. In this way the time has come in which we no longer know very much of spiritual processes and things; the time of materialism, because man has urged himself so deeply into his physical body.

Now, within the physical body there naturally lies the etheric body. The Greek still knew much more of his etheric body. He dimly perceived, even though only as a reminiscence, that the etheric body always echoes the movements of the physical body. He still felt that it is not merely the physical hand which moves, but that the etheric hand moves with it, and lies at the basis of the physical movement. All this is now forgotten, but man, while he lived in the Greek age, so experienced it all that he felt himself much more intensely in this etheric body than he does now, and that knowledge is not utterly lost. As soul-beings, we have all gone through it, and it remains in our etheric body. It all remains there as preserved thoughts, and when we leave the world in which we dwell between death and rebirth, we leave behind, as if forgotten, everything which we were previously very well able to dominate in our etheric body. We now thrust ourselves so deeply into our physical body that we leave behind all we acquired in the Grecian epoch. From this you see that man's etheric body really contains much more than he now realises. At present he evolves his consciousness chiefly within his physical body, and in so doing he covers up what is in his etheric body. If he only possessed all the knowledge of the inner human organisation which is concealed in his etheric body, he could know infinitely more than he does now. For this etheric body has acquired a certain perfection, greater than man is at present aware of. In regard to it especially, much is driven back because it cannot be brought to consciousness in a suitable manner. Man knows very little of his etheric body.

Among other things in the etheric body—the astral body, as you know, is also at work there. Everything which the etheric body accomplishes must naturally be thought of as permeated by the astral body. If we could suddenly bring to the surface all that the etheric body contains we should be infinitely cleverer than we are at the present epoch, in which we have to struggle on with nothing but the physical body. For this etheric body contains much (naturally the astral body also shares in this), it contains infinite treasures of wisdom. These lie in the depths of our soul, within the etheric body. There we find a host of dexterities, a mass of information. For instance, in reference to Geometry. I have once before mentioned how much we all unconsciously know of Geometry. This is actually a fact. For when we learn Geometry we do not learn it from outside things, it is reached by bringing that which is in the etheric body to consciousness. If we draw external figures, they merely serve as an inducement. If I draw a triangle, of which I know that the angles = 180^o, I have the knowledge of this through the etheric body. We only draw figures in consequence of human laziness. In reality we know everything that can be learnt of Geometry. We know it unconsciously, it rests below in the depths of the unconscious soul-life. We have no idea how clever we are in the subconscious depths of the soul. Could we but know it! The evil in human evolution does not lie in man having little wisdom within him, but in his powerlessness to extract that wisdom out of his own soul. All educational development consists in bringing out the concealed wisdom lying in the depths of the soul. Now, if we were not obliged to bring up these things in this difficult way, we could not properly advance our evolution. Just think! If we were not to acquire such a relation to our physical body as we now have, we should really be born as terribly clever children, and it would not take much to bring out at a relatively early age that which lies within the etheric body. But man would then take far too little trouble to acquire wisdom, and it would thereby be too little his own, he would be too much a mere copy of wisdom. A personal assimilation arises through our having such a relation to the physical body as is ordained for this fifth epoch of culture. This personal assimilation causes knowledge to become our very own possession. When we delve for it in this fashion, our knowledge is then our own: we have it for ourselves. This holds good with reference to the etheric body.

With reference to the astral body something quite different holds good, and that is as follows: If we were able to draw forth everything lying in the astral body, everything which the astral body knows, in all its details, that would be of no advantage for our present life. For we should then really live amongst our fellow-men as automatons. Indeed, our astral body knows, though our consciousness does not, the relation in which, as astral body, it stands to all the individual persons it contacts in life. Our astral body has such a consciousness. So that if we could make use of everything the astral body knows, we should be absolutely aware for instance, that with this or that person we shall have trouble; and this person or the other will be a kind friend. Such knowledge would naturally change life utterly, but for our present earthly relations, not in a good sense. Now, I could relate still more concerning what the astral body knows (and unconsciously it does already use its knowledge), but it is a knowledge that really is very little noticed in the connections of human life. Suppose a man perishes through an accident. In ordinary human life it appears to us as if the accident had overtaken the man, for according to our present consciousness, man does not seek an accident. But if we investigate the astral body, we shall find no single accident which man, in so far as he is in the astral body, has not sought. That which is necessary for ordinary consciousness, is sought by the astral body out of a free inner choice. It is thus willed, actually willed by the astral body. Even if a man is run over by a railway train, that is brought about by the astral body, with regard to the whole connections of his life. It is not something which merely happens by accident. Thus we not only have our connection with our fellow-men as wisdom in our astral body, but in reality our connection also with the entire outer life, with that which runs its course as natural events, or other social happenings in which we are implicated. It is good that all this is purposely hidden from us, otherwise we should learn nothing for our further evolution: but there exists in the astral body a true thought, I mean a kind of knowledge of everything, which shows our connection with the events and human elements in which we are involved. Man takes little heed of this in ordinary life. For when anything happens to us, we say, ‘This has just occurred,’ and, as a rule, that is the only thing observed. We do not really consider what would have happened if that particular event had not occurred. I will bring forward a striking instance. At a particular time in his life a man is wounded. In ordinary life one merely thinks: Yes, he has been wounded, and that ends the matter. What would have happened if he had not been wounded? To this, one pays no attention, but through a wound the whole life may be altered, everything that follows may be different. Now, the astral body beholds the entire connection, before the wounding of the man. One may say the astral body is clairvoyant.

And the true Ego, which rests still deeper in the subconsciousness, and which dwells in the inner depths of our being, is much more clairvoyant still. As you already know, we built up our physical body on old Saturn, our etheric body on the Sun, and our astral body on the old Moon. Our Ego is the baby among the human principles, it is the youngest. Not till the Vulcan period, after the Jupiter and Venus evolutions are completed, will the Ego be formed, as the physical body is fashioned now—but this Ego rests the whole time in the bosom of the spiritual world. Then, during the Vulcan epoch, an inconceivable knowledge of the connections of life will stream out of the Ego. But this knowledge is already now within us and the evolution on Jupiter and Venus will consist in drawing out the capacity for using it.

Thus, while we regard these depths of the soul's life, we see in a wonderful manner our connection with the spiritual world. We men in ordinary human life are only given what we are able to receive, because the Ego is reflected in the physical body: but behind this rests a widely extended earthly knowledge, which is in the etheric body. Behind this again rests a clairvoyant knowledge which is already in the astral body, and a still more clairvoyant knowledge which is in the true Ego. It is good to place these things before the mind, before going on to what I now have to say. Let us consider the case which at the present time is speaking so deeply to the soul in such manifold ways, of a man who in early youth is led through the gates of death from the battle-field. It then happens that the more deeply-lying principles of human nature (etheric body, astral body, and Ego), are torn out of their connection with the physical body, in quite a different way from what occurs when one becomes old and slowly dies in bed. A quicker separation from the physical body often takes place—I have already spoken of the prophetic nature of the etheric body. We have said that even in dreams if we were able in a sense to interpret the pictures we see, we should know that in our etheric body, through the dream which arises because the astral body turns to the etheric body, which then receives as a reflection what the astral body is experiencing—that in these pictures there is something which indicates our future life, something of a prophetic nature.

Now for the spiritual investigator who has to investigate those things, an important question arises out of such considerations. He has first to place this question before himself. And the posing of the question is then a kind of introduction to the answer which must then arise from the clairvoyant observation. For example; one must say: Here on earth, according to the normal course of life Man is destined to reach old age and to use up his life slowly. To this end his etheric body, astral body, and Ego are adjusted. This would occur, if the course of life were normal: but now, through a shell that suddenly strikes a man, the whole connection is disturbed. Through this, a certain faculty of the etheric body (I will for the present limit our consideration to the individual man), that force which would have been able to work as if prophetically through the entire life, which would have been able to lead him through many other relations in life—that force is torn out of life; it is separated from the physical plane. Just suppose that the shell had not struck the man. (We can put this hypothesis and not consider the fact that all this is of course karmic). Well, he would then have gradually used up that force in his etheric body, perhaps during many years. That force is nevertheless in the inner part of his soul. It does not cease to exist, and it may be perceived when the man, who has been killed by a shell, gazes on his life-tableau, looks back in the etheric body. I have already indicated that this life-picture has a quite special characteristic. It has the characteristic of seeming to come from the outer world, rather than of having to be produced from within.

In short, that energy, that force, which is then cut off, remains in the man. Observation reveals the fact that the force is there and transforms the entire life following after death. It is just the same with the force in the astral body. This, too, would have been used during the whole life. This also is still there. In short, a man goes in quite a different way through the gates of death, if he is violently torn out of physical life. If he has perhaps been struck by a shell, and loses his life in that manner, it is not the same as if he dies slowly in his bed. Now for the spiritual investigator there arises a great question: What is the actual significance of this? What does it mean for his epoch when a man, as in the case quoted, really brings something quite different into the spiritual world from what he would have brought if he had lived his life out? For such an epoch as the one in which we live, this question is of infinite importance, for much of what has just been described is being carried up into the spiritual world. What does this signify for the spiritual world? This is a tremendously significant question! When one studies a little the relation of the spiritual world to the physical world (as one can in the Vienna cycle: ‘Inner Being of Man and Life Between Death and Rebirth’), something becomes important which for a long time has not been believed, but which reveals itself clearly to spiritual investigation. It is the following. In reality all our conceptions and ideas change on entering the spiritual world; not only on entering the spiritual world through initiation, but also on entering it through the gates of death. You see, here on earth, man really evolves more and more in a definite direction. One might call it that of the so-called ‘concept of being.’ And to-day people are already greatly taken with this idea of ‘the concept of being.’ What do I really mean by this? Nowadays hardly anything is regarded as of value unless it is conceived as actually existing. When anyone comes who does not speak of something palpable, he is considered a dreamer. Men go about speaking of ‘reality,’ and compared to this, mere thought is nothing. Countless men do not value thought to-day because they cannot lay hold of it. ‘Existence’ means the forcible realisation of that which is perceived; one has nothing to do with bringing about the existence of a thing, its existence is obvious. And anything which cannot in this way be proved to exist, is held by man in ever decreasing regard.

In the evolution of the spiritual world the reverse is the case. There, that which exists and makes an impression, such as a physical object, is for the man in the spiritual world something inimical, something disturbing, something of which he knows that it pertains to the ‘nothingness,’ and that it is destined to disappear into nothing. And if one enters without further ado into a spiritual region in which there are perhaps rather undeveloped souls (souls who to the spiritual world are just as simple as many souls appear to be in the earthly world), then one finds the opposite opinion prevailing even there. Anything to which these dead souls attach value should not exist, as one speaks of existence here on the earth. Existence here, as such, is of no value to these souls. In the spiritual life it really is the case that one confronts pure spiritual beings. They affect one. But one must first acquire perception for them. It is thus: one stands in the spiritual world; behind one stand souls belonging to the spiritual hierarchies, Angels, Archangels, and so on. One knows they are there. But if a man is to perceive them, he must first arouse them into that which one here calls ‘existence.’ That which in the spiritual world works on one, must be brought into an ‘Imagination.’ That which is ‘non-awakened being,’ to which man does nothing, which simply exists of itself, that is of no value in the spiritual world. Here man stands on the earth, and is surrounded by nature. But the spiritual world demands that man should raise himself up to it, for it is not there without further ado. To have nature around one requires no special trouble. It exists, as it were, of itself. Therefore the materialistic love to have nature around them. But in the spiritual world nature is no longer there. For man, there only exists in the spiritual world that which he himself continuously works at. There he has to be continually active. That which is there, is the other world, that world which man has forsaken, to which he continually looks back, as though to a world of existence. The world, which carries the transitory within itself, continually battles with the non-existent. If for one moment the world so beloved by the materialists were to disappear, if men were to know nothing of their bodies, but first had to create the ‘imagination’ of them, if they were to know nothing of the table until they had created it for themselves in thought, but could instead see the spiritual world—then they would have in this life here below what they have there in the spiritual world. Those in the spiritual world can only bring it to perception by their own activity. The ‘other world’—our own world here below—is always present. Whereas here the heaven is hidden and only the world which is round us is always present, there the surrounding world is hidden unless we ourselves bring it into vision by our own efforts. For one who can have immediate cognisance of it, it is easy there to believe in the ‘world beyond,’ which is our present one. But consider from the standpoint of the spiritual that which makes this world of ours, I might almost say, disagreeable, is its permeation with existence. It is a disturbing fact that it is permeated with existence—that really is disturbing. Many say: ‘A spiritual world indeed!—I would willingly believe in one if I could only see it! If I could see it while here!’ We may compare that remark with what the souls in the spiritual world say: ‘We might endure that physical world continually existing down there if only it was not permanently present. If only it were not so permeated with being. We cannot look down on to the earth without seeing in every part of it this terrible existence.’

And if here someone is a practical materialist and does not believe in idealism, then he loves existence only. But in order that this conviction of the merely obvious existence may not spread, there continually arise from time to time the Idealists, who lead humanity to believe in ideals and their efficacy, in the power of Idealism in the progress of history. These ideals of the ethical, the beautiful, the religious, are carried into the world. Certainly the absolute materialists will have nothing to do with them; at most they dispose of them in a few words. But just that which in the material sense does not seem to exist, is carried into the physical plane as the most precious thing in life. And if the evolution of humanity on the earth be considered from a higher human point of view, then one may say: Certainly nature is there, great and significant. But what would this whole human life be if existing nature alone were there, be it ever so beautiful: if man were not capable of having ideals, if he could not be spurred forward, not by that which does not exist, but by that which ought to exist, the ethical, religious, artistic, and educational life. It is the non-existing, we might say, that presses in on us from a spiritual world, as the ideals of humanity, that which does not exist but that ought to exist, that alone makes life valuable. Everyone who is not utterly submerged in the swamp of materialism feels this very strongly. And so those who in the course of history are in a special sense the bringers of ideals appear as those who alone give value to the life of existence, out of that which ought to exist. And now to the spiritual investigator the following appears. From the spiritual world one looks back in like manner at the earthly life, but in such a way that, as a higher soul, one longs that everything on the earth should not merely exist; but that among the things on the earth there should be something which is not earthly, in the strictest sense of the words. Something else must be mingled with the earth-existence, which in the earth-sense has no existence. This appears as something infinitely significant, when the spiritual investigator perceives it in connection with those people who were destined for a long life, and were forcibly cut off. So that there is a portion of their life which from the spiritual standpoint was really destined for existence, and which has not lived it out. Let us take the case of a man who has lived in the world only to his twenty-fifth or twenty-sixth year instead of to his seventieth or eightieth, for which he had the necessary life forces. Then, let us say, he is struck by a shell. The principles of his human nature are suddenly sundered from one another. The etheric body, astral body and Ego would still have been able for a long time to develop the faculty of maintaining the physical body. That which would have been able to continue but for the shot, was intended for the earth existence. It has not passed into existence. From the spiritual this appears so that one can say, ‘Down there is something which does not merely exist.’ Something else is mingled with the earth existence, something that was destined for existence, but which has not lived through it. It is existence, but merely in germ. Yet in a sense it is something that ought to exist. Therefore those whose life is thus ended at an early stage through an external happening, are to the spiritual world, when they go through the gates of death, in a similar yet not the same sense, spiritual messengers, as are the Idealists who come here on the earth, to mix with the existing that which ought to exist. Those who go early through the gates of death, ascend in order to announce to the heavens that on the earth there is not only mere existence, but also that which ought to exist.

