The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Today's lecture is to deal with the conditions that we must fulfill if we want to develop the forces and faculties slumbering within us and come to an experience and observation of the higher worlds. In the articles in the Journal “Lucifer-Gnosis” How does one attain knowledge of the Higher Worlds? [Now in book form], you have a picture of much that a human being has to fulfill when treading the path of knowledge, when wishing to press up into the higher worlds.

You remember the indications that were given in the interpretation of Goethe's Fairy Tale. We are concerned with the fact that human beings have soul forces of various kinds, and that from their development—that is, of thinking as such, of feeling as such, and of willing as such—depends our ascent on the one hand, and on the other hand our need to bring these into the right proportion by means of exercises. Willing, feeling and thinking must always be brought to development in exactly the right measure in knowledge of the different goals of spiritual life. For a definite goal, willing, for example, must step back, while feeling must come more strongly to the fore; for another goal, thinking must retreat, and again for another goal, feeling. All these soul forces must be perfected through occult exercises in the right proportion. The ascent into the higher worlds is connected with the development of thinking, feeling and willing.

Above all, it is a matter of refining and purifying thinking. That is necessary in order that thinking may no longer depend on the external sense-perceptions that can be gained on the physical plane. Yet, not only thinking but also feeling and the will can become forces of knowledge. In ordinary life, they go on personal paths; sympathy and antipathy take their way in accord with the individual personality, yet they can become, forces of knowledge. This may sound unbelievable for modern science! One can believe it more easily of thinking, especially of the descriptive thinking directed to sense-observation, but how can people admit that feeling can become a source of knowledge when they see how one person feels so, and another feels so, about the same things?

How can one admit that anything so vacillating, so dependent on personality as sympathy and antipathy can become an authority for knowledge and can be so far disciplined that they could grasp the innermost nature of a thing? That thought does so can be easily understood, but that when we confront something, and it arouses a feeling in us, this feeling can be of such a nature that not personal sympathy or antipathy speaks, but that feeling itself can become a means of expression for the inmost being of the thing—that seems hardly credible! And further, that the force of will and desire can also become means of expression for the inner nature—that above all, seems simply frivolous.

In the same way, however, as thinking can be purified and become objective, and hence a means of expressing facts in both the sense-world and the higher worlds, so, too, can feeling and willing become objective. Yet, there must be no misunderstanding. Feeling, as it exists in the ordinary life of modern man—in its direct content of feeling, does not become a means of expression of a higher world. This type of feeling is personal. The object of the occult exercises received by the student is to train feeling, alter and transform it, so that it becomes different from what it was when it was still personal. Yet, when a certain stage has been reached on the occult path through the development of feeling, one must not believe that one can state with knowledge: I have a being before me, and I feel something of this being—not that what one has there in feeling is a truth, a piece of knowledge.

The process that transforms feeling by way of occult exercises is a much more intimate and inward one. One who has changed feelings through exercises comes to Imaginative knowledge, so that a spiritual content reveals itself in symbols. The facts or beings of the astral world express themselves by symbols. Feeling becomes something different; it becomes Imagination, and astral pictures light up that express what is taking place in astral space. One does not see as one sees a rose, for instance, in the physical world with its color; one sees in symbolic pictures, and in fact, all that is brought before us in occult science is seen in pictures. The black cross with the wreath of roses and all such symbols are to bring to expression a definite fact, and they correspond just as much to astral facts as what we see in the physical world corresponds to physical facts. One therefore develops feeling, but knows in Imagination. And it is just the same with the will.

When one has reached the stage that can be reached to a certain extent through occult training, then if a being confronts one, one does not say, “It awakens in me a power of desire,” but one begins to perceive the nature of sound in Devachan.

Feeling is developed in us and astral vision in Imagination is the result. Will is developed in us, and the result is the experience of what comes about in devachanic spiritual music, the sphere-harmony from which there streams to us the inmost nature. Just as one perfects thinking and attains to objective thinking, which is the first step, so does one develop feeling, and a new world will emerge at the stage of Imagination. In the same way, one trains willing and there results in Inspiration the knowledge of Lower Devachan, until at length in Intuition there opens before us the world of Higher Devachan.

We can say, therefore, that as we lift ourselves to the next stage of existence, we are presented with pictures, but pictures that we cannot use as we use our thoughts. We do not ask, “How do these pictures correspond to reality?” Things are clothed in pictures of form and color, and through Imagination we must ourselves “unriddle” the beings who are showing themselves to us in symbols. In Inspiration, the things speak to us. There, we need not question nor try to find a solution in ideas that would be a carrying-over of the theory of knowledge from the physical plane. Rather, the inmost being of the thing itself speaks to us. When a human being confronts us, expressing his or her inmost nature to us, it is different from when we stand before a stone. We have to "unriddle" the stone and ponder about it.

With people, it is different; we experience their being in what they say to us. That is how it is in Inspiration. There, in Inspiration, it is not an abstract discursive thinking, but one listens to what the things say; they themselves express their being! It would have no meaning for someone to say, “When someone dies and I meet him again in Devachan, shall I know whom I meet?” For devachanic beings must look different and cannot be compared with what is on the physical plane. In Devachan, the being itself says what being it is, as if human beings should tell us not only their names but also let their natures flow out to us continually. That streams to us through the sphere-music and a non-recognition is not possible.

Now this is a certain opportunity for answering a question. Misunderstandings can very easily arise through the various theosophical presentations, and one can easily think that the physical, the astral and devachanic worlds are distinguished from one another spatially. We know, in fact, that where the physical world is, there is also the astral and the devachanic—they are in one another. Now the question could be asked, “Well, if everything is in one another, I cannot distinguish them as in physical space, where everything is side by side! If the ‘other side’ is in ‘this side’ how do I distinguish the astral world and the devachanic world from each other?” One distinguishes them through the fact that when one ascends from the astral pictures and colors to the devachanic world, the colors resound. What before was spiritually luminous becomes, henceforth, spiritual resounding. In experiencing the higher worlds there are also differences, so that when we rise up to these worlds, we can always recognize by definite experiences whether we are in this or that world.

Today we will characterize the differences between experiencing the astral world and the world of Devachan. It is not only that the astral world is known through Imagination and the devachanic through Inspiration, but we also know through other differences, too, which world we are in. A part of the astral world is the time during which a human being has to live through directly after death, which in anthroposophical literature we call the period of Kamaloca. What does it mean to be in Kamaloca? We have often tried to show this by description. I have often given the characteristic example of the epicure, who pines for the enjoyment that only the sense of taste can give him. With death, the physical body is stripped off and left behind, and so, too, the etheric body to a great extent, but the astral body is still present with its qualities and forces. These do not change immediately after death, but only gradually. If a person has longed for dainty foods, this longing remains, this pining for the enjoyment, but after death the soul lacks the physical instrument with which to satisfy it. The physical body with its organs is no longer there, and the soul must do without the enjoyment; it pines for something that it must go without. This holds good for all the Kamaloca¬experiences that consist, really, in a condition within the astral body when the soul still longs for the satisfaction that can be fulfilled only through the physical body. And because the soul has this no longer, it has to rid itself of the striving for these enjoyments; it is thus the period of becoming “disaccustomed”. The one who has died is freed from it only when this longing has been torn out of the astral body.

During the whole Kamaloca period, something lives in the astral body that can be called “privation”—deprivation in most varied forms, nuances and differences; that is the content of Kamaloca. Just as light may be differentiated into red, yellow, green, blue tones, so can privation be differentiated into the most varied qualities, and the characteristic of privation is the sign of the one who is in Kamaloca. However, the astral plane is not alone Kamaloca, but is far more comprehensive. Nevertheless, a human being who has lived only in the physical world and experienced solely its contents would never be able to experience the other parts of the astral world—whether after death or through other means—unless the soul had prepared itself. It can experience the astral world in no other way than through deprivation! One who comes up into the higher worlds and knows: “I am deprived of this or that and there is no prospect of supporting it,” experiences the consciousness of the astral world. Even if such a one had been able through occult means to enter the astral plane out of the body, he or she would always have to suffer privation there.

Now, how can one so develop and perfect oneself that one learns to know not only the part expressed in privation, the phase of feeling a lack, but that one experienced the astral world in the best sense—the part that is really brought to expression in the good, the best sense? A human soul can come into the other part of the astral world through the development of that which is the counterpart of deprivation! Therefore, the methods that awaken the forces in a human being that are opposed to privation will be the ones that will bring the soul into the other part of the astral world. These are the forces of renunciation. Just as privation can be conceived in manifold nuances, so, too, can renunciation. With the smallest renunciation that we take upon us, we make a step forwards in the sense that we evolve upwards to the good side of the astral world on the path of sacrifice.

When one renounces the most insignificant thing, it is an inculcation of something that contributes essentially to experiencing the good side of the astral world. Hence, in occult traditions so much weight is laid on the test carried out by the pupil of denying oneself this or that, the exercise of renouncing. Through this, the pupil gains entry into the good side of the astral world.

What is brought about in this way? Let us first remember the experiences in Kamaloca. Let us think that someone leaves the physical body, either through death or in some other way; then the physical instruments of the body are lacking to that person, who thus entirely lacks the power to satisfy some desire. Deprivation is felt, and this arises as an imaginative picture in the astral world. For instance, a red pentagon or a red circle appears. This is nothing but the image of what appears in the soul's field of vision and corresponds to the privation, just as in the physical world an object corresponds to what one experiences in the soul as concept of it. If someone has very low desires, then terrible beasts confront that person when out of the body. These frightful beasts are the symbols for the very debased desires. If one has learnt renunciation, however, then in the moment when through death or initiation one is out of the body, the red circle changes into nothing, because one permeates the red with the feeling of renunciation, and there arises a green circle. In the same way, through the forces of renunciation, the beast will vanish, and a noble image of the astral world will appear.

So what is given to one objectively—the red circle or horrible animal—he or she must change into its opposite through the developed forces of renunciation and resignation. Renunciation conjures out of unknown depths the true forms of the astral world. No one must believe, therefore, that if he or she wants in the true sense to lift oneself up into the astral world, the co-operation of one's soul forces is not necessary. Without this, one would attain to only one part of that world. Renunciation is essential—even all Imagination. One who gives up claims and renounces—this is what conjures forth the true form of the astral world.

In Devachan, one has Inspiration. And here, too, there is an inner difference for the parts of Devachan, which the soul cannot experience passively when experiencing them after death. Through a certain universal relationship, so much harm has not yet been done in Devachan; the astral world has the fearful Kamaloca in it, but Devachan has not that yet. That will first come about in the Jupiter and Venus conditions, when through the use of black magic and the like, a decadence will have set in. Then, in Devachan, an element will develop similar to what exists today in the astral world. Here, in Devachan in the present cycle of evolution, the situation is somewhat different. What first appears before a human being ascending on the path of knowledge from the astral world to Devachan, or when as a simple human being one is led there after death—what does such a one experience in Devachan? Bliss is experienced! That which changes from the color-nuances into tones—that under all circumstances is bliss. At the present stage of evolution, all in Devachan is a bringing forth, production, and in respect of knowledge, a spiritual hearing. And all producing is blissfulness; blissfulness is all-hearing of the sphere-harmony! The human being in Devachan will experience pure bliss—nothing but bliss.

When a human being is led upwards through the methods of spiritual knowledge, through the leaders of human evolution, the Masters of Wisdom and the Harmony of Feelings, or in the case of the ordinary human being after death, such a one will always experience bliss there. That is what the initiate must experience when he or she has come so far on the path of knowledge. But it lies in the future evolution of the world that it may not remain at mere bliss. That would signify an enhancement of the most refined egotism; the human individuality would always take into itself the warmth of bliss, but the world would not progress. In this way, beings would be developed who would harden in their souls. For the welfare and progress of the world, therefore, it must be possible for someone who through exercises enters Devachan, not only to experience all nuances of bliss in the sphere-music, but must also develop in oneself the feeling of the opposite of bliss. Just as renunciation is the counterpart of deprivation, so is the feeling of sacrifice related to bliss: sacrifice that is ready to pour out what is received as bliss—to let it flow out into the world.

Those divine Spirits, whom we call the Thrones, had the feeling of self-sacrifice when they began to play their part in the Creation. When they poured out on Saturn their own substance, they sacrificed themselves for the newly-arising humanity. What we have today as substance is the same as they streamed out on Saturn. And in the same way, the Spirits of Wisdom sacrificed themselves on the Old Sun. These divine Spirits have ascended into the higher worlds; they have taken in the experiences of bliss not only passively, but by passing through Devachan they have learnt to sacrifice themselves. They have not become poorer through the offering, but richer. Only a being living entirely in materiality, thinks that it loses itself through sacrifice; no, a higher, richer development is linked with sacrifice in the service of universal evolution.

So we see that the human being ascends to Imagination and Inspiration and enters that sphere where the whole being is permeated with ever-new nuances of bliss, where the soul experiences everything around it, in such a way that everything not only speaks to the soul, but that all around the soul becomes an absorption of the spiritual tones of bliss.

The ascent to the higher powers of knowledge is attained through the transformation of one's whole life of feeling. And occult training has this sole purpose: that through the rules and methods that have been given us by the Masters of Wisdom and of the Harmony of Feelings, and which have been proved and tested for thousands of years, the human being's feeling and will are so transformed that he or she may be led up to higher knowledge and experience. When pupils gradually develop and transform the content of their feeling and will through occult methods, they attain to these higher faculties.

It should not be a matter of indifference to one who is within the Movement of Spiritual Science whether he or she has belonged to it for three or six or seven years. That has a definite significance. The feeling of a shared experience of this inner growth through its inner law must become real to the student. We must direct our attention to it; otherwise, its effects pass us by.

It is often said, and rightly so, that anthroposophically oriented spiritual science will only attract the attention of the right people when it is able to engage with philosophical matters. Until it does so, it will make an amateurish impression on philosophers, and until then people will also say that the followers of this spiritual science are only followers of it because they lack a thorough philosophical education.

It would be quite hopeless to wait until a sufficiently large number of people with a philosophical education would realize that spiritual science is something that lifts even the most philosophical person far above mere philosophy. But since we cannot afford to wait for the spiritual-scientific movement, and must give spiritual science to the public as this public is capable of receiving and grasping it, even without the individual members of this public having received any particular philosophical training, if we is generally compelled to do so, it must be strictly emphasized that in the field of anthroposophy there is nothing that cannot be discussed in the strictest sense with what is necessary and right in the field of philosophy. And even if I am not in a position to give philosophical considerations due to the general direction of the theosophical movement, I would still like to use this short hour to draw the attention of those who have studied philosophical matters to some philosophical points of view. And I ask you to take this as something that falls completely outside the scope of the other anthroposophical considerations, as something that is purely a single philosophical consideration. You may find some of the things that need to be discussed difficult. But don't worry if you have to sit through a short hour of difficult and not-so-heartfelt reflections here. In any case, you can be sure that it will be extremely useful for you to establish the foundations of spiritual-scientific truths. You will find again and again, when you take in real philosophical thinking, that this philosophical way of thinking will not only greatly facilitate your understanding of spiritual science in general, but also of what is called “esoteric development”. So today's purely philosophical reflection is to be quite out of the ordinary.

You should not regard philosophy as something absolute. Philosophy is something that has only emerged in the course of human development, and we can easily state the hour of its birth, for this is more or less correctly stated in every history of philosophy. In recent times, some have objected to the fact that every history of philosophy begins with Thales, that is, with the first appearance of philosophy in Greece; and it has been thought that philosophy could be traced back beyond that time. This is not correct. What can justifiably be called “philosophy” actually begins with Greek philosophy. Oriental wisdom and knowledge are not what should properly be called “philosophy”. If we disregard the great philosophical intuitions, as they appear in a different way in Heraclitus, Thales, and later in Socrates, and go straight to philosophy as it presents itself to us in a closed world-building, in a closed structure of thought, then Pythagoras is not the first philosopher. For Pythagoras is, in a certain respect, still an intuitive seer who, although he often expresses what he has to say in philosophical forms, is not a philosophical system in the true sense of the word, any more than the Platonic system is. A philosophical system in the true sense of the word is only the great system - as a philosophical system - that Aristotle built up in the 4th century BC. We must first orient ourselves on these things.

If Aristotle is called the first philosopher and Plato is still regarded as a half-seer, it is because Aristotle is the first who has to draw solely from the source of philosophy, namely from the source of thinking in concepts. Of course, all this had been prepared for a long time; it was not as if he had to create all the concepts himself; his predecessors had done considerable preparatory work for him in this regard. But in truth, Aristotle is the first to give precisely that which, for example, was the subject of the mysteries, not in the old seer form, but in the conceptual form. And so, anyone who wants to orient themselves in philosophy will have to go back to Aristotle. In him, he will find all the concepts that have been gained from other sources of knowledge in earlier times, but he will find them processed and worked up into a conceptual system. Above all, it is in Aristotle that we must seek the starting point of a - let us call it 'science' - a science that did not exist in this form within the development of mankind and could not have come into being. Anyone who can follow the development of humanity in this way, with the means of spiritual science, knows that before Aristotle – of course this is all to be understood with the famous Gran Salz – an Aristotelian logic was not conceivable in this way, because only Aristotle created a corresponding thinking technique, a logic. As long as higher wisdom was imparted directly in the mysteries, there was no need for logic. In a certain way, Aristotle is also the unrivaled master of logic. Despite all the efforts of the 19th century, logic has basically not made much progress in all essential points beyond what Aristotle has already given.

It would take us too far afield today to point out the reasons why philosophy could only enter into humanity at this time, in the time of Aristotle. Through anthroposophy, it will gradually become clear to many why a very specific age was necessary for the foundation of philosophy.

We then see how Aristotle is the leading philosopher for a long time and, with brief interruptions - which seem more like interruptions to today's people than they really were - remains so until today. All those who are active in other fields, let us say in Gnosticism, Platonism, or in the church teachings of early Christianity, they processed the Aristotelian arts of thought. And in a wonderful way, what Aristotle gave to humanity as the formal element of thinking also spread in the West, where what the Church had to say was more or less clothed in the forms that Aristotle had given in his thinking technique. Even though in the first centuries of the spread of Christianity, Aristotle's philosophy was still disseminated in the West in a very deficient form, this is essentially because the writings of Aristotle were not available in the original language. But people thought in terms of the thinking technique developed by Aristotle.

In a different way, Aristotle found acceptance in the East, only to come to the West again via the Arabs. Thus Aristotle found his way into the West in two ways: firstly through the Christian current and secondly through the current that gradually flowed into the culture of the West through the Arabs.

It was during this period that there was a great interest in Aristotle's thinking, which represents the actual high point in medieval philosophy, namely the first form of what is called “scholasticism”, specifically “early scholasticism”. Scholasticism essentially existed to be a philosophy of Christianity. It was compelled for two reasons to take up Aristotle: firstly, out of the old traditions, because one was accustomed to knowing Aristotle in the first place; even the Platonists and Neoplatonists were more Platonists in content; in their thought technique, they were often Aristotelian. But there was another reason why scholasticism had to rely on Aristotle, namely because scholasticism was compelled to take a stand against the influence of Arabism and thus against Oriental mysticism, so that in the eleventh, twelfth and thirteenth centuries we find scholasticism philosophically justifying Christianity in the face of the Arab world of ideas. The Arab scholars came with their wonderfully honed Aristotelian knowledge and tried to attack Christianity from a variety of positions. If one wanted to defend Christianity, one had to show that the Arabs were using the instruments they were using in an incorrect way. The point was that the Arabs gave themselves the appearance that only they alone had the correct way of thinking of Aristotle and therefore directed their attacks against Christianity from this correct way of thinking of Aristotle. In the interpretation of the Arabs, it appeared as if anyone who stood on the ground of Aristotle must necessarily be an opponent of Christianity.

The philosophy of Thomas Aquinas arose in the face of this endeavor. His aim was to show that if one understands Aristotle correctly, one can use Aristotelian thought to justify Christianity. Thus, on the one hand, there was the tradition of proceeding in Aristotelian thought technique, on the other hand, the necessity to handle this very technique of Aristotle in the right way against the onslaught of Arabism, which was expressed in the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas.

Thus we find a peculiar synthesis of Aristotelian thought in what constitutes the essence of scholastic philosophy in its early days, a philosophy that was much maligned but is little understood today. Very soon, then, the time came when scholastic philosophy was no longer understood. And then all kinds of scholastic aberrations occurred, for example the one that is usually referred to as the school of thought called “nominalism”, while early scholasticism was “realism”. It is due to this nominalism that scholasticism soon outlived itself and fell into disrepute and obscurity. In a sense, nominalism is the father of all modern skepticism.

It is a strange tangle of philosophical currents that we see emerging in our more recent times, all of which basically flow against scholasticism. We still see some minds that stand firmly and firmly in the Aristotelian technique of thought, but which are no longer completely protected against the onslaught of modernity. Nicholas of Cusa is one of them.

But then we see how the last thing that can be saved from this philosophical-methodical basis is to save Cartesius. And on the other hand, we see how all the good elements of Arabism - that kind of philosophy that combined more Western-Oriental vision with Aristotelianism - have intertwined with that technique of thought that we call “Kabbalistic”. Among the representatives of this trend is Spinoza, who cannot be understood otherwise than by linking him, on the one hand, to Western Orientalism and, on the other, to Kabbalism. All other talk about Spinoza is talk in which one has no solid ground under one's feet.

But then “empiricism” spread with a vengeance, especially under the aegis of Locke and Hume. And then we see how philosophy finds itself increasingly confronted with purely external material research - natural science - and how it gradually retreats before this kind of research. We then see how philosophy becomes entangled in a web from which it can hardly extricate itself. This is an important point where the philosophy of modern times gets caught, namely with Kant! And we see in the post-Kantian period how great philosophers appear, such as Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, who appear like a kind of meteor, but who are least understood by their own people. And we see how a brief, strange wrangling over ideas takes place in order to escape from the net in which Kantianism has caught the philosophers, how impossible it is for philosophy to escape from it, and how German thought in particular suffers from Kantianism in its most diverse variations, and how even all the beautiful and great attempts that are made suffer from Kantianism. Thus we see a deficiency appear in all of modern philosophy that has two sources: One is evident in the fact that at our philosophy chairs, which believe they have more or less freed themselves from Kantianism, people are still floundering in Kant's snares; the other is evident in the fact that philosophy suffers from a certain impossibility of asserting its position, which it should defend as philosophy, against the very short-sighted natural science.

Not until our philosophy has freed itself from the nets of Kantianism and from all that causes philosophy to stop in the face of the onslaught of natural science, not until our better-intentioned elements recognize how they can get over these two obstacles that stand in their way, can any salvation on the philosophical field be expected. Therefore, the philosophical field, especially within Germany, presents a truly sad picture, and it is highly distressing to see, for example, how psychology is gradually receding, how, for example, people who are actually incapable of doing anything other than processing elementary things a little in a philosophical way, but who do not get beyond certain trivialities, have a huge reputation, like Wundt, for example. On the other hand, it must be seen that minds such as Fechner's - who could be stimulating if people had an appreciation for it - are regarded by those who are pure dilettantes as a new Messiah. This was bound to happen and is not meant as criticism.

I would now like to start from a concept that is so closely related to the web in which philosophy has become entangled since Kant, which is the fundamental evil of the philosophical mind, an evil that can be characterized by the words: “philosophy has fallen prey to subjectivism!”

If we want to understand Kant, we must first understand him historically. Kant's view is actually born entirely out of the developmental history of human thought. Those who know Kant better are aware that the Kant of the 1750s and 1760s was completely absorbed in what was the most common philosophy in Germany at the time, which was called the Enlightenment philosophy of Wolf. In its external form, it was often a jumble of empty phrases, but its spirit was partly still borrowed from the old Leibnizianism. But let us concern ourselves here with a brief characterization of Wolffianism. We can say that for Wolffianism, the world view is divided into two truths: firstly, that of external observation and what man can gain from it; secondly, that which man can gain through pure thinking: 'a priori'. Thus there was also a physics - an astronomy, a cosmology - that was gained from the consideration of facts, and a rational physics - a rational astronomy - that was gained by pure thinking. Wolff was aware that human thinking, without taking any experience into account, could construct knowledge about the nature of the world purely rationally, out of itself. This was knowledge from pure reason, “a priori”, while “a posteriori” was knowledge that was gained from the senses, from mere understanding, from experience. Likewise, for Wolff there were two psychologies, one in which the soul observed itself, and the other, the rational psychology. And in the same way, Wolff distinguished between a natural theology based on revelation, on what has come down to us as revealed truth and is present as the supersensible in religious creeds; from this he distinguished rational theology, which could be derived from pure reason - a priori - and which, for example, draws the proofs of the existence of God from pure reason.