An infinitely deep and significant discovery can be made on coming to this chapter of spiritual investigation, when one learns to know these idealists impelled to the heavens, who become what they are, by going through the gates of death in the manner indicated here. And in the present time it is very fitting that we really unite such a thought with our souls.

On entering the domain of spiritual life it is necessary that besides those who, as it were, accomplish their task in the spiritual life, there should be also those who point to the earth, who have really woven something into the earth evolution, but have taken it out earlier than should have been done according to plan. Thus we may say that those who go early through the gates of death become in many respects for the human souls in the spiritual world just those who make it possible to believe in the heights of earth-life. They make it possible for those yonder to believe that earth-life really contains something spiritual which is of value; for these souls adopt a similar position there to the idealists here on earth.

We must always bear in mind that we should not imagine men living on in the spiritual world as they last were, when here. The trivial ideas that people hold, as, for instance, that those who die as children continue to live on as children, are naturally incorrect. The imagination may picture the dead as we last saw them here, but that is not their true form; it is rather the expression of it. A child may die, but the human entity incarnated in the child may be a highly evolved soul, and continue its life after death as a highly evolved soul. I have often mentioned this. Thus we see something is carried up into the spiritual world which, being bound up with earth existence and nevertheless not consumed by it, should, in a sense not ‘be’ there. That works in the evolution which the human soul passes through between death and rebirth. Those men who have thus gone through death so pass through the intervening stage, between death and rebirth, that they there represent the humanity of the earth in a much richer and more comprehensive sense than one can do who has gone through a normal earth life. That has nothing to do with what is laid down for man through Karma. If one lives to be old, that is Karma. If one dies young, that is Karma. But just as on earth a man cannot make himself arbitrarily into this or that individuality which his consciousness on this side of the veil might select, neither can he determine from the earth-consciousness how the life between death and rebirth is to be fashioned. If one is taken forcibly from physical existence into the spiritual world, he then has a much more intense imaginative vision of everything human than one who enters the spiritual world in a different fashion. We say that those who pass thus through the gates of death, stand especially near, during their life between death and rebirth, to that which happens on the earth, as far as humanity is concerned. That can be seen by investigating the lives of persons who have accomplished something of a very special importance at a particular time of their life, something which could perhaps only be done by them. Suppose a man accomplishes something of great importance in a certain direction, at a definite epoch of his life, for example, in his forty-ninth year. (Naturally this can only be investigated occultly). If one traces this back, one finds that in an earlier incarnation, and perhaps just in his forty-ninth year, this man died a more or less violent death. He acquires this strong tendency towards the ideal evolution of the earth by having carried up ‘that which should exist’ into the spiritual world. Thereby he incorporated into his whole physical being the strong force wherewith to accomplish something definite in a definite year. We can again see from this, as I pointed out in the last lecture, that men who have to effect many things, especially through their will, and who thus live more for universal humanity, have carried up in some form, from some earlier incarnation, such life ‘which ought to exist.’

It is indeed specially difficult, while one only wishes to conceive of life in the spiritual as a somewhat more refined earthly life, to reconcile oneself to acquiring the following idea of the spiritual: Here on earth, physical life is always known of itself; while over there is the life which is unknown; and that in the spiritual, things are reversed. People do not take the trouble to understand that actually, unless one does something oneself, everything is dark and gloomy in the spiritual life; that one must first bring everything to light. Everything which is visible is on this side (the physical), but seen from that side. Also the most significant thing that is intermingled there consists in ‘something that should exist.’ This is a conception which one has to acquire if one wants to perceive aright the connection of physical life with the spiritual life.

In our time it is really a good plan to acquaint ourselves with such conceptions for, as I have said, suffering souls so frequently ask themselves to-day: Why must so many men be called into the spiritual world in the flower of their age? Why cannot they complete their life here? And wonderful as it sounds (though, as I have said, the spiritual truths may sometimes seem cruel) it is nevertheless true, that there must be carried into the spiritual world the possibility of so looking at the earth that this earth itself can be permeated by the spirit. If all men reached old age normally, if there were no martyrs, no men able to sacrifice themselves in youth, then would the earth, regarded from above, lapse into worthless existence. That which is here mingled with the earth as Ideal, is at the same time that which continually brings from out of the past something better for the future. That is connected with what is here sacrificed. Suppose a man at the age of twenty-six sacrifices his whole future life, which he otherwise would have employed in his external work, and would have devoted it to the progress of humanity. This lives further. In the forces of progress there live the lives that men have sacrificed, the lives which they would have been able to live here. The evolution of the earth needs this sacrifice of life. We can thus see how that which is otherwise merely an abstract idea in our materialistic age, becomes extremely concrete. In yet another sense than I developed it here in July, we can say, ‘Not only do these etheric bodies work in the entire connection of human progress, but the work of those who have gone early through death also lives on.’

The work of these individualities is such that we can ask: Who then are those who principally labour for the good of humanity in general, and who set themselves universal tasks in later incarnations? They are those who in earlier incarnations, have in some way or other died a death of sacrifice. The devotional natures, those given up to the spiritual here on the earth, owe this to their life of martyrdom in a previous incarnation. The earth could not progress unless people sacrificed themselves.

When we think of this, we can look away from the present into the future. Such an immense number are now being sacrificed and are sacrificing themselves. Painful as this is considered from many a personal standpoint, yet if we look at it from the standpoint of the wisdom of the Cosmos we may console ourselves. For in proportion to what is now sacrificed will the forces of progress be given to the future. Humanity requires such forces of progress. This is not considered deeply enough today, but it will be, when a sufficient number not of centuries but of decades, have come and gone in the present materialistic evolution. The consequence of materialism will follow with incredible rapidity. The zenith of materialism was really attained in the Nineteenth Century, and man would be swamped by it unless something occurred to arrest it. This conversion should be brought about by Spiritual Science. And this can only be done by strong forces, working for the ideal to be really worked into earth life. Many who are now called away will help to prevent the earth from falling a prey to materialism and being dominated by it.

Just read the course of lectures on the Apocalypse, in which this is indicated in broad outlines. You can then form some idea how great is the fruit of the sacrificial deaths that will be required by the earth in the future, to redeem it as far as possible from sinking into materialism, and the strife, hate and enmity, connected with it; so that it can pursue its further course in the Cosmos. Such a time as ours demands, more than other epochs that we should think, not only on what is taking place, but on the fruits of these happenings. And we can only recognise these fruits if we bear in mind the two sides of Cosmic existence, which shows us that we really experience two completely different poles of life: one here between birth and death and the other there between death and rebirth. Here, we are, in a certain sense, passive in our innermost being, and if we wish to raise ourselves to the perception of the spiritual world, we have to work so hard that many find it impossible. There, it is necessary to be active in order to have with us our vision of the immediately present spiritual world in which we find ourselves; on the other hand we always have, as a reminder, the existing world beneath. Here in this earthly world, the Idealists bear ‘that which should exist,’ which makes existence of value. Into that world to which men pass through the gates of death, which those enter whose life has run its regular earth course, come those who die more or less early as martyrs. And there they are: the witnesses, that below on earth, not merely the material exists, not merely that which is given over to the nothingness, to the transitory, and decaying—but that on this earth is also intermingled that which is retained by those who did not complete their life, whose life was indeed forcibly taken from them.

We must take such things not only intellectually but unite them deeply with our feeling, then may things become comprehensible. Certainly our present epoch contains many riddles, but some of them can be solved if we connect the present suffering with the great wisdom of the Cosmos. And this again is a chapter which if we apply what has now been said to our own times, may be embodied in the great truth:

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.

In every domain Spiritual Science has to show us the connection between the spiritual worlds and the world which we perceive through our senses while in our earthly bodies, and which we seek to grasp through intellectual thoughts. In several lectures we have been especially occupied in considering the connection that exists between the life led by man as a soul between death and rebirth, and the life he passes here, while incarnated in a physical body. We must continually bear firmly in mind that man, so long as he lives within his physical body, directs his thoughts to that sphere which he has to experience after death and before rebirth. We direct our thoughts to that sphere, not in order to satisfy mere curiosity, but because we have always been able to convince ourselves through our Spiritual Science, that in turning our thought to that other world, we are able to make a contribution to this world, by ennobling and invigorating the conceptions needed for our acting, thinking, feeling, etc. We must hold firmly to the thought that many of life's secrets can only be solved if we have the courage to approach what may be called the riddle of death. Now to-day, in order to consider the connection between the spiritual and sense world, from a special standpoint, we may commence with a trivial observation, yet one which contains profound feeling. We shall start from the fact of which we have often spoken, the fact that man goes through the gate of death. I repeat, we start from something which is of every-day occurrence but is connected with very deep experiences, gripping man in the depths of his soul. As you know, when we stand face to face with a man here in the physical world, we form thoughts which can unite us to him. We surround him with feelings of sympathy, or antipathy, etc. We feel either friendship or enmity for him. Briefly, we form here in the physical world a certain relation to another man. This relation may arise through ties of blood, or it may be brought about by the preferences which occur in daily life. All this can be comprehended in the expression, ‘The relation of man to man.’ Now, when a man with whom we have been united through various ties leaves the physical world and passes through the gates of death, at first there remains to us the memory of this man, that is, a number of feelings and thoughts have arisen as a result of our relation to him, and which we ourselves have experienced. But since he passed away from us through the gates of death these thoughts and feelings which united us with him, now live on in a very different manner. While he lived with us here on the physical plane, we knew that at any time, in addition to the relation our souls had formed to him, the outer physical presentment itself might also appear; we knew that we could bring our inner experience to bear upon this outer reality of his. And if at any time by some means the man changed, we had to expect that the feelings we formerly had towards him would also change in one way or another. We do not often think of the radical difference it makes when suddenly, or even not suddenly, the moment comes, when henceforward we can only carry in our soul the memory of our friend, when we know, ‘Never more will our eyes see him, or our hands grasp his.’ The picture we formed of him remains fundamentally as already fixed. But a radical change appears in the relation of the two people. As has been said, it may sound trivial, but it cuts deeply into the inner life in each individual case, when a human soul which formerly impressed us from without by means of its physical embodiments, becomes nothing but a memory.

Let us now compare such a memory with others which we construct from our experience. A great part of our physical life is lived in memory. We know what we ourselves have experienced; we know, for instance, the events which have occurred to us and for which we have retained ideas. We know that we can revert to times now past through these thoughts, times in which the events in question took place. But now, if we examine the contents of the greater part of these recollections, we find that in our thoughts we bear something within us which is no longer here, past events, events which as reality we can no longer meet with in the external world, for they belong to the past. If we have absorbed some of the thoughts of Spiritual Science, then the memory of our dead, or of one who has gone through the gates of death, is quite different to our psychic gaze. We then hold thoughts in us, but these thoughts are fixed on reality—a reality certainly not accessible to us in the external physical world, but existing in the spiritual world. That to which those thoughts are directed is present, although it cannot enter the sphere of our vision; but there is quite a different conception in our memory from the mere remembrance of what occurred here, in the physical world. Now, if we observe the fact involved in this, in relation to the entire Cosmos, we can then say that we carry in our souls thoughts of a being who is in the spiritual world. Now we know, and this must be especially clear to us from the considerations pursued here in the last three lectures, we know that not only does the longing of souls incarnated here ascend to the spiritual world, but that the consciousness of those who have passed through the gates of death, and who are now living in the intermediate world between death and rebirth, also extends to what transpires here in the physical world. We can say: Those discarnate souls who live in the spiritual world, receive into their consciousness, from the physical world, that which their spiritual gaze and their spiritual vision directed down to earth, enables them to perceive. I pointed out in one of the last lectures how souls still incarnated here in physical bodies can be perceived by the so-called dead, and distinguished from souls who are already discarnate and living in the intermediate stage, between death and rebirth. I explained that souls living in the spiritual world must continually be active in order to get any perception. For instance, they may be aware that another soul is quite near them, but in order to perceive it, they must exert inner activity. They have, as it were, to construct a picture. The picture will not appear of itself, as it does here, in the physical world. In the spiritual world comes first the thought of an ‘existing presence;’ and then one must, as it were, inwardly experience this existing entity, so that the picture may arise. The process is reversed; for there is a significant difference in the construction of the picture, which refers to those souls already in the spiritual world, and the picture of such as are still incarnate on the earth; the discarnate soul must produce the picture of a soul that is already in the spiritual world entirely from itself, and it must be thoroughly active in so doing: but it may remain more passive in reference to a soul still living on the earth, and then the picture rather comes to it. The effort made is much slighter as regards a soul living on the earth, than with one already discarnate; less inner activity is necessary, and this represents the distinction between the two, to those souls living between death and rebirth. If you grasp this, you will realise that after the soul has passed through the gates of death and lives the life of the spiritual world, it not only beholds the Beings of the Higher Hierarchies, and the other human souls living with it in the spiritual world, but there also appears the world of souls to which it was related before going through the gates of death.

The important distinction must be firmly retained, that while man here on earth has that which constitutes earth existence actually around him, and can only comparatively speaking grasp the other world in spirit, this is reversed on entering the spiritual world. What the soul can there see of itself, without an effort, is our world; and from there it is the ‘other world;’ but the soul must exert itself to make its own world, the world in which it then is, always perceptible, and must always construct it for itself. Thus when man is in the spiritual world, it is that world on which he must continually work; and what is then to him ‘the other world’ always arises as if of itself. But now within this ‘other world,’ which for us on earth is this world, there appear the human souls, with that which lives in them; especially those human souls with whom relations were established during life on earth. These human souls appear. Now within this sea of spiritual perception which we make here, in our souls, of the ‘other world’ there occasionally appear the memories of those who have gone through the gates of death. Picture this very clearly to yourselves. Let us suppose that we lived in a time in which nobody could remember any dead person; the dead would still perceive these human souls—in which there lived no memory of the dead. In this ocean of spiritual perceptions which the discarnate souls can see, are preserved the memories of the dead. They live within it. That is something which through man's free will and love here is added to what the dead can always see from the other side. Thus it is something added.

Now here again we come to a point when important questions arise to the spiritual investigator. Here is one question which the spiritual investigator must investigate. Of what significance is it to one who has gone through the gates of death when he now sees embedded in the souls ebbing and flowing in our world, the memories which these souls streaming by have of the dead? When he perceives these memories what do they mean to him? Now in spiritual investigation when such a question arises it must first of all be thoroughly experienced. One must live into it. If one begins to speculate as to a possible solution to such a question, as to a possible answer, one will certainly arrive at a false conclusion. For the effort of the ordinary brain-fettered understanding gives, as a rule, no solution. That can only be ascertained through inner activity. The answers to questions relating to the enigmas of the spiritual world descend from the spiritual world as by an act of grace. One must wait. There is really nothing else to be done but to live with the question and meditate on it again and again. Let it live in the soul with all the feelings aroused by it, and then calmly wait; wait till one is worthy—that is the right word—worthy to receive an answer from the spiritual world. And, as a rule, this comes from quite a different quarter than one would expect. Thus the answer comes from the spiritual world at the right moment, that is, at the moment when one has sufficiently prepared one's soul to receive the answer. As to whether it is then the right answer, can as little be decided theoretically, as can any statement concerning physical reality; experience alone can furnish the criterion. To those who are always denying spiritual reality by saying, ‘That cannot be proved; and everything must be proved,’ I should like to put one question: Would it have been possible to prove the existence of a whale in the physical world if none had ever been discovered? Nothing can be proved, unless it can be shown in the same way as a reality; even in the spiritual world one must experience that which is reality.

Now that which enters one's consciousness as the solution, may of course appear in many different forms, according to the preparation one has made in one's soul. The truth may present itself in many ways, but nevertheless it must be experienced as the truth. For example, if one lets the above question live aright in the soul, there then appears, apparently from quite a different quarter, a picture, an inner picture, which, I may say, gives one an inner impression of offering something concerning the solution of the riddle in question. The picture may arise of a man who allows himself to be photographed, or has his portrait painted. The principle point in the picture will be some physical thing, an image of this physical thing, and there finally arises all that pertains to the realm of art, to the artistic presentation. Now, if you consider how physical life runs its course, you know that in physical life man is confronted with the outer occurrences of nature, the external beings, and events of nature. They run their course and expire. It is similar with all human concerns, with what man attends to and plans for his necessities, and so on: with what he makes as history. But beyond all this man seeks something which really has nothing to do with the immediate necessities of the world. The human soul is aware that if nature and history merely ran their course in connection with the satisfaction of human needs, life would become barren and desolate. Man creates here in physical existence something above and beyond the course of nature and necessity. He does not merely feel the need of seeing a certain landscape, but also of copying it. He so arranges his life that anyone connected with him can get one or more copies of it. Starting from this we can think of the whole realm of art as something that man creates here which is higher reality than the ordinary reality pertaining to nature and history. Just think what the world would miss if there were no Art, if Art did not add that which she can produce from her own sources to that which is self-existing. Art creates something which, one may say, need not of necessity exist. If she were not there, all the necessities of nature might still go on. One may suppose that even if no single copy of nature had been made and no artistic representation, life would still pursue its course, from the beginning to the end of the earth. We can picture to ourselves all that men would then be without. But theoretically, it might be possible for our earth to be punished through the inability to evolve any Art. We have in Art something extending beyond life. Think of all that Art has created in the world, and also of the progress of man through the world; there you have in a sense two parallel progressive processes: the necessities of nature and history, and the stream of Art which is inserted in them.

Now just as Art, in a sense, brings as by enchantment a spiritual world into the world of physical reality, so another world conjures up into the world of those who have gone through the gates of death, these memories which fill our souls here. As far as the dead are concerned the world here might run its course without any memories living in the souls here, memories born of love and all our human relationships. But then the world of the dead would be to them as a world would be to us—in which we could find nothing transcending ordinary reality. That is an extraordinarily significant connection; for, through the thoughts of love, through the memories, and all that thus transpires in our souls in connection with those no longer in the physical world, there is created for the dead something analogous to artistic creation here. And whereas here in the physical world a man must bring forth artistic creation out of his own soul, must contribute something out of his own being; to those now in the spiritual world, the opposite must occur. It must be brought to them from their other world from the souls still incarnated here—from the souls whom they can contemplate more passively than those already with them in the spiritual world. That which the course of nature and history would be to us, if it ran on simply of itself, without Art, without everything man creates above and beyond the immediate reality, such would our world be for the dead, if the souls still on the physical plane retained no memories of them.

Now, such things as these are not really known in the physical life of man. We may put it thus! These things are not known by the ordinary consciousness, but the deeper subconsciousness is aware of them. And life is always directed in accordance with this. Why has a value always been laid by human communities on the celebration of All Souls Day, and days for the dead? And those who cannot share in the usual memorials for the dead, have nevertheless, their own days set apart for this. Why is this? Because in the depths of man's subconsciousness there lives what may be called a dim knowledge of what takes place in the world by keeping alive the memory of the dead. When the receptive soul of the seer celebrates All Souls Day, or a Sunday devoted to the dead, or some similar day when many people come together full of the memories of their dead, he sees the dead participate in the ceremony; it is to them, with certain natural differences, as it is here when on our globe people visit a cathedral and behold those forms which they could never see unless something had been created out of the artist's imagination, unless something had been added to physical existence; it is the same when they hear a symphony, or music of that sort. Something is reproduced in all these memories, which, in a sense, transcends the ordinary level of existence. And as Art inserts herself into the physical course of human history, so do these memories insert themselves into the picture of their world which the souls between death and rebirth receive. In such customs, which are formed in human communities, that secret knowledge contained in the depths of the soul finds expression. And many a worthy custom is connected with this deeper sub-consciousness. We feel greater reverence for the connections of life when we can permeate them with what Spiritual Science offers to us, than if we are unable to do this. Each time that a dead person contacts a remembrance of himself in the soul of a man who was in some way connected with him here, it is always as if something streamed over to him which beautified his life, and enhanced its value. And as to us here, beauty comes from Art, so to the dead, beauty streams to them from what rays forth out of the hearts and souls of those who keep them in memory.

That is one connection between the world here and the spiritual world there. And this thought is closely connected with that other thought, which should arise from much of what can be cultivated in Spiritual Science, the thought of the value and importance of earth life. Spiritual Science does not lead us to despise the earth, with all that it can bring forth; it leads us rather to consider life as a part of the whole life of the Cosmos, as a necessary part, which is arranged in conformity with what is active in the spiritual world, and without which the spiritual world would not appear in its perfection. And henceforth when we turn our attention to the fact that from out of our physical world must spring forth beauty for the dead, we are struck by the thought that the spiritual world would lack this beauty, if there were no physical world, with the human souls who, while still in the body, were able to evolve thoughts full of feeling and sentiment for those no longer in this world. It signified a great deal, when in olden times, whole peoples over and over again devoted themselves reverently at their festivals to the thought of their great ancestors, and united in feeling for the memory of their great forefathers. It was of extreme significance, when they inaugurated such memorial days. For it always meant the flashing up of something beautiful for the spiritual worlds, that is, for the souls living there between death and rebirth. And while here on earth it is not very rational, to put it mildly, to take special pleasure in one's own portrait; nevertheless for the dead it is important to find their image in those souls who still remain here. For we must bear well in mind that our earth-man appears very different to us when we consider him from the standpoint of the spiritual, from the standpoint of the dead. We have often emphasised this. Here we are enclosed within our skin. What we designate as ‘we,’ as ‘I,’ that which is most precious to us, is shut in by our skin. This holds good even for the most selfless people; perhaps it holds good for them to a higher degree than for those who consider themselves less selfless. First and foremost we value that which is shut up inside this skin; then comes the rest of the world. We regard that as our outer world. But the most significant thing is that when we are outside our bodies we are one with the outer world and live in it. I have often described this going forth, this expansion of oneself over the outer world. And that which then bears the same relation to us as does the outer world now, is just what we have experienced here between birth and death. In a sense we can say that the outer world becomes our inner world, and what is now our inner world then becomes our outer world. Hence that significant experience on entering the land of the spirit, ‘Thou art That,’ described in my book Theosophy. We then look back at our external world here, which is encompassed by our Ego. But there the soul unable to be as egoistic as it was here, looks back on the thoughts which appear, as thoughts of itself. That is, as it were, the external world that confronts it, which is really incorporated into the compass of what we can designate as the ‘Beautiful,’ that which exalts one. There comes into this—which has become an outer world consisting of the memory of all we have undergone between birth and death—something which does not live in this, does not belong to this life of ours, but lives in other souls and relates itself to us. That really means the insertion of something transcending ourselves, transcending our outer world, just as here some work of art rises above the ordinary reality which exists in itself. And just as it is improper for a man here to be in love with himself, and also with his own portrait, so there it is quite natural for a man to stand in that sort of relation to what arises as an image in the souls left behind—the other presentation of himself—to stand before that picture, just as here we stand before a landscape and compare it with the scene itself. Thus when this question comes before the soul, one is shown the presentment of the man and his picture, and from this one finds a way of answering the question. Speculation as a rule does not help at all, one must learn to wait, to wait patiently. In reality one should only trouble oneself about the question relating to the spiritual world, for the answers can only be given to the human soul as by a revealing act of grace.

In this lecture I have pointed out that certain arrangements, such as memorial festivals and days of remembrance as organised by men, are connected with a profound knowledge, outside the range of ordinary consciousness. That rests in the fact that man has in the depths of his soul, a dim but comprehensive knowledge—I have repeatedly touched upon this—and that he actually draws the knowledge embraced by his consciousness from out of this comprehensive wisdom. I have pointed out how clever we should really be if we could with our ordinary consciousness embrace everything included in the astral body. This astral body goes through life wiser, in a much higher sense than we usually believe. We do not value the wisdom of our astral body because we are quite unaware of it, but we can at least form some idea of its comprehensive wisdom, if we place the following before our souls.

Our lives are lived, as we might say, in the daytime. Now, we judge events very little according to their connections. If we consider them in their setting, many things would seem very, very different to us. Consider this: Suppose we made a plan, we propose doing something, and we decide in the morning what we intend doing during the evening. At midday something occurs which prevents us fulfilling the evening plan. We are really vexed that we are not able to carry it out. We think how much finer and better it would have been if we had been able to accomplish that particular thing. The astral body, however, with its more embracing but subconscious knowledge, is of a different opinion! In such a case the astral body often says: ‘Yes, if you fulfil what you had intended for the evening, you will be put in a position in which you may perhaps fall and break your leg.’ Of course it may be quite possible that we absolutely cannot avoid this; and if we accomplish in the evening what we have arranged, there may previously be a combination of circumstances that brings about the breaking of our leg. We do not know of this in our ordinary consciousness, but the astral body perceives it. And it therefore leads us into a position in which we ourselves prevent the fulfilment of the evening programme. The intervention which vexes us so much, is sometimes caused by this extraordinary wise knowledge of the whole setting of our life. It is not born of chance, but arises entirely from the wisdom of our astral body, of which we remain unconscious, as regards our ordinary consciousness. If we could only see why we do some things and omit others, perhaps because we cannot do otherwise, or are led away first to something else—if we could perceive all that, we should see that there is always a connection in our life which proceeds from something within us, wiser than we are in our ordinary consciousness. It is a part of our life's arrangement, but the whole purpose is not perceptible. But as soon as we rightly hold the thought in our minds of our connection with the spiritual world, the matter will then become clear to us. Over us there is a Being that in a limited sense belongs to us, a Being of the Hierarchy of the Angels, our Guardian Angel. Indeed, at the present time we always turn at the beginning of our lectures to the Guardian Spirits of those who have to fulfil the severe demands of the time outside in the world. Now, this Guardian Spirit of ours sees the whole connection. For a long time there has been a feeling in human consciousness that certain connections, imperceptible to us, are perceived by our Guardian Angel. Occasionally the following takes place: The boundary between what we can see and what we cannot see with ordinary consciousness, varies. There are, indeed, persons here, who go through life with a certain inner satisfaction, for no matter what comes to them they submit, because they believe in a ruling wisdom. They are permeated with a feeling that even things which may cause annoyance are also dominated by a ruling wisdom. It is often very difficult to believe in a ruling wisdom, when something happens which absolutely interferes with our plans. But one of those very impulses which may easily bring us well into connection with the workings of the spiritual world, consists in our feeling ourselves cared for by this ruling wisdom, without thereby becoming indolent or lazy, without believing that this wisdom works independently for us individually. Thus the boundary is movable; and in reference to our actions, and to forming of intentions, it varies greatly. In ordinary consciousness there are certainly impulses of an intimate and delicate nature. How often does it happen that we plan something for a later time; then something occurs, and we feel that we must do this which will really hinder the later action. We have the feeling to act as immediate necessity demands and to set about the matter with a certain delicacy, for we know if we set about it roughly that it will disperse and vanish before us. We all have to a greater or less degree within us, besides the self on which our freedom depends, a second self that wants to feel its way through life, and believes it attains far more through what it gropes for, than through what it can strictly measure by intellect. The boundary is movable.

But at certain times the boundary is even more adjustable. And now comes a point which should be correctly grasped with reference to practical life. There are persons—and in a certain respect we are all gripped by that which rules in such people—there are persons who have a sort of longing, a sort of passion to order their life aright, so to traverse the paths of life that they can order it correctly. Let us take an exceptional case. Suppose a man you know forms a friendship for another. You may say: ‘I really cannot understand why he has formed this friendship. I cannot make it out. No real affinity exists between these two, yet he does all he can to approach this man.’ It seems incomprehensible; and only a long time afterwards we see the reason. The man in question may need the other for something much later on. He formed a friendship with him, not because he found something in him which gave him pleasure; he did not form this friendship for its own sake, but as a means to something which would apply later. He regulated his life rightly. Through forming that friendship he attained some prospect, through which his friend could later help him in some situation. And the consequence is that something actually takes place through the help of the so-called friend which could not otherwise have occurred. If you apply this thought to life, you will see how often it occurs, that people arrange something which they do not immediately desire, but they wish it so arranged, because they will have need of its after-effects. Thus we must say that there are people who, in the adjustment of their life show an enormous subtlety—we cannot call this wisdom; we should feel an inner objection to calling it wisdom. But these people display great cunning in doing something at an earlier stage of their life which cannot profit them in any way at the time, but can only do so at some later epoch. And we may express the following feeling: ‘I really did not think so and so was so clever, for when I approached him and exchanged thoughts with him or was in his society he really seemed much too stupid to order his life so cleverly.’ Now that comes about because what a man carries in his astral body can be much cleverer than his ordinary consciousness. And if he strongly checks his egotism and drives it down to the sphere of unconsciousness, if he does not live in accordance with a certain primitive instinct, but, as it were, allows his egotism to dominate, it then lays holds of his subconsciousness: and that other man that dwells in us all, but who as a rule trains us to take life in a more natural and direct manner, then guides him to organise his life, and to create beforehand the conditions for something later. Then we see the astral body ruling with its cleverness; but permeated, not by what usually dominates in life, but by the egotism forced out of the ordinary consciousness down into the astral consciousness. And we see such a man apparently going through life with much more, of what we might call calculation, than should come to him from his ordinary consciousness. There are many dangerous sides to the evolution of the human soul. And it is very important to become aware of this: that the moment we meet what is ordinarily unconscious in us, we must try not to approach it with too much egotism. Therefore, the avoidance of egotism in the development towards the spiritual worlds must again and again be emphasised. For beneath our ordinary consciousness there really rules something which may be permeated by the consciousness of our Guardian Spirit from the Hierarchy of the Angels. Then arises that which to the ordinary consciousness makes a man seem to act without reflection, but which is nevertheless subject to a certain law. I expressed this law very simply in one of the Mystery Plays by letting one of the characters say: ‘The heart must often direct our Karma.’ And if one transcends that which the heart indicates as Karma, and lets reason prevail, then reason sometimes administers a strong dose of egotism. Or it may be that egotism so prevails that we find man more subtle than he seems to be, judging by his ordinary consciousness. In that case he has pressed the egotism down into his astral body. Then comes something into the working of his soul, not now from the regular Beings of the Hierarchy of the Angels but something Luciferic, which enables the man to embrace a wider sphere than he could consciously do at this present stage of his evolution. Thus we see that what must of necessity be strongly emphasised, when one is approaching spiritual evolution, is really something delicate and intimate; for we must of course strive to expand our consciousness, but in doing so, we should always take care to obliterate the hindrance that is created when our egotism is removed either into a deeper or a higher sphere of consciousness.