Thus, all knowledge of the time was divided into that which was derived from pure reason and that which was derived from pure experience. Those who stood on this ground studied at all universities at that time. Kant was also one of them, even though he went beyond them, as can be seen from one of his writings entitled: “On the Concept of Introducing the Negative into the World”. Then he became acquainted with the English skeptic Hume and thus became familiar with that form of skepticism that has a shattering effect on all rational knowledge, especially on the view of universal apriority, the law of causality. Hume says: There is nothing that can be gained by any a priori form of thinking. It is simply a habit of man to think that every fact is to be understood as the effect of a cause. And so the whole rational structure is something that one has become accustomed to. For Kant, who found something plausible in Hume, the ground was thus removed for Wolffian rationalism, so that he said to himself that only knowledge from experience is possible.

Kant then found himself in a very strange situation. His whole feeling and perception resisted the assumption that there was actually nothing absolutely certain. If you were to go along with Hume completely, you would have to say: Yes, we have seen that the sun rises in the morning and warms the stones, and we have concluded from all the cases that the sun rose in the morning and warmed the stones that there is a certain causal connection in this; but there is no necessity at all that this conclusion is an absolute truth. That is Hume's view. Kant did not want to abandon the absolute truth. It was also clear to him that no a priori statement is possible without experience. He therefore turned this last sentence around and said: Certainly, it is true that man cannot arrive at anything without experience; but does knowledge really come from experience? No, said Kant, there are mathematical judgments that are quite independent of experience. If mathematical judgments were derived from experience, we could only say that they have proved true so far, but we do not know whether they are correct. Kant added: The fact that we can make judgments like mathematical ones depends on the organization of the subject at the moment we make these judgments; we cannot think differently than the laws of mathematics are, therefore all experience must conform to the realm of mathematical lawfulness. So we have a world around us that we create according to the categories of our thinking and our experiences. We begin with experience, but this has only to do with our organization. We spread out the network of our organization, capture the material of experience according to the categories of perception and understanding of our subjective organization, and basically see a world picture that we have spun according to its form. [Gap in the postscript.]

Since Kant, philosophy has become ensnared in this subjectivism – except to a certain extent in Fichte, Schelling and Hegel – in this subjectivism, which states that man has something to do with things only insofar as they make an impression on him. More and more has been attributed to Kantianism. Even Schopenhauer, who in his “World as Will and Representation” really goes beyond Kant, but also others to a much greater extent, have only understood this Kantianism to mean that the “thing in itself” is completely inaccessible to human knowledge, whereas everything that occurs in man - from the first sensory impression to the processing of impressions as knowledge - is merely an effect on the subject.

You see that man is then basically cut off from everything objective, only wrapped up in his subjectivity. “Our world is not a world of things, only a world of ideas,” says Schopenhauer. The thing is something that lies beyond the subject. The moment we know something, what we have before us is already our idea. The thing lies beyond the subject, in the trans-subjective. The world is my idea and I only move within my ideas. That is the net in which philosophy has caught itself and you can find it spread over the whole thinking of the nineteenth century. And this thinking could not lead to anything else in the field of psychology either, except to understand that which is given to us as something subjective. This is even noticeable in the individual sciences. Consider the teachings of Helmholtz. Helmholtz says: That which is given to us is no longer just an image, but only a sign of the real image; man must never claim that what he perceives has a similarity to reality.

The whole development of subjectivism in the nineteenth century is an example of how people can lose their impartiality once they are wrapped up in a thought. Eduard von Hartmann's “Transcendental Realism” is an example of this. It was impossible to talk to Eduard von Hartmann about the fact that perhaps the world could not just be “my imagination”. He had become so wrapped up in this theory that it was hardly possible to discuss an epistemological question with him objectively. He could not get beyond this definition “the world is my imagination”.

Anyone who is fair will not deny that this subjectivism, which lies in the sentence “the world is my imagination”, has something tremendously seductive about it. If you look at it from the subject's point of view, you will say that if we want to recognize something, we must always be active. From the first sensation to the last generation of the point in our field of vision that means “red”, we must be active. If it were not for the way our eyes are organized, “red” could never appear in our eyes. So that when you survey the field of experience, you have the activity of the subject in the experiences, and that therefore everything within your knowledge, viewed from the subject, is produced by yourself. This is in a certain way very significant, that man must be active, down to the last detail, if he wants to recognize. The subjectivity of the human being touches on the “thing in itself”; wherever it touches, it experiences an affection; you only ever experience a modification of your own powers. So you spin yourself in; you do not go beyond the surface of the “thing in itself”. All you could achieve is to say: My own activity always pushes against the surface of the 'thing in itself', and everywhere I feel only my own activity.

I would like to give you an image. This image is one that none of the subjectively oriented philosophers has really thought through. For if they did, they would find in this image the possibility of getting out of subjectivity.

You have a sheet of paper, drip liquid sealing wax on it and now press a seal into the sealing wax. Now I ask you: What has happened here? On the seal there should be a name, let us say “Miller”. When you have pressed it, what is in the seal is absolutely identical to what is in the sealing wax. If you go through all the sealing wax, you will not find the slightest atom that has come from the seal into the sealing wax. The two touch each other, and then the name “Miller” appears. Imagine that the sealing wax were a cognizant being and would say, “I am sealing wax through and through; that is my property, to be sealing wax. Out there, the seal is a ‘thing in itself’; not the slightest part of this ‘thing in itself’ can get into me.” The substance of the brass remains completely outside; and yet, if you remove the seal, the name “Müller”, on which it depends, is absolutely correct for the sealing wax. But you cannot say that the sealing wax has produced the name “Müller”. The name “Müller” would never have come about if there had not been a touch.

If only sealing wax could talk and say, “This imprint is only subjective!” – That is basically what all Kantians conclude; only they do so in such convoluted thoughts that the simple person can no longer recognize the error in such something simple.

Now, however, the seal impression completely matches the name engraved in the seal, which is what matters here, apart from the mirror image, which is not considered here. Therefore, the impression and imprint can be considered identical, at least with regard to the essential, the name “Müller”. It is exactly the same with the impressions we receive from the outside world: they are identical with the way in which things exist outside, that is to say, in relation to the essential in both.

Now, the sealing-wax could still say: “I do not get to know brass after all.” But that would mean that what contains the name “Miller” would also be recognized in terms of its material nature. But that is not the point. You have to distinguish between refuting Kantianism – if we follow this example to its conclusion, Kantianism is absolutely refuted – and completely transcending subjectivism. And that raises the question of whether we can now also find the other thing, which is neither in the nature of the sealing wax nor in that of the brass, which is above both and will be a synthesis between objectivism and subjectivism? For merely refuting Kantianism is not enough.

If we want to answer this question, we have to delve a little deeper into the problems. The fact that recent philosophy has not been able to make any headway in this area is due to the fact that it has lost touch with a real technique of thinking. Our question now is this: Is there anything in man that can be experienced that is not subjective? Or does only that live in man that cannot go beyond subjectivity?

If humanity had been able to follow the straight path from Aristotle, it would never have been entangled in the web of Kantianism. The straight path – without the break in the Middle Ages – would have led to the realization that there is a supersubjective reality above the subjective. Mankind did not progress in a straight line from Aristotle, but rather took a detour, and this deviation already began in the later scholasticism due to the emergence of nominalism. It then rolled further and further down this wrong path until it finally found itself entangled in a formal net with Kant. To get out of this impasse, we have to go back to Aristotle and ask ourselves: Is there nothing that goes beyond the merely subjective, that is, so to speak, subjective-objective?

Let us consider how Aristotle treats cognition. He distinguishes between cognition through the “sense” and cognition through the “mind”. Cognition through the sense is directed towards the individual sensual thing, cognition through the mind is directed towards making a distinction between “matter” and “form”. And Aristotle understands “form” to mean a great deal. Mankind would first have to be made aware of Aristotle's concept of form in the right way. An old friend of mine in Vienna always made this clear to his students using one example. Matter is basically not the essence of a thing, but the essence of a thing for our minds is the “form”.

If we want to make this distinction correctly in the sense of Aristotle, then we must say: All wolves are based on the species from which they “sprang”, which transformed matter into wolves. And the human soul represents the wolves in the concept, so that the generic concept in the human soul is for Aristotle what is represented in the soul, what the species is. How man recognizes the genus in the generic concept depends entirely on him, but not the reality of the genus.

Thus we have a union between what is only in the soul, the concept, and what is in the realm of the trans-subjective or the genus. This is absolute realism, without falling into the error of Plato, who subjectivized the species and regarded them as a kind of trans-subjective powers. He grasps the concept of the species again as the essence in itself, whereas the concept is only the expression of the soul for the transcendental reality “species”.

From here we then come to the task of early scholasticism, which of course had the very special task of justifying Christianity. Here, however, we will only deal with the epistemological basis of early scholasticism in a few words. It is initially based entirely on the fact that man knows nothing but his ideas. It is true that we know through ideas, but what we imagine is not “the idea” but the object of the idea. The “representation” is an impression in the subject, and need not be more. Now it is important that you understand the relationship between subject and object in the early scholastic sense. Everything that is recognized depends entirely on the form of the human mind. Nothing can enter or leave the soul that does not come from the organization of that soul itself. But that which originally underlies the work of the soul comes about through the soul's contact with the object. And it is the subject's contact with the object that makes the idea possible. This is why early scholasticism said that man does not present his ideas, but that his ideas represent the thing to him. If you want to grasp the content of the idea, you have to look for the content of the idea in the thing.

However, this example shows that in order to absorb the scholastic concepts, one needs a keen mind and a fine distinction, which are usually lacking in those who simply condemn scholasticism. You have to get involved with such sentences: “I present” or “My ideas represent a content, and that comes from the object”. Modern man wants to get straight down to the nitty-gritty with all the concepts, as they arise for him out of trivial life. That is why the scholastics all appear to him to be school foxes. In a sense, they are, because they have just seen to it that man first learned something: a discipline of thinking technique. The thinking technique of the scholastics is one of the strictest that has ever occurred in humanity.

Thus, in all that man cognizes, we have a web of concepts that the soul acquires from the objects. There is a fine scholastic definition: in everything that man has in his soul in this way, in the representations and concepts, the object represented by the same exists in the manner of the soul. “In the cognized, the objective exists in the manner of the soul.” Down to the last detail, everything is the work of the soul. The soul has indeed represented everything in its own way within itself, but at the same time the object is connected with it.

Now the question is this: How do we get out of subjectivism today? By taking the straight path from Aristotle, we would have got beyond subjectivism. But for profound reasons, this straight path could not be followed. The early days of Christianity could not immediately produce the highest form of knowledge through thinking. In the first centuries, something else lived in the souls, which prevented scholasticism from [gap in the transcription] rising above subjectivity.

We can easily understand how to get beyond subjectivism if, in the manner of the scholastics, we understand the difference between concept and representation. What is this difference? It is easiest to understand this using a circle as an example. We can gain the representation of a circle by taking a boat out to sea to a point where we see the vault of heaven on the horizon all around us. There we have gained the idea of the circle. We can also gain the idea of the circle if we tie a stone to a thread and swing it around. Or, even cruder, we can get this idea from a wagon wheel. There you have the circle everywhere in the life of ideas. Now there is another way to get the circle, the way in which you get the circle through purely inner construction, by saying: the circle is a curved line in which every point is the same distance from a center. - You have constructed this concept yourself, but in doing so you have not described yourself.

You can gain the idea through experience, you can get the concept through inner construction. The idea still has to do with subject and object. At the moment when a person constructs internally, the subject and object are irrelevant to what he has constructed internally. Whether you really construct a circle is absolutely irrelevant to the nature of the circle. The nature of the circle, insofar as we come to it through internal construction, is beyond subject and object.

Now, however, modern man does not have much that he can construct in this way. Goethe tried to create such [inner constructions for higher areas of natural existence as well. In doing so, he came up with his “archetypes”, his “archetypal phenomena”].

In such an inner construction, the subject rises above itself, it goes beyond subjectivity. To return to the image - the sealing wax, as it were, into the matter of the seal.

Only in such pure, sensuality-free thinking does the subject merge with its object. This high level could not be attained immediately. Man had to pass through an intermediate stage first. Up to a certain point in time man worked directly out of the spiritual world; he did not think for himself, but received everything from the Mysteries. Thought only arose at a certain time. Therefore, logic was only developed at a certain time. The possibility of developing pure, sensuality-free thinking was only attained at a certain stage of development. This type was already attained, potentially, in the nineteenth century in minds such as Fichte, Schelling and Hegel. And we have to develop it further in the more intimate areas through spiritual science. Spiritual research is to be re-founded on pure, sensuality-free thinking, as it has been lived and expressed, for example, in the Rosicrucian schools. In earlier times of human development, people were initiated into the deeper secrets of existence by initiates. Now they must train themselves to gradually work out these things for themselves. In the meantime, it was important to maintain the connection with the divine world. In order for Christianity to mature calmly, the knowledge of the supersensible had to be withdrawn from human research for a certain period of time. People should learn to believe, even without knowing. Therefore, for a time, Christianity relied on mere belief. People were to let the idea mature quietly. Hence we have the coexistence of faith and knowledge in scholasticism. In scholasticism, the concept only wants to provide a firm support for what, with regard to supersensible objects, should be left for a certain period to what has been imparted to it through revelation. This is the standpoint of scholasticism: to keep the things of revelation aloof from criticism until man's thinking has matured. The foster-father who gave thinking its technique was Aristotle. But this thinking should first be trained on firm points of support in outer reality.

Today it is a matter of understanding the spirit of scholasticism in contrast to what dogma is. This spirit can only be recognized in the fact that what was beyond the power of judgment remained the subject of supersensible revelation, while the consequence of rational knowledge was that man himself should arrive at productive concepts, at that which is imperishable in them, through the world of sensual experience. This method of constructing concepts was to remain - and it is precisely this method that modern philosophy has completely lost. Nominalism has conquered modern philosophy by saying: the concepts that are formed according to the nature of the soul are mere names. The connection with the real had been completely lost because the instrument of those who no longer properly understood scholasticism had become blunt. Early scholasticism wanted to sharpen thinking on the thread of experience [for the supersensible-real]. But then came others who clung to the documents of experience, whereas reason was only to be trained on them. And then came the current that said: Forever must the supersensible be withdrawn from all human rational knowledge! - And according to Luther's saying, reason is “the stone-blind, the deaf, the mad fool”.

Here we see the starting point of that great conflict between what could be known and what could be believed; and Kantianism arose from this one-sided, nominalistic school of thought only in a mysterious way. For basically, all Kant wanted was to show that Reason, when left to its own devices, is nothing but a “stone-blind, deaf, and crazy fool.” When reason presumes to transgress the boundaries it itself has laid down in [...] [... gap in the transcription], then it is the “blind fool.” In the one-sided development of [nominalistic] thinking, we see the web in which Kantianism has spun itself maturing. Knowledge is tied to external experience, which is now even prescribed the limits. And faith [gap in the postscript].

It is a task that only anthroposophically oriented spiritual science will be able to accomplish: to get philosophy back on the right track.

What we are about to consider now is completely outside the scope of anthroposophical considerations. It is only indirectly related to it, and is intended to be a purely philosophical consideration. The direct connection is that it is often claimed that anthroposophical spiritual science cannot stand up in the forum of science, that it appears like pure dilettantism that a serious philosopher should not engage with. It will now be shown that it is not anthroposophy that is amateurish, but philosophy.

At present, philosophy is a wholly unsuitable instrument for elevating oneself to anthroposophy. Let us first orient ourselves in philosophy. Let us see how philosophy has developed historically. Then we want to subject the hereditary evil to a certain consideration. We want to show how philosophy today suffers from the fact that at a certain time all philosophical thinking became entangled in a spider's web, and is therefore incapable of gaining a broader perspective in relation to reality.

We must face the fact that all the history of philosophy begins with Thales. In more recent times, attempts have been made to extend philosophy backwards, that is, to go beyond Greek philosophy. People speak of Indian and Egyptian philosophy. Those who do not construct an arbitrary concept of philosophy say that an important period did indeed begin with Thales. If we ask what it is that intervenes in human evolution, what was not there before, we must say: it is conceptual thinking. It was not present before. This is characteristically different from everything that was there earlier. In the past, only what the seer had seen was said. In Plato, the gift of prophecy still predominates. The first conceptual thinker, whose system is no longer based on the old gift of prophecy, is Aristotle. In him we have the purely intellectual system. Everything else was preparation. The gift of living and thinking in pure concepts begins to find its most outstanding expression in Aristotle. It is no mere coincidence that Aristotle is called the “father of logic”. To the seer, logic is revealed at the same time as seeing. But to form concepts, one needed not only his logic, but also the fact that in the following period the revelations of Christianity were re-shaped into thought formations with Aristotelian logic.

This Aristotelian thinking spread both to the Arab cultural area in Asia, to Spain and to Western Europe, as well as to the south of Europe, where Christianity was influenced by Aristotelian thinking. Anyone observing the 7th to 9th centuries can see that Christian teachers, like anti-Christian elements, expressed their teachings in Aristotelian form, and this remained so until the 13th century.

We will see in a moment what the focus of Aristotelian thought is. In the middle of the Middle Ages, Thomas Aquinas spread the so-called Thomistic philosophy; it is based on Christian revelation and Aristotelian logic. The Christian teachings were not taught in a strictly adhered form of thought, but it was intended to show that these teachings could also be defended in Aristotelian forms of thought, against the Arabs and their students, such as Averroes, who also thought in these forms of thought. They wanted to show how one could use the correctly understood Aristotle not for Arab teachings, but for Christianity. They wanted to refute the objections of the Arab thinkers; hence the zealous study of Thomas Aquinas. At that time, Aristotle dominated all of science, including, for example, medicine.

Now we have to characterize what the earlier scholasticism had of Aristotle. The thinking at that time was quite different from today's. If you compare it with what was done at that time, you have to say: in terms of content, life was poor then. The tremendous inventions were only made later. The essential thing about that time is the strictly trained thinking. Today people laugh at the strict definitions of scholasticism. But when you compare it to today's arbitrary understanding of all concepts, then you first feel the benefit of that view that there must be an understanding of the concepts. It takes a long time to define the concepts, but then you are working on solid ground.

In order to be able to orient ourselves further, we have to go into a few of Aristotle's concepts. He was a good interpreter for Christianity, even from the point of view of anthroposophy. A few concepts should show how sharply Aristotle thought. Aristotle distinguishes knowledge according to sense and intellect. The senses perceive this rose, this person, this stone. Then the intellect enters. It breaks down into an understanding of matter and form. All things contain matter and form. These two concepts take us a long way. Aristotle sees matter and form in every single natural thing that the senses perceive: consider a wolf. It eats nothing but lambs; then it consists of the same matter as the lambs, but a wolf will never become a lamb. What makes the two different is the form. We have the form of the lamb and the wolf. He identifies the underlying form with the genus lamb and the genus wolf. Aristotle makes a clear distinction between the genus and the generic concept. When we are confronted with a flock of lambs, we form the generic concept. What our concept determines in its form is an objective thing outside us, just as if we were to imagine the prototypes of the forms spreading invisibly throughout the world, spurting out the individual genera into which the indifferent matter is poured. Everything around us is based on the generic; for Aristotle, the material is indifferent.¹

With the scholastics, Albertus Magnus, we find what underlies the external entities. The earlier scholastic distinguishes universals before things, in things and after things. Albertus Magnus says about this: the universals before the thing are the thoughts of the divine entities. There we have the genus. These thoughts have flowed into the things. When man encounters things, he forms the universals according to the thing, which is the conceptual form. In this whole description of the development of thinking, there is only talk of sensible things. He identifies the outer sense with the “sense”. Everything else that is there is a concept to him. The generic concept is not identical to the genus. The whole thing is because people had lost the ancient gift of seeing, so that a philosophy could arise.

An old sage would not have understood at all how to make distinctions in this way, because he would have said: With the gift of prophecy, one can perceive the genus. It was only when the gift of prophecy dried up that the actual science emerged. It was only when man was left to his own devices that the necessity arose to develop a thinking art. Scholasticism arose under the influence of this important principle. In ancient times, the spiritual worlds were still accessible to man. Now the scholastics could refer all the more to Aristotle, because he spoke of the gift of prophecy: Ancient reports tell us that the stars are gods, but the human intellect can no longer make anything out of them. But we have no reason to doubt it.

Scholasticism replaced what was seen with revelation. It placed what was to be taught in the once inspired word. At first, humanity must become accustomed to developing the theory of thought in relation to external things. Where would it end if it were to roam into all possible supersensible things? We want to deny ourselves that; we want to educate ourselves in the things that are around us. So says Thomas Aquinas. When objects come to us, they are given to us for the senses. Then we are compelled to form concepts of them. Behind the things, divine powers rest, which we do not dare approach. We want to educate ourselves from thing to thing. Then, by strictly adhering to the sensual, we finally come to the highest concepts. So we adhered to two things: to the revealed teaching material, which is given in the scriptures, to which thinking does not approach. It has been taken over by the seers. Furthermore, they adhered to what was being worked out in the sensory reality. With this, we only just reach the Bible and Revelation. For a time, the higher world is withdrawn from human thought. But there is no final renunciation of the supersensible worlds. When man has conquered the sensual world, he can get a presentiment of the supersensible worlds. Man can free himself from the physical body and have revelation directly. But first the intellect must be trained. When the human being forms concepts about external things, these concepts depend on the human organization in form, but not in content. In scholastic epistemology, it is never considered that something unrecognized may remain. The objective enters into knowledge; only the form in which concepts are formed depends on the organization of the human mind.

This earlier scholasticism is called realism. It believed in the reality of content. Scholasticism then became nominalistic. People have lost touch with the objective external world. They said: the mind forms concepts; they are not real. The concepts became mere names; they were only abstractions. What is to be achieved with the concept is lost. Therefore, the nominalists had to say to themselves: Sensual reality is spreading before us. We summarize it as our minds will. Nothing real corresponds to our concepts. One must guard the actual revelation against human thinking and renounce all understanding. This view reached its climax in Zuther's saying that human reason is powerless, the deaf, blind, foolish fool who should not presume to approach the teaching material.

This is an important turning point. Luther condemns Aristotle. From this point on, the suggestion that gave birth to Kantianism goes. Kant was a Wolffian until the end of the sixties, like almost all philosophers at the time. Wolff taught: Reason is able to make something out about the supernatural worlds. He distinguishes between rational and empirical science. It is possible to gain a certain amount of human knowledge. The a posteriori knowledge has only relative validity.

[Gaps and deficiencies in the transcript. For a description of Wolff's philosophy, see the lecture of March 14, 1908 in this volume.]

At first, Kant also followed in Wolff's footsteps. Hume disturbed him. Hume developed skepticism. He said that no wall should be built between a priori and a posteriori knowledge. All knowledge is knowledge of habit; there is no rational knowledge. Kant awoke from his dogmatic slumber. But he could not completely go along with it. He said: Hume is right; we gain everything from experience. Only mathematics is an exception; what it says has absolute validity. He therefore advocates two things. First, there are absolutely certain judgments a priori. Second, all knowledge must be gained from experience. But experience is governed by our judgments. We ourselves give laws to experience. Man confronts the world with his organization of thought. All experience is governed by our form of knowledge. Thus Kant linked Hume with Wolff.

Now man is ensnared in this philosophical web. Fichte, Schelling and Hegel are exceptions. Individual natural scientists also follow this path. Helmholtz says: What man has before him is spun out of his organization. What we perceive of the thing is not even an image, but only a sign. The eye makes only perceptions on the surface. Man is completely ensnared in his subjectivity. The thing in itself remains unknown. – It had to be so. Nominalism has lost the spiritual behind the surface. The human interior has been enervated. The inner working becomes purely formal. If man wants to penetrate behind reality, his inner being gives him no answer. The whole of 19th-century philosophical thinking does not find its way out of this. Hartmann, for example, does not go beyond the idea. A simple comparison can clarify this. A seal contains the name Müller. Nothing, not even the smallest material thing, can come from the brass of the seal into the sealing wax. Consequently, nothing objective can come from the seal; the name Müller must form itself out of the sealing wax. The thinker is the sealing wax. Nothing passes from the object to the thinker. And yet the name Müller is in the sealing-wax. Thus we take the content out of the objective world, and yet it is the true content that we take out. If one takes only the material, it is true: nothing passes from the seal to the stamp and vice versa. But as soon as one sees the spirit, the higher principle, which can embrace the objective and the subjective, then the spirit passes in and out into the subjective and the objective. The spirit carries everything over from objectivity into subjectivity. The ego is objective and subjective in itself. Fichte showed that. -²

The entire epistemology of the 19th century resembles a dog chasing its own tail. You end up with: I have created everything. The world is my imagination. Everything has spurted out of my inner being. I also have the right to kill everything.

Kant uses very convoluted terms. Kant says: I have destroyed knowledge to make room for faith. He has limited knowledge and established a practical faith because everything is spun out of the subjective.