You may ask: ‘How can we do this?’ It is very easy to say that we should not remove egotism from our ordinary consciousness. But how are we to avoid doing this? Well, this cannot be done by rules, but solely through widening one's interests. When a man extends his interests he is always in some way already fighting his egotism. For with each new interest we acquire we go a little beyond ourselves. Therefore, we strive for Spiritual Science in this manner; that is, we are taught not only to pay attention to what man so willingly listens to because of his egotism, but to have our interests really extended. How often does the demand arise, again and again: ‘Why are the books written in a way so difficult to understand? Could they not be written in a simpler fashion?’ And someone or another makes suggestions as to how these books could be written for the people and made popular. One must really beware of gaining such popularity, for it only enhances egotism. If it were made so easy to enter Spiritual Science then each one could enter without overcoming his egotism. But in the work accomplished spiritually by the efforts we have to make, we get rid of a little of our egotism; we enter what we wish to acquire through Spiritual Science in a more hallowed frame of mind if we have had to take trouble over it, than if it had been presented to us in quite an easy and popular form. For example, a person has come home and said: ‘There are so many people who have to work all day long. If these people have to sit down in the evening to read these difficult books, they do not get on very well. For such as these there ought to be books quite easy to read.’ To this I had to answer—and quite correctly: ‘Why should one prevent these people from applying even the little time at their disposal to reading such books as are purposely written with full regard to spiritual conditions? Why should they occupy the little time they have in reading books which may be more convenient, but which trivialise the matter even textually?’ For it is just because these books do not place the soul in the right attitude, that they drag down into the trivial life that which should lead one away from it, even as regards the nature of the experience connected with another sphere.

It will become of special importance in Spiritual Science that we should bear in mind not only the ‘What’ (the matter) but the ‘How’ (the manner): that we should really bestir ourselves gradually to acquire ideas of a world quite different from the ordinary physical world, and thus gradually to accustom ourselves to form conceptions different from those we can build so comfortably in the physical world. And now, in conclusion, I should like to mention a concept which we shall require in our next lecture. But I shall mention it to-day, so that you may see that it is well to assimilate new words for that which transpires in the spiritual world.

We have a word which expresses the manner of a man's life between birth and death, which expresses this life as it strikes us. We see the young child fresh and rounded, its inner life flowing through its outer form; teeming, as we say, with inner life, up to a certain year when life pours itself into the outer form. Then comes a time when the inner life ceases to flow, when we become wrinkled and things change with us. In short, we can follow up this outer life from birth to death in the changes presented by the physical body as life runs its course. We call this growing old for the quite trivial reason that when we are born the physical body is young, and when we die it is old. Now with the etheric body the case is really quite different. Our etheric body is old, if we can use the word at all in this connection, it is old through the forces by which it is fashioned at conception or birth. It is already old when we begin our physical life. It is then already formed and chiseled out, it has a great many inner formations (they are movements, yet inner formations); these are taken from it as life proceeds. But on the other hand the life force is enhanced; it is young when we grow old. While we say of the physical body—we are aging—of the etheric body we must say we are growing young. And it is well to use this expression. We really grow young as regards our etheric body, for at our birth its whole forces are directed to all that is enclosed in the human skin. When at a certain age we pass through death, the etheric body enters into a certain relationship with the whole Cosmos. It recovers the forces which have been taken from it. The moment we became children its connection with the Cosmos was broken. It had then to send all its forces into the small space enclosed in the human skin. It was compressed, as it were, to one point of the Cosmos. Now the etheric body revives, and gradually takes it place in the Cosmos in proportion as the physical body ages. Although somewhat of an exaggeration, we may say when we become wrinkled, the etheric body becomes chubby and again becomes an image of the external force, the creative, abounding force, in the same way as the physical body is an expression of this force at the beginning of childhood. We grow young as regards our etheric body. Thus it will gradually become necessary to coin words wherewith really to grasp the absolutely different relations of the spiritual world, It is important that we should acquaint ourselves with this radical difference in the whole perception of the spiritual world, as opposed to the physical world. We shall start our considerations next time from this point.

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.

We have devoted the recent lectures to considering from a certain point of view the life which runs its course behind the ordinary life which in normal circumstances, or to ordinary science, is embraced by our physical consciousness. Fundamentally all our considerations are directed to that life, which transpires beneath the threshold of ordinary consciousness. And we seek to characterise it from the most varied sides, as must be done in Spiritual Science.

A certain security is connected with the external physical perceptible reality, in that one beholds it. But physically, even for those who do not undergo the necessary training whereby they can themselves rise into the spiritual worlds, yet through illuminating these worlds from different sides which harmonise, a certain wisdom is created, and this may create a feeling of security.

Especial attention is drawn to the fact that man is not only in the world which he beholds with ordinary consciousness. Beneath the threshold of ordinary consciousness a life takes place which, unless one goes through the Portal of Initiation, is not grasped by the consciousness. This remains unknown to ordinary human life. Much takes place in the world with reference to the whole entity that comprises a human being; that which man knows while living in the physical body is merely one part of what really occurs; and all the efforts made to get into touch with the spiritual world, consist in trying to see something of the life which transpires beneath the threshold of ordinary consciousness. By means of a widening of this consciousness we try to cross the threshold and perceive that in which we really live, but which is not perceptible to our ordinary consciousness. As I have said, a certain adjustable threshold exists between the ordinary consciousness and that of which—and this expression has a certain meaning for us—we are unconsciously conscious.

In the last lecture I gave a very pointed example. A man proposes early in the morning to accomplish something that night. He lives, as it were, in the thought, that he will carry out his plan during the evening. At mid-day something occurs which prevents him from fulfilling his intention. To the ordinary consciousness this occurrence would seem to be an accident. But if one looks deeper into human life, one discovers wisdom in the so-called accident, but a wisdom that lies beneath the threshold of consciousness. One cannot really perceive this wisdom with the ordinary consciousness, but one very frequently discovers in such cases that if hindrance had not occurred at mid-day the man would perhaps have been brought into some disastrous situation through undertaking the proposed project during the evening. As I said, he might perhaps have broken his leg. But when one knows the connection, one discovers that wisdom lies in the entire occurrence: that the soul herself sought the obstacle and put it in the way, but with intentions lying beneath the threshold of consciousness. Now that is something which is still close to the ordinary consciousness, but it points below to a region to which man belongs; to which he belongs with the concealed parts of his being, those parts which, after he lays aside the physical body, go through the gate of death. This region belongs to that ruling consciousness, of which we spoke in the public lecture, as the beholder of the actions of our will. This spectator is really always present. He guides and conducts us, but the ordinary consciousness knows nothing of him, A great deal goes on in the intervals between the events which we perceive. In all this, especially in what takes place between the events of life, and in what transpires beneath the threshold of consciousness, there is prepared, as the living being is prepared in the egg, that which we shall be after we have passed through the gate of death. And now something on which we dwelt in our last consideration, must be brought into connection with much that should be well known to us from earlier lectures.

I have often pointed out how important and essential memory is for man, in so far as he stands here in physical consciousness, and that this memory should not be severed. We must remember back to a certain point in our physical experience, or at least have the power of tracing the continuity of our life. If this connecting thread is sundered, if we cannot remember definite events, so that at least we have the consciousness that we were in existence when these events took place, then a serious psychic illness appears, to which I have referred in a recent lecture. This memory forms part of our experience here in physical consciousness. But it is also, in a certain sense, a veil; it hides from us those events to which I am now referring, which lie behind the ordinary consciousness, and especially behind that veil woven by our continuous memory. Just think: we are first infants; then we traverse a period of consciousness which we do not recollect. Next comes the time to which we can always remember back in later life. This begins a continuous series of memories. At a certain time, either in the second, third, fourth year of life, or even later with some people, we must recollect becoming aware of the individual self, the Ego. When we thus look back into ourselves, our soul gaze meets this memory, and in so far as we are physical men here, we really live inwardly in these memories. We could not speak of ourselves as ‘I,’ unless we did retain this memory. Anyone who observes himself, recognises this. When he looks into himself, he really looks into the region of his memory. He regards, as it were, the tableau of his memories. Even although all we have experienced may not arise in our memory, yet we know that memories might arise, as far back as that point already described. We must presuppose that we have been consciously present with our Ego in all these memories, and have been able to retain them. If that were not so, the continuity of our Ego would be disturbed, and a soul disease would appear. But behind what we notice in memory there lies that which is seen with spiritual eyes and heard with spiritual ears. So that what I have already explained in public lectures is absolutely correct. When we look into the spiritual world, we use the same force which we otherwise employ in memory. That does not mean that we necessarily lose our memory on acquiring spiritual sight, but it does mean as already characterised in a public lecture, that it is not always possible to remember what we perceive spiritually, we cannot always take it in, for it to live in the memory; for we must always behold it over and over again and always behold it afresh. I have often said, for example, that if one gives a lecture on what one really sees in the spiritual world, one cannot do this from memory in the same way as one can speak of ordinary things, for one must bring it ever again out of the spiritual world. That which lives in the thought must be produced anew. Both the soul and the spirit must be active in such a case and must bring forth the things afresh. When the spiritual seer really looks into the spiritual world that which is usually the veil of memory becomes transparent, and he uses it to look through. He looks, as it were, through the force which otherwise fashions his memory, and looks into the spiritual world. If a student performs his occult exercises with strength and energy, he notices that in ordinary life he uses his power of thought to gain knowledge of the things and events of the world, with the support of the body as a physical instrument which enables him to form real conceptions of these things. The concept supported there by the activity of the physical body remains in us as a memory. When, however, we enter the spiritual world we must be continually active in order to call forth the concepts anew. When we reach the point which I characterised in the public lecture, where one can do nothing but wait until the secrets of the spiritual world reveal themselves—a ceaseless activity begins. But one must participate in this. Just as when drawing one has to be continually active, if one wishes to express anything through the drawing, similarly, when the spiritual world reveals itself, the imagination must actively co-operate. What it produces arises from the objective reality, but man must take part in this production of concepts. In this way we contact something which is continually active in man—in the two-fold man, of which I have already spoken—but which is concealed in us, which lives within our physical covering beneath the threshold of our ordinary physical consciousness. One connects oneself with this being. Then one notices the following: here in the physical world one is so united with it that one stands on a firm basis. One sees other things in the outer world and moves about among them. One enters into certain relations with other men, to whom one does this or that and from whom one suffers this or that. We spend the life which we embrace with the ordinary consciousness in the continuous comprehension of what we develop in this way, but behind it there lies another, a life following definite laws, which we do not perceive with the ordinary consciousness; in this life we share, when, between going to sleep and waking, we live in the astral body and Ego. Our consciousness is, however, then so lowered that we cannot perceive with ordinary senses what position we occupy in a spiritual world which pursues its own course, which continually lives around us, and while yet being super-sensible and invisible weaves itself into the sensible and visible.

Above all we must understand this world as spiritual, and not think of it as a duplicate, a simply more refined physical sensible world; we must conceive of it as spiritual. I have often drawn attention to the reason why just in our time there must be produced from out the fountain of all human knowledge, that which, as carried on by us, relates to the spiritual world. For truly, not only because of the facts which present themselves to the spiritual investigators who have to impart truths concerning the spiritual world, but from the whole course of our civilisation (I have drawn attention to this from various standpoints), it is evident that in humanity a certain longing is arising to open the soul to the hidden side of human life, and to learn something of it. I have already brought forward phenomena in scientific life and elsewhere, which show how this longing lives at the present time.

To-day I should like to add to our considerations a quite special example, from which we can see that already in our day there are people who to a certain extent touch on these secrets of existence. They divine and know something of these mysteries of existence, but for reasons which we shall presently examine closer, they do not wish to approach them in the manner practised by Spiritual Science. The easiest way to bring these things before people is to leave them more or less undecided, leaving, as it were, the door open, by saying: ‘You need not believe these things. You need not think of that world as real.’ In our time there are plenty of examples of this. I have given instances. I shall bring forward an especial case to-day in reference to this point. I shall introduce into our considerations a few remarks about a really extraordinary and significant novel of modern German literature. I might call it a pearl among German novels. It is called Hofrat Eysenhardt. It is really one of the best novels to be found in the more recent literature of Germany and in it, in a really wonderful manner, only one single individual is depicted: namely, Hofrat Eysenhardt himself. He lived in Vienna and became a lawyer, and later President of the local court. He became one of the greatest lawyers of his country. He was feared by all those who had anything to do with the law, and beloved by those associated with him, for he was a most distinguished criminologist. His eloquence was such that he could get anyone convicted who came within his clutches; during the trial he subjected him to a crossfire, and with a certain indifference to human life he was able so to harass his victim (one can use this expression here) that whatever happened, he was trapped. Thus this Hofrat Eysenhardt was, in his external life, a very remarkable man. He had not much talent for entering into psychic relations with other men. He was a kind of hermit with regard to human life; he laid great stress on being correct and blameless in external life; with his subordinates he exchanged but few words, but with his superiors he was not only friendly, but deeply courteous. I could bring forward many more characteristics; he was a model advocate. We need not enter now into his other qualities, they are wonderfully brought out in the novel, reflected in the statement of a subordinate, but we may go to the occasion when he was once chosen to conduct an important case against a notorious man named Markus Freund. This Markus Freund had already suffered punishment in a lesser degree for offences similar to the one of which he was now accused. But it never occurred to the examining magistrate who made the enquiry, that there was any possibility of bringing about a conviction on this occasion. Yet Hofrat Eysenhardt obtained one. And in a document which the Hofrat himself then drew up for a purpose which we shall presently disclose, he himself describes the manner in which Markus Freund behaved during and especially after his conviction. Let me read the passage: ‘This man, who possessed the strong family affections so characteristic of his race, had a special tenderness for a young grand-daughter, of whom he was never tired of speaking with his fellow prisoners. He could hardly await his release, which he confidently anticipated in spite of the severe suspicions laid on him, so much did he long to see the child again. Markus Freund obstinately denied everything, and in the preliminary trial before the magistrate was so well able to explain away each of the suspicious circumstances with a sagacity truly astounding, that the magistrate, a very efficient, although excessively soft-hearted man, was firmly convinced of Freund's innocence until the closing proceedings began, presided over by the person to whom this information refers.’ (Hofrat Eysenhardt writes that himself, he writes of himself in the third person.) Although Markus Freund even in the final trial exerted his sagacity to the utmost, and his advocate made a very beautiful and touching speech (of merit even according to the newspapers) yet the verdict was exactly the opposite to that expected by the magistrate, and perhaps by the defendant himself. Markus Freund was unanimously convicted by the jury and, as there were many previous convictions and aggravating conditions in his past, he was condemned to the severest penalty, twenty years' imprisonment. The person concerned (none other than Hofrat Eysenhardt himself) might well without presumption, regard this verdict as one of the greatest triumphs of his many years of criminal practice. For the jury would have been deceived by the truly bewildering sophistry of Markus Freund—although public feeling at that time was not favourable to men of his race—had not the President been able, by his superior eloquence to crumple this sophistry into nothing. ‘The effect of the verdict on the defendant was such’ (the Hofrat himself is still relating this) ‘that it required hardened nerves, accustomed to such outbreaks, not to be shaken as to the truth and justice of the sentence. First Markus Freund stammered a few incomprehensible words, probably in Hebrew. Then this bowed man, of barely middle height, drew himself up to his full height, so that he appeared huge, and lifted the heavy lids which usually almost covered his eyes—showing the blood-shot whites of his rolling eyes. And from his distorted mouth he rapidly hissed forth a stream of bitter curses and threats directed against the President. To repeat them here in the offensive jargon in which they were poured forth, would hardly harmonise with the respect due to the law. Only the first sentence may be quoted: “Mr. President! You know as well as I do myself that I am innocent;” and the last, “This shall be repaid to you. An eye for an eye, it shall be paid back to you. You shall see!” The rest of his speech was entirely fantastic and appeared, in so far as it had any sense at all, to amount to this: he, Markus Freund, had probed the noble President with his eyes to the very depths and discovered, that even though noble, the President was not aware of it, he was nevertheless of the same sort as himself; he the down-trodden, but this time, innocent Markus Freund. The officers immediately did their duty and seized the offender, to whom the President immediately awarded disciplinary punishment for his outburst. While the soldiers, each holding one of his waving arms, led the accused away, his fury broke out in weeping and sobbing. Even in the corridor one heard his dull moaning: my poor, poor little girl, you will never see your grandfather again. The jury were greatly distressed at this incident, and questioned the President through their foreman as to whether it would not be possible to try the case again immediately. Through their insufficient knowledge of the law they had not enough experience to know that outbursts of this kind occur more often with very hardened blameworthy criminals, than with innocent defendants, who really are much scarcer than the sensational minds of the public imagine. Less excusable was the fact that the above-mentioned soft-hearted Vice-President, who was present at the pronouncement of the sentence and its disagreeable sequel, took upon himself to say to the prosecutor, gently shaking his head, “Mr. President, I do not envy you your talent!”’

‘So Markus Freund was now imprisoned and the Hofrat lived on. But how he lived and what now happened he relates in his statement. We must presuppose that some considerable time has elapsed, and the accused had been a long time in prison. Now the following occurred: ‘Just as the person in question’ (the Hofrat relates this of himself) ‘had seen him at the moment when he uttered those threats and curses against him, with a face distorted with fury, precisely so did the long-forgotten Markus Freund come before his mind in the night between the 18th and 19th March, at 2 o'clock, when he suddenly awoke without cause.

‘Thus the Hofrat suddenly wakes up in the night between the 18th and 19th of March, at 2 o'clock, and has the impression in his mind that Markus Freund was standing before him.

‘And while he lay motionless, as in a trance, the above-mentioned events recapitulated themselves in imagination with lightning speed. He was not clearly conscious whether in the intervening years he had thought much about the occurrence or not. Both alternatives appeared equally correct to him at that moment, for horror weakened his power of thought.

‘Thus Hofrat Eysenhardt woke up in the middle of sleep, was forced to think of Markus Freund and to recapitulate what had happened, but he did not know whether he had previously often thought of it or not. ‘While he lay thus with throbbing heart, an impulse arose immediately to light the candle on the table, but he could not. (He could not move his hands). It was as if something gently tapped at the bedroom door, or rather a timorous scratching, as if a little dog was begging to be let in. Involuntarily the question formed itself: “Who is there?” There was no answer, nor did the door open, but nevertheless he had a feeling that something slipped in. The floor creaked slightly, the sound passing across the room from the door to the bed, as if this invisible something came nearer, and finally stood close to him. Anyhow he had the indescribable feeling of a strange presence, and not of an indefinite, unknown presence, but it seemed to him as if this “something” must be that Markus Freund, the sudden recollection of whom had roused him out of a deep sleep. He even felt as if this invisible presence bent over his face. Now, whether he fell asleep again without being aware of it and dreamed, and—as you know—the dreams and the people of whom one dreams are frequently confused with one another, or whether certain exaggerated ideas of Schopenhauer as to the secret identity of all individuals stirred in him as the after effects of what he had been reading during the last few days, at any rate the senseless thought flashed through his mind that he and Markus Freund were fundamentally one and the same person. And as if in confirmation of this idea, silly as it was and contrary to all logic, he repeated, whether merely inwardly, or outwardly and audibly, he knew not, the above-mentioned curses and threats of Markus Freund as far as he could remember them, and indeed with the horror-struck feeling that each curse was now beginning to fulfil itself. Now whether, as was not impossible, he had fallen asleep and dreamed, certain it is that he awoke with this terrible impression and lit the candle. The clock registered ten minutes past two. Everything in the room was as before, although furniture, walls, and pictures appeared strange to him, and he had to drink a glass of water and wait a little while to recover himself and realise where he was.’

He relates all this himself and says, that first he had this vision, as we may call it. Now, this made such an impression on him that he was driven to go immediately—though still somewhat shaken—to the Court, and look up the documents relating to Markus Freund. But he was not able to do so; something else occurred—Hofrat Eysenhardt had always been a quiet, open-minded man, and he merely relates what happened to him. We shall shortly see why he relates it. Indeed, he considers himself somewhat ridiculous and unworthy to have yielded to it.

‘In vain did he tell himself how absurd and ridiculous his conduct was. His former iron will was in this respect weakened, and remained so. It barely sufficed to conceal from his colleagues the inner torments which were always present with him. One morning, passing a group of legal officials who were engaged in heated conversation in a dark corridor, he thought he heard the name of Markus Freund.’

One day when he went to the Court-house, he really lacked the courage to again take up these documents, but in passing a corridor where several people were conversing he heard the name of Markus Freund.

‘Now, as this man and his name had gradually become a fixed idea in his mind, and never gave him any rest, he regarded a self-deception as not unlikely, and he stopped and asked the gentleman of whom they had been speaking? “Of Markus Freund, of your Markus Freund, Herr Hofrat, don't you remember him?” answered one of the gentlemen, who happened to be the soft-hearted magistrate who at the time had made that rash remark. “Of Markus Freund? Why? What has happened to him?” He could hardly breathe. “Why he is dead. By the grace of God the poor devil is now free,” the soft-hearted one answered. “Dead? When?” “Oh, he died in the night between the 18th and 19th of March, at 2 o'clock.”’

Thus the story relates that Hofrat Eysenhardt had convicted Markus Freund, who was imprisoned for a long time. During the night between the 18th and 19th of March, Eysenhardt wakes up, sees Freund in his thoughts, and then has a vision of his appearance. He is terribly frightened, wants to look up the documents, but allows several weeks to pass. Finally, he overhears a conversation, whereby he learns that Markus Freund died at the very time he appeared to him, creeping into his room like a little dog.

Now, in order to understand all that has been related, the conclusion of the novel is necessary. For this shows that the Hofrat was now urged by circumstances, and indeed by such circumstances that one could not have supposed would have this effect upon him. As President of an especially important trial of a case of espionage he was necessarily brought in connection with certain people. Now, in his connection with them and guided by a dim instinct, he is led to commit the very same offence of which he had convicted Markus Freund. And later, after he had been dragged by passion into crime, he had occasion to remember in a quite special manner the words spoken by Markus Freund after his trial: ‘This shall be repaid to you. An eye for an eye, you shall see.’ Thus something had lived beneath the threshold of the Hofrat's consciousness which was definitely connected with his previous deeds, and which was also connected in a remarkable and mysterious way with the fulfilment of what the dead man had threatened him with. Indeed, there is an even deeper connection. The author of the novel wrote in the first person, as though many of the things about Hofrat Eysenhardt had been related to him personally, and he writes that he had a conversation with one of his subordinates (this conversation occurs in the novel). And this subordinate, who was an extraordinary sagacious, philosophically inclined man, said: ‘This Hofrat was specially gifted with the power to penetrate to the depths of these things because he had a strong disposition towards them himself. And so he penetrates deepest into the cases which appeal to him most.’ That is related in the novel. Now, it is interesting that in the night of the 18th to the 18th of March, at 2 o'clock, the thought arises in the Hofrat, ‘You and this Markus Freund are practically identical.’ This unity, this uniting of the consciousness appears evident to his soul; he has an insight into a connection which lies beneath the threshold of ordinary life. This is revealed to him. Naturally it is not revealed to him in the same way as to others, for cases vary, but this disclosure comes to him. Now, it is interesting that the author of this novel has brought together all the materials possible to make the event comprehensible. And we must also recollect what this author mentions as preceding the vision which the Hofrat had during the night. The Hofrat was really a robust man; as has been said, many characteristics could be brought forward which show him to be a man who did not go soulfully through life, but was one who pursues his way with a sort of brutality, caused by a certain inner robustness. Only, as it were, through an outer symptom could this man, who had never been led astray and who was always sure of himself, become a wrong doer. The outer cause was this: he discovered a tooth had become loose and that he could easily remove it with his fingers. The thought then flashed through his head, ‘my life is now on the wane. Something has begun to decay.’ He could not get the thought out of his head: ‘In this way I shall lose my health, little by little.’ That would not have been so bad, the worst was that from that moment (only he did not notice it, but ruminated over his own decay, as he himself shows in his letters, wherein he describes himself in the third person), from that moment his memory began to fail. His memory was such a help in all his professional work that he develops a certain anxiety about life. He noticed that he could no longer remember certain things which formerly could be recalled so easily. Just consider how interesting it is that the novelist brings forward the possibility of developing a partial clairvoyance as the memory begins to decline. Then his memory becomes better again. He decides to record this, and remembers what his state had been. He, as a freethinker, cannot suppose otherwise than that all this was a part of a diseased condition. And he reflects: ‘thus I am really in danger of going mad.’ That conclusion would be natural in a freethinker. He is ashamed to seek advice and therefore he takes advantage of his position to write in the third person. He then places the document before a physician for mental diseases, as the case of some unknown person, and in that way he hoped to get medical advice. Thereby it happens that the novelist uses this document to impart something of the psychic life of this man.

You see that we have here a really beautiful work of art, which indeed points to those elements of which we have to speak in Spiritual Science, just those elements of which one speaks when dealing with the connection between the power of memory and the perception into the spiritual worlds. The novelist accomplishes that beautifully by causing the memory to fail the moment certain ‘shreds’ of these secret connections become evident to the person in question. And the whole narrative is very extraordinary, for it is so constructed in its various parts that one sees that the author realises that there are such connections behind life. Only he clothes the knowledge in the form of a novel. The novel is very cleverly written, and could only be written by a philosophical mind. It is written by one who was for many years the Manager of the Hamburg Theatre, and who later became Manager of the Vienna Burg-Theatre. This novel is really not only one of the best he has written, but is one of the pearls of German fiction. Naturally I do not say this because it is written around a subject deeply interesting to us, but because none but a man of very fine perception could have such delicate observation in an apparently abnormal matter. What I have said as to the merit of this book is purely from an artistic standpoint. It is really so written that the reader has the consciousness: the author has written a novel, but he might just as well have written a biography of Hofrat Eysenhardt, so realistically does he write. And we see in such a novel that Berger must have known a man who really had such experiences in the course of his life. One cannot help saying: how natural it would be for such a man as Alfred Freiherr von Berger to approach the spiritual world so that through Spiritual Science he might learn to know the real connections. How infinitely important would it be for Berger to have studied Spiritual Science, so that he would have been able to say, for example, ‘What will Hofrat Eysenhardt have to experience in the time which immediately follows the passage through the gates of death, in what we have always called Kamaloka, after having caused an innocent man to be convicted?’ As I have told you: man then has to experience the effects of his deeds, and the significance which his deeds have for others in connection with whom they were committed. What the Hofrat had done at the trial afforded him a tremendous satisfaction at the time, especially his great power of oratory. He had great satisfaction, which he expressed by saying: ‘He regarded it as meritorious that he prevailed against the sophistry of the prisoner, and delivered a speech which urged the jury to convict him, although they regretted it immediately afterwards, when they saw the effect of their verdict on the accused.’ That is the thing as seen from this side of the Hofrat. From the side of Markus Freund it is a very different matter, here we see the effect of the sentence upon him. The effect of this on his soul the Hofrat has to experience in Kamaloka. And a reflection, a picture of this reveals itself in the very moment when Markus Freund himself goes through the gates of death. This so discloses itself to him that he now sees himself as identical, as one with this Markus Freund. He sees himself in Markus Freund. He feels himself also within him. We see that the Hofrat had a foretaste of Kamaloka. This is so powerful that he not only experiences what had happened previously, but something which is intimately connected with the whole matter transpires further in him beneath the threshold of his consciousness. Each single detail is of importance. I told you that he had lost his memory for a while, during which this part of the spiritual world unveiled itself to him. But now comes a time when he is endowed anew with a great natural power of memory. Memory reinstates itself in him again, when he tried the case of espionage. But in the course of this very trial he is driven to commit the same offence for which through his eloquence he had caused Markus Freund to be convicted. The force which formerly proceeded from memory was transformed into the force of instinct, and this drives him. He does not now see the connection which was subconsciously working between what he was now himself doing, and what he had ascribed to Markus Freund. This leads to the following: Hofrat Eysenhardt, when he sees what has happened to him, the very evening preceding the conclusion of the law suit in which he was to accomplish his greatest triumph, goes into his office ...'

Having entered his once, the key of which he had with him, he lit the two candles on the writing table, washed his hands, face, and hair; then changed his civilian attire for his uniform, and for a long time paced up and down. Then he opened the top drawer of his writing table and took from a parcel a new revolver and a packet of cartridges which he had probably bought at the worst time of his nervous breakdown. He carefully loaded every chamber, then took from the paper-rack a sheet of official paper and wrote the following:

“In the name of His Majesty the Kaiser! I have committed a serious offence and feel myself unworthy to exercise my office further, or to live any longer. I have condemned myself to the severest punishment, and in the next few minutes shall execute the same with my own hand. EYSENHARDT. Vienna, 10th June, 1901.”

Neither writing nor signature betrayed a trace of even the slightest nervousness. Next morning he was found dead.

A quite remarkable connection is described in this novel, and we must say that the author was well qualified to see the connection existing between that which transpires here in the ordinary consciousness and that which happens beneath the threshold of consciousness, that is, he could see the spiritual events in which man is entangled. Exoterically one only sees the happenings of the physical world: that the judge convicted Markus Freund, and so on. If that had not happened just at that time when the lawyer became confused and lost his memory, he would not have seen these threads of the spiritual world. They would not have revealed themselves to him; and all this would have remained subconscious. A novel such as this is sent out into the world from the following standpoint, so to speak. ‘There is certainly something behind life, which in certain special cases cannot but be recognised. But if one speaks of this people do not like it. It is uncomfortable to approach such realities. So it is related as a novel and then nobody need believe it; if it merely amuses people that is all right.’