Kantianism is the last result of nominalism. Today the time for it has expired. Man must train his thinking again in reality in order to form real concepts; then we can recognize the supersensible truths again. The scholastic attitude is time-bound, the spiritual had to be withdrawn from thinking for a time. Now the revealed teaching material must again become teaching material to be examined. We must again examine everything with reason. It is a light with which one can penetrate everywhere. One can investigate, understand, grasp everything. Reason is the lowest form of clairvoyance, but it is a seeing, hearing, and intelligent power. Thus we extricate ourselves from the net. Philosophy must free itself from this net and allow itself to be fertilized by logic to achieve true thinking.

• 1. See note
• 2. The rest of the lecture was only recorded by the transcriber in fragmentary notes, as the following sentences show.

Today I may begin with an experience of my own. Once I had the opportunity to visit a man in the afternoon, around two o'clock. He was lying on a daybed and at first he seemed so absorbed in his own thoughts that he didn't notice that I and another person had entered. He continues to reflect and seems to pay no attention to those around him. One can get the impression – and I ask you to put every word on the scale – that one is standing before a person who has been intensively occupied with difficult questions and problems all morning, then had lunch and is now using this time to let his soul go over what he has been working on. One can get the impression of this personality, who is covered up to his chest by a blanket, as an extremely fresh person, whose mental freshness is also expressed in the fresh color of his face. One can get the impression of a very rare human forehead, which is actually a combination of a beautiful artist's forehead and a thinker's forehead, the impression of a personality who reflects completely freshly on the great problems of humanity. This personality, who could have impressed the person who saw her in this way, had already been insane for more than three years when she offered this picture. Such moments as the one described alternated with terrible ones, but we want to hold on to this moment.

The personality was Friedrich Nietzsche, whom I had not seen before and could not see again afterward. You can appreciate that such a vision is in itself something profoundly significant from a spiritual-scientific point of view. Because the description actually contradicts the true facts, I said: One could have received this impression. One must bear in mind a peculiar phenomenon: that a contradiction arises between the inner and the outer. At that time Nietzsche no longer knew anything of his work. He did not know that he had written his writings, did not know his surroundings and much more. And yet he looked so fresh, as if imbued with a deep thought, lying on the bed, and one could have carried within oneself a strange sensation, which those who have been dealing with spiritual problems for some time will understand better, namely the sensation: How is it that this soul still hovers around this body?

A deep examination of Nietzsche's personality and his mental work can, to a certain extent, provide an answer to this question. Indeed, in Nietzsche we have a very peculiar personality before us. It will hardly be possible for anyone who somehow takes the position: either I accept or I reject – who cannot selflessly engage with what this personality was in itself. It may be that anthroposophists in particular take umbrage with my writing 'Friedrich Nietzsche, a fighter against his time'. For it is in the nature of our time that it says: Well, anyone who talks about Nietzsche like that must also be a Nietzschean. But I can say: If I had not succeeded in making this fact: to delve into a personality without considering my own experiences, then I would not speak of it today as I can and may speak of it.

There is a point of view of independent objectivity. It is as if one were the mouthpiece of the other being. In the case of Friedrich Nietzsche, this kind of consideration is also necessary for its own sake. It would probably make a strange impression on Nietzsche's personality if he could perceive today within the brain what Nietzsche's followers and opponents write. Both would then touch him in a most peculiar way. He would have a loathing for all his deeds. His words would stand before his soul: “What is the fate of all believers...; only when you have all denied me will I return to you.” And now, after we have presented the feeling that we could have received at Nietzsche's sickbed, we want to try to get an idea of Nietzsche as it appears through himself and through modern intellectual life.

Nietzsche stood at this time quite apart from many other minds. We may grasp the character of his soul best by saying that much of what was concept, representation, idea, conviction for other people became for him sensation, feeling, innermost experience. Let us call up before our minds the images of modern intellectual life over the last fifty to sixty years, which also passed before him. The materialism of the 1950s, which had adherents in almost all civilized countries, said: Nothing is real but matter and its motion. That matter takes on the form we see it in is caused by motion. In the brain, motion causes thought. We remember the time when it was said that language was a development of animal sounds. We also remember that experience and sensation were thought of as higher instincts. We remember that it was not the worst minds that formulated such thoughts. The most worthy and consistent even found a certain satisfaction in them. There was not one who would have thought: I do not see with satisfaction the rule of matter. Most said: I find the highest bliss in the thought that everything should dissolve. - Many could get intoxicated by that. We consider the fact that in this world view a system also came about, and that it reached its highest flowering through it.

And then we paint a different picture, the picture of the soul concept of such a person, who directs his gaze to the great ideals of humanity, who directs his gaze back to Buddha, Hermes, Pythagoras, Plato, who could be uplifted by the figure of Christ Jesus, the bearer of human spiritual deeds, the bearer of all that elevates the human heart. We paint for ourselves the picture of a man who could feel all this. And we realize that this man said to himself: Ah, all the Buddhas, Hermes, Pythagoras, Plato, they all only dreamed of lofty spiritual ideals, of something that could uplift them.

I am not telling you something that I have invented. I am describing the soul of many people in the 1960s. These thoughts were present in people who were overwhelmed by materialism and who considered ideals to be a mere fantasy. And a deep tragedy settled upon the souls of such people. Friedrich Nietzsche lived in such a time as a student and young professor. He educated himself in such a time. He was not related to any of the other spirits. His type was quite different from that of his contemporaries. One can understand him in spiritual scientific terms. If one takes into account that the human being consists of several bodies, then one can know that even the young Nietzsche was exceptional in the way his ether body and physical body were put together. Nietzsche had a much weaker connection between his etheric body and his physical body, so that what this personality experienced inwardly in his soul was experienced in a much more spiritual way, much more independently of the physical body, than is the case with other people.

Now it was first the student Nietzsche who was led into the world of the Greeks. For him, there were now two currents in his soul life. One we call something innate, lying in his karma. This was a deeply religious trait, that was a mood of his being, a trait that must worship something, look up to something. Religious feeling was there; and through the peculiar way in which this etheric body was connected to the physical body, what was a condition for this was present in him: an enormous receptivity for what could be read and heard between the lines of the books and between the words of the teachers, what could be felt and sensed. Thus he formed a picture of the ancient Greek world that completely filled his soul, a unique picture that lived more in feeling than in clear imagination. If we want to visualize it as it was experienced by the young Nietzsche, we have to consider him and his time.

Nietzsche had a loose connection with the materialism of his time. He could understand it, but this materialism was something that hardly touched him. Since his etheric body was only slightly connected to the physical body, the materialistic time touched him only as a floating figure is touched by the hem of the dress barely touching the ground. Only one thing was present in him as a dark feeling, the feeling of the deep dissatisfaction of such a world view. The feeling that a person who has such a world view faces the bleakness, the emptiness of life; that was what touched his soul like a faint hint. Above that arose what lived in his soul as an attitude toward Greek culture. We understand this when we learn to comprehend what lived in his soul. This image was not one in which sharp words could be chosen. We will try to present it as it can reveal itself to us through spiritual science.

The spiritual scientist looks into an ancient human development, of which history no longer knows anything. Only clairvoyance can illuminate these times, when wisdom was very different from later times, when people who were ripe for it were initiated into the mysteries and through the initiates were brought to an understanding of human development. If we want to get an idea of the lower mysteries, we have to imagine a special process. This initiation or teaching did not take place as it does today. Learning consisted of something quite different. Let us assume that the thought, which man today expresses so dryly, that spiritual beings descended into the material, but that the material ascended and developed until it became the present human being, that this thought, which is so sober, was presented in an important image at that time. One could literally see the descent of the spirit and the ascent of the material. This took place literally; and what the student saw there was wisdom to him; it was science to him, but not expressed in concepts, but tangible in intuition. There was something else as well. The picture the student saw was such that he sat before it with great, pious feelings. He received wisdom and religion at the same time. Besides, the whole picture was beautiful. It was true, genuine art. The student was surrounded by art, wisdom and religion combined into one.

It is rooted in the course of human development that what was united was separated: art, science and religion. For there could have been no progress in human development if people had kept all this united. In order for each to be perfected in the individual, what had previously been united had to be separated: science, art and religion, in order to be able to flow together at a higher level of perfection later on. What now presents itself in sharp contours, think of it as shrouded in a veil so that one merges into the other. And think that in Greek cultural life an echo of the ancient development of humanity is being lived out and only a dark inkling, a feeling of it, remains in Greek cultural life.

So you have the feeling that this was alive in young Nietzsche; that was the fundamental sound of his soul. The dullness of sensual existence is suffering; to endure it, art, science and religion are given to us. To spread salvation over this suffering is the basic mood of his soul. The image of Greek art increasingly came into his field of vision. Art became a great means for him to endure life in the sensual. And so he grew up. He was in this frame of mind when he graduated from high school. As is often the case with such natures, he was able to acquire with great ease what others can only acquire with difficulty. It was easy for Nietzsche to acquire the external tools of the philologist and thus bring order into his basic mood. Then came the time when he perfected himself more and more. Now we see how gradually an inkling of the ancient spiritual connection of the various currents of humanity dawns on him. He sensed this connection as an indefinite darkness. He sensed a higher power that ruled in the individual personalities. When he immersed himself in the real Greek way of thinking, in the thoughts of Thales, Anaxagoras and Heraclitus, a remarkable idea formed in him that distinguishes him so much from others. He himself once said: When I immerse myself in Greek philosophy, I cannot do it like others, like others do it; that is only a means for me. Now he is developing what distinguishes him so much from other thinkers. We can best make this clear to ourselves by means of an example. Let us take Thales. An ordinary scholar takes up the teachings of Thales, but for him Thales is more or less a historical example. He studies the spirit of the time in him. For Nietzsche, all the thoughts of this philosopher are only an approach, only a way to the soul of Thales himself; Thales stands before him in the flesh, vividly. He forms a friendship with him, he can associate with him, he has a purely personal relationship of friendship with him. Every figure becomes real for Nietzsche, is truly related to him. Look at what he wrote, look at that essay: “Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks,” 1872/73, and you will find it there. He is there to make friends through philosophy with those he describes. But when you enter into such intimate relationships, it means something completely different for the heart and soul than our dry science. Just think how dull a learned history is! It can only be a learned hypothesis.

Love, suffering and pain, the whole range of the soul's emotions, can only be experienced by ordinary people in relation to the people who surround us in everyday life. Everything from the deepest pain to the highest bliss, the whole gamut of feelings, could be experienced by Nietzsche in relation to the souls that arose for him from the gray depths of the mind. The beings to whom he felt drawn lived in completely different realms than his daily environment. What ordinary people feel in everyday life takes place in Nietzsche in relation to his friends, who have arisen for him out of the spiritual world. Thus, a spiritual world was available to him in which he felt suffering, joy and love. He was always somewhat floating above reality, the world of the senses. This is the great difference that distinguishes him from the other people of his time.

And now let us see how this life was shaped! Above all, we see his great ease of comprehension. He had not yet completed his doctorate when the University of Basel asked his teacher Ritschl, the great philologist, whether he could recommend a student for a professorship. He recommended Nietzsche, and when, in view of Nietzsche's youth, it was asked whether he was really suitable, Ritschl wrote: “Nietzsche will be able to do anything he wants.” So the young scholar became a professor in Basel. He was appointed doctor when he was already a professor, and without an exam, because the gentlemen before whom he was to take the exam said: “But, colleague, we can't examine you.” These things go their easy course, floating above reality, quite understandably.

Then a twofold event happens for him. He gets to know the soul content of a person who has already died and of a living person. He gets to know a soul in Schopenhauer, which he cannot contemplate like a human being whose philosophical system he looks at and admires, and whose teachings he would swear by, but he has a feeling towards him as if he would like to say to him, “Father!” And he gets to know Richard Wagner, who had remarkable experiences of the soul that touched on what Nietzsche felt when contemplating Greek culture. We need only sketch out a few lines to describe Richard Wagner. We need only recall that Richard Wagner said: There must have been a time when all the arts were united. He himself felt the great ideal of humanity to bring the arts together again as an artist, to unite them and to cast a religious, consecrating mood over them. Now we think of how something in Nietzsche came to life that conjured up in his soul that original state of humanity when the arts were still united. We think of his words: “If you want to describe the true human being, you must take into account that something higher lives in every human being. If you want to describe true humanity, you must go to the figures that reach beyond sensuality.” He was always a little suspended over the reality of the sensual world. In his search for that higher, for the figures that reach beyond sensuality, he was led to the “superman,” to the spirit-filled superman. Thus he created his pure, serene, mythical figures.

In this sense, he was led to the higher language, to music, to the language of the orchestra, which could become the expression of the soul. Let us recall what lived in Richard Wagner's soul: Shakespearean and Beethovenian figures stood before him. In Shakespeare, he saw acting figures. He saw figures whose actions take place when they have felt soul, when they have had feelings of pain and suffering and feelings of supreme bliss. In Shakespeare's dramas, according to Richard Wagner, the result of the soul experiences of the characters appears. This is a drama that seeks solely to externalize the inner life. And in Shakespeare, one can sense the experiences of the soul of the characters. Alongside this, the image of Beethoven the symphonist appeared to him. In the symphony, Wagner saw the reproduction of what lives in the soul, in the whole gamut of feelings between suffering and bliss. In the symphony, the soul's feelings are given full rein, but do not become action, do not enter the room. Once, in the conclusion of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, this inner experience in Beethoven's music seemed to him to want to externalize itself with all its might. Wagner wants to step in at this point. He wants to continue Beethoven in a certain sense. He wants to bring about a synthesis, a unification between Shakespeare's and Beethoven's art. Something of that primeval human culture was alive in Wagner. What lived in him as an impulse must have appeared to Nietzsche as the realization of his most significant dreams.

Nietzsche had a different relationship with Schopenhauer. He read Schopenhauer with fervor. As with every school, he also had reservations about Schopenhauer. All the more was the feeling in him to call him “father.” He had a deep relationship with him. Schopenhauer was not as heavy for him as Richard Wagner. He feels the purifying, ennobling influence of Schopenhauer. Thus we see the genesis of his work “Schopenhauer as Educator.” All this arose from the feeling of saying “father” to him. One cannot imagine a picture that could create a more vivid bond between the living and the dead.

But there was something in Nietzsche's question that Schopenhauer did not answer. The question of cultural connections always came to his mind. He had intuitively grasped the original state of humanity, in which great individual spirits, the initiates, taught and led men in the mysteries. Thus he arrived at the concept of the “superman,” who, he believed, must necessarily arise out of the history of natural evolution. That is his concept of the superman, as the sentence shows: “By raising itself to the great human being, nature fulfills its highest goal, the great personality.” Thus, for him, nature and man are linked together. And now everything he experiences becomes something other than theory. It becomes a very personal emotional experience. It becomes something in which his pain, his joy, his desire for action glows. What he says is less important than that what he says points to what was glowing in his heart. And from the fading away of what he experiences in his soul, his first significant work emerges: 'The Birth of Tragedy'. There he almost falls on how Greek culture developed from ancient Greece, from the state of the united arts. And one may say: here something of the deep truth is touched upon. He knows nothing of that primeval culture which one gets to know through spiritual science. He only senses it. He believes that the first beginnings of art would have played themselves out in grotesque, paradoxical forms; that human beings would have indulged in wild, grotesque figures. And he describes it as if it had taken place in an instinctive state, whereas the art of the mysteries was the highest expression of the spiritual. As man stood in the mysteries, Nietzsche felt as if man had made himself a work of art, as if he had imitated the rhythm of the stars, the world event in dance, as if he had wanted to express the law of the world. But Nietzsche considered all this to be instinctive feeling. He did not know that the laws of the world were given to people in the purest and most noble symbolic forms by initiates in the mysteries. That is why all this has such a wild expression in Nietzsche. But it is an inkling of the actual.

But how does Nietzsche view later tragedy? He said that it was all an expression and fruit of a later time; that man had already fallen out of touch with the divine; that he no longer imitated the laws of the world in his dance; he only imitated it in pictures. He saw in it a serene image of the original, but not the original itself. Thus, already in Sophocles we have an Apollonian art that expressed the original in the static image. [Gaps in the transcript.] And through Richard Wagner, Nietzsche was led back into the old Dionysian element. You see how the conclusion of his writing “The Birth of Tragedy” is a mixture of longing, presentiment, and confusion.

But now, more and more, he was confronted with external reality. He became acquainted with what modern culture had put in the place of the old. What he had been unable to recognize in the first period of his life, what modern materialism had produced, he now became acquainted with. And from the mood that I described, that many of the noblest minds found almost a blessing in materialism, he now got to know something in his way. Now all ideals passed from his view. He once said that all these old ideals were 'put on ice' for him. Now they appeared to him as a legitimate evil, arising from human weakness. The writing of “Human, All Too Human” began.

Now comes the second period of his life. He experienced the materialistic world view in such a way that, in his own way, he had to immerse himself in it. It was his fate that he had to lock up everything he wanted to think in his soul. And just from this world view, from Darwinism, something like a release dawned on him, which in turn led him out of materialism. He looked at the development of humanity in a Darwinian way. He said to himself: Man has developed out of animality. But he also drew the consequences of this view. He had to draw them because he wanted to see clearly in relation to materialism. Because he had to live with it. So he came to the conclusion: If I look at the animal forms, I see in them the remains of an earlier culture. If I look at man, I must say that he contains as a possibility the state of perfection of the future. I may call the ape a bridge between man and animal. So what is man? A bridge between the animal and the superhuman. Thus the superhuman slumbers in man. Nietzsche felt, could not help feeling, what it means to live in such a way that what can become appears. That was the lyrical mood of his “Zarathustra”, in the Song of the Superhuman, the song that describes the future. Feeling bound him to this thought; feeling was what filled him.

And now we see how another thought is linked to this. All lyrical moods resonate in “Zarathustra”. But Nietzsche had no such points of reference as we have in Theosophy. That did not exist for him. The idea of reincarnation did not enter his field of vision, the idea that the “superman” lives in man as a higher divine self in the human body. We see the “superman” recurring, so that we see the consoling ascending line of development, not the repetition of the same. Nietzsche knew nothing of this. Yet there is a mysterious connection between what he said and our spiritual-scientific view. For Nietzsche, the idea of the eternal return of the same was now linked to the idea of the superman. The idea presented itself in a strange way and revealed itself to him in such a way that all things had already existed countless times. This thought was Nietzsche's true, very own thought. How you all think and feel, you have thought and felt countless times, and so you will think and feel countless times. This thought now combined with that of the superman. He had to feel his way into both thoughts.

Now imagine Nietzsche's organism, think of the loosening of the etheric body, which was always ready to separate from the physical body. Imagine a man who takes the thoughts he forms terribly seriously, and imagine his mood: as I am, as I feel, so will I be and feel forever. And now consider how he felt the loosening of his etheric body. He felt it in such a way that for a hundred days of the year he had the most terrible headaches. Then you can understand how this came to life in his soul: this was there countless times, it will return countless times. On the one hand, we feel comforted by the thought of the superhuman, on the other hand, we feel desolate at the thought of the eternal return of the same. And we understand moods like this: “Happy the man who still has a home!” We feel much of what is connected with the feeling of home. We feel something of the idiosyncrasy of Friedrich Nietzsche that is connected with the fate of the world view of the 19th century. He had to feel the feeling of homelessness. It is a testimony to how the world views of their time live in a deeply feeling soul, and how longing arises in it for a spiritual home.

Thus we see how it is only through Theosophy that it becomes possible to arrive at a synthesis of wisdom, art and religion, which are to be reunited into a great culture through spiritual science. Imagine the idea of the eternal return of the same developed further, so that it means reincarnation, only in this way does the thought acquire its true content, and you are filled with the hope that the union of wisdom, art and religion will arise anew. It is not the return of the same, but a constant perfecting.

We may say that a great question appears to us in Nietzsche's life, the question: How is it possible for a truly deep soul to live in the materialistic world view? In Nietzsche's soul, we have before us a soul that was unable to find the answers to the anxious questions of our culture. It lacked what we find through the anthroposophical worldview. And let us imagine another soul that has the opportunity to find these answers through anthroposophy, which gives us answers to the questions that the deepest souls must feel. Nietzsche posed these questions, but could not answer them. Longing filled him, and this longing destroyed him. He is proof that the great problems posed by the spirit must be answered by anthroposophy. The answer to longing is the remedy for Nietzsche's cry. And this remedy lies in anthroposophy. Longing was the power of Nietzsche's soul, which remained so alive that it maintained the exterior of this personality as an imprint of inner aliveness. It was as if, beyond the death of the spirit, the soul wanted to remain with the body in order to catch something of the answers that Nietzsche could not reach, that he longed for and that ultimately destroyed him. From Nietzsche's soul we can feel the necessity of anthroposophy. Let us imagine him as the great questioner, as the questioner of the questions of humanity, the answers to which determine the necessity of an anthroposophical spiritual science. ON THE MISSION OF SAVONAROLA Berlin, October 27, 1908

The word 'mission' is perhaps not quite the right one to use when considering this unique phenomenon at the end of the 15th century. And there is perhaps something else associated with the personality of Savonarola that suggests to us that it would be much more important than defining the mission of Savonarola. This other thing would be for those of us who belong to the anthroposophical worldview and world movement to familiarize ourselves with the essence of Savonarola, because there are many lessons to be learned from his activities and character. In a figure like Savonarola, we can see at the dawn of the modern era the point to which the development of Christianity had come by the end of the 15th and beginning of the 16th century. And we can see precisely what kind of activity is not effective. We can see what kind of activity is needed to further human development.

It might also be necessary to show how certain one-sided currents are precisely unsuitable for strengthening and introducing Christianity. We will not take long, but just a few detailed strokes to visualize the effectiveness of Savonarola. And beside him will stand out another figure, that of a very different Dominican friar, a friar who painted the monastery from which Savonarola's earnest words had been silenced with wonderful, delicate paintings: Fra Angelico da Fiesole. He is there at the dawn of this new era, as if to show that Christianity at that time expressed itself in two forms. One could carry within oneself the whole wonderful vision of the Christian figures and events, as they live in the hearts of men. One could also, in a simple way, without worrying about what was going on outwardly, without worrying about what the Church was doing, what the popes were doing, just paint what one experienced as Christianity within oneself. And that is then proof of what Christianity could become in a soul at that time. That is one way, but the other way is – and this is the way of Savonarola – to live Christianity in that period of time. If you were a person like Savonarola, with a certain amount of certainty, a strong will and a certain clarity of mind, you could do what he did: believe at a relatively young age that you could live a truly Christian life within an order like that, where the true rules of the order were to be followed. If you also had what Savonarola had, the deepest moral convictions, you also looked at what was going on in the world. You could compare Christianity with what was going on in Rome, with the truly worldly life of the Pope, the Cardinals, or how it was expressed in the magnificent creations of Michelangelo! One could observe how in all Catholic churches masses were read in the strictest worship, and how people felt that they could not live without this worship. But one could also see that those who were under the gown and stole and chasuble indulged in a liberality in their civil life that what is striven for today as liberality is child's play by comparison. One could see that what is wanted today from a certain side and what is striven for as a tendency is realized up to the highest steps of the altar.

And one could combine an ardent belief in the higher worlds with an absolutely democratic sense: the rule of God and no human ruler! That was one of Savonarola's heartfelt desires. One could admire the Medicis for all they had done in Italy, for all they had brought Italy, but one could also, as Savonarola did, regard the great Medici, Lorenzo de' Medici, as a tyrant.

You could be Lorenzo de' Medici and think about having a quarrelsome Dominican preach as you wished. Lorenzo de' Medici was a man of noble thoughts. He could grasp various things, for one must look at things from two sides. He had invited Savonarola to Florence, and from the very beginning Savonarola went against the grain of Lorenzo as his patron. And when Savonarola became prior of the monastery, he did not even comply with the custom of paying a visit of thanks to Lorenzo. When this was pointed out to him, and also that Lorenzo had summoned him to Florence after all, he said: “Do you believe that it was Lorenzo de' Medici who summoned Savonarola to Florence? No, it was God who summoned Savonarola to this monastery in Florence!”

But Lorenzo, as a nobleman, donated many things to the monastery, and one could believe that one could tame Savonarola somewhat by giving to the monastery. But he gave away all these gifts and declared that the Dominicans were there to keep the vow of poverty and not to collect riches.

Who were Savonarola's enemies, really? All those who had established the configuration, the domination on the physical plane. Nothing deterred Savonarola. He went straight ahead. He said: There is a Christianity. In its true form, it is unknown to people. The church has distorted it. It must disappear, and in its place must arise new organizations, in which will be shown how the true Christian spirit can shape the outer reality. He preached these sentences over and over again. At first he preached with great difficulty, for at first he could only force the words out with an effort. But he became an orator, whose following grew larger and larger, whose oratorical talents increased more and more.