Now, that which holds people off from the spiritual world is something of which they are not aware. The way into the spiritual world goes, as it were, in two directions. In the first we push aside the veil of nature and investigate that which lies behind the phenomena of external nature. In the second we push through the veil of our own soul life, and seek what lies behind that. The ordinary philosophers also seek to probe behind the basis of existence; they seek to solve the Cosmic riddle. But note—how do they do this? They either observe nature directly, or through experiments, and then think it over afterwards. But while one puzzles out these ideas acquired through the knowledge of nature, turning them over and over again in one's mind, and interlacing them, one does certainly arrive at a philosophy, but not at anything really connected with the true outer reality. We can never get behind the veil of existence by reflecting on that which presents itself in outer nature. I expressed this as follows, in a public lecture: ‘That which causes our eternal forces is active, in that it first produces in us the instrument with which we approach our ordinary consciousness.’ But if we are to build up our ordinary consciousness, we must use this instrument. When we enter the experience of ordinary consciousness, everything which the eternal forces make in us is already completed. Hence when through meditation we reach this stage we notice that we cannot penetrate the secrets of nature by means of reflection, but by quite different means. If, as I have described in my public lectures, we strengthen our thought through meditation, and the revelation of the spiritual world comes to us through grace, we then behold nature quite differently. Even human life itself has a different aspect then. We then approach nature, and while taking in any process or object or event that meets us, we have at the same time the consciousness, ‘Before you really see a rose, something else takes place.’ True, you first see the perception, the realisation; but that perception has first fashioned itself. Into the perception is inserted the spiritual; therein lies the memory, the memory of the previous thought. To get behind the secret in this way through spiritual research, that is the secret. The philosopher beholds the rose and then philosophises about it in his rejections. But he who wants to get behind the secret of the rose may not reflect, for if he does, nothing happens. He must behold the rose and be aware, that before it comes through to his sense consciousness, some process has already taken place. It appears to him as a memory which preceded the perception. The whole matter turns on this; that something like a memory transpires, which tells us: ‘I did this before I reached the sensible perception; so that as regards external nature a previous thinking has taken place although it remains subconscious, and then it is brought to the surface as a memory.’ One cannot penetrate the secrets of nature through afterthought, but through forethought. Just as little can one penetrate the secrets of that which fills the soul, in any other way than by really approaching that spectator, of whom I have often spoken. Note well, these are the ways by which we can enter the spiritual world to-day.

You will remember that in the novel a shred of the spiritual world reaches the perception of Hofrat Eysenhardt after he realised the processes of decay in himself, and this is a peculiar illustration of what I have brought forward in my lectures. When our thinking is so strengthened by our exercises that we can see the spiritual world, we are immediately confronted with the process of destruction, with that which is connected with death. The Mystics of all ages have expressed this by the phrase: ‘To approach the Gate of Death,’ that is, all that manifests as destruction in human life. And if we have really carried our meditation to that point where we attain the experience of Initiation, we experience this: ‘I stand at the Gate of Death. I know there is something in me which has prevailed since my birth or conception, which then concentrates itself and becomes the phenomenon of death, the confiscation of the physical body.’ One then makes reply: ‘But all that leads to death has come from the spiritual world. That which has come from the spiritual world has united itself with that which arises from the hereditary substance.’ We see a man standing here in the physical world and we say: ‘That which confronts us is his countenance, which speaks to us through his words, everything he does as physical man is the expression of what prepared itself in the spiritual world through his last death and birth. His soul being lives in this.’ And from the whole bearing of these considerations we can conclude: that part of the human soul which lives between death and rebirth attracts the forces out of the spiritual world in order to fashion man in this incarnation between birth and death, in order to build something which is just the man himself. And then it is really the case, that through meditating on the Will, there is evolved the germ which again goes through the gate of death, to prepare itself in the spiritual world for a next incarnation. Thus in man there lies this eternal process of growth. The psychic spiritual descends from the spiritual world and forms a man here, in whom arises, at first as a mere speck, that which now originates here in life as the germ, and this again goes through the gates of death in order to continue its evolution. So that when we have a man here, it is really evident that as he stands before us, he as man has been created from out of the spiritual world. With that provided by the parents there unites itself that which descends from the spiritual world. While he was in the spiritual world he was among the spiritual powers, just as here in the physical body he is among the forces of nature. He was among the spiritual forces, and with their help he prepared himself for this incarnation. When we see a man incarnate before us, it truly is as I have represented in the second Mystery Play, The Soul's Probation, that whole worlds of divine beings work in order to produce man. Between death and rebirth spiritual forces are operative in order to maintain man. Man here is the goal of certain spiritual forces which are active between death and rebirth. Now note: this leads to Spiritual Science, but it has always been known and brought to expression; for example, a man of note expressed what I have said over and over again, by saying: ‘Life in the human body is the ultimate aim of the Path of the Gods.’ He meant that when we are in the spiritual world, woven into the world of the Gods between death and rebirth, we prepare ourselves for our incarnation, for our body. That is the object of the Divine Path. He was unable, however to add the other sentence: ‘In the body a new beginning is prepared, which then again goes through death and leads to a new incarnation.’ This phrase, ‘The life in the body is the ultimate aim of the Divine Path,’ forms to a certain extent the leading motive of all the works written by Christoph Oetinger, a very noted man nearly a hundred years ago. He drew attention continually to the path that human knowledge and perception must take if it is to recognise these spiritual connections. What Anthroposophy really desires can already be found in the older Theosophists. But Oetinger wishes to present it in his own way. His editor uttered some beautiful words at the end of his preface, in 1847. He wanted to express that in former times men sought the spiritual path, but in their own way; but that the time would come, and was not far distant, in which that which one had really always sought, would be grasped with full scientific consciousness. His editor says: ‘The essential point is that when Theosophy becomes a real science and brings forth definite results, these will gradually become the universal conviction of humanity. Yet this rests in the bosom of the future, which we do not wish to anticipate.’ Thus spake Richard Rothe, the Heidelberg professor, in referring to the Theosophist, Christoph Oetinger, in November, 1847. What Spiritual Science strives for has already existed, but in another form. To-day it is necessary to find it in just the form most appropriate for our time. And as I have often said, ‘the thought of Natural Science has to-day reached a standpoint from which, out of the method of that science herself, the right scientific form must be sought for what lived in Theosophy of all times.’ And when Rothe, as the editor of Oetinger, says that what the latter implies ‘rests in the bosom of the future,’ we must remember that what in 1847 was the future has certainly matured into the present of our time. We are confronting time when we can prove—for it was but one example which I have brought before you to-day in the novel Hofrat Eysenhardt, by Alfred von Berger—that human souls are really ripe to approach the spiritual truths, but that they morally lack the courage to grasp them in reality.

I said that in two directions lies the path to the spiritual world, in which one can see behind the veil of nature. For those who are accustomed to think scientifically, and who merely have to raise their scientific thought to an inner instrument in the way described, why is it so difficult to make progress? Why? They say that there are limits to human knowledge! Ignorabimus! And why do they not wish to enter the spiritual world? Well, the reason for that lies beneath the threshold of their consciousness.

Within the sphere of consciousness so-called logical reasons are brought forward as to why man cannot enter the spiritual world. These arguments have long been known. But beneath these logical reasons is to be found the true inner reason: the fear of the spiritual world. This fear of the spiritual world holds people back, but they are not aware of it. If they could only acquaint themselves with the existence of this unconscious fear, and how everything that is brought forward in opposition is merely a mask, hiding the fear in its reality, they would become aware of many things. That is the one thing. The other is this: directly a man enters the spiritual world he is seized upon, just as we can grasp his thoughts here—he is seized by the Beings of the Higher Hierarchies. Man becomes, as it were, a thought in the spiritual world. Against this the soul inwardly struggles. It is frightened, terrified, and shrinks from being taken possession of by the spiritual world. Again a question of fear, a powerless terror of allowing itself to be laid hold of by the spiritual world, in the way in which at birth one is laid hold of by the physical forces. Thus, outer fear, and dread of a certain powerlessness to resist being seized by the spiritual world, this it is which holds men back from it. That is why they so often wish, as the author in this novel, to splash in the waves of the spiritual world, without—as I might say—binding themselves in any way. That is why they have not really the courage to draw too near to the spiritual world lest it should lay hold of them, as may truly happen through the inner experiments often described, just as the apprehension of the secrets of nature may come about through external experiments.

If to what has been said you apply what was brought forward in one of the public lectures concerning this connection between the forces of genius which appear in life, and premature death, brought about by man's body being taken from him, through a shell or some other cause on the battlefield—if, in connection with what has been said you remember that the forces of genius or of invention appear in man as the effect of those processes which occurred when he was deprived of his physical body, then there also you have something remaining beneath the threshold of consciousness. But in his courage, in the whole way in which a man offers himself up for some great event of the time, there lies an instinctive expression of something resting beneath the threshold of consciousness, and which is unable to reach his consciousness in its full significance. Nevertheless, in our time there is in human evolution an impulse to carry up to the threshold of consciousness what lies beneath it, so that man may know something of it. And when I point to the fact that even in the great events of our time, in all that transpires in full consciousness, especially in the events of this epoch, there lie significant subconscious processes—I mean this to be taken in the above-mentioned sense, for that which these events are inserting into the great connection of human will never be included in what the external historian can grasp of these present events. More than ever before does the subconscious play a part in the present happenings. And therefore the spiritual investigator is allowed to indicate that a time will come in the future when, in order to behold the present significant historical events in the right light of their Cosmic connections, we shall point to their spiritual background. With this in view the words with which we now always conclude will be more and more present to our souls:—

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.

We shall begin to-day by studying a Northern poem that we considered in this group some time ago. The whole content of this poem is connected with Christmas and the Christmas season. It treats of the Legend of Olaf Åsteson and contains the fact that Olaf Åsteson, a legendary person, passed the thirteen days between Christmas and the Day of Epiphany in a very unusual way. And we are reminded thereby how within the world of these Sagas there lives the perception of the primitive clairvoyance formerly existing in humanity. The story is the following: Olaf Åsteson reaches a church door one Christmas Eve and falls into a sort of sleep-like condition. And during these thirteen nights he experiences the secrets of the spiritual world; he experiences them in his own way, as a simple primitive child of nature. We know that during these days when in a sense the deepest outer darkness prevails over the earth, when the growth of vegetation is at its lowest ebb, when, in a sense, everything external in physical earth-life is at a standstill, that the earth-soul awakens and attains its fullest waking consciousness. Now, if a human soul mingles its spiritual nature with what the spirit of the earth then experiences, it can, if it still retains the primitive conditions of nature, rise to a vision of the spiritual world such as humanity as a whole must gradually re-acquire through its own efforts. We then see how this Olaf Åsteson actually experiences what we are able to bring from out of the spiritual world. For whether he says Brooksvalin and we say Kamaloka or soul-world and spiritual world, or whether we use different images to those of the Saga, is of no consequence. The chief thing is that we should perceive how humanity has proceeded in its soul evolution from an original primitive clairvoyance, from a state of union with the spiritual world, and that this had to be lost so that man could acquire that thinking, that conscious standing in the world through which he had to pass, and from and beyond which he must again develop a higher perception of the spiritual world. I might say that this spiritual world which the primitive clairvoyance has forsaken is the same in which the evolved perception again lives; but man has passed through a condition which now causes him to find his way into this spiritual world in a different manner. It is important to develop the feeling that in reality the inner spiritual psychic development of a spiritual psychic being is connected with the transformation of the earth at the different seasons of the year; a psychic spiritual being is connected with the earth as a man's soul with his physical being. And anyone who merely regards the earth as the geologists do, as that which the usual Natural Science of to-day in its materialistic attitude so easily explains, knows as much of this earth as one man knows of another, of whom he is given a model in papier-maché, and which is not filled with all that the soul pours into the external nature of man. External Science really only gives us a mere papier-maché image of the earth. And he who cannot become conscious that a psychic distinction prevails between the winter and summer conditions of the earth are like a man who sees no difference between waking and sleeping. Those great beings of nature in whom we live, undergo states of spiritual transformations as does man himself, who is a microcosmic copy of the great macrocosm. Nature and the experiencing of it, the spiritual living with it has a certain significance. And he who can evoke a consciousness that just during these thirteen nights something transpires in the soul of the earth which man can also experience, will have found one of the ways through which man can live more and more into the spiritual world. The feeling for this experience of what is lived through in the great Cosmic existence has been lost to humanity to-day. We hardly know any more of the difference between winter and summer than that in winter the lamps must be lit earlier, and that it is cold in winter and warm in summer. In earlier times humanity really lived together with nature, and expressed this by relating in pictorial fashion how beings traversed the land while the snow fell, and passed through the country when the storm raged but of this in its deepest sense the present-day materialistic mind of man understands nothing. Yet man may grow into this frame of mind again in the deepest sense, if he turns to what the old Sagas still relate, especially in as profound a myth as that of Olaf Åsteson, which shows in such a beautiful way how a simple primitive man, while losing his physical consciousness grows into the clear light of spiritual vision. We shall now bring this Saga before our souls, this Saga which belongs to bygone centuries; which has been lost, and has now been recorded again from the Folk-memories. It is one of the most beautiful of the Northern Sagas, for it speaks in a wonderful way of profound, Cosmic mysteries—in so far as the union of the human soul with the world-soul is a Cosmic mystery.

(The Legend was here recited.)