The ruling powers were initially liberal; they did not want to do anything against him. An Augustinian friar was sent to deliver a speech that would sweep away Savonarola's power. And one day an Augustinian friar spoke on the subject: “It does not behoove us to know the day and hour when the divine creator intervenes in the world!” The Augustinian monk spoke with flaming words, and one would like to say, knowing the currents that have flooded through Christian life: the whole confession of Dominicanism stood against Augustinianism. And Savonarola prepared for battle and spoke on the same theme: “It behooves us well to know that things are not as they are. It behoves us to change them and then to know when the day and hour will come!” The people of Florence cheered him as they had cheered the Augustinian monk. He was considered dangerous not only in Florence, but also in Rome and throughout Italy. After tremendous torture and falsified records, he was sentenced to death by fire.

That was Savonarola, who lived at the same time as the other Dominican monk, who painted a Christianity that hardly existed in the physical world. And if we recall a word spoken by a remarkable man, what it means for Savonarola: Jacob Burckhardt, the famous historian of the Renaissance, formed the opinion that at that time the development of life in Italy had reached such a point that one was on the verge of secularizing the church, that is, of making the church a worldly organization, we see that Savonarola represented the eternal conscience of Christianity.

Why was it that Savonarola, who stood up for Christianity with such fire, remained ineffective after all? Because he is an historical figure. This was the reason: that at this dawn of the New Era and at this dusk of the Church, when Savonarola represented the conscience of Christianity, something had to be brought forward against the external institutions of Christianity. The test has been passed that even a figure like Savonarola was not needed to restore Christianity. Those striving in spiritual science should learn from this that something else is needed, something objective, something that makes it possible to tap the deep sources of esoteric Christianity. Such an instrument can only be Anthroposophy. The figure of Savonarola is like a distant sign shining in the future, indicating that anthroposophists should teach not by the means by which one could believe in those days to rediscover Christianity, but by the means of anthroposophical spiritual science. As an anthroposophist, one can learn a great deal from this figure.

The relationship between anthroposophy and philosophy has already been discussed, albeit only briefly. Today we want to talk about fairly elementary aspects of so-called formal logic. Despite the elementary nature of our deliberations today, it may not be without use to delve into a philosophical chapter between our forays into higher worlds. It is not meant that such a lecture could directly offer anything for penetrating into the higher worlds. A logical consideration can do this no more than formal logic can enrich experience in the sensory realm. For example, someone who has never seen a whale cannot be convinced that they exist. He must make the observation himself. But it is precisely the knowledge of borderline areas that will be useful to anthroposophy, just as logic was useful to scholastics. The philosophers of the Middle Ages, who today are somewhat contemptuously grouped together under the name of scholastics, did not regard logic as an end in itself either; it did not serve to learn anything substantial. The subject-matter of teaching was either the observation of the senses or revelation, which is obtained through divine grace. But although, in the opinion of the scholastics, logic was quite powerless to enrich experience, they nevertheless regarded it as an important instrument of defense. So it should be an instrument of defense for us as well.

A distinction is made between material and formal logic. Logic as such cannot grasp anything material or substantial as its object. Concepts such as time, number, and God give a content that does not arise through logical conclusions. On the other hand, the form of thinking is the task of logic; it brings order to thoughts, it teaches how we must connect concepts that lead to correct conclusions. It is fair to say that logic was more highly valued in the past than it is today. In grammar schools, philosophy, logic and psychology used to be taught together. The aim of the teaching was to lead young people to disciplined, orderly thinking; propaedeutics means preparation. Today, however, people are trying to eliminate this kind of preparation and incorporate it into the study of silence because logic is no longer sufficiently respected. Thinking, they say, is innate in man; so why teach thinking in a special subject? But it is precisely in our time that it is very necessary to reflect on ourselves and to devote more attention to formal logic.

Aristotle is considered the founder of formal logic. And what Aristotle has done for logic has always been recognized, even by Kant, who says that formal logic has not progressed much since Aristotle. More recent thinkers have sought to add to it. We do not want to examine today whether or not such additions were necessary and justified. We just have to recognize the scope of logic here.

Anthroposophists are often reproached for not being logical. This is very often because the person making the reproach does not know what logical thinking is and what the laws of logical thinking are. Logic is the science of the correct, harmonious connection of our concepts. It comprises the laws by which we must regulate our thoughts in order to have within us a mirror reflecting the right relationships of reality.

We must first realize what a concept is. The fact that people are so little aware of what a concept is is due to the lack of study of logic on the part of the learned. When we encounter an object, the first thing that happens is sensation. We notice a color, a taste or a smell, and this fact, which takes place between man and object, we must first consider as characterized by sensation. What is in the statement: something is warm, cold and so on, is a sensation. But we actually do not have this pure sensation in ordinary life. When we look at a red rose, we not only perceive the red color; when we interact with objects, we always perceive a group of sensations at once. We call the combination of sensations “red, scent, extension, form” a “rose.” We do not actually perceive individual sensations, only groups of sensations. Such a group can be called a “perception”.

In formal logic, one must clearly distinguish between perception and sensation. Perception and sensation are two entirely different things. Perception is the first thing we encounter; it must first be dissected in order to have a sensation. However, that which gives us a mental image is not the only thing. The rose, for example, makes an impression on us: red, scent, shape, expanse. When we turn away from the rose, we retain something in our soul, such as a faded remnant of the red, the scent, the expanse, and so on. This faded remnant is the idea. One should not confuse perception and idea. The idea of a thing is where the thing is no longer present. The idea is already a memory image of the perception.

But we still have not come to the concept. We get the idea by exposing ourselves to the impressions of the outside world. We then retain the idea as an image. Most people do not get beyond the idea in the course of their lives, they do not penetrate to the actual concept. What a concept is and how it relates to the idea is best shown by an example from mathematics. Take the circle. If we take a boat out to sea, until we finally see nothing but the sea and the sky, we can perceive the horizon as a circle when it is very calm. If we then close our eyes, we retain the idea of the circle from this perception as a memory image. To arrive at the concept of the circle, we have to take a different path. We must not seek an external cause for the idea, but we construct in our minds all the points of a surface that are equidistant from a certain fixed point; if we repeat this countless times and connect these points with a line in our minds, the image of a circle is built up in our minds. We can also illustrate this mental image with chalk on the blackboard. If we now visualize this image of the circle, which has been created not by external impressions but by internal construction, and compare it with the image of the sea surface and the horizon that presented itself to our external perception, we can find that the internally constructed circle corresponds exactly to the image of external perception.

If people really think logically, in the strict logical sense, they do something other than perceive externally and then visualize what they have perceived; this is only an idea. In logical thinking, however, every thought must be constructed inwardly, it must be created similarly to what I have just explained using the example of the circle. Only then does man approach external reality with this inner mental image and find harmony between the inner picture and external reality. The representation is connected with external perception, the concept has been created by inner construction. Men who really thought logically have always constructed inwardly in this way. Thus Kepler, when he formulated his laws, constructed them inwardly, and then found them in harmony with external reality.

The concept is therefore nothing other than a mental image; it has its genesis, its origin in thought. An external illustration is only a crutch, an aid to make the concept clear. The concept is not gained through external perception; it initially lives only in pure inwardness.

In its thinking, our present-day intellectual culture has not yet gone beyond mere imagining, except in mathematics. For the spiritual researcher, it is sometimes grotesque to see how little people have progressed beyond mere imagining. Most people believe that the concept comes from the imagination and is only paler, less substantial than the latter. They believe, for example, that they can arrive at the concept of a horse by successively seeing large, small, brown, white and black horses appear in their perception; and now I take - so people continue - from the perception of these different horses, what is common to all horses and omit what is separate, and so I gain the concept of the horse. But one only gets an abstract idea, and one never arrives at the concept of the horse in the strict sense of the word. Nor does one arrive at a concept of the triangle by taking all kinds of triangles, taking what is common to them and omitting what separates them. One only arrives at a concept of the triangle by inwardly constructing the figure of three intersecting lines. With this inwardly constructed concept we approach the outer triangle and find it harmonizing with the inwardly constructed image.

Only in relation to mathematical things can people in today's culture rise to the concept. For example, one proves by inner construction that the sum of the angles in the triangle is equal to one hundred and eighty degrees. But if someone starts to construct concepts of other things inwardly, a large proportion of our philosophers do not recognize it at all. Goethe created the concepts of the “primordial plant” and the “primordial animal” by inward construction; not only was the different left out, the same was retained - as stated earlier in the example of the horse. The primordial plant and the primordial animal are such inward mental constructions. But how few recognize this today. Only when one can build up the concept of the horse, the plant, the triangle, and so on, through inner construction, and when this coincides with outer perception, only then does one arrive at the concept of a thing. Most people today hardly know what is meant when one speaks of conceptual thinking.

Let us not take mathematical concepts, and let us not take Goethe's Organik, where he created concepts in a truly magnificent way, but let us take the concept of virtue. One can indeed have a pale general idea of virtue. But if you want to arrive at a concept of virtue, then you have to construct it inwardly, and you have to take the concept of individuality to help you. You have to construct the concept of virtue as you construct the concept of a circle. It takes some effort to do this, and various elements have to be brought together, but it is just as possible as constructing mathematical concepts. Moral philosophers have always tried to give a sensuality-free concept of virtue. Some time ago, there was a philosopher who could not imagine a sensuality-free concept of virtue and thought those who claimed such a thing were fantasists. He explained that when he thinks of virtue, he imagines virtue as a beautiful woman. Thus, he still introduced sensuality into the non-sensual concept. And because he could not imagine a sensuality-free concept of virtue, he also denied this to others.

If you delve into Herbart's ethics, you will find that for him, “goodwill” and “freedom”, these ethical concepts, are not formed by taking what is common and omitting what is separate. Instead, he says, for example, that goodwill encompasses the relationship between one's own will impulses and the imagined will impulses of another person. He thus gives a pure definition. In this way, one could construct the whole of morality through pure concepts, as in mathematics, and as Goethe attempted with his organic system. The general idea of virtue must not be confused with the concept of virtue. People arrive at the concept only gradually, through an inner process.

By setting the concept of the concept before us, we distance ourselves from all arbitrariness of imagining. To do this, we must first consider the pure course of imagining and the pure course of conceptualizing. I need not say that when a person imagines a triangle, he can only imagine this or that triangle. We must now take into account the way in which mere perceptions are connected and the way in which pure concepts are connected. What governs our perceptual life? When we have the perception of a rose, the perception of a person who has given us a rose can arise quite spontaneously. This may be followed by the perception of a blue dress that the person in question was wearing, and so on. Such connections are called: association of perceptions. But this is only one way in which people link ideas together. It occurs most purely where the human being completely abandons himself to the life of ideas. But it is also possible to string ideas together according to other laws. This can be shown by an example: a boy sits in the forest under tall trees. A person comes along and admires the good-quality timber. “Good morning, carpenter,” says the bright boy. Another comes along and admires the bark. “Good morning, tanner,” says the bright lad. A third passes by and marvels at the magnificent growth of the trees. “Good morning, painter,” says the boy. So here three people see the same thing – the trees – and each of these three people has different ideas, but these are different for the carpenter, the tanner and the painter. They are different combinations of ideas, not mere associations. This is because, according to his inner element, his soul structure, man connects this or that external idea with another, not only externally surrendering himself to the ideas. Here man allows the power that rises from his inner being to work. This is called: apperception is at work in him. Apperception and association are the forces that link mere ideas through external or subjective inner motives. Both apperception and association work in the mere life of ideas. It is quite different in the life of concepts. Where would people end up if they only relied on the subject's apperception and random association in the life of concepts? Here, people have to follow very specific laws that are independent of the association of ideas and the apperception of the subject. If we look at the mere external connection, we do not find the inner belonging of the concepts. There is an inner belonging of the concepts, and we find the lawfulness for this in formal logic.

First of all, we now have to look at the connection between two concepts. We connect the concept of the horse and that of running when we say: The horse is running. - We call such a connection of concepts a “judgment.” The point now is that the connection of concepts is carried out in such a way that only correct judgments can arise. Here we have, first of all, only a connection of two concepts, quite independently of association and apperception. When we connect two ideas through their content, we form a judgment. An association is not a judgment, because, for example, you could also connect bull and horse with each other through an association. But the connection of ideas can also happen in more complicated ways. We can add judgment to judgment and thus come to a “conclusion.” A famous old example of this is the following: All men are mortal. Caius is a man. Therefore, Caius is mortal. - Two judgments are correct in these sentences, so the third one “Caius is mortal” that follows from them is also correct. A judgment is the combination of two terms, a subject with the predicate. If two judgments are combined and a third follows from them, that is an inference. We can now develop a general scheme for this: If “Caius” is the subject \(S\) and “mortal” the predicate \(P\), then in the judgment “Caius is mortal” we have the connection of the subject \(S\) with the predicate \(P: S = P\). According to this scheme, we can form thousands of judgments. But to come to a conclusion, we still need a middle term \(M\), in our example “human”, “all humans”. So we can set up the scheme for a conclusion:

\(M = P\) All humans are mortal
\(S = M\) Caius is a human
\(S = P\) Therefore Caius is mortal.

If this conclusion is to be correct, the concepts must be connected in exactly this way; nothing must be transposed. If, for example, we form the sequence of judgments: The portrait resembles a person – The portrait is a work of art – we must not conclude: Therefore the work of art resembles a person. This latter conclusion would be false. But what is the error here? We have the schema:

\(M = P\) The portrait resembles a person
\(M = S\) The portrait is a work of art
But \(S\) is not equal to \(P\):
The work of art does not resemble a person.

We have turned the universally valid schema upside down here. It depends, then, on the form of the schema, on the manner of linking, to know: the first figure of conclusion is correct, the second is false. It is immaterial how the linking of concepts otherwise proceeds in our thoughts; it must be like the first formula in order to be correct.

We shall now see how one comes to know a certain legitimate connection in order to be able to find a number of such figures. Correct thinking proceeds according to quite definite such figures of inference; otherwise it is just wrong thinking. But things are not always as easy as in this example. Merely from the fact that the conclusions are wrong, one could often find out today, from even the most learned books, that what has been said cannot be true. Thus there are inner laws of thinking like the laws of mathematics; one could say an arithmetic of thinking. Now you can imagine the ideal of correct thinking: all concepts must be formed according to the laws of formal logic. However, formal logic has certain limits. These limits must be applied to the human mind. This would lead to correct insights and recognize the nature of fallacies. By all rules of logic, it would conform to the laws of logic if we said:

All Cretans are liars \(M = P\)
This one is a Cretan \(S = M\)
Therefore he is a liar, therefore \(S = P\)

Now the ancient logicians had already noticed that this is true for all cases, except for the case in which a Cretan himself says it. In this case, the conclusion is certainly false. For if a Cretan says, “All Cretans lie, therefore I am a liar,” it would not be true that Cretans are liars, and so he would be telling the truth; and so on.

It is similar with all fallacies, for example with the so-called crocodile conclusion: An Egyptian woman saw how her child playing by the Nile was seized by a crocodile. At the mother's request, the crocodile promises to return the child if the mother guesses what it will do now. The mother now utters: You will not give me back my child. - The crocodile replies: You may have spoken the truth or a lie, but I do not have to give the child back. Because if your speech is true, you will not get it back according to your own saying. But if it is false, then I do not return it according to our agreement. - The mother: I may have spoken the truth or spoken falsely, but you must give me back my child. Because if my speech is true, then you must give it to me according to our agreement; but if it is false, then the opposite must be true. You will give me back my child. The same applies to the conclusion that affected a teacher and a student. The teacher has taught the pupil the art of jurisprudence. The pupil is to pay the last half of the fee only after he has won his first case. After the teaching is completed, the pupil delays the beginning of the practice of law and therefore also the payment. Finally, the teacher sues him, saying to him: “Foolish youth! In any case, you must now pay. For if I win the lawsuit, you must pay according to the judgment; if you win, you must pay according to the contract, for you have won your first lawsuit. But the student: Wise teacher! Under no circumstances do I have to pay. For if the judges rule in my favor, I have nothing to pay according to the judgment; but if they rule against me, I pay nothing according to our contract.

There are countless such fallacies, which are formally quite correct. The problem is that logic can be applied to everything except itself. The moment we refer back to the subject itself, formal logic breaks down. This is a reflection of something else: when we move from the three bodies of man to the ego, everything changes. The self is the setting for logic, which, however, may only be applied to other things, not to itself. No experience can ever be made through logic, but logic can only be used to bring order to experiences.

Of course, it is not possible to cover this topic of logic as fully as one would wish in the time available. If you wanted to cover the subject exhaustively, you would have to hold a kind of course. Therefore, please take what is said here only as a few sketchy suggestions. I do not intend to proceed systematically either, but only to present some of the elementary logical truths to you, so that you may have something that you can perhaps make use of right now.

We have formed a concept of the concept itself, have heard what a judgment is and how a conclusion arises, namely through the connection of judgments. It has been said that there are certain inner laws of the technique of thinking that determine how to connect judgments if one wants to reach correct conclusions. We have given the original form of the conclusion in the first form of the conclusion using the example: All men are mortal. Caius is a man. Therefore Caius is mortal. In the major premise, “All men are mortal,” we have the first judgment; and in the minor premise, “Caius is a man,” we have a second judgment. The point now is to let a new judgment follow from the connection of these two judgments, through inner conformity to law: “Therefore Caius is mortal.” We call this last judgment the conclusion. We see what this concluding sentence is based on: we have two sentences that are given, that must be present; we know what they state. The point now is to omit the middle term from these two given sentences. The subject term of the antecedent was: “all men”, the predicate term “mortal”. In the consequent we had the subject term “Caius” and the predicate term “man”. In the final sentence, the two terms that were present in both sentences are omitted, namely the term “human”. The fact that we can form the final sentence depends on how this middle term “human” is included in the upper and lower sentences. Our scheme was: \(M = P\); \(S = M\); \(S = P\).

The fact that we are allowed to construct the conclusion in this way depends on the distribution of the concepts in the antecedents. If it were different, we would not be able to conclude as we did in the example given above: Photography resembles man (antecedent); photography is a mechanical product (subordinate clause). If we were to omit the middle term, which is contained in both sentences, then no valid conclusion could be formed here. This is because in both sentences the middle term is connected to the predicate in the same way as the subject. The middle term must be at the beginning in one case and at the end in the other; only then can we form a valid conclusion. Logic is a formal art of forming concepts. It is already evident in the arrangement of the concepts how one can arrive at valid conclusions. We must acquire as laws the way in which the concepts must be combined. We could also say that formal logic comprises the doctrine of concepts, judgments, and conclusions.

Now we will deal with judgments in a few remarks. Certain laws can be established about judgments. The laws of inference will only be understood once the tenets about the concepts and judgments have been established. So today we will first deal with the laws of judgments and concepts.

If we start with the law of concepts themselves, we can compare a concept such as “lion” with the concept of “mammal”. Both are concepts that we can form. They differ in the following ways. Think about what all falls under the concept of “mammal”. It is a large group of individual objects, for example, monkeys, lions, marsupials, and so on; that is much more than we summarize under the term “lion”, which gives us only a small part of the “mammal” concept. Thus, all concepts differ from each other in that some concepts cover a great deal and some only a small area. Here we say: The concepts differ in their scope; but they also differ in other respects. To define the concept of “lion”, many characteristics are needed, many features such as head, color, paws, teeth, and so on. All these things that are listed to get to the concept of “lion” are called the content of the concept. The concept of “mammal” has considerably fewer characteristics than the concept of “lion”. If you were to subsume animals with a certain hair color under the concept, that would no longer be correct. When you form the concept of “mammal”, you have to have as few characteristics as possible, a small content, for example, only the characteristic that it gives birth to live young and that it suckles them. Thus, in “mammal” we have a concept with little content and great scope, and in “lion” the opposite. There are therefore concepts with great scope and little content, and concepts with little scope and great content. The greater the scope of a concept, the smaller its content; the greater the content, the smaller the scope. Thus, concepts differ in content and scope.

Let us now consider judgments in a similar way. When you pronounce the judgment: All men are mortal, you have a different judgment than: The crocodile is not a mammal. The difference between the two is that in the first case something is affirmed, the concepts are brought together in such a way that they are compatible. In the second case, the concepts do not agree; they exclude each other; here we have a negative judgment. Thus, we distinguish between affirmative and negative judgment. There are still other differences with respect to judgment. All men are mortal - the judgment is such that something quite different is given with it than with: Some flowers are red. In the first case, the statement of the property applies to the entire scope of the subject concept; in the second case, other characteristics can be added. The latter judgment is called a particular judgment, in contrast to the first, a general judgment as opposed to a universal judgment. So we have affirmative and negative, universal and particular judgments. Other distinguishing features can also be found in judgments. For example, a judgment can be made in such a way that it is along the lines of “All men are mortal,” or a judgment can be pronounced in such a way as “When the sun shines, it is light.” The first judgment unites the subject and predicate concepts unconditionally, whereas the second unites the subject and predicate concepts not unconditionally, but only conditionally. It only states that the predicate term is there when the subject term is also there, nothing else. The first - All men are mortal - is an absolute or unconditional judgment, the second - When the sun shines, it is light - is a hypothetical judgment. So there are absolute or unconditional judgments and hypothetical or conditional judgments. Many more such characteristics of judgments could be cited; but the point is to show that some of the knowledge depends on these differences. One must master the technique of concepts in order to be able to draw correct conclusions.

If, for example, you take our conclusion after the first conclusion figure: All men are mortal. Caius is a man. Therefore Caius is mortal – we have a general judgment in the major premise and a singular judgment in the subordinate premise, because it is applied to only one individual, to Caius. This is a subform of the particular judgment. This arrangement of the judgments is permissible; it leads to a correct conclusion. But let us try a different arrangement. Take, for example, the proposition: Some women have red dresses – this is a particular judgment. And now let us say: Mrs. NN is a woman. – Now I must not conclude: Therefore Mrs. NN has a red dress. – I must not do that because it is impermissible to conclude according to this figure of speech when the antecedent contains a particular judgment. Only when the antecedent is a universal judgment is this figure of speech correct. Thus certain laws can be established here again. We could now also cite other properties of judgments. We have said that a judgment can be affirmative or negative. Let us take a negative judgment: The crocodile is not a mammal. This animal is a crocodile. Here we may conclude: Therefore this animal is not a mammal. The subordinate clause may thus be affirmative as well as negative.

So there is a certain technique of thinking, a law of thinking, which is formal, that is, quite independent of content. If we observe this formal technique, we think correctly, but otherwise we think incorrectly. We have to follow this technique of thinking, this law of thinking, in order to come to the right conclusions.

We now have a famous classification into analytical and synthetic judgments, which was originally proposed by Kant. Today, people who do a little philosophy can very often come across this classification. What is the difference in the Kantian sense? An analytic judgment is one in which the concept of the predicate is already contained in the concept of the subject. In a synthetic judgment, on the other hand, the concept of the subject does not necessarily contain the concept of the predicate. For example, the sentence “the body is extended” is an analytic judgment, because one cannot think of a body without also thinking of its extension. “Extended” is only one characteristic of the concept “body”. A synthetic judgment, however, is one in which the concept of the predicate is not yet contained in the concept of the subject. Subject and predicate are brought together by an external cause. For example: “The body is heavy” is, according to Kant, a synthetic judgment. For he believes that the concept of heaviness is connected with the concept of the body only through external reasons, through the law of attraction. In the synthetic judgment, therefore, the concepts are more loosely connected.

Much nonsense has been made of the concepts of analytical and synthetic judgments in recent philosophy. It always seemed to me that the most enlightening thing was the story that is said to have happened to an examinee at a German university. He came to a friend on the evening before the exam and asked him to quickly teach him a few more logic terms. But the friend realized the futility of such an undertaking and advised him to leave as he was and take his chances. The next day, the examinee was asked: Do you know what an analytical judgment is? The sad answer was: No. To which the professor replied: That's a very good answer, because I can't say either. And what is a synthetic judgment? The student, growing bolder, answered again: “I don't know.” The professor said, very pleased: “You have grasped the spirit of the matter. I congratulate you, you will get a good grade!” In a certain respect, the matter seems to me to be indeed shedding light. For the difference between the two types of judgment is indeed a floating one: it depends on what one has thought with the concept. For example, one person adds the concept of extension to the body; on the other hand, the person who adds the concept of gravity brings more to the concept from the outset than the other person. The point now is for us to recognize what is really real in the combination of concepts into judgments, or rather what the secret goal of all judgment is. Judgment is in fact purely formal at first.

But there is something connected with judging that will become clearest to you if you compare the following two judgments with each other. Let us assume – not that we are going to leave the physical plane – we have the judgment: The lion is yellow. When you form this judgment, it can be correct. But let us assume that someone imagines some concept out of his head, an animal half lion, a quarter whale and a quarter camel. He could quite well imagine it together; he calls it, let us say, “Taxu”. He could now form the judgment: This animal is beautiful. - This judgment is valid in a formal respect just as the judgment: The lion is yellow. - How do I distinguish valid judgment from invalid judgment? - Now we come to a chapter in which we have to find the criterion for the ability to form a judgment at all. You can change the judgment: “The lion is yellow” at any time, namely by saying, “A yellow lion” or “The yellow lion is”. - But we cannot say, “A beautiful taxu is”. This leads to a criterion for the validity of a judgment: one must be able to include the predicate concept in the subject concept and make an existential judgment out of it. The transformation of a formal judgment into an existential judgment by adding the predicate to the subject thus forms the criterion for validity. In the first case, [empirical] necessity unites the concept “yellow” with “lion”; in the second case, it is assumed when forming the concept that the subject has been taken from an existential judgment, whereas in fact it only arose from a formal judgment.

This is a criterion for the validity of every judgment. The formal correctness of a judgment depends only on the correct connection of the concepts, but the validity of a judgment depends on the existential judgment. A formal judgment is transformed into an existential judgment by adding the predicate to the subject; one enriches the subject. And that is precisely the goal of judging and also of concluding: the formation of such concepts that have validity. Form the judgment: A yellow lion is - then you have thought not only in terms of formal correctness, but also in terms of validity. Now you see that formal logic does indeed offer us the possibility of filling ourselves with correct concepts, so to speak, but that the formation of valid judgments is what we must have in mind; and valid judgments cannot be gained from mere formal logic. The existential judgment in our example – The yellow lion is – was gained from external sense observation. Formal logic gives us the possibility of arriving at correct concepts; with its help we can create quite fruitful concepts. But for the validity of judgments, logic will have to be fertilized by content-related aspects. People usually do not really realize what logic is at all. But if one has learned to grasp the concept correctly, independently of content, it is extremely important.

The validity and the formality of a judgment are two different things. Because people do not really understand the connection between these things, they spin out very grand theories, which some people regard as irrevocable, but which would collapse of their own accord if people were to realize the difference between “formal correctness” and “validity”. You know that there is a modern school of psychology that strictly denies the freedom of the human will. Every human action, it says, is strictly determined by previous events. There are certain methods of proving this, and these play a fateful role today in statistics, for example. For example, someone is investigating how many people in France die by suicide. That's easy, you don't even have to think about it; you just note the numbers over a period of about five years, then you examine it for another five years and so on. Then the person finds that there is a certain difference between these numbers. Now he takes larger numbers, compares twenty to twenty years and finds that here the suicide numbers are almost the same; of course not the same, because the circumstances change, - say, they increase in a certain proportion. A numerical law can be found according to which one can predict how many suicides will occur within a certain period, how many people will die by suicide in a certain period of time. Now there are people who say: if you can calculate in advance how many people would commit suicide, how can one still speak of human freedom? It is the same with estimating future crimes. According to an immutable causality - so they say - so many people would have to become criminals. It is not to be said here that the law is not valid. In a way, it is perfectly applicable in practice to certain cases. But the moment the law is applied, the worst misunderstanding will result, the essence of things or the human being will be investigated and fathomed.

Let us think of insurance companies that work with probability calculations. They arrive at very specific formulas by deducing from experience that a certain number of every hundred married twenty-year-olds will lose the other spouse to death over the course of thirty years. They check the percentage rate within a certain period of time and use it to determine the insurance premiums. It is quite practical to apply such laws in the insurance business; they are true, these laws; but they do not go to something deeper. The matter becomes strange when we take the laws more deeply! Let us imagine that someone is presented with the material of such an insurance company and finds: There is still a spouse alive who should have died by now; but this person is healthy and, according to his inner being, it does not even occur to him to die yet. Nevertheless, the insurance company still has a right to its money, because the formal laws apply very well in the world, but one cannot see into the inner being of a person through such laws. And so it is with all the laws of nature, which are only gained through the collection of external observations. One only gains a concept of the external course of events, but cannot draw conclusions about the inner essence of a thing or a person, for example, whether it is healthy or sick. In the same way, you can never gain a concept of the essence of light by observing its phenomena. You have to keep this in mind, otherwise you will come to results such as those of Exner in his last rectorate speech in Vienna.

External facts are not indicative of the inner essence of a thing. There is still a great deal of confusion in the thinking of humanity in this regard. It cannot be claimed that one can learn to think through logic; that is just as impossible as becoming a musician through the study of harmony. But logic is necessary for correct thinking, just as the study of harmony is necessary for composing for the right musician. One must know how judgments and conclusions are formed. But we must always remain in the same region if we want to make formally correct judgments. For example, the conclusion is: All men are mortal. I am a man. Therefore I am mortal - apparently no fallacy, because here we fall back on the subject. However, the laws of logic only apply if you stay on the same level. The conclusion “Therefore I am mortal” refers only to the body. However, our ego belongs to another level; it is not mortal. The conclusion: “Therefore the ego is mortal” is therefore false. Such formal errors are frequently found in the work of today's scholars.

Today we will have a brief interlude in our lectures. We will not be talking about an anthroposophical topic, but about a purely philosophical subject. As a result, this evening will have to bear the essential character of being boring. But it is perhaps good for anthroposophists to immerse themselves in such boring topics from time to time, to let them get to them – for the reason that they have to hear over and over again that the sciences, especially philosophical science cannot deal with anthroposophy because only dilettantes occupy themselves with it, people who have no desire to devote themselves to serious, rigorous research and serious, rigorous thinking. Dilettantism, amateurism, that is what is repeatedly reproached by learned philosophers of anthroposophy. Now the lecture that I gave in Stuttgart and which will be available in print here next Wednesday will be able to show you from a certain point of view how philosophy itself will first be able to find the way, the bridge to anthroposophy, when it first finds its deepening within itself. This lecture will show you that the philosophers who speak of the dilettantism of anthroposophists simply cannot build a bridge from their supposed scientific approach to anthroposophy, which they so despise, because they do not have philosophy itself, because, so to speak, they indulge in the worst dilettantism in their own field.

There is indeed a certain plight in the field of philosophy. In our present-day intellectual life, we have a fruitful, extraordinarily significant natural science. We also have to show purely scientific progress in other areas of intellectual life, in that positive science has succeeded in constructing exact instruments that can be used in various fields, measuring spaces and revealing the smallest particles. Through this and various other means at its disposal, it has succeeded in advancing external research to a point that will be greatly increased in the future by the expansion of methods. But the fact remains that this external research is confronted with a philosophical ignorance, especially on the part of those who are researchers, so that although it is possible, with the help of today's tools, to achieve great and powerful results in the external field of facts, it is not possible for those to whom are the ones who are supposed to make these discoveries, it is not possible for them to draw conclusions from these external results for the knowledge of the mind, simply because those entrusted with the external mission of the sciences are not at all at a significant level of education in terms of philosophical thinking. It is one thing to work in a laboratory or a cabinet with tools and an external method in research, and it is quite another to have educated and trained one's thinking in such a way that one can draw valid conclusions from what one can actually research, conclusions that are then able to shed light on the origins of existence.

There were times when there was less philosophical reflection and when people who were called to it had trained their thinking in a very particular way, and when external research was not as advanced as it is today. Today the opposite is the case. There is an admirable external research of facts, but an inability to think and to work through concepts philosophically in the broadest sense. Yes, we are actually dealing not only with such an inability on the part of those who are supposed to work in research, but also with a certain contempt for philosophical thinking. Today, the botanist, the physicist, the chemist do not find it necessary to worry about the most elementary foundations of thought technology. When they approach their work in the laboratory or in the cabinet, it is as if one could say: Yes, the method works by itself. Those who are a little familiar with these things know how the method works by itself, and that basically it is not such a world-shattering event when someone makes a discovery of facts that may be deeply incisive, because the method has been working for a long time. When the empirical researcher comes across what is important, a physicist or chemist comes along and wants to report something about the actual reasons underlying what he is researching, then he starts thinking and the result is that something “beautiful” comes out, because he is not trained in thinking at all. And through this untrained, this inwardly neglected thinking, which clings to the scholar as well as to the layman, we have arrived at a state where certain dogmas are authoritatively bandied about, and the layman accepts them as something absolutely certain. Whereas the original cause that these dogmas have come into being at all lies only in this neglected thinking. Certain conclusions are drawn in an incredible way.

We will take as an example such a conclusion, which has a certain historical significance. When a bell rings, people say to themselves: I hear a sound; I will investigate to see what the external, objective cause of it is. And now they find, and in this case through exact experiment, through something that can be established externally through facts, that when a sound comes from an object, then the object is in a certain way inwardly shaken, that when a bell sounds, its metal is in vibration. It can be demonstrated by exact experiment that when the bell vibrates, it also sets the air in certain vibrations, which propagate and strike my eardrum. And as a consequence of these vibrations – so the initial conclusion, quite plausible! – the tones arise. I know that a string vibrates when I have one; I can prove this in the world of facts by placing little paper tabs on the string, which come off when the string is bowed. Likewise, it can be demonstrated that the string in turn sets the air in vibration, the air that then strikes my ear and causes the sound. For sound, this is something that belongs to the world of facts, and it is not difficult to follow when it is explained. One need only put the facts together and draw conclusions from them, and then what has been said will emerge. But now the matter goes further, and there is a tremendous hitch. People say: Yes, with the ear we perceive sound, with the eye we perceive light and colors. Now it seems to them that because sound appears, so to speak, as an effect of something external, color as such must also be the effect of something external. Fine! The exterior of the color can be imagined similarly, as something that vibrates, like the air in the case of sound. And just as, let's say, a certain pitch corresponds to a certain number of vibrations, so one could say that something will also move at a certain frequency, which causes this or that color. Why should there not be something outside that vibrates, and not something that transmits these vibrations to my eye and causes the impression of light here? Of course, you cannot see or perceive through any instrument what vibrates in this case. With sound it is possible. It can be determined that something vibrates; with color it cannot be perceived. But the matter seems so obvious that it does not occur to anyone to doubt that something must also vibrate when we have a light impression, just as something vibrates when we have sound impressions. And since one cannot perceive what vibrates, one simply invents it. They say: Air is a dense substance that vibrates when sound is produced; the vibrations of light are in the “ether”. This fills the whole of space. When the sun sends us light, they say, it is because the sun's matter vibrates, and these vibrations propagate through the ether, striking the eye and creating the impression of light.

It is also very quickly forgotten that this ether was invented in a purely fantastic way, that it was speculated into existence. This has taken place historically. It is presented with great certainty. It is spoken of with absolute certainty that such an ether expands and vibrates, so much so that the public opinion is formed: Yes, this has been established by science! How often will you find this judgment today: Science has established that there is such an ether, the vibrations of which cause the light sensations in our eye. You can even read in very nice books that everything is based on such vibrations. This goes so far that the origins of human thought are sought in such vibrations of the ether: A thought is the effect of the ether on the soul. What underlies it are vibrations in the brain, vibrating ether, and so on. And so, for many people, what they have thought up, speculated on, presents itself as the real thing in the world, which cannot be doubted at all. Yet it is based on nothing more than the characterized error in reasoning. You must not confuse what is called ether here with what we call ether. We speak of something supersensible; but physics speaks of the ether as something that exists in space like another body, to which properties are attributed like those of the sensual bodies. One has the right to speak of something as a real fact only if one has established it, if it really exists outside, if one can experience it. One must not invent facts.

The ether of the modern scientist is imaginary, and that is what matters.

It is therefore an enormous fantasy at the basis of our physics, an arbitrary fiction of mysterious secrets.

Therefore, at the basis of our physics there is an enormous fantasy, an arbitrary fiction of mysterious ether vibrations, atomic and molecular vibrations, all of which cannot be assumed to be possible because nothing other than what can actually be perceived can be regarded as actual. Can any of these ether vibrations be perceived as physics assumes them to be? We would only have an epistemological justification for assuming them if we could establish them by the same means by which we perceive other things. We have no other means of establishing things than sensory perception. Can it be light or color that vibrates in the ether? Impossible, because it is supposed to produce color and light first. Can it be perceived by other senses? Impossible; it is something that is supposed to produce all perceptions, but at the same time it cannot possibly be perceived by the concept that one has put into it. It is something that looks very much like a knife that has no handle and no blade, something where, so to speak, the front part of the concept automatically consumes the back part. But now something very strange is achieved, and you can see in it a proof of how justified – however bold the expression may sound – the expression 'neglected' is in relation to philosophical thinking. People completely forget to take into account the simplest necessities of thought.

Thus, by spinning out such theories, certain people come to say that everything that appears to us is nothing more than something based on vibrating matter, vibrating ether, motion. If you would examine everything in the world, you would find that where there is color and so on, there is nothing but vibrating matter. When, for example, a light effect propagates, something does not pass from one part of space to another, nothing flows from the sun to us. In the circles concerned, one imagines: Between us and the sun is the ether, the molecules of the sun are dancing; because they dance, they make the neighboring ether particles dance; now the neighboring ones also dance; because they dance, the next ones dance in turn, and so it continues down to our eye, and when it dances in, our eye perceives light and color. So, it is said, nothing flows down; what dances remains above, it only stimulates to dance again. Only the dance propagates itself. There is nothing in the light that would flow down. - It is as if a long line of people were standing there, one of whom gives the next one a blow, which the latter in turn passes on to the third and the fourth. The first does not go away, nor does the second; the blow is passed on. This is how the dance of atoms is said to propagate. In a diligently and eruditely written brochure, which one has to acknowledge insofar as it is at the cutting edge of science, someone has achieved something nice. He wrote: It is the basis of all phenomena that nothing moves into another part of space; only the movements propagate. So if a person walks forward, it is a false idea to think that he carries his materiality over into another part of space. He takes a step, moves; the movement is generated again, and again with the next step, and so on. That is quite consistent. But now such a scholar is advised, when he takes a few steps and has to recreate himself in the next part of space because none of his body comes across, that he just doesn't forget to recreate himself, otherwise he could disappear into nothingness. Here you have an example of how things lead to consequences! People just don't draw the consequences. What happens in public is that people say to themselves: Well, a book has been published, someone has set out these theories, he has learned a lot, and that's where he concocted these things, and that's for sure! - That there could be something completely different in it, people don't think of that.

So it is a matter of the fact that the matter is really not so bad with the dilettantism of anthroposophy. It is true that those who stand on the ground of intellectual erudition can only regard anthroposophy as dilettantism; but the point is that on their own ground people have spun themselves into concepts that are their thinking habits. One can be lenient when someone is led by their thought habits to have to create themselves over and over again; but nevertheless, it must be emphasized that on this side there is no justification for speaking from their theoretical point of view down to the dilettant antism of anthroposophy, which, if it fulfills its ideal, would certainly not make such mistakes as not to try to draw the consequences from the premises and to examine whether they are absurd. From anthroposophy you can draw conclusions everywhere. The conclusions are applicable to life, while they are not there, cannot be applied to life, only apply to the study!

These are the kinds of things that should draw your attention to the errors in reasoning, which are not so easy to see for those who are not familiar with them. Today, the sense of authority is much too strong in the interaction between scholars and the public in all circles; but the sense of authority has few good foundations today. One should be able to rely on it. Not everyone is able to follow the history of science in order to be able to get from there the things that teach them about the scope of purely external research and of research into ideas. Thus it is perfectly justified to ascribe great significance to Helmholtz merely because of his invention of the ophthalmoscope. But if you follow this discovery historically, if you can follow what has already been there and how it only needed to be discovered, you will see that the methods have worked here. Today, basically, one can be a very small thinker and achieve great, powerful things if the relevant means and methods are available. This does not criticize all the work in this field, but what has been said applies.

Now I would like to give you the reasons, from a certain point of view, why all this could have happened. There are an enormous number of these reasons; but it will suffice if we keep one or two in mind. If we look back in the history of intellectual life, we find that what we call thinking technique, conceptual technique, originated in Greek intellectual life, and had its first classical representative in Aristotle. He achieved something for humanity, for scholarly humanity, that was undoubtedly extremely necessary for this scholarly humanity, but which has fallen into disrepute: purely formal logic. There is much public discussion about whether philosophical propaedeutics should be thrown out of grammar schools. It is considered superfluous, that it could be done on the side in German, but that it is not needed as a special discipline. Even to this consequence, the snobbish looking down on something like the technique of thinking has already led. This technique of thinking has been so firmly established by Aristotle that it has been able to make little progress. It does not need it. What has been taught in more recent times has only been taught because the actual concept of logic has even been lost.

Now, in order for you to see what is meant by this, I would like to give you an understanding of formal logic. Logic is the study of concepts, judgments, and conclusions. First, we need to understand a little bit about how concepts relate to judgments and conclusions. Man first of all acquires knowledge on the physical plane through perception. The first thing is sensation, but sensation as such would be, for example, an impression, a single color impression. But objects do not appear to us as such single impressions, but as combined impressions, so that we always have before us not mere single sensations, but combined ones, and these are the perceptions. When you have an object before you that you perceive, you can turn away from the object your organs of perception and it remains as an image within you. When this remains, you will be able to distinguish it very well from the object itself. You can look at this hammer, it is perceptible to you. If you turn around, an afterimage remains. We call this the representation.

It is extremely important to distinguish between perception and representation. Things would go very well if it were not for the fact that so little thinking technique is available that these things are made extremely complicated from the outset. For example, the sentence that is supported by many epistemologies today - that we have nothing but our representations - is based on error. Because one says: you do not perceive the thing in itself. Most people believe that behind what they perceive are the dancing molecules. What they perceive is only the impression on their own soul. Of course, because otherwise the soul is denied, it is strange that they first speak of the impressions on the soul and then explain the soul as something that in turn consists only of dancing atoms.

When you tackle things like this, you get the image of the brave Munchausen, who holds himself up in the air by his own hair. No distinction is made between perception and imagination. If one were to distinguish, one would no longer be tempted to commit this epistemological thoughtlessness, which lies in saying: “The world is my imagination” – apart from the fact that it is already an epistemological thoughtlessness to attempt to compare perception with imagination and then address perception as imagination. I would like someone to touch a piece of glowing iron and then to state that he is burning himself. Now he should compare the idea with the perception and then say whether it burns as much as this one. So the things are such that you only have to grasp them logically; then it becomes clear what they are. We must therefore distinguish between perception, in which we have an object in front of us, and the idea, in which this is not the case.

In the world of ideas, we distinguish again between idea in the narrower sense and concept. You can get an idea of the concept of a concept from the mathematical concept. Imagine drawing a circle on a piece of paper. This is not a circle in the mathematical sense. When you look at what you have drawn, you can form the idea of a circle, but not the concept. You have to imagine a point and then many points around it, all equidistant from the one center. Then you have the concept of a circle. With this mental construction, it is correct; what is drawn, what consists of many small chalk mountains, does not match at all. One chalk mountain is further away from the center than the other.

So when you talk about concept and idea, you have to make the distinction that the idea is gained from external objects, but that the concept arises through internal mental construction. However, you can read in countless psychology books today that the concept arises only from the fact that we abstract from this or that, what confronts us in the outside world. We believe that in the external world we only encounter white, black, brown, yellow horses and from this we are supposed to form the concept of the horse. This is how logic describes it: we omit what is different; first the white, black and so on color, then what is otherwise different and again different and finally something blurry remains; this is called the concept of “horse”. We have abstracted. This, it is thought, is how concepts are formed.

Those who describe the matter in this way forget that the actual nature of the concept for today's humanity can only be truly grasped in the mathematical concept, because this shows first what is constructed internally and then found in the external world. The concept of a circle cannot be formed by going through various circles, green, blue, large and small, and then omitting everything that is not common, and then forming an abstraction. The concept is formed from the inside out. One must form the thought-construction. Today, people are just not ready to form the concept of the horse in this way. Goethe endeavored to form such inner constructions for higher regions of natural existence as well. It is significant that he seeks to ascend from representation to concept. Anyone who understands the matter knows that one does not arrive at the concept of the horse by leaving out the differences and keeping what remains. The concept is not formed in this way, but rather through internal construction, like the concept of a circle, only not so simply. What I mentioned in yesterday's lecture about the wolf that eats lambs all its life and yet does not become a lamb, occurs here. If you have the concept of the wolf in this way, you have what Aristotle calls the form of the wolf. The matter of the wolf is not important. Even if it eats nothing but lambs, it will not become a lamb. If one looks only at the matter, one would have to say that if it consumes nothing but lambs, it should actually become a lamb. It does not become a lamb because what matters is how it organizes the matter, and that is what lives in it as the “form” and what one can construct in the pure concept.

When we connect concepts or ideas, judgments arise. If we connect the idea “horse” with the idea “black” to “the horse is black,” we have a judgment. The connection of concepts thus forms judgments. Now it is a matter of the fact that this formation of judgments is absolutely connected with the formal concept technique that can be learned and that teaches how to connect valid concepts with each other, thus forming judgments. The study of this is a chapter of formal logic. We shall see how what I have discussed is something that belongs to formal logic. Now formal logic is that which discusses the inner activity of thinking according to its laws, so to speak the natural history of thinking, which provides us with the possibility of drawing valid judgments, valid conclusions.

When we come to the formation of judgments here, we must again find that more recent thinking has fallen into a kind of mousetrap. For at the door of more recent thinking stands Kant, and he is one of the greatest authorities. Right at the beginning of Kant's works, we find judgments in contrast to Aristotle. Today we want to point out how errors in reasoning are made. Right at the beginning of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, we find the discussion of analytical and synthetic judgments. What are analytical judgments supposed to be? They are supposed to be where one concept is strung on to another in such a way that the predicate concept is already contained in the subject concept and one only has to extract it. Kant says: If I think the concept of the body and say that the body is extended, then this is an analytical judgment; for no one can think the concept of the body without thinking the body extended. He only separates the concept of the predicate from the subject. Thus, an analytical judgment is one that is formed by taking the concept of the predicate out of the subject concept. A synthetic judgment, on the other hand, is a judgment in which the concept of the predicate is not yet so wrapped up in the concept of the subject that one can simply unwrap it. When someone thinks the concept of the body, they do not think the concept of heaviness along with it. So when the concept of heaviness is added to that of the body, one has a synthetic judgment. This is a judgment that not only provides explanations but would also enrich our world of thought.

Now, however, you will be able to see that this difference between analytical and synthetic judgments is not a logical one at all. For whether someone already thinks the predicate concept when the subject concept arises depends on how far he has progressed. For example, if someone imagines the body in such a way that it is not heavy, then the concept “heavy” is foreign to him in relation to the body; but anyone who, through his mental and other work, has already brought himself to think of heaviness in connection with the body, also needs only to unwrap this concept from his concept of “body”. So this is a purely subjective difference.

We must proceed thoroughly with all these matters. We must seek out the sources of error with precision. It seems to me that the one who grasps as purely subjective that which can be isolated from a concept, and that he will not really find a boundary between analytical and synthetic judgments and that he could be at a loss to give a definition of it. It depends on something quite different. What is it that it depends on? We shall come to that later! It seems to me, in fact, to be quite significant what happened when, during an examination, the two judgments were mentioned. There was a doctor who was to be examined in logic as a subsidiary subject. He was well versed in his subject, but knew nothing at all about logic. Before the exam, he told a friend that he should tell him a few things about logic. But the friend, who took this a little more seriously, said: If you don't know anything yet, it's better to rely on your luck. Now he came to the exam. As I said, everything went very well in the main subjects; he was well-versed in those. But he knew nothing about logic. The professor asked him: So tell me, what is a synthetic judgment? He had no answer and was now very embarrassed. Yes, Mr. Candidate, don't you know what that is? the professor asked. No! was the answer. An excellent answer! cried the examiner. You see, people have been trying to figure out what a synthetic judgment is for so long that they still don't know what it is. You couldn't have given a better answer. And can you tell me, Mr. Candidate, what an analytical judgment is? The candidate had now become more impertinent and answered confidently: No! Oh, I see you have penetrated to the heart of the matter, the professor continued. People have been searching for what an analytical judgment is for so long and haven't come up with it. You don't know that. An excellent answer! The fact has really happened; it always seemed to me, though it cannot necessarily be taken as such, as a very good characteristic of what distinguishes both judgments. In fact, nothing distinguishes them; one flows into the other.

Now we must still realize how it is possible to speak of valid judgments at all, what such a judgment is. This is a very important matter.