As we are able to meet here to-day, we may perhaps speak of a few things which may be useful to some of us when we look back to what have learnt through Spiritual Science in the course of the year. We know and this has lately been emphasised even in our public lectures—that at the back of what is visible to external perception as external man, there lies a spiritual kernel of man's being which in a sense is composed of two members. We have learnt to know the one as that which meets our spiritual vision on undergoing the experience usually designated as the “Approach to the Gate of Death”; the other member of the inner life appears before the human soul when we become aware that in all the experiences of our will there is an inner spectator, an onlooker, who is always present. Thus we can say: human thought, if we deepen it through meditation, shows us that in man there is always present in the innermost of his own spiritual being a something which, as regards the external physical body, works at the destruction of the human organism, a destruction which finally ends in death. We know from the considerations already put forward that the actual force employed in thinking is not of a constructive nature, but is rather, in a sense, destructive. Through our power of dying, through our so developing our organism in our life between birth and death that it can fall into decay and dissipate into the Cosmic elements, we are enabled to create the organ by means of which we develop thought, the noblest flower of physical human existence. But in the depths of a man's life between birth and death there is a kind of life-germ for the future which is especially adapted to progress through the gates of death; it is that which develops in the currents of Will and which can be regarded as the ‘spectator’ already characterised. It must continually be urged that what brings spiritual vision to the soul of man is not something which first develops through the spiritual vision itself, but something which is always present; it is always there, only man in our present epoch should not see it. This may be said, that one ought not to see it. For the evolution of the spiritual life has made much progress, especially in the last decades, so that anyone who really gives himself up to what in our materialistic age is designated ‘the spiritual life’ spreads a veil over that which lives in his inner nature. In our present age those concepts and ideas are chiefly developed which are best calculated to conceal what is present spiritually in man. In order to strengthen ourselves aright for our special task, we who follow Spiritual Science may point, just at this significant season, to the particularly dark side of present-day spiritual life, which must indeed exist, just as the darkness in external nature must also exist; but which we must perceive and of the existence of which we must become aware. We are living through a relatively dark period of civilisation in regard to the spiritual life. We need not constantly repeat that in no wise do we undervalue the enormous conquests of which—in this epoch of darkness, mankind is so proud. Nevertheless with regard to spiritual things the fact remains that those concepts and ideas which are created in our epoch, absolutely conceal that which lives in the souls of men—especially from those who immerse themselves most earnestly in these ideas. In reference to this the following may be mentioned. Our epoch is specially proud of its clear thinking, acquired through its important scientific training. Our age is very proud of itself. Of course not so proud as to lead all men to want to think a great deal: no, its pride does not lead to that. But it results in this, that people say: ‘In our epoch we must think a great deal if we want to know anything of the spiritual world.’ To do the necessary thinking oneself is very difficult. But that is the task of the theologians. They can ruminate on these things. Thus, our epoch is supposed to be very highly evolved and is exalted above the dark age of belief in authority; and so we must listen to the theologians, who are able to think about spiritual things. Our epoch has also progressed with respect to the concept of right and wrong, of good and evil. Our epoch is the epoch of thought. But in spite of this advance from the belief in authority, it has not led each man to think more deeply on right and wrong; the lawyers do that. And therefore because we have got beyond the epoch of belief in authority we must leave it to the enlightened lawyers to think over what is good and evil, right or wrong. And with reference to bodily conditions, to bodily cures, because we do not know what is healthy or unhealthy in this epoch which desires to be so free from belief in authority, we go to the doctors. This could be exemplified in all domains. Our epoch is not much inclined to despair, as was Faust, thus:

‘I have studied, alas! Philosophy
And Jurisprudence and Medicine too.
And saddest of all Theology!
With ardent labour through and through!
And here I stick, as wise, poor fool!
As when my steps first turned to school.’

One thing results: our age actually refuses to know anything of the things which perplexed Faust, but desires to know all the more of those things already clearly cognised in the many different departments in which the weal and woe of humanity are decided. Our epoch is so terribly proud of its thinking, that those who have brought themselves to read a little Philosophy in the course of their lives—I will not go so far as to say they have read Kant, but merely some commentary on Kant—are now convinced that anyone who asserts anything about the spiritual world in the sense of Spiritual Science, sins against the undeniable facts established by Kant. It has often been said that the whole work of the Nineteenth Century has been directed to developing human thought and investigating it by means of critical knowledge. And many to-day call themselves ‘critical thinkers’ who have only taken in a little. Many men to-day, for instance, assert that man's knowledge is limited, for he perceives the outer world through his senses; yet these senses can merely yield what they produce through themselves. Thus man perceives the world by its effects on his senses, therefore he cannot get behind the things of the world, for he can never transcend the limit of his senses! He can only receive pictures of reality. And many, speaking from the depths of their philosophy, say: ‘The human soul has only pictures of the world;’ and thus it can never arrive at the ‘Thing in Itself.’ One may thus compare what we obtain through our senses, our eyes, ears, etc.—to pictures in a mirror. Certainly, if a mirror is there and throws back pictures, the image of one man, the image of a second man, etc., and we behold them, we have then a world of images. Then come the philosophers, and say: ‘Just as anyone who sees a man, or two in a mirror, in a reflected image, has a picture world of his own, and as he does not behold the “Thing in Itself,” the man, but merely his image, so we really have only images of the whole external world, when the rays of light and colour strike the eye, and the waves of air strike our ear, we have only images. All are images! Our critical epoch has resulted in this: that man forms nothing but images in his soul, and can never through these images reach to the “Thing in Itself.”’

Infinite sagacity (I now speak in full earnestness) has been applied by Philosophy in the Nineteenth Century in order to prove that man merely has images and can never reach the ‘Thing in Itself.’ What is really the origin of this critical resignation, of this passivity as regards the ‘limitations of our knowledge,’ when we thus discover the image nature of our perception? Whence does it originate? It arises from the fact that in many ways the thought of our epoch, of our enlightened age, is devoid of truth, and short sighted. Our thinking throws out an idea in a pedantic fashion and cannot get beyond it. It holds up this idea like a wooden mannequin and can no longer find anything which is not given by the mannequin. It is almost incredible how rigid thought has become in our time. I shall just make clear to you, by means of the same comparison of the reflected image, the whole story of this image nature of our perception, and of what the so-called critical progressive thought has produced. It is quite a correct premise that the world, as man has it here in sense existence, is only here because it impresses itself on man and throws up images in his soul. And it is well that humanity should have reached this point, through the critical philosophy of Kant. We are well able to say: The images we have of the outer world are such that we can compare them with images of the two men in a mirror. Thus, we have a mirror and two men stand before it. We do not see the men but their pictures. We thus have images of the world through what our souls know of the outer world. We have images which we compare with the two men whose reflected pictures we behold. But some one who had never seen men, but only images, would be able to philosophise thus: ‘I know nothing of the men, but their lifeless images.’ Thus conclude the critical philosophers. And with this conclusion they remain satisfied. They would find themselves refuted in their own being, if they could get a little further away from their mannequin of thought, out of the dead into the living thought. For, if I am in front of a mirror in which are reflected two men, and I see in it that the one strikes the other so that he is wounded, I should be a fool to say: ‘The one mirror-image has struck the other.’ For I no longer see merely the image in the mirror, but through the image I see real events. I have nothing but the image, but I see an absolutely real occurrence through the mirror image. And I should be a fool to believe that that only took place in the mirror. Thus: critical philosophy seizes the one thought that we have to deal with images, but not the other thought, that these images express the facts of something living. And if we grasp these images in a living way, they give more than pictures, for they point to the ‘Thing in Itself,’ which is the real outer world.

Can one still say that the people who produce this ‘Critical Philosophy’ really think? Thought is to a great extent lacking in our time. It is really at a stand-still. And we have stood still at this ‘Criticising of Thought.’ I have often mentioned that this criticism, this critical philosophy, has even progressed in our culture, and that a man making a noble effort (they are all honourable men and their efforts entirely praiseworthy) has produced a certain ‘Criticism of Language.’ Fritz Mauthner has written a ‘Criticism of Language’ in three thick volumes, and even a philosophical dictionary written from this standpoint, in two still thicker volumes. And Mauthner, himself a journalist, has a whole journalistic train of followers, who naturally regard it as a great work. And in our time, in which ‘Belief in Authority’ is supposed to be of no importance, very many who have reached that standpoint, consider it a significant work, as does even the press for which Fritz Mauthner wrote; for to-day ‘there exists no belief in authority!’

Now, Mauthner finally explains how man actually forms nouns, adjectives, etc., but says they all signify nothing real. In the outer world one does not experience what words signify. Man so lives himself into words that we really do not have his thoughts and soul images, but merely words, words, words. Humanity finds itself entangled in the language which gives him his vocabulary. And because he is accustomed to attach himself to the language, he only reaches the symbol of things as given in words! Now, that is supposed to be something very significant. And if one reads these three volumes by Mauthner, and if you have something to reproach yourself with, it is a good penance to read half of them! Then one finds that their author is profoundly convinced—indeed one cannot put it otherwise—that he is cleverer than all the clever men of his time. Of course a man who judges of his own book is naturally cleverer than the others. So Fritz Mauthner finally concludes that man has nothing but signs, signs, signs. Indeed, he goes still further. He goes so far as to say the following: Man has eyes, ears, sense of touch, etc., that is, a collection of sense organs. And in Mauthner's opinion man might have not only organs of sight, hearing, touch, taste, but quite different senses. For instance, he might have another sense besides the eye. He would then perceive the world quite differently with this sense from what he does by receiving pictures through the eyes. Then much would exist for him which is not perceptible to the ordinary man. And now this critical thinker feels a little mystically inclined, and says: “The immeasurable fullness of the world is conveyed to us only through our senses.” And he calls these senses ‘Accidental Senses,’ because in his opinion it is a Cosmic accident that we should have just these very senses. If we had other senses the world would appear differently. Thus it is best to say: “We have accidental senses! Thus an accidental world!” Yet he says the world is immeasurable!—It sounds beautiful. One of the followers of Fritz Mauthner has written a brochure called Scepticism and Mysticism. In this special attention is drawn to the fact that man may even become a mystic in the depths of his soul, when he no longer believes what these accidental senses can give. A beautiful sentence is given us on the twelfth page of this book.

‘The world pours down on us; through the few miserable openings of our accidental senses we take in what we can grasp, and fasten it to our old vocabulary, since we have nothing else to retain it with. But the world streams further, our language also streams on further, only not in the same direction, but according to the accident of language, which is subject to no laws.’

Another philosophy! What does it want to do? It says: The world is immeasurable, but we have merely a number of accidental senses into which the world streams. What do we do with what thus streams in? What do we do according to this gentleman's doctrine of accidents? We remind ourselves of what he calls memory. We fasten that on to the words transmitted to us through our language, and the language then streams on again further. Thus what streams to us from the immeasurable Cosmic Being through our accidental senses, we speak of in our word-symbols. A sagacious thought. I repeat it in all earnestness. It is a sagacious thought. One must be a clever man in our age to think thus. And it can really be said of these people that not only are they all honourable and praiseworthy; ‘they are also remarkable thinkers.’ But they are entangled in the thought of our epoch, and have no will to transcend it.

I have experienced a kind of Christmas sadness—one cannot call it joy for it has become grief, through having once more to consider certain of these matters in this connection. And I have written down a thought, formed exactly after the style of the above thinker who wrote what has just been read. I have applied exactly the same thought to another object with the following results: ‘Goethe's genius is poured on to the paper. With the few miserable forms of its accidental letters the paper takes up what it can, and lets itself express what it can take up with its old store of letters, since there is nothing else to express it with. But Goethe's genius streams on further, the writing on the paper also streams on further, not only in the same direction, but according to the accidents in which letters can group themselves, being subject to no laws.’ It is exactly the same thought, and due regard has been given to each single word. If one maintains that: ‘the immeasurable Cosmos pours down to us, and we take it up with our few accidental senses, as well as we are able, and fix it into our vocabulary: the Cosmos then streams on further, while language streams in another direction, according to the accidents of the history of language, and thus human perception flows on.’ Then this is exactly the same thought as if one said: ‘Goethe's genius flows through the twenty-three accidental letters, because the paper can only receive things in that way. But Goethe's genius is never within them, for it is immeasurable. The accidental letters cannot take that up. They stream on further. What is on the paper also streams on further and groups itself according to the formations possible to the letters, the laws of which cannot be perceived.’ If now these extremely clever gentlemen conclude from such suppositions that what comes to us in the world is merely the result of accidental senses, that we can never get to what really underlies the world in its depths—that is the same as thinking that in reality one can never reach that which lived in the genius of Goethe. For they make it clear—that of this genius nothing exists but the grouping of twenty-three accidental letters. Nothing else is there! These gentlemen have a precisely similar thought, only they are not aware of it. And there is just as much sense in saying: ‘One can never know anything at all of Goethe's genius, for you see that nothing of it can flow to you. You can have nothing but what the different grouping of twenty-three accidental signs can give.’ There is just as much sense in this as in the discussion on the Cosmos that these men bring forth, concerning the possibility or impossibility of Cosmic knowledge. There is just as much sense in this whole train of thought—which is not the thinking of simpletons—but the thinking of those who are really the clever men of to-day, but who do not wish to raise themselves above the thought of our epoch.

The matter has, however, really another aspect. We must be clear that this manner of thinking, which meets us in the example in which it determines the limitations of knowledge, is our own mode of thought in the present age. It prevails, and is to be found everywhere to-day. And whether you read this or that apparently philosophical book intended to solve the great riddles of the universe—or disguise them—or whether you read the newspaper, this style of thinking is everywhere prevalent. Its methods dominate the world. We drink it in to-day with our morning coffee. More and more daily journals appear with such opinions. And in the whole web of our social life this same manner of thought prevails. I have attempted to expose this thinking in its philosophical development, but it could also be traced in those thoughts which one evolves in every possible relation in life, in everything man reflects upon, this thinking prevails to-day. And this is the cause of man's inability to evolve the will to experience in its reality what, for example, Spiritual Science seeks to give. For Spiritual Science is not incomprehensible to true thinking. But what it has to give must naturally always remain incomprehensible to those men who are built after the pattern of Fritz Mauthner. And the majority of men are fashioned thus to-day. Our contemporary science is absolutely permeated through and through with this thinking. Nothing is here implied against the significance and the great achievements of Science. That is not the point, the essential question is how the soul lives in our age, in our present civilisation. Our age is utterly lacking in the power of fluidic thought, unable really to follow what must be followed if these thoughts are to grasp what Spiritual Science has to impart.

Now we can ask ourselves: ‘How does it come about that such a book as Gustav Landauer's Scepticism and Mysticism can be written, when it simply oozes with self-complacency?’ I might say that the reader himself beams with the whole tone of self-satisfaction within it, as one does on reading Mauthner's Criticism of Language or the article in the Philosophical Dictionary. How is this? One does not learn how this comes about by following the thinking. I can imagine very clever men reading such a book and saying: ‘That is a thoroughly clever man!’ They would be right, for Mauthner is indeed a clever man. But that is not the point; for cleverness expresses itself by a man forming in a certain logical manner those ideas of which he is capable, turning them one after the other into nonsense, and reconstructing them again in some fashion. One may be very clever in some branch or other, and possess a really right sort of cleverness, but if one enters a life which is permeated with the consciousness of spiritual knowledge, then with each step there develops such a relation to the world that one has the feeling: ‘You must go further and further. You must perfect your ideas each day. You must develop the belief that your ideas can lead you further and further.’ One has the feeling that the cleverness of the man who had written such a book is of the following nature: ‘I am clever and through my cleverness I have accomplished something definite. I will now write that in a book. That which I now am I shall inscribe in a book, for I am clever on this the 21st of December, 1915. The book must be finished and will reproduce my cleverness.’ One who really knows never has that feeling. He has the feeling of a continual evolution, of an eternal necessity to refine one's ideas, and to evolve higher. And he certainly no longer has the feeling: ‘On this 21st of December, 1915, I am clever; now, through my cleverness I shall write a book that will be finished in the course of months or years.’ For if he has written a book he truly does not look back to the cleverness which he had when he began to write it, but through the book he acquires the feeling: ‘How little I have really accomplished in the matter and how necessary it is for me to evolve further what I have written.’ This ‘journeying along the path of knowledge,’ this constant inner labour, is almost entirely unknown to our materialistic age; it believes it knows it, but in reality it knows it no longer. And the deepest reason for this can be clothed in the words: ‘These men are so excessively vain.’ Man is tremendously vain, for, as I said, such a book really oozes with vanity. It is clever, but terribly vain. The humility, the modesty, that results from such a path of knowledge as has been laid down, is utterly lacking to these men. It must be utterly lacking when a man unconditionally ascribes cleverness to himself on this 21st December, 1915. Humility must be lacking. Now you will say: ‘These people must be stupid if they regard themselves as clever.’ But they do not consider themselves stupid with the surface consciousness, but with the subconsciousness. They never learn to distinguish between the truth which lives in the subconsciousness, and what they ascribe to themselves on the surface, and thus it is the Luciferic nature which really urges the men of to-day to desire to be clever, to attain a definite standpoint of cleverness, and from this point to consider and judge everything. But when a man bears this Luciferic nature within him, then, while he beholds the external world with Lucifer he is led to Ahriman. He then naturally sees this outer world materialistically in our epoch, quite naturally he looks at it in a materialistic manner. For when a man with Lucifer in his nature begins to contemplate the world, he then meets Ahriman. For these two seek each other out in man's intercourse with this world. Therefore such radically vain thinking never reaches the possibility of this conviction, ‘if I use a word, I naturally use merely a symbol for that which the word signifies.’ Mauthner made the great discovery that no substantives exist. There are none. They are no reality. Of course not. We grasp certain phenomena, think of them rightly for a moment and call them substantives. Certainly substantives are not reality: neither are adjectives. That is quite understood. That is all true: but now if I join a substantive and an adjective together, if I bring speech into movement, it then expresses reality. Then what the image represents transcends the image. Single words are no reality in themselves, we do not, however, speak in single words, but in groups of words. And in these we have an immediate presence within the reality. Three volumes have to be written to-day, and a two-volumed dictionary added, in order to expound all these things to man by means of thoughts of infinite cleverness, which simply overlook the fact that although single words are only symbols, the connecting of several into groups is nevertheless not merely symbolical, but forms part of the reality. Infinite wisdom, infinite cleverness is to-day used to prove the greatest errors.