A judgment is initially nothing more than the connection of ideas or concepts. “The rose is red” is a judgment. Whether a judgment is valid because it is correct is a different matter. We must realize that just because a judgment is correct does not necessarily make it a valid judgment. To be a valid judgment, it is not enough just to connect a subject with a predicate. Let us look at an example! “This rose is red” is a correct judgment. Whether it is also valid is not certain; for we can also form other correct judgments, which are not necessarily valid. According to formal logic, there is no reason to object to the correctness of a judgment; it could be quite correct, but it could still lack validity. For example, someone could imagine a creature that is half horse, a quarter whale, and a quarter camel. We will now call this animal “taxu.” Now it is undoubtedly true that this animal would be ugly. The judgment, “The taxu is ugly,” is therefore correct and can be pronounced in this way according to all the rules of correctness; for the taxu, half horse, quarter whale and quarter camel, is ugly, that is beyond doubt, and just as the judgment “This rose is red” is correct, so is this. Now, one should never express a correct judgment as valid. Something else is necessary for that: you must be able to transform the correct judgment. You must only regard the correct judgment as valid when you can say, “This red rose is,” when you can take the predicate back into the subject, when you can transform the correct judgment into an existential judgment. In this case, you have a valid judgment. “This red rose is.” There is no other way than to be able to include the concept of the predicate in the concept of the subject. Then the judgment is valid. ‘The taxus is ugly’ cannot be made into a valid judgment. You cannot say, ‘An ugly taxus is.’ This is shown by the test by which you can find out whether a judgment can be made at all; it shows you how the test must be done. The test must be made by seeing whether one is able to transform the judgment into an existential judgment.

Here you can see something very important that one must know: that the mere combination of concepts into a logically correct judgment is not yet something that can now be regarded as decisive for the real world. Something else must be added. We must not overlook the fact that something else is required for the validity of the concept and judgment. Something else also comes into question for the validity of our conclusions.

A conclusion is the connection of judgments. The simplest conclusion is: All men are mortal. Caius is a man - therefore: Caius is mortal. The subclause is: Caius is a human being. The conclusion is: Caius is mortal. This conclusion is formed according to the first figure of conclusion, in which the subject and predicate are connected by a middle term. The middle term here is “human being,” the predicate term is “mortal,” and the subject term is “Caius.” You connect them with the same middle term. Then you come to the conclusion: Caius is mortal. This conclusion is built on the basis of very definite laws. You must not change these. As soon as you change something, you come to a train of thought that is no longer possible. Nobody could find a correct final sentence if they were to change this. That would not work. Because it does not work that way, you can see for yourself that thinking is based on laws. If you were to say: The portrait is an image of the person, photography is an image of the person, you would not be allowed to form the final sentence from this: Photography is a portrait. It is impossible to draw a correct final sentence if you arrange the concepts differently than according to the specific laws.

Thus you see that we have, so to speak, a real formal movement of concepts, of judgments, that thinking is based on very specific laws. But one never comes close to reality through this pure movement of concepts. In judgment, we have seen how one must first transform the right into the valid. In the conclusion, we want to convince ourselves in another form that it is impossible to approach reality through the formal conclusion. For a conclusion can be correct according to all formal laws and yet not valid, that is, it cannot approach reality. The following example will show you the simplicity of the fallacy: “All Cretans are liars,” says a Cretan. Suppose this Cretan says it. Then you can proceed according to quite logical conclusions and yet arrive at an impossibility. If the Cretan says this, then if you apply the premise to him, he must have lied, then it cannot be true. Why do you end up with an impossibility? Because you apply the conclusion to yourself, because you let the object coincide with purely formal conclusions, and you must not do that. Where you apply the formality of thought to itself, the pure formality of thought is destroyed. That doesn't work.

You can see from another example that the correctness of thought goes on strike when you apply thought to itself, that is, when you apply what you have thought up to yourself: An old law teacher took on a student. It was agreed that the student would pay him a certain fee, a portion of which would be paid immediately and the rest when he had won his first case. That was the agreement. The student did not pay the second part. Now the law teacher says to him: “You will pay me the fee under all circumstances.” But the student claims: “I will not pay it under any circumstances.” And he wants to do this by taking the teacher to court for the fee. The teacher says: Then you will pay me all the more; because either the judges will order you to pay – well, then you have to pay – or the judges will rule that you do not have to pay, then you have won the case and therefore pay again. – The student replies: I will not pay under any circumstances; because if I win the case, then the judges grant me the right not to pay, and if I lose, then I have lost my first case and we agreed that if this were the case, I would not have to pay. - Nothing has come of a completely correct formal connection because it goes back to the subject itself. Formal logic always breaks down here. Correctness has nothing to do with validity.

The mistake of not realizing that one must distinguish between correctness and validity was made by the great Kant, and that was when he wanted to refute the so-called ontological proof of the existence of God. This proof went something like this: If one imagines the most perfect being, it would lack a property for its perfection if one did not ascribe existence to it. Thus, one cannot imagine the most perfect being without existence. Consequently, it is. Kant says: That does not apply, because the fact that existence is added to a thing does not add any more property to it. - And then he says: A hundred possible dollars, dollars conceived in thought, have not a penny more or less than a hundred real ones. But the real ones differ considerably from the imagined ones, namely through being! - So he concludes: One can never infer existence from a concept that has only been grasped in thought. Because - so he argues - however many imagined thalers one puts into the wallet, they will never become actual. So one must not proceed with the concept of God by trying to extract the concept of being from thinking. But in transferring the purely logical-formal from the one to the other, one forgets that one should distinguish between, that dollars are something that can only be perceived externally, and that God is something that can be perceived internally, and that in the concept of God we must disregard this quality of being perceived externally. If people agreed to pay each other with imaginary dollars, they would not need to distinguish between real and imaginary dollars. If, then, in thinking a sensory thing could be ascribed its being, then the judgment would also apply to this sensory thing. But one must realize that a correct judgment does not necessarily need to be a valid one, that something must be added.

So we have today passed by some of the fields of philosophy, which does no harm. It gave us a sense that the authority of today's scientists is somewhat unfounded and that there is no need to be afraid when anthroposophy is presented as dilettantism. For what these authorities themselves are capable of saying when they begin to move from facts to something that could lead through a conclusion to a reference to the spiritual world is really quite threadbare. And so today I wanted to show you first how vulnerable this thinking is, and then to give you an idea that there really is a science of thinking. Of course, this could only be done in sketchy form. We can go into it in more depth later, but you have to be prepared for the fact that it will be somewhat boring.

Yesterday, we were able to discuss with a somewhat larger group the paths that lead to the higher worlds. Today, we may be permitted to say a few words about the higher worlds themselves. In particular, we want to pick out one of the most important chapters from the realm of the supersensible worlds and take a look at the processes that take place in a person between death and a new rebirth. This is one of the most important chapters in the realm of higher life because it concerns the most fundamental facts and processes of human development. And since the physical existence of man is connected and interwoven with significant processes in those worlds, one must penetrate into these secrets if one wants to understand the human being at all.

I would like to start by describing the life of a person between death and a new birth, but in order to understand what happens in this interim period, we must first consider the nature of the human being. For those who have been involved in anthroposophical studies for some time, the information in the introduction should not be new. But we must nevertheless consider these things very carefully from the outset in order to prepare ourselves for a complete understanding of the subsequent descriptions.

For anthroposophical spiritual science, the essence of man is not merely that essence of a material nature, as it appears to the external senses, which we can touch with our hands and which is bound to the physical world by physical laws. Spiritual science shows that this physical body of man is only part of his entire being, and that man has this physical body in common with the mineral world. We can see for ourselves outside in nature, everything that appears to be dead, mineral nature, consists of the same materials from which the human body is built. The same physical processes occur in stone and in the human body, but there is a big difference between the processes of ordinary, inanimate physical bodies and the nature of man. An external physical body, like a stone, has a form, and it retains its form until an external process, such as smashing or some other force, destroys the form. The human physical body, on the other hand, or that of any other living being, is destroyed in death by the inherent laws of physical and chemical substances, and the human body is a corpse in this case.

Spiritual science now shows us that in the state between birth and death, that is, during our physical lifetime, a second part of the human being is present as a constant fighter against the disintegration of the physical body. We call it the etheric body or life body. It is present in all of us. If this second link were not present in the human being, the body would only follow the physical forces in every moment; it would disintegrate. The fighter against this disintegration is the etheric body or life body. Only at death does this life body separate from the physical body. Man has this life body in common with every other living being; the animal has it, and the plant also has such a continuous fighter. In them too, there must be such a continuous fighter against decay.

If the physical body has been described as a first link of living beings, and the life body as a second, then man has a third link in addition to these. We are able to see this with our intellect alone, with logic. Let us assume that a person is standing before us. Is there nothing more in this space that he occupies, in this hand that he uses, than what has been mentioned so far? Oh, there is something more in it than just bones and muscles, than all kinds of chemical components that we can see with our eyes and feel with our hands. And each one of us also knows very well that there is something more to it. This something more is the sum of his suffering and his joy; everyone knows this something, for it is everything that takes place in sensations and feelings, from morning to evening, throughout one's entire life. There is an invisible carrier of these sensations, and we refer to it as the astral body or the human being's body of sensation. This astral body, which is not perceptible to the physical eye of man, is considerably larger than the physical body. To the clairvoyant consciousness, it is recognizable as a cloud of light in which the physical body is embedded. This third link of his being man has in common with the animal, because the animal also has an astral body.

But then there is still a fourth link in the human being, the crown of the earthly kingdom, the crown of human nature. We can see this fourth link when we trace an intimate movement of the human soul. There is one thing in man that can never approach him from the outside. It is this one name, the simple name 'I'. Only from the deepest depths of the soul can this name, this designation 'I', resound. Never can another human being say 'I' to a fellow human being. Man can only speak this to himself; it can only come from within him, from his own deepest inner being, and here something completely different, something divine, begins to resound through the name “I”. All great religions also felt that there is something sacred in the I. This is also clearly recognizable in the Old Testament. There the name 'I' is equivalent to the name of God. Only the priest was allowed to pronounce the name of God on particularly solemn occasions, at particularly solemn services, and when he reverently uttered the name 'Yahweh' in the temple, the name 'Yahweh' meant nothing other than 'I' or 'I am'. It was meant to signify that the God within man expresses himself. And only that being can utter these words in the soul to its soul in whose nature the divine essence reveals itself. The revelation of God in man is a fourth link in the human being. But we should not think that we are now God ourselves. It is a spark from the ocean of divinity that flashes in man. Just as a drop from the ocean is not the ocean itself, but only a drop from it, so the human ego is not God, but a drop from the divine substance: God begins to speak in the human soul.

Only the priest was allowed to pronounce the holy name, Yahweh, on particularly solemn occasions. To make this divine being resound in the soul of man, so that man can say, “I am,” is the crowning of creation. This I-bearer, the fourth link in human nature, makes man the first among the beings that are visible in earthly creation. That is why the ancient mysteries everywhere spoke of the holy tetrad, the first link of which is the visible physical body, the second link the etheric body or life body, the third link the astral body or sentient body, and the fourth link the I. These are the four links that we want to look at first. And human life, human consciousness, depends on the way in which they are connected with each other.

Only in day consciousness, in waking, do the four aspects of human nature interpenetrate. Then we have the physical body permeated by the etheric body, only finer and somewhat larger, rising above the physical body. Then we have the astral body, the carrier of our feelings, permeating the etheric body and, like a large shiny oval, surrounding the physical body, which is connected to the etheric body. And then we have the ego body. However, the four aspects of human nature only permeate each other when we are awake. When a person sleeps, the astral body with the ego carrier emerges, while the physical body, connected to the etheric body, remains in bed. In the morning, or when the person wakes up, the former two of the four members descend again and reconnect with the other two.

What does the astral body do at night in the ordinary person? It is not inactive. To the clairvoyant's eye it appears as a spiral cloud, and currents emanate from it, connecting it to the physical body lying there. When we fall asleep tired in the evening, what is the cause of this tiredness? The fact that the astral body uses the physical body during the day when we are awake and thus wears it out appears as tiredness. But during the whole of the night, while we are asleep, the astral body is at work dispelling the fatigue. That is why we feel refreshed after a good night's sleep, and it shows how important it is for a person to have a truly healthy sleep. It properly restores what has been worn out by waking life. The astral body also repairs other damage during sleep, such as diseases of the physical and etheric bodies. You will not only have observed this in yourself and in other people from your own life experience, but you will also have learned that every sensible doctor says that in certain cases sleep is an indispensable remedy for recovery. That is the significance of the alternating state between sleeping and waking.

Now we will move on to consider an even more important alternating state, that between life and death. As we have seen, as soon as sleep sets in, the astral body with the vehicle of the ego leaves the physical body connected with the etheric body. In ordinary life, this separation of the etheric body from the physical body hardly ever occurs, except in certain exceptional cases, which will be mentioned later. It is only at death that the physical body and ether body normally separate for the first time. Now, at death, not only does the astral body leave the four-part human being with the ego, as in sleep, but the three parts, ether body, astral body and ego, leave the physical body, and we have on the one hand the physical body, which remains behind as a corpse, is immediately attacked by physical and chemical forces and falls prey to destruction; on the other hand, we have a connection between the etheric body, astral body and I-bearer.

The question now arises as to how anyone can possibly know how these conditions develop at death. Well, if you followed yesterday's public lecture, you will understand that those people who are able to see into higher spheres are also able to report on the conditions after death. And means are available and ways are offered for every human being to acquire such abilities, which is why there is also the possibility of knowing what a person experiences when he passes through the gate of death. If any facts are reported that cannot be immediately verified by anyone, then only those who really know can decide on their correctness. But if the reproach were made to the one who knows by those who know not, that he too could not know anything, then the reproach of arrogance would lie entirely with those who know not and yet claim that one can know nothing. Thus only the one who knows can decide what can be known.

When a person has passed through death, he first has a feeling that he is growing into a world in which he becomes bigger and bigger and that he is no longer outside of all entities as in this physical world, not facing all other things, but, as it were, within them, as if he were crawling into all things. At the moment immediately following death you feel not a here and there, but an everywhere; it is as if you yourself were slipping into all things. Then there is a total recollection of your entire past life, which stands before you with all its details like a large tableau. This recollection cannot be compared with any recollection, however good, of your previous life, as you know it in earthly life, but this memory tableau suddenly stands before you in all its grandeur. What is the reason for this? It is because the etheric body is in fact the carrier of memory. As long as the etheric body was still enclosed in the physical body during earthly existence, it had to function through the physical body and was bound to physical laws. There it is not free; there it forgets, for there all memory steps aside that does not directly belong to the very next thing that the person is experiencing. But in death, as explained earlier, the etheric body, the carrier of memory, becomes free. It no longer needs to function through the physical, and so memories suddenly arise in an unbound way.

In exceptional cases, this separation of the physical and etheric bodies can also occur during life. For example, in cases of mortal danger, when drowning, when falling, that is, in such cases where the consciousness receives a great shock through the horror. People who have been subjected to such a shock sometimes report that for a few moments their whole life stood before them like a tableau, so that the vanished experiences from the earliest period of their lives suddenly emerged from oblivion with full clarity. Such stories are not based on deception, but on truth; they are facts. At that moment of the flash of the memory tableau, something very special happens to the person; only, with such a shock, consciousness must not be lost. At that moment of the crash or other horror that caused the shock, something occurs that the clairvoyant can see. Not always, but sometimes, the part of the etheric body that fills the head region emerges from the head, either completely or in part, and even if this only happens for a moment, it still frees the memory, because at such a moment the etheric body is freed from the physical matter that hinders uninhibited memory.

We can also observe a partial emergence of the etheric body on other occasions. If you press or bump any part of your body, a peculiar tingling sensation may occur, and we tend to describe this feeling by saying that the limb has fallen asleep. Children who want to describe what kind of feeling they have when this happens have often been heard to say: “I feel like seltzer water in my hand.” What does that mean? The actual cause is that the corresponding part of the life body has been removed from this limb for a while. The clairvoyant person can then perceive the elevated part of the etheric body near the physical body, like a copy of it. For example, when a person falls, the corresponding part of the etheric body is pushed out of the head by the falling movement.

At death, this tableau of memories occurs immediately and with full intensity because the entire physical body is abandoned. The duration of this tableau of memories after death is also known. It is three to four days. It is not easy to give the reasons for this. This period of time is different for each person and roughly corresponds to the ability of the person concerned to stay awake without falling asleep for as long as they could have done so during their lifetime.

After that, something else happens. What happens then is that a kind of second corpse is released. The human being now also leaves the etheric body behind; but he retains a certain essence of it, and that is what the person takes with him and retains for all eternity. Now, after discarding the etheric body, the time of the Kamaloka begins for the person, the Kamaloka state. If you want to understand what kind of state this is, you have to bear in mind that after leaving the physical and etheric bodies behind, the human being still has the astral body and the ego of his four limbs, and the question now arises for us as to what the astral body, with which the ego now lives into the time of the Kamaloka, is all about. The astral body is the carrier of pleasure and pain, of enjoyment and desire, so these do not cease when the physical body is discarded; only the possibility of satisfying desires ceases, since the instrument for satisfying desires, the physical body, is no longer available. Everything that the person was as a sentient being in the physical body does not cease to be. The person retains all of this in their astral body. Let us think of an ordinary desire, and for the sake of simplicity, let us choose one of a rather banal nature, for example, the desire for a tasty dish. This desire is not based in the physical body, but in the astral body. Therefore, this desire is not discarded with the physical body; it remains. The physical body was only the instrument with which this desire could be satisfied. If you have a knife to cut with, that is the instrument, and you do not lose the ability to cut when you put the knife away. So at death only the tool for enjoyment is laid down, and therefore man is first in a state in which all his various desires are represented, which now must be laid down or rather must be learned to be laid down. The time when this happens is the Kamaloka time. It is a time of testing, and it is very good and important for the further development of man. Imagine you were suffering from thirst and you were in a region where there was no water, and of course no beer or wine, no drink of any kind at all. You would suffer from a burning thirst that cannot be quenched. In a similar way, a person experiences a certain feeling of thirst when he no longer possesses the instrument with which he was the only one able to satisfy his desires.

Kamaloka is a period of weaning for the person, since he must give up his desires in order to live in the spiritual world. This Kamaloka period lasts for a longer or shorter time for each person, depending on how well he has mastered the habit of giving up his desires. It depends on how the person has already acquired the habit of regulating his desires in life, and how he has learned to enjoy and to renounce in life. But there are pleasures and desires of a lower and a higher kind. We call those pleasures and desires, for the satisfaction of which the physical body is not the actual instrument, higher pleasures and desires, and these are not among those that a person has to get rid of after death. Only as long as a person still has something that draws him towards the physical existence - lower pleasures - does he remain in the astral life of the Kamaloka period. When nothing draws him back down after this period of disaccustoming, then he has become capable of living in the spiritual world, and then a third corpse emerges from the human being. The human being's stay in this Kamalokai period lasts approximately as long as a third of one's lifetime.

It depends on how old the person was when they died, that is, how long they had lived in the physical body. However, this time of transition is not always terrible or unpleasant. In any case, the human being becomes more independent of physical desires through it, and the more he has already made himself independent in life and acquired interests in the contemplation of spiritual things, the easier this time of the Kamaloka will be for him. It makes him freer, so that the human being becomes grateful for this time of the Kamaloka. The feeling of deprivation in physical life becomes bliss in the time of the Kamaloka. Thus opposite feelings arise, for everything one has learned in life one is glad to do without in the time of the kamaloka period. When, as already mentioned, the third corpse emerges from the human being, then everything that the person cannot use in the spiritual world floats away with this astral body. These astral corpses are visible to the clairvoyant and take twenty, thirty, even forty years to dissolve. Since such astral corpses are continually present, they occasionally pass through the bodies of the living, through our own bodies, especially during the night, when our astral bodies are separated from the physical bodies during sleep. Just as an extract, a certain essence, remains for all eternity for the actual human being after the ethereal corpse has left, so too does a certain essence remain for him for all eternity after the astral corpse has left, as the fruit of the last embodiment.

And now the time of Devachan begins for the person, the entry into the spiritual world, into the home of the gods and all spiritual beings. When a person enters this world, he experiences a feeling that can be compared to the liberation of a plant that grew in a narrow crevice and suddenly grows up into the light. For when man enters this heavenly world, he experiences complete spiritual freedom and from then on enjoys absolute bliss. What, in fact, is the time of Devachan? You can get an idea of it if you consider that man is preparing here for a new life, for a new reincarnation. In the physical world, in this lower world, man has experienced and learned so much, and he has taken these experiences with him. He has absorbed them like a fruit of life, which he can now freely process within himself. He now forms an archetype for a new life during the devachan period. This happens during a long, long time. It is a working on one's own being, and every working, every producing is connected with bliss. You can get an idea of the fact that every producing, every working is connected with bliss by observing a hen brooding an egg. Why does she do that? Because it feels like doing it. In the same way, it is a pleasure for a human being to weave the fruits of the past life into the plan for a new life in Devachan.

In the chain of reincarnations, the human being has indeed already gone through many lives, but at the end of a life he is never the same as he was at the beginning of that life. In this life, forced into the physical body, he must behave quite passively. But now that it is free, freed from the physical body, from the etheric body and from the astral body, it weaves an image into its eternal essence, and this weaving in is perceived as bliss, as a feeling that cannot be compared to anything that it can ever experience in the physical world as bliss. His life is bliss in the spiritual world. But do not think that the physical life has no significance in this spiritual world. When bonds of love and friendship have been formed from soul to soul in life, only the physical part is lost with death, but the spiritual bond remains and forms lasting, indestructible bridges from soul to soul, which condense into effects in the archetypes. These are then able to be lived out in the physical in the following re-embodiments. It is the same in the relationship that exists between mother and child. A mother's love for her child is the answer to the prenatal love of the child for the mother, who, because of the affinity of her soul with the child, felt drawn to her as a result of her longing for re-embodiment. What then takes place in the life, in the jointly experienced embodiment between mother and child, forms new, soul ties that remain. And everything that bound soul to soul is already woven into the spiritual life that you find when you enter the spiritual world after death. The life between death and a new birth is such that what was done in the previous physical life has an effect. Yes, even the favorite pastimes that a person was devoted to in life have an effect. But after death, the human being becomes freer and freer, because he becomes a preparer for the future, for his own future.

Does a person do anything else in the hereafter? Oh, he is very active in the hereafter. Someone might ask why a person is reborn and why he comes back to this earth at all if he can also be active in the hereafter. Well, this happens because re-embodiments never occur in such a way that a person is unnecessarily reborn in the course of them. He can always learn new things, and conditions on earth have always changed so that he enters completely different circumstances to gain experience for his further development. The face of the earth, the regions, the animal kingdom, the plant cover, all this is constantly changing in a relatively short time. Think back a hundred years. What a difference compared to today! It is not so long ago that every child learns to read and write by the age of six, as is the case in our society today. In ancient times, there were highly educated people who were at the head of the state and could neither read nor write. Where are the forests and animal species that populated the land five hundred years ago, which is now criss-crossed by railways? What were the localities like where our big cities are today, what were they like a thousand years ago? Only then is man reborn, only then does he enter into a new rebirth when conditions have changed so much that man can learn something new. Follow the centuries as the face of the earth is changed, torn down and built up by the intellectual powers of men. But there is also much that changes that cannot be worked on by the external intellectual powers of people. The plant cover and the animal world change before our eyes; they disappear and other species take their place. Such changes are brought about from the other world. A person walking across a meadow can see how a bridge is built over the stream, but he cannot see how the plant cover is built up. The dead do that. They are working to reshape and rework the face of the earth in order to create a different setting for themselves for a new reincarnation. After man has been busy with the preparations for the new reincarnation in this way for a long, long time, the moment approaches when it is to take place. What happens now? What does man do when he enters into his new incarnation? At that time man finds himself in his Devachan, and there he feels that he must first attach a new astral body to himself. Then, as it were, the astral substance rushes towards him from all sides, and depending on his character, it crystallizes around him, so to speak. You have to imagine it like iron filings being drawn to a magnet and grouping themselves around it. In the same way, the astral substance groups itself around the re-embodied ego. But then it is still necessary to choose suitable parents, and so the person is led to this or that pair of parents, but not merely in obedience to his own attraction. For in this process, exalted beings intervene and take action, who, in keeping with the present state of human development, have taken on the work of karmically ordering these relationships in a correct and just manner. If, therefore, parents and children occasionally appear to be out of harmony, there need be nothing wrong or unjust in that. Sometimes it is good for man to be brought into the most complicated conditions and to have to adjust himself to the strangest circumstances, in order to learn thereby.

The succession of these repeated re-embodiments is not, however, an endless one. There is a beginning and there is an end. Once, in the distant past, man did not descend to incarnations. He did not yet know birth and death. He led a kind of angelic existence, not interrupted by such drastic changes in his condition as are present today in the form of birth and death. But just as surely as man will come to a time when he has gained sufficient experience in the lower worlds to have acquired a sufficiently mature, enlightened state of consciousness to be able to work in the exalted upper worlds without being forced to descend again into the lower worlds.

After hearing the conditions presented here about repeated lives on earth, some people believe they should be afraid that the feeling of parental love could be affected by a mother learning that the child is not entirely of her flesh, because there is something about this child that is not of her, something foreign. But the bonds that span parents and children are by no means subject to chance and lawlessness. They are not new bonds. They already existed in previous lives and once existed in kinship and friendly connections. These bonds of love unite them permanently even in the higher worlds in eternal reality, and all people will one day be embraced in eternal love, even if they no longer descend into the cycle of re-embodiments.

This evening's public lecture will discuss re-embodiment and karma, and it may be appropriate for us to choose a topic for our branch lecture that delves deeper into some questions of the law of karma and, in some respects, provides a more intimate supplement to what can only be given in general terms in the public lecture.

Karma, the great law of existence, the law of fate, can be discussed, so to speak, in the very first rudiments of spiritual science, because it is something that belongs to the most elementary things in the world view. But the more intimate questions are such that, in order to understand them, a familiarity with spiritual science is needed that can only be found if one has worked for a while in a study group and has not acquired empty theories, but what flows quite unnoticed from the spiritual teachings into the human soul: a certain kind of sensations and feelings. This is something that every spiritual aspirant soon notices: that spiritual science is something other than just another worldview, because it gives us concepts and ideas that are transformed into feelings and sensations in our hearts, and that we become different people through it, people with a completely different way of relating to our fellow human beings.

This kind of preparation is meant when we speak of a relative inner maturity, which one acquires in this way through spiritual science. We know that karma initially means the spiritual causation of a later event, a later quality or ability in a person, through a previous one. It does not matter whether this spiritual causation occurs in a life between birth and death, or whether it extends through the various earthly lives as the great law of fate for humanity, so that the causes for something happening in one life lie in a previous life or one that lies far in the past – this law, this all-encompassing law of fate, is what we call karma. If one wants to consider the details of karma, one can talk for many months and even longer, and only slowly and gradually can one grasp the things associated with it. Therefore, in a lecture one can only state the facts of the law of karma in a narrative way, and then the maturity of the spiritual seeker shows itself in that he can accept these things as facts, as results, and then reflect on them further and seek them out in life. The individual life shows the effects of karma in the most diverse ways; only the human view of life usually does not go very far. People usually observe themselves or their fellow human beings with attention for only a short period of life, because their view is not sharpened by the spiritual eye.

I would first like to discuss how little this is the case, so that you can get an idea of how the spiritual view can be developed in ordinary life. This will be done by means of a kind of personal experience. Some of you may already know that I have spent fifteen years of my life as an educator, with a wide range of educational responsibilities, including perhaps difficult ones, where problems arose that could only be solved through prolonged observation and study. It is obvious that in the course of such activities I had the opportunity to make observations, not only of the children directly under my charge, but also of their relatives, their cousins, who were always around. One sees how they grow up, and one can observe a large circle of people entering the world. Now, anyone who has followed life a little, sharpened with spiritual vision, can perceive many things in such details. For example, during the time when I was engaged in that activity, a widespread but then extremely respected medical bad habit was in vogue, which consisted of wanting to keep the children “in good shape” by giving them a small glass of red wine every day. It was fashionable at the time for doctors to have the little tykes take a glass of red wine with each meal. This prescription was conscientiously followed by the parents. Now I had the opportunity to observe such children, those who had been treated this way and those who had not. When you are in the prime of life, you can observe people who were still children when you met them in a variety of ways. The children who were treated to this wine back then are now people between the ages of twenty-six and twenty-eight.

So I have had the opportunity, in the most diverse ways, not only to look at a few years, but also to survey larger periods of time. The people who were one to three years old when I met them and are now twenty-eight years old can be divided into exactly two groups: those who were given their glass of red wine to “strengthen them for life,” and those who were not given it. The former have become people who today, in the physical sense, have to struggle terribly with their nervous system - in spiritual terms, with their astral body. They have become people who lack what is called: holding firmly to a goal in life, having backbone; while those who went without wine in their youth have become people who have backbone, who are firmly grounded, who know what they want, who don't need to go here and there for recreation when their business allows them the least, and who, because they have become fidgety people, don't get that recreation after all. The others, on the other hand, have become firmer individuals. I do not just want to point out how it is when you approach such a person again after years, but rather that life looks a little different when you look at it in terms of the connection between cause and effect, not just as far as the person's nose reaches, but also the larger and deeper connections of causes and effects.

This, too, is the highest form of observation of life when we try to observe people with regard to the qualities that are of an inner, karmic nature. Unfortunately, it is a fact that people do not usually connect the beginning of a person's life with its end. People do observe children, but who has the patience, where they have the opportunity to do so, to observe what follows the way a person's soul life was in the first childhood years and then again what life is like when the course of life is coming to an end? And yet there is a very definite karmic connection between the beginning and the end of life. Certain things that occur at the end of life or in the second half of life are based on very specific causes in the early years or youth of life.

Let us take a specific case, for example a person who, in early youth, is angry, hot-tempered, and easily inclined to become angry about something that happens in his or her environment. This anger, and especially the sudden anger that occurs in children, can take on two forms. It can be, so to speak, merely what is called a bad habit, which in a sense is merely an outburst, a rage-like outburst of excessive selfishness. But it can also be something else. One must learn, especially as an educator, to distinguish these two types from each other. A child's outburst of anger can also be what we encounter when a child sees an injustice happening around him. A child does not yet have the power of judgment, cannot yet say to himself with his mind what is happening. If one were to try to explain that what is happening is not wrong, one would soon become convinced that the child cannot yet understand this. Therefore, it is grounded in the world order, in the spiritual guidance of the world, that what later appears as the power of judgment comes to light in childhood in the form of affects, emotions. The child cannot yet understand what is happening, but it becomes angry. This anger, this affect is a preceding soul proclamation of what later is the power of judgment. These two types of anger and irascibility must be clearly distinguished from each other. Anger in the first case must be treated in such a way that the child lives out this anger as much as possible by really feeling the effects of this anger in the right way and also the wrong of the anger. For if, for instance, out of love, one always does for the child the things by which it gets the fulfillment of its will, then anger misses its effect. Anger always has an effect in the soul. Where anger arises in the soul and is not resolved by achieving what it strives for, it strikes back into the inner being. And that is good. That is why popular language, which often has a keen sense for such things, calls anger “poison” in various places where the German language is spoken. To be angry is to poison oneself. This word is truly taken from the facts of mental life. Anger enters the soul, and through the effect of anger within, when it strikes back, the excess egoism is pushed out. So even anger has its good. It is an educator of the human being, it works like a poison that dampens excessive selfishness.

Something quite different is the anger that arises when a child sees an injustice. This anger is a judgment in advance. It is justified. In this case, one must not merely try to punish – by punishing one would merely drive the anger back inside – but one must try to use this emotion in the child to gradually teach him understanding, to teach him the power of judgment. This anger can be overcome by developing the power of judgment. If a child becomes angry when witnessing an injustice, then the following would happen: The child would be introduced to a kind of understanding that the injustice is done by human nature; depending on his maturity, he would be given an explanation of what happened. Then such anger will also have its right effect. It will prepare the child to judge the world, because it is a harbinger of the power of judgment. This is said to draw attention to the fact that man is not always unjustifiably angry. Anger has its value for the development of man. Man must purify himself, he must overcome anger. Anger is something that has a beneficial effect when it is overcome. Man could never ascend to perfection without overcoming anger.

Now one might ask: Why is there anger in the world government? There is anger because one becomes strong by overcoming it; one becomes more powerful over oneself by overcoming it. If you observe someone who had that noble anger in their youth, in the years when idealism arises, when something filled them with anger because they were not yet able to see the deeper connections, then in their later years, you can see that in old age the good effect of this arises. On the other hand, anyone who in youth was unable to overcome anger, to purify himself, to become master of his passions, will not easily attain in later years that mild activity which touches so pleasantly. For mildness is precisely the effect of anger overcome. Mildness in old age is the effect of anger overcome in youth.

A quite different effect is produced by the soul quality of devotion, which likewise makes its appearance in youth. It consists in man's acquiring a feeling for what he is not yet able to comprehend. Wrath is a rejection of what we cannot yet understand; devotion is a looking up to what we cannot yet comprehend, an attitude of respect for what we are not yet equal to. No one can come to knowledge who cannot worship that which is above him in devotion. Devotion is the best path to knowledge. Men would never come to knowledge if they had not first worshipped from the dark background those spiritual powers that stand above them. Devotion is a force that leads up to what one wants to achieve. Therefore it is basically necessary that devotion be developed. The person who, in later life, can look back on many moments of devotion will look back on them with bliss. If it has occurred to you that in your early childhood you have heard your family talk about a family member who is said to be very revered, and if as a child you have also taken this feeling in, and the day approaches when you can see this personality for the first time – if you then have a holy awe to press the latch of the door behind which the revered person is to appear, that too is a very devout feeling, and we will have much of it in later life if we have had several such moods in our youth.

Devotion is the reason, the karmic cause of the power of blessing in later life, in the second half of life. That power, which flows out and enables us to be a comforter to others, is gained through nothing other than a devotional mood in youth. Look around you, wherever there is a person who comes to others who are sad, who then only needs to be there to comfort the sad with his mere presence, to be their comforter, to spread active love - you will find: the karmic cause for this active power lies in those devotional moods of youth. The power that is poured into the soul of the growing person as devotion is something permanent in him; it runs like a current through the soul and comes to light as a blessing power at a later age. We could consider many cases where the law of karma is already working distinctly between birth and death.

Let us now take a closer look at the law of karma in a specific case in a particular life. Suppose a young person had been studying. At the age of eighteen, the father would have gone bankrupt. The young person would therefore have to stop studying, he would be torn out of the profession for which he had been prepared; he would have to take a different career path. Now, of course, all professions are equal; we are only interested in the facts of the change of profession. So the young man had to become a merchant. Now, if you are not a student of life, you will say: Well, the event happened, and you will observe what happened before and what happened after. But only someone who really observes life with a keen eye will discover a connection between what came before and what came after. If the young man is now in the other profession and everything goes normally – I will not say that it always goes normally, but it can go normally – we will be able to see something different in the later years of life. At first, the profession is new to him. He grasps what is relevant to him. But already in the twenty-first year it will become apparent that something is different about this man compared to a man who has been prepared for the commercial profession from the very beginning: in the twenty-first year it already becomes apparent that he has less interest in what is incumbent upon him in his profession. Certain feelings arise in his soul and separate him from what he should be doing, so that he cannot do what is demanded of him with true satisfaction. If one now investigates the cause of this, one will perceive the following: When a particular point is reached where the course of life is changed, a life knot, for example when a change of occupation occurs, then according to the law of karma little is noticeable in the first few years. But then it comes, so that in the twenty-first year feelings, sensations, moods assert themselves, which can be explained from what comes from the preparations for the other profession in the eighteenth year, feelings that he has taken up but not led to realization. At first he suppressed them, but then they asserted themselves to such an extent that he no longer felt satisfied with his new profession. What was placed in him three years before the change of career will emerge three years after that change in such a way that the person concerned can no longer find the right satisfaction. And from there, things can happen in such a way that in the twenty-second year, the fourteenth year of life is repeated, and in the twenty-third year, the thirteenth. It can also turn out differently because everything in life intersects. In the twenty-third year, for example, he can start a household; interests arise that intersect with the past ones and make them run differently. But the law is still valid. Even when a new interest arises, the earlier interests are still there, having been deflected. From such an example you can see the course of the life process as it presents itself to spiritual science. It is the least that one can gain all kinds of insights through spiritual science; but the most important thing is that through it one can penetrate into the life process. Let us suppose – I never relate cases that have not occurred; one must acquire the habit of never inventing anything, but always choosing cases that have actually occurred – so a mother comes to me who has to lead her only son into another profession because his father has been taken from him. In today's world, the right thing is hardly likely to happen, because true observation of life can hardly be reconciled with today's view of life. If such a mother becomes acquainted with spiritual science, she learns to reckon with the law of karma and can become a good friend of the young man who is to be guided through the years of such a career change. This was the case some time ago. A mother came to me and said, “What is my best life's work?” I said she should use the next few years to gain her son's trust. Then she could use spiritual science to educate his mind so that she could help him when certain events occur. The feelings of piety that had been implanted in his soul would assert themselves strongly in all later years, and she would be able to see correctly what would certainly happen. If one day the son comes home and says, “I don't know what to do with my life, my job gives me no satisfaction,” then she will be able to trace it back to what happened earlier. She will recognize the cause and will instinctively find out how to help her son overcome his difficulty. She will certainly be better able to do so than if she had no idea how karma works and only believed that mood swings and depression arise out of something trivial. Nothing comes into being without a cause; but often the causes lie much closer than one might think. We just have to observe such a node, trace life back from there and see what takes a different course. It is like this: Imagine you have a violin string. You have stretched it and stroke it with a suitable object. The string produces a certain sound. If you now hold it in the middle, something happens on both sides: the string vibrates on both sides. There are events in life of which one can observe how what happens before is reflected afterwards.

The middle of life is also such a crossroads. What is prepared in youth comes out in old age. It is necessary to pay attention to these things so that one can gradually really get a feeling that spiritual science is not impractical, but that one's whole life can be shaped practically from a spiritual point of view. A mere life of love is of no use if wisdom is not combined with love. Love must combine with wisdom, with the realization of what is right. Love alone is not enough to live by.

We can mention another case that occurred in the first half of the eighteenth century and has been carefully examined. A mother raised her little daughter. She had seen how this little daughter started to take things, to steal. But she could not bring herself to punish her in her love, which is, after all, an excellent quality. The little daughter stole once or twice, a third time and did other things; and if you follow the course of her life, you will see that the child became a famous poisoner. Here you have love that is not united with wisdom. Love must be imbued with the light of wisdom. Love can only truly unfold when it is imbued with wisdom. How else can a friend help a young person to develop, to guide them through important moments in their lives, if one knows that there is a law that sometimes shows the causes of an event quite clearly, causes that would not be understood without knowledge of the law? It would be right not just to know in general terms that there is a law of karma, but to follow karma in detail by acquiring a correct worldview. The student of spiritual science must seriously endeavor to familiarize himself with the concrete working of these laws and know how they manifest in life. This is the most important thing: not to bandy phrases about Karma, but to get involved in observing the laws in life. This is necessary!

Now I would like to tell you something else. One can also single out a few cases that relate to karma that passes from one life to another. Of course, here too one can only limit oneself to individual cases. So let us consider a question regarding a person's inner karma, which comes about because basically a person must always be a dual entity in life. If you observe life, you will have to say to yourself: when a person comes into existence through birth, two things have to be distinguished. One is what he has inherited from his ancestors. For example, Schiller inherited the shape of his nose from his grandfather; but what is specifically Schiller's, he has not inherited, but that comes from his previous incarnations, his previous embodiments. On the one hand, there is the hereditary stream of that which is passed on through generations; on the other hand, there is that which the person takes from one life to the next. Those who have acquired an eye for the spiritual will always ask themselves how much a person has from their parents and how much comes from their previous incarnation.

In a rational sense, one cannot teach differently unless one can make this distinction. The art of education will only receive the right form when people have learned to distinguish between these two currents. Only at the end of the evolution of the earth will these two currents flow together so that the human being will be able to find the body into which he fits. At the present time this is not yet possible. If a complete fitting together of outer physicality and inner individual organization were to take place in our present time, it would be impossible for a person to die before normal age due to inner causes; because dying is not something accidental, but a disharmony, then premature dying could not occur, since harmony would prevail in man. But as it is, this disharmony between what has been inherited and what has been brought from a previous incarnation can become so strong that it causes death to occur earlier.

If people would only pay a little attention to spiritual teachings, they could grasp reincarnation with their own hands today – this is not to be taken figuratively, but literally – if only materialistic theories would interpret the corresponding facts correctly instead of incorrectly. This can be demonstrated in certain cases. There are people who have not progressed very far in their development, so that their feelings are still completely rooted in their sentient soul. Their whole consciousness is connected with the sentient soul. And this can be seen from people's outward gestures: they betray certain causes that lie in the astral body. When a person is still completely immersed in the sentient soul, when he feels really good inside, it happens, for example, when he has had a good meal, that he slaps his body with pleasure. This is a sign that he still has a too strong sentient soul. When a person is deeply immersed in the mind soul, this also manifests itself. Because the sense of truth is located in the mind, a person who is immersed in the mind soul or mind will pat himself on the chest when affirming a truth. A person who is deeply immersed in the consciousness soul will touch his nose when he is deeply pondering something. What relates to the sentient soul is expressed in the lower body; what relates to the mind or emotional soul is expressed in the chest, and what relates to the consciousness soul is expressed in the head: one also scratches behind the ears. I only mention this to show how what is in the astral body is expressed in the physical body.

Now the following can occur. Man can take into his consciousness the highest feelings and ideas and ideals that he can have at all in this cycle of time; for example, our ethical ideals, which alone should be proof enough for man of the existence of a spiritual world. If we are inspired by an inner voice for these ethical ideals, and devote ourselves to these high ideals, the stimulus for this cannot come from outside. Now this can go so far that a person elevates something that he feels without ideals to the level of these ideals, so that he does not live according to a particular idea out of a sense of duty, but because he can no longer do otherwise. For the one who allows himself to be permeated by a moral idea, it will come about that he becomes so immersed in this idea that he commands himself what is right in its sense. Thus the ideals must light up in the consciousness soul, then they flow down and become instincts.

When this happens, when man has so imbued his feelings with his ideals, then something special asserts itself. These instincts strive to express themselves all the way to the physical body. But between birth and death, man can no longer work on his physical body. So certain currents go through the chest to the head. If someone is enthusiastic about an ideal, is glowing for it and full of fire, so that he feels with love: that should happen - he will devote himself to it in this life, will do anything for it. But that is not all. Through this activity, currents go up to the upper part of the human head. These are forces that seek to work up to the physical body; but they can no longer change the head in this life, because even if one ennobles oneself in such a way, one's physical body is no longer capable of being shaped. But these forces still flow upwards. These currents remain with the person in his soul, and when the person passes through death and a new birth, he brings them with him into a new existence. This is where phrenology finds its individual justification: these acquired forces emerge in the bumps on the skull. You cannot say that this bump expresses this in general, but rather that which the individuality has often associated with it in this way during the previous life and which could no longer reshape the body, that is expressed here.

So these predispositions go through life between death and new birth, and we really grasp what the person has so often let flow into himself in the previous life. You really grasp reincarnation and karma when you feel the different bumps and humps on the head. But we must be aware that each person has their own laws; these humps must not be judged in general, but on an entirely individual basis. So, for example, we take a hump and know: it is the work that the person did on their soul in their previous life. So you can grasp karma and reincarnation, grasp them with your hands! In this way, you can learn from spiritual science right down to the shape of the body.

Just as the physical form lives on from a previous life into a later one, so do other things carry over. However, one must not look at all these things in a fussy way. One must not believe that the law of karma is as cut as a civil code; it can only be understood through extensive studies.

Let us consider a great misfortune that causes deep pain. We often look at it wrongly because we only ever look at the effect. We then see that an event has occurred that has made us unhappy and thrown us off course. We only see the effect. However, we should look for the cause. We might find the following: Yes, in a previous life there was the possibility of acquiring this or that ability. But we did not do it, we neglected it. So we passed through the gate of death without having acquired this ability. Now, in the following life, those forces, which are already karmic forces, drive us to misfortune. If we had acquired that ability in the previous life, the power would not have driven us to misfortune. It is through this misfortune that we now acquire this ability. Suppose this misfortune befalls us in the twentieth year, and in the thirtieth year we look back on it and ask ourselves: What made us acquire these or those abilities? Thus we recognize the purpose of this misfortune. We gain infinitely if we look at things not as an effect but as a cause for what they make of us. That is also an achievement of the doctrine of karma, to look at things as a cause. All these things are details of the law of karma. So you see that one should participate in anthroposophical life because one can learn a lot that otherwise remains only a general concept.

Something quite significant, which is connected with the law of karma, should still be pointed out. A person who comes into spiritual science and hears that there is the possibility of acquiring spiritual abilities, of growing up to the gift of clairvoyance, might ask: Why is it always so difficult to learn what spiritual science says? This question may be justified, but it really does arise mostly from a misunderstanding on the part of many people who become acquainted with spiritual science only superficially, a misunderstanding they have about the connection between physical and spiritual life. They know that physical life is by no means inserted into human life unnecessarily. It has its mission, just like the life between death and a new birth in the spiritual world.

Let us ask ourselves the question: What about two people, one of whom, due to his karma from a previous life, is unable to develop his clairvoyant gift in this incarnation, but has to content himself with diligently acquiring anthroposophical knowledge through study, so that he can see how these things are to be understood – so he could only progress through study – and another to whom the opportunity was given to develop his clairvoyant gifts and to penetrate into the spiritual world? The latter could have the following attitude. He says to himself: I see into the spiritual world, I can see spiritual beings, why should I then still study books? I know there is a spiritual world, so why should I study anthroposophy? It is unfounded and boring. It is a recurring fact that people who are karmically fortunate enough to be clairvoyant say to themselves: We don't want to learn anything more now; why should we study now what is only given in dry terms? One person is able to study all the harder, but he cannot acquire the gift of clairvoyance; the other despises study, but his karma is so favorable that he can become a clairvoyant. What about these people after death, what is the overall picture? A person who has attained the gift of clairvoyance between birth and death, who could see into the spiritual world and see different things, but did not want to learn the theoretical concepts, who did not want to grasp the spiritual scientific information with logical thinking, who despised all of this, has nothing of it after death. He is no better informed than he was without the gift of clairvoyance that he had during his lifetime. That person is even better off who has not yet been able to see clairvoyantly in his physical life, but who was not prevented from forming a logical concept of the spiritual world by reading.

However, this is not meant as an instruction to be lazy and do nothing to develop the spiritual senses. No one can know whether he will not yet acquire the gift of clairvoyance before his death. For those who have studied the spiritual-scientific world view, these concepts now transform into real insights. What one acquires here through concepts will not be lost, it remains. There is an obligation: No matter how highly initiated one is, if one could see so highly but could not penetrate what one has seen with concepts, one would still gain nothing from it. Man should not stop at mere looking, but should invest everything with concepts drawn from physical life. Human beings are called upon to really absorb within themselves all that they can experience on earth. That which is lacking in the spiritual world must be acquired in the physical world and must be carried up.

The above is connected with something much more significant. There is something that people could never have learned in the spiritual world. No event could ever have been learned in the spiritual world if man had not been led down to the physical earth and gone through the incarnations. All spiritual beings that do not incarnate cannot learn about one event: that is death. There is no death in the astral world and even higher; one cannot experience it there. Hence there is the old principle in esoteric philosophy: If gods want to learn how to die, they have to go to Earth to learn it. This is a very profound truth. And there is something else connected with death: Man would never have attained self-awareness. Only by repeatedly passing through the gate of death and shedding his covers at the end of each incarnation does he come to true awareness of the self. Man must learn to overcome death. Without death entering the world, man would not have come to know self-awareness. Thus death had to become the great teacher of the physical world. This is connected with a great event. If it had never descended to physical earth, if it had always remained up in the spiritual spheres, man would never have been able to experience what is the greatest event in the evolution of the earth: the Mystery of Golgotha.

The Christ event can only be experienced between birth and death. And precisely therein consists the greatness of this event, that a God descended from the heights of heaven and shared the fate of men. Only on earth could He fulfill this mystery. Never could the Mystery of Golgotha have been established anywhere in the spiritual world. To teach people the victory over death, a God had to descend from spiritual heights to die on earth. And this event, understood by man on earth, is the greatest thing that can flow into the earthly incarnation of man. This is the greatest thing that man can take with him when he leaves the physical earth through the gate of death. Man could never comprehend the magnitude of the Christ if he had not learned on earth what the Christ is. When he has learned this on earth, he can retain it and take it with him into the spiritual world.

Humanity could never have come to know the Christ if He had not descended, developed the physical body and had the opportunity on earth to understand the death of a God. This event had to take place, for it is of significance for all future times. Humanity will in turn develop backwards in the spiritual world. Before, it knew nothing of the Christ Impulse; on earth it had to learn it, and now it will be carried up, taken along by all those who on earth have acquired an understanding for it. With this understanding, which is gradually acquired on earth, with that event in the soul, man lives on in the following incarnations and also in those lives that elapse between death and birth. People will understand more and more what Golgotha is. The Christ will live more and more. And when the earth is physically destroyed, when only the souls, the spirits of people remain, they will look back on the evolution of the earth and say: We had to go through a development in a world where we prepared ourselves for the Christ. Then this mystery came, the development continued, we understood the event of Palestine better and better, we digested it in our lives between birth and death, and when this great mystery was understood, the earth was ripe to disappear again, because we incorporated what was the most important thing in the whole earth evolution. We had to be on earth, we had to go through it to experience what cannot be experienced anywhere else. Now it has been carried up into the spiritual world, but the origin of what is now in the spiritual world was down there.

This is how your souls will feel when they have gone through many incarnations, when the earth as a physical planet has died and people will have ascended to a new existence. What is the most important heirloom of earth's evolution? What is the most important thing that we have taken with us, and that can only be experienced and lived on earth? The Mystery of Golgotha. Now we have the Christ in us. That is the significance of the sacrifice, that the Christ descended and underwent that event which people experience as death: to become ever more self-aware, to gain ever more strength, in order to take on the karma of the power of the Christ to an ever greater extent.

Thus we see how karma works in this significant instance, and how the understanding of the Christ is connected with the entire earthly karma of humanity. And humanity is to receive the Christ within itself. Man cannot fulfill earthly karma without having attained this understanding of the Christ. And the achievement of the goal on earth will be a karmic effect of the acquisition of the understanding of Christ. Thus we can say: We will understand the smallest as well as the greatest event when we consider the law of karma.

Some poetry will be recited now and a corresponding mood in profound sense can only be created because the largest part of the friends present here have lately been deeply concerned with material concerning the spiritual world in relation to the entire historical development of humankind. What will be presented here in this lecture will bring to our awareness how spiritual science or Theosophy is not only something merely announced to the world through the Theosophical Society but that Theosophy as a teaching is based on the greater occult truth and wisdom which has already flowed through ancient times through the best minds searching for the Higher Worlds. We can find personalities in olden and recent times who can in actual fact show that in their imagination, ideas, feelings and experience, in their life mood they were totally permeated with a world view we could call theosophical and from which they worked, and that their entire life's activity unfolded in harmony with this. One such extraordinary personality lived in Novalis during the last three decades of the eighteenth century.

Not even reaching thirty years of age was Novalis, and we hope that through the lecture of his “Hymns to the Night” an awareness will be able to develop, which speaks out of these Hymns—so complete, as it was only possible in the last three decades of the eighteenth century—in an all encompassing manner, the precise knowledge of these spiritual scientific truths.

Out of a highly respected aristocratic family, Friedrich von Hardenberg, called Novalis, was born on 2 May 1772. Whoever has the opportunity to visit Weimar must not hesitate to view the impressive Novalis bust. It belongs to the classic records of Weimar, and clearly expresses how closely the spiritual high culture was connected to this time, the end of the eighteenth century. Whoever views this extraordinary bust will, if he or she has any sensitivity for it, get the impression that, one could say, out of this sphere of humble humanity the physiognomy of his soul expresses that he was totally established in the occult, in the spiritual worlds. To add to this, Novalis is one of those personalities who is a living proof of the possibility to connect this spirituality, this self-elevation in the highest sense of human beings reaching the spiritual worlds, to connect this to a solid practical `standing on the ground' physical reality. Basically Novalis never entered an angry conflict with the still conservative traditions in which his family circle lived, but we can take into consideration, that this family always had an open receptivity for everything noble and good, also when coming into contact with unknown people.

When we study Novalis' biography—it is in itself a work of art—and we allow it to work on us, his father is shown as having a practical, applied nature. Novalis was actually in his civil life educated for a totally practical career, for which knowledge of law and mathematics was necessary. He became a mountain engineer. Here is not the place to explore how he actually became a delight in this career for those whom he worked. It is also not the moment now to show how the mathematical-materialistic sciences, which lay at the foundation of this career, not only in full theory and practice came to be controlled by him completely, but that he was a diligent mathematician. What is most important is that Novalis as a spiritual being allowed mathematics to penetrate into his inner development.

When mathematics showed him how it is suitable for the elevation of pure sense-free thought, then we have where relevant, to refer to a classic example as here with Novalis, where outer observation doesn't have a say. For him life in the mathematical imagination became a great poem which filled him with delights, allowing his soul to experience an elevation when he dived into numbers and sizes. For him mathematics became the expression of divine creation, divine thought as it flashes through space in powerful directions and in measures of power and crystallize out there. Mathematics became for his mindset the warmest way to the spiritual life, while for many people, who only know mathematics from outside, it remains cold. It is so much more meaningful that we meet this spirituality in Novalis in a gentleness and refinement, as we would not meet in one or other of the most important intellects.

Novalis was a contemporary of Goethe. One should not place the kind of spirituality within Novalis, on the same level as what Goethe had. Goethe came to it through a regulated, out of a Higher World directed course towards an initiation, up to a particular stage. Novalis, by contrast, lived a life which one can best describe by saying: This young man, who left the physical plane at the age of twenty nine and who gave the German intellectuals more than a hundred thousand others could give, he lived a life which was actually a memory of a previous one. Through a quite specific event the spiritual experiences of earlier incarnations appeared, presented themselves to his soul and flowed in gentle, rhythmically woven poems from his soul.

Thus we can see that Novalis understood how the human being's soul can be lifted up into a higher world. For Novalis it gave the possibility to see that waking everyday awareness is only a fragment in a current human life, and how the soul who in the evening leaves the daily awareness and sinks into unconsciousness, in actual fact sinks into the spiritual world. He was able to experience deeply and to know, that in these spiritual worlds which are entered by the soul at night, lived a higher spiritual reality, that the day with all its impressions, even the impression of sun and light, only formed a fragment of the entire spiritual worlds. The stars, surreptitiously sending away the light of day during the night, appeared to him only in a weak glow, while in him spiritual truths rose up in his consciousness, which for the clairvoyant appears illuminated in a dazzling bright astral light when during the night he shifts himself spiritually into this state. During the night the actual spiritual worlds appeared to Novalis and thus the night from this perspective became valuable.

What enabled his memories of an earlier incarnation to appear? How did it happen that the experiences of the occult world, which we can reveal today in occult knowledge, rose so uniquely in him? His life unloosened him from the soul in whose knowledge slumbered earlier incarnations. One must take the result, which these spiritual experiences lifted out of this soul, back into the light of a spiritual observation, if one wants to understand it. Only childlike folly could place these experiences on the same footing as Goethe's meeting and Friederikes zu Sesenheim. This would be a coarsely unrefined comparison.

During his stay in Grüningen he became acquainted with a thirteen year old girl. Soul secrets played here which one could never, without abandoning the gentleness of a soul, call this a love relationship. Basically there was in Sophie von Kühn—that was her name—something like the lives of various beings. She became ill and soon died. The moment her spirit loosened from Sophie von Kühn, it wrestled with Novalis' inner life, awakening inner spiritual abilities.

Perhaps you could, when you allow yourself to admit it, obviously see the inability of a way of thought bound by outer experience coming to the fore here in what we must experience in judging these relationships, which can only be understood if we want to understand it in its spirituality, in our present materialistic time. People say science must be based on documentation; it must absolutely lead from everything concrete on the physical plane. Such natural scientists, who surely present a distorted side, the farcical side of natural science, have allowed us to experience what they believe in, that by presenting documents, Novalis basically had fallen prey to an illusion. The poetry is nice—they say—but show us the documents, let us look at who Herr von Rockenthien was where Sophie von Kühn lived. Look at—so the “Novalis adherents” said—various letters Sophie von Kühn wrote to Novalis. Sopie von Kühn made not only in every line but nearly in every word, a writing or spelling error! - concluding Novalis had fallen victim to a big deception.

In Jena, where she spent the last years, she also encountered Goethe—and made a deep impression on Goethe! Whoever can't comprehend that these unique words of Goethe are more valuable than documents which can be dug up—because all documents can lie—whoever wants to come with proof to show something, will not consider producing counter evidence, it will not help him, despite all his science.

What was the result for Novalis? Sophie von Kühn passed away and Novalis lived within a mood of: “I will emulate her in death” (Ich sterbe ihr nach!). Nevermore was he separated from her soul. Pouring out of the deceased soul of Sophie von Kühn came a force which he had in his own soul experienced as a mediator in the night, and within him rose enormous experiences which he depicted in his poetry.

Once again another feminine individual crossed his path: Julie von Charpentier. To him however, she was only the earthly symbol of Sophie von Kühn's deceased soul. Dissolved out of his soul were the elements of wisdom which he poured into the “Hymns to the Night”, through this first soul bond.

(Marie von Sivers (Marie Steiner) read the first two Hymns at this point.)

So far does this poem transport us into the worlds in which Novalis lived as a spirit, when he experienced from within the everlasting elements of wisdom.

You might often have heard that such reaching into the higher worlds is linked to a penetration of other secrets of existence. Out of this, a backward glance into the prehistoric times is necessary, where that, which now lives in the world, only existed as a sprig in the Divine and had not yet come down into an earthly form. When the soul of the natural kingdoms still existed in pure spirit, only perceptible in the astral world, all this contributed to the impressive images unfolding to Novalis the seer, when he glanced back. He saw the time when the souls of plants, animals and people were still companions of divine beings, when an interruption in awareness had not yet happened as it did later to human beings in the exchange between night and day—while nothing was influenced by any interruption, as is expressed in the words: birth and death. Everything living flowed in the spiritual-soul where there was no sense of death in this prehistoric past.

Then the thought of death struck into the life of these gods and divine earthly beings, and down into the earthly world the spirits moved. The godly beings were concealed in earthly bodies, the godly beings were enchanted into the mineral, plant and animal realms. Those who were able to return to the spiritual worlds found the gods within all phenomena, they recognised the earlier gods as linked to the human beings before an earthly existence began. They learnt what the life of a soul was, learnt to recognise that the day with its impressions creates a weaker fragment out of the great world of the beings whose existence was endurance, eternity. They learnt to become disenchanted by the world of nature.

This happened to Novalis' soul when he united his eternity to Sophie's soul by emulating her in death. In this emulation his spirit flourished. He experienced “die to live” and in him rose what he called his “magical idealism”.

(Now followed the recitation of the fourth hymn, from part 20, and the start of Hymn 5.)

In this way Novalis could glance back to a time in which gods moved among men, when everything took place spiritually because spirits and souls had not yet descended into earthly bodies. He perceived a point of transition: how death hit the world and how the human beings during this time placed death as their earthly shadowing and how he tried to brighten it up through fantasy and art. But death remained a riddle.

Then something of universal significance happened. Novalis could perceive the universal meaning of what had happened at that time on earth. Souls from the kingdoms of nature descended to the earth. Forgotten were the memories of their spiritual original existence, yet a unique spiritual Being remained in this universal womb of creation from which everything descended. One Being provisionally held back; it had held itself above and only provisionally sent its gift of grace downward, and then, when human beings needed it the most, it also descend into the earthly sphere. It remained in the spiritual spheres above the being of the spiritual light, this Being was hidden behind the physical sun. It held itself in heavenly spheres and descended when human beings needed to once again be able to rise up to spiritual worlds. It descended with the Mystery of Golgotha when Christ appeared in a physical body.

Humanity understands Christ in His universal unfolding when the life of Jesus of Nazareth is followed back to His spiritual origins, to the unsolvable riddle of death. The Greek spirit of death appears as a pondering muse, as an enigma which cannot be solved. Even the Greeks sensed that the riddle which is hidden in the youth's soul, found its solution with the Event of Golgotha, that here victory overcomes death and as a result a new impulse is given to humanity.

This Novalis could see and as a result there appeared to him, from the mystery of faith and the mystery wisdom, the Star which the old Magi had followed. As a result he understood the actual essence of what the Christ death implied. In the night of the soul the riddle of death revealed itself to him, the riddle of the Christ. This was it, which this extraordinary individual wanted to learn—through the memory of earlier lives—what the Christ, what the event of Golgotha signified for the world.

Hymns to the Night
I

Before all the wondrous shows of the widespread space around him, what living, sentient thing loves not the all-joyous light—with its colors, its rays and undulations, its gentle omnipresence in the form of the wakening Day? The giant-world of the unresting constellations inhales it as the innermost soul of life, and floats dancing in its blue flood—the sparkling, ever-tranquil stone, the thoughtful, imbibing plant, and the wild, burning multiform beast inhales it—but more than all, the lordly stranger with the sense-filled eyes, the swaying walk, and the sweetly closed, melodious lips. Like a king over earthly nature, it rouses every force to countless transformations, binds and unbinds innumerable alliances, hangs its heavenly form around every earthly substance.—Its presence alone reveals the marvelous splendor of the kingdoms of the world.

Aside I turn to the holy, unspeakable, mysterious Night. Afar lies the world—sunk in a deep grave—waste and lonely is its place. In the chords of the bosom blows a deep sadness. I am ready to sink away in drops of dew, and mingle with the ashes.—The distances of memory, the wishes of youth, the dreams of childhood, the brief joys and vain hopes of a whole long life, arise in gray garments, like an evening vapor after the sunset. In other regions the light has pitched its joyous tents. What if it should never return to its children, who wait for it with the faith of innocence?

What springs up all at once so sweetly boding in my heart, and stills the soft air of sadness? Dost thou also take a pleasure in us, dark Night? What holdest thou under thy mantle, that with hidden power affects my soul? Precious balm drips from thy hand out of its bundle of poppies. Thou upliftest the heavy-laden wings of the soul. Darkly and inexpressibly are we moved—joy-startled, I see a grave face that, tender and worshipful, inclines toward me, and, amid manifold entangled locks, reveals the youthful loveliness of the Mother. How poor and childish a thing seems to me now the Light—how joyous and welcome the departure of the day—because the Night turns away from thee thy servants, you now strew in the gulfs of space those flashing globes, to proclaim thy omnipotence—thy return—in seasons of thy absence. More heavenly than those glittering stars we hold the eternal eyes which the Night hath opened within us. Farther they see than the palest of those countless hosts—needing no aid from the light, they penetrate the depths of a loving soul—that fills a loftier region with bliss ineffable. Glory to the queen of the world, to the great prophet of the holier worlds, to the guardian of blissful love—she sends thee to me—thou tenderly beloved—the gracious sun of the Night,—now am I awake—for now am I thine and mine—thou hast made me know the Night—made of me a man—consume with spirit-fire my body, that I, turned to finer air, may mingle more closely with thee, and then our bridal night endure forever.

II

Must the morning always return? Will the despotism of the earthly never cease? Unholy activity consumes the angel-visit of the Night. Will the time never come when Love's hidden sacrifice shall burn eternally? To the Light a season was set; but everlasting and boundless is the dominion of the Night.—Endless is the duration of sleep. Holy Sleep—gladden not too seldom in this earthly day-labor, the devoted servant of the Night. Fools alone mistake thee, knowing nought of sleep but the shadow which, in the twilight of the real Night, thou pitifully castest over us. They feel thee not in the golden flood of the grapes—in the magic oil of the almond tree—and the brown juice of the poppy. They know not that it is thou who hauntest the bosom of the tender maiden, and makest a heaven of her lap—never suspect it is thou, opening the doors to Heaven, that steppest to meet them out of ancient stories, bearing the key to the dwellings of the blessed, silent messenger of secrets infinite.

III

Once when I was shedding bitter tears, when, dissolved in pain, my hope was melting away, and I stood alone by the barren mound which in its narrow dark bosom hid the vanished form of my life—lonely as never yet was lonely man, driven by anxiety unspeakable—powerless, and no longer anything but a conscious misery.—As there I looked about me for help, unable to go on or to turn back, and clung to the fleeting, extinguished life with an endless longing:—then, out of the blue distances—from the hills of my ancient bliss, came a shiver of twilight—and at once snapt the bond of birth—the chains of the Light. Away fled the glory of the world, and with it my mourning—the sadness flowed together into a new, unfathomable world—Thou, Night-inspiration, heavenly Slumber, didst come upon me—the region gently upheaved itself; over it hovered my unbound, newborn spirit. The mound became a cloud of dust—and through the cloud I saw the glorified face of my beloved. In her eyes eternity reposed—I laid hold of her hands, and the tears became a sparkling bond that could not be broken. Into the distance swept by, like a tempest, thousands of years. On her neck I welcomed the new life with ecstatic tears. It was the first, the only dream—and just since then I have held fast an eternal, unchangeable faith in the heaven of the Night, and its Light, the Beloved.

IV

Now I know when will come the last morning—when the Light no more scares away Night and Love—when sleep shall be without waking, and but one continuous dream. I feel in me a celestial exhaustion. Long and weariful was my pilgrimage to the holy grave, and crushing was the cross. The crystal wave, which, imperceptible to the ordinary sense, springs in the dark bosom of the mound against whose foot breaks the flood of the world, he who has tasted it, he who has stood on the mountain frontier of the world, and looked across into the new land, into the abode of the Night—truly he turns not again into the tumult of the world, into the land where dwells the Light in ceaseless unrest.

On those heights he builds for himself tabernacles—tabernacles of peace, there longs and loves and gazes across, until the welcomest of all hours draws him down into the waters of the spring—afloat above remains what is earthly, and is swept back in storms, but what became holy by the touch of love, runs free through hidden ways to the region beyond, where, like fragrances, it mingles with love asleep.

Still wakest thou, cheerful Light, that weary man to his labor—and into me pourest joyous life—but thou wilest me not away from Memory's moss-grown monument. Gladly will I stir busy hands, everywhere behold where thou hast need of me—praise the lustre of thy splendor—pursue unwearied the lovely harmonies of thy skilled handicraft—gladly contemplate the clever pace of thy mighty, luminous clock—explore the balance of the forces and the laws of the wondrous play of countless worlds and their seasons. But true to the Night remains my secret heart, and to creative Love, her daughter. Canst thou show me a heart eternally true? has thy sun friendly eyes that know me? do thy stars lay hold of my longing hand? and return me the tender pressure and the caressing word? was it thou did adorn them with colors and a flickering outline—or was it she who gave to thy jewels a higher, a dearer weight? What delight, what pleasure offers thy life, to outweigh the transports of Death? Wears not everything that inspires us the color of the Night? She sustains thee mother-like, and to her thou owest all thy glory. Thou wouldst vanish into thyself—in boundless space thou wouldst dissolve, if she did not hold thee fast, if she swaddled thee not, so that thou grewest warm, and flaming, begot the universe. Truly I was, before thou wast—the mother sent me with my brothers and sisters to inhabit thy world, to hallow it with love that it might be an ever-present memorial—to plant it with flowers unfading. As yet they have not ripened, these thoughts divine—as yet is there small trace of our coming revelation—One day thy clock will point to the end of time, and then thou shalt be as one of us, and shalt, full of ardent longing, be extinguished and die. I feel in me the close of thy activity—heavenly freedom, and blessed return. With wild pangs I recognize thy distance from our home, thy resistance against the ancient, glorious heaven. Thy rage and thy raving are in vain. Unscorchable stands the cross—victory-banner of our breed.

Over I journey
And for each pain
A pleasant sting only
Shall one day remain.
Yet in a few moments
Then free am I,
And intoxicated
In Love's lap lie.
Life everlasting
Lifts, wave-like, at me,
I gaze from its summit
Down after thee.
Your lustre must vanish
Yon mound underneath—
A shadow will bring thee
Thy cooling wreath.
Oh draw at my heart, love,
Draw till I'm gone,
That, fallen asleep, I
Still may love on.
I feel the flow of
Death's youth-giving flood
To balsam and ether
Transform my blood—
I live all the daytime
In faith and in might
And in holy fire
I die every night.

V

In ancient times, over the widespread families of men an iron Fate ruled with dumb force. A gloomy oppression swathed their heavy souls—the earth was boundless—the abode of the gods and their home. From eternal ages stood its mysterious structure. Beyond the red hills of the morning, in the sacred bosom of the sea, dwelt the sun, the all-enkindling, living Light. An aged giant upbore the blissful world. Fast beneath mountains lay the first-born sons of mother Earth. Helpless in their destroying fury against the new, glorious race of gods, and their kindred, glad-hearted men. The ocean's dark green abyss was the lap of a goddess. In crystal grottos revelled a luxuriant folk. Rivers, trees, flowers, and beasts had human wits. Sweeter tasted the wine—poured out by Youth-abundance—a god in the grape-clusters—a loving, motherly goddess upgrew in the full golden sheaves—love's sacred inebriation was a sweet worship of the fairest of the god-ladies—Life rustled through the centuries like one spring-time, an ever-variegated festival of heaven-children and earth-dwellers. All races childlike adored the ethereal, thousand-fold flame as the one sublimest thing in the world. There was but one notion, a horrible dream-shape—

That fearsome to the merry tables strode,
A wrapt the spirit there in wild fright.
The gods themselves no counsel knew nor showed
To fill the anxious hearts with comfort light.
Mysterious was the monster's pathless road,
Whose rage no prayer nor tribute could requite;
'Twas Death who broke the banquet up with fears,
With anguish, dire pain, and bitter tears.

Eternally from all things here disparted
That sway the heart with pleasure's joyous flow,
Divided from the loved ones who've departed,
Tossed by longing vain, unceasing woe—
In a dull dream to struggle, faint and thwarted,
Seemed all was granted to the dead below.
Broke lay the merry wave of human bliss
On Death's inevitable, rocky cliff.

With daring spirit and a passion deep,
Did man ameliorate the horrid blight,
A gentle youth puts out his torch, to sleep—
The end, just like a harp's sigh, comes light.
Cool shadow-floods o'er melting memory creep,
So sang the song, into its sorry need.
Still undeciphered lay the endless Night—
The solemn symbol of a far-off might.

The old world began to decline. The pleasure-garden of the young race withered away—up into more open, desolate regions, forsaking his childhood, struggled the growing man. The gods vanished with their retinue—Nature stood alone and lifeless. Dry Number and rigid Measure bound it with iron chains. Into dust and air the priceless blossoms of life fell away in words obscure. Gone was wonder-working Faith, and its all-transforming, all-uniting angel-comrade, the Imagination. A cold north wind blew unkindly over the rigid plain, and the rigid wonderland first froze, then evaporated into ether. The far depths of heaven filled with glowing worlds. Into the deeper sanctuary, into the more exalted region of feeling, the soul of the world retired with all its earthly powers, there to rule until the dawn should break of universal Glory. No longer was the Light the abode of the gods, and the heavenly token of their presence—they drew over themselves the veil of the Night. The Night became the mighty womb of revelations—into it the gods went back—and fell asleep, to go abroad in new and more glorious shapes over the transfigured world. Among the people who too early were become of all the most scornful and insolently estranged from the blessed innocence of youth, appeared the New World with a face never seen before—in the poverty of a poetic shelter—a son of the first virgin and mother—the eternal fruit of mysterious embrace. The foreboding, rich-blossoming wisdom of the East at once recognized the beginning of the new age—A star showed the way to the humble cradle of the king. In the name of the distant future, they did him homage with lustre and fragrance, the highest wonders of Nature. In solitude the heavenly heart unfolded to a flower-chalice of almighty love—upturned toward the supreme face of the father, and resting on the bliss-foreboding bosom of the sweetly solemn mother. With deifying fervor the prophetic eye of the blooming child beheld the years to come, foresaw, untroubled over the earthly lot of his own days, the beloved offspring of his divine stem. Ere long the most childlike souls, by true love marvellously possessed, gathered about him. Like flowers sprang up a strange new life in his presence. Words inexhaustible and the most joyful tidings fell like sparks of a divine spirit from his friendly lips. From a far shore, born under the clear sky of Hellas, came a singer to Palestine, and gave up his whole heart to the wonder-child:

The youth thou art who ages long hast stood
Upon our graves, so deeply lost in thought;
A sign of comfort in the dusky gloom
For high humanity, a joyful start.
What dropped us all into abyssmal woe,
Pulls us forward with sweet yearning now.
In everlasting life death found its goal,
For thou art Death who at last makes us whole.

Filled with joy, the singer went on to Hindustan—his heart intoxicated with the sweetest love; and poured it out in fiery songs under the balmy sky, so that a thousand hearts bowed to him, and the good news sprang up with a thousand branches. Soon after the singer's departure, his precious life was made a sacrifice for the deep fall of man—He died in his youth, torn away from his beloved world, from his weeping mother, and his trembling friends. His lovely mouth emptied the dark cup of unspeakable woes—in ghastly fear the birth of the new world drew near. Hard he wrestled with the terrors of old Death—Heavy lay the weight of the old world upon him. Yet once more he looked fondly at his mother—then came the releasing hand of eternal love, and he fell asleep. Only a few days hung a deep veil over the roaring sea, over the quaking land—countless tears wept his loved ones—the mystery was unsealed—heavenly spirits heaved the ancient stone from the gloomy grave. Angels sat by the Sleeper—delicately shaped from his dreams—awoken in new Godlike glory; he clomb the limits of the new-born world—buried with his own hand the old corpse in the abandoned hollow, and with a hand almighty laid upon it a stone which no power shall ever again upheave.

Yet weep thy loved ones tears of joy, tears of feeling and endless thanksgiving over your grave—joyously startled, they see thee rise again, and themselves with thee—behold thee weep with sweet fervor on the blessed bosom of thy mother, solemnly walking with thy friends, uttering words plucked as from the Tree of Life; see thee hasten, full of longing, into thy father's arms, bearing with thee youthful humanity, and the inexhaustible cup of the golden future. Soon the mother hastened after thee—in heavenly triumph—she was the first with thee in the new home. Since then, long ages have flowed past, and in ever-increasing splendor have stirred your new creation—and thousands have, away from pangs and tortures, followed thee, filled with faith and longing