Now, finally, that such errors should be manifest in a criticism of speech or even in a criticism of thought, is not in itself so bad, but the same kind of thought expressed in these errors—in these very intelligent and clever mistakes—lives in the whole thought of our present-day humanity. If we do but grasp the task which is comprised in our spiritual movement, it really forms part of it that we should become conscious of the necessity for those who wish to be Spiritual Scientists, to look at their era in the right way, and really place themselves in the right attitude to it. So that really, I might say: the practical side of our spiritually scientific movement demands that we should seek to transcend that thinking which answers to the above description, and not follow along those lines of thought, but try to alter them. We shall immediately approach the understanding of Spiritual Science with the simplicity of children if we only remove those hindrances which have entered the spiritual life of the civilisation of our present age through the stiffened and petrified forms of thought. Everywhere we should lay aside in our own souls that belief in authority which to-day appears under the mask of freedom. That should form part of the practical life of our Spiritual Science. And it will become more and more necessary that there should be at least a few people who really see the facts as they are and as they have been characterised to-day—and not only see them, but take them in real earnestness all through life. This is the essential. One need not display this externally, but much can be done if only a small number of persons will organise their lives—in whatever position they may occupy, in accordance with these explanations.

We can see in one definite respect how absolutely our age demands that we should again make our thinking alive. Let us briefly place before our souls something that we have often considered. In the beginning of our era that Being whom we have frequently characterised, the Christ Being, took on the life of a human being and united Himself with the earth aura. Through this there was given to the earth, for the first time, the right purpose for its further evolution, after it had been lost through the Luciferic temptation. The Event of Golgotha took place. The Evangelists, who were seers, though for the most part seers in the old style, have described this Event. Paul also described this Mystery of Golgotha;—Paul saw the Christ spiritually through the event of Damascus. His seership was different from that of the Evangelists. As a result of these descriptions a number of men united their souls with the Christ-Event. Through this connection of single individuals with the Christ-Event Christianity was spread abroad. At first it lived beneath the earth; so that in reality the following picture may continually appear in our souls: In ancient Rome, beneath the earth, those who had grasped the Mystery of Golgotha with their souls, maintained their Divine Service. Above, the civilisation and culture of the age, then at its summit, was carried on. Several centuries passed; that which was formerly carried on below in the catacombs, concealed and despised, now fills the world. And the civilisation of that time, the old Roman intellectual culture has disappeared. Christianity is spread abroad. But now the time has come when men have begun to think, when they have become clever, and free from authority. Thinkers have appeared who have examined the Evangelists. Honourable and clever thinkers: they are all worthy of honour. They have concluded that there is no historical testimony in the Gospels. They have studied them for decades, with earnest and critical labour, and they have come to the conclusion that there is no actual historical testimony in the Gospels, that Christ Jesus never lived at all. Nothing is to be said against this critical labour: it is industrious. Whoever knows it, knows of its industry and of its cleverness. There is no reason to despise lightly this critical wisdom. But what does it imply? What is at the bottom of it all? This: that humanity does not in the least see the point of importance! Christ Jesus did not intend to make things so easy for men that subsequent historians should arise and comfortably verify His existence on the earth as simply and easily as the existence of Frederick the Great may be verified. Christ did not wish to make things so easy as that for men—nor even would it have been right for Him to do so. As true as is the fact that this critical labour on the Gospels is clever and industrious, so true also is it that the existence of Christ may never be proved in that way, for that would be a materialistic proof. In everything that man can prove in external fashion, Ahriman plays a part. But Ahriman may never meddle with the proof as to Christ. Therefore there exists no historical proof. Humanity will have to recognise this: although Christ lived on the earth, yet He must be found through inner recognition, not through historical documents. The Christ-Event must come to humanity in a spiritual manner, and therefore no materialistic investigations of truth, nothing materialistic may intervene in this.

The most important event of the earth evolution can never be proved in a materialistic manner. It is as if through Cosmic history humanity were told: Your materialistic proofs, that which you still desire above all in your materialistic age, is only of value for what exists in the field of matter. For the spiritual you should not and may not have materialistic proof. Thus those may even be right who destroy the old historical documents. Just in reference to the Christ-Event it must be understood in our epoch that one can only come to the Christ in a spiritual way. He will never truly be found by external methods. We may be told that Christ exists, but to find Him really is only possible in a spiritual manner. It is important to consider that in the Christ-Event we have an occurrence concerning which all who will not admit of spiritual knowledge must live in error. It is extraordinary that certain people go wild when one utters what I have just said: that the Christ can be known by spiritual means—thus that which is historical can be recognised spiritually—certain people affirm that it really is not possible; no matter who says it, it cannot be true! I have repeatedly drawn your attention to this fact.

Now, our worthy Anthroposophical members still let many things leak out here and there in unsuitable places because they do not always retain this in their hearts, nor give forth in the right way what they have in their hearts. For instance, a person was told—this reached him in a special form—(this is certainly a personal remark, but perhaps I may make it this once), he was told that I had said that personally, as regards my youthful development, I did not begin with the Bible, but started from Natural Science, and that I considered it as of special importance that I had adopted this spiritual path, and had been really convinced of the inner truth of what stands in the Bible before I had ever read it; for I was then certain of it when I had read the Bible externally; that I had thus proved in myself that the contents of the Bible can be found in a spiritual manner before finding it subsequently in an external manner.

This has no value because of its personal character, but it may serve as an illustration. Now that came in an unseemly way to a man who could not understand that anything of the sort is possible, for he (pardon the word) is a theologian. He could not understand it. Since he wanted to make this matter clear in a lecture to his audience he did so in the following way. He read in a book that I once assisted at Mass. (These assistants are boys who give external help at the Mass.) Then he said to himself: ‘whoever assisted at Mass cannot possibly have been ignorant of the Bible. He overlooks the fact that he learnt to know the Bible there. Later on these things come back to him, from his Bible knowledge.’ Yes but there is indeed a plan in all this. In the first place the whole story is untrue, but people to-day do not object to quoting a fact which is untrue. In the second place, the assistants at Mass never learn the Bible but the Mass-book, which has nothing to do with the Bible. But the essential is to attend to this: the man could not conceive that a spiritual relation exists, he could only imagine that one comes through the letters of the alphabet, to the spiritual hanging on to them. It is very important for us to know these things and to have practical knowledge of them. For our spiritual movement will never be able to thrive until we really—not merely externally but in the very depths of our soul—find the courage to enter into everything connected with the whole meaning and significance of our conception of the world. And with reference to this uniting oneself with the spiritual world a critical situation has really arisen just in our time. The very men who regard themselves as the most enlightened feel themselves least united with the spiritual world. This is not stated as a reproach or criticism but as a fact. It is, therefore, especially important in our time to arouse an inner understanding for such significant Cosmic symbols as meet us in everything which surrounds the mystery of Christmas. For this can unite itself very deeply with a man's nature without the help of letters or learning. We must be able to make the Christmas Mystery alive in every situation in life, particularly in our own soul.

While we awaken this Mystery in our souls we look up and say: ‘Christmas reminds us of the descent of Christ Jesus on to the earth plane, and of the rebirth of that in man which was lost to him through the Luciferic temptation.’ This rebirth occurs in different stages. One stage is that within which we ourselves stand. That which for the sake of further evolution had to be lost—the feeling in the human heart of union with the spiritual world: ‘the birth of Christ within us’ is only another word for it—that has to be born again. Just that, which we desire and ever strive for, is intimately connected with this Christmas Mystery. And we should not merely regard this Christmas Mystery as that day of the year on which we fix up our Christmas tree, and, beholding it, take into ourselves all sorts of edification, but we should look upon it as something present in our whole existence, appearing to us in all that surrounds us.

As a symbol I should like in conclusion to present something which a remarkable poet, who died many years ago, wrote of his feeling about Christmas.

‘Our Church celebrates various Festivals which penetrate our hearts. One can hardly conceive anything more lovable than Whitsuntide or more earnest and holy than Easter. The sadness and melancholy of Passion week and the solemnity of that Sunday accompany us through life. The Church celebrates one of the most beautiful Festivals, the Festival of Christmas, almost in mid-winter, during the longest nights and shortest days, when the Sun shines obliquely across our land, and snow covers the plains. As in many countries the day before the Festival of the Birth of our Lord is called the Christmas Eve, with us it is called the Holy Evening; the following day is the Holy Day and the night intervening the Sacred Eve. The Catholic Church celebrates Christmas Day, the Day of the Birth of the Saviour, with the greatest solemnity. In most regions the hour of midnight is sacred to the hour of the Birth of the Lord, and kept with impressive nocturnal solemnity, to which the bells call one through the quiet solemn air of the dark mid-winter night, and to which the inhabitants go, with lanterns along the well-known paths, from the snow mountains and through the bare forests, hurrying through the orchards to the church, which with its lighted windows dominates the wooded village with the peasants' houses’ (Adalbert Stifter, Berg Kristall). He then describes what the Christ Festival is to the children and further, how in the old and isolated village there lived a cobbler who took a wife out of the neighbouring village, not out of his own; how the children of this couple learnt to know Christmas as was customary there. That is; someone said to them ‘The Holy Christ has brought you this gift,’ and when they were sufficiently tired of the presents, they were put to bed, very tired, and did not hear the midnight bells. These children had thus never yet heard the midnight bells. Now they often visited the neighbouring village. As they grew up and were able to go out alone they visited their grandmother there. The grandmother was especially fond of the children, as is often the case. Grandparents are often more devoted to the children than the parents. The grandmother liked to have the children with her, as she was too frail to go out. One Christmas Eve, which promised to be fine, the children were sent over to their grandmother. The children went over in the morning and were to return in the afternoon to follow the custom of the country, calling at the different villages, and were then to find the Christmas tree at home in the evening. But the day turned out different from what was expected. The children were overtaken by a terrible snowstorm. They wandered over the mountains, lost their way, and in the midst of a dreadful snowstorm they reached a trackless country.

What the children went through is very beautifully described; how during the night they saw a phenomenon of nature. It is desirable to read you the passage, for one cannot relate it as beautifully as it is described there. Each word is really important. They reached an ice field on a glacier. They heard behind them the crackling of the glacier in the night. You may imagine what an impression that makes on the children. The story continues:

Even before their very eyes something began to develop. As the children sat thus a pale light blossomed in the sky, in the centre underneath the stars, and formed a delicate arch through them. It had a greenish shimmer which moved gently downwards. But the arch became clearer and clearer until the stars withdrew and faded away before it. It even sent a reflection into other regions of the sky, a pale green light, which moved and coated gently among the stars. Then arose sheaves of various lights above the arch, like the spikes of a crown, and they flamed. The neighbouring spaces of the heavens were flooded with light, gently scintillating, and traversing long stretches of the heavens in delicate quiverings. Had the “storm-substance” of the sky so expanded through the snowfall that it flowed out in these silent glorious streams of light, or was it some other cause in unfathomable nature? Gradually the whole became fainter and fainter, the sheaves becoming extinguished first, until slowly and imperceptibly it all became fainter and nothing remained in the sky but the hosts of simple stars.

The children sat thus through the night. They heard nothing of the bells beneath. They had only snow and ice around them in the mountains and the stars and the phenomena of the night above them. The night drew to a close. People grew anxious about them. The whole village set out to find them. They were found and brought home. I can omit the rest and merely say that the children were almost stiff with cold, were put to bed and told that they should receive their Christmas gifts later. The mother went to the children, which is related as follows:

‘The children were confused by all this agitation. They had been given something to eat and were put to bed. Towards evening, when they recovered a little, while certain neighbours and friends gathered in the sitting-room and spoke of the event, the mother went into the bedroom and sat on Sanna's bed, caressing her. Then the little maid said: “Mother, while I sat on the mountain to-night, I saw the Holy Christ.”’

This is a beautiful presentation. The children had grown up without any instruction about the Christmas Festival. They had to pass Christmas Eve in that terrible situation, up above on the mountains, amid snow and ice, with only the stars above them, and this phenomenon of nature. They were discovered, brought back to the house, and the little maid said: ‘Mother, I have seen the Holy Christ to-night.’ ‘I have seen the Holy Christ.’ Seen Him! She had seen Him, so she said.

There lies a deeper meaning in this when it is said—as we have continually emphasised in our Spiritual Science, that Christ is not only to be found where we find Him, in the evolution of the earth epoch, historically inserted into the beginning of our era, where civilisation shows Him to us, but He is to be found everywhere! Especially when we are confronted with the world at the most serious moments of our life. We can surely find the Christ then. And we ourselves, we spiritual disciples, as I might say, can find Him, if we are only sufficiently convinced that all our efforts must be directed to the rebirth of the spiritual in the development of mankind, and that this spiritual, which must be born through a special activity of the souls and hearts of men, is based on the foundation of what was born into the earth's evolution through the Mystery of Golgotha. That is something which we must realise at this season. If you can find during the days of which we have spoken to-day, and which are now approaching, a correct inner feeling of the evolving and weaving of external earth existence in its similarity with the sleeping and waking of man; if you can experience a deeper communion with external events, you will then feel more and more the truth of the words ‘Christ is here.’ As He Himself said: ‘I am with you always, unto the end of the earth epochs!’

And He is ever to be found, if we only seek Him. That thought should strengthen us, and invigorate us at this Christmas Festival if we celebrate it in this sense. Let us carry away these thoughts which may help us to find that which we have to regard as the real content, the real depth of our spiritual scientific efforts.

May we bring to this epoch of ours a soul so strengthened that we can place ourselves in the right attitude to it, as we now desire to do. Thus let us turn from the general consideration we have brought forward concerning the spiritual world, to the feeling of strengthening that can come to us from these considerations—strengthening for our soul.

Now let us turn our attention to those on the fields where the great events of our time are taking place:

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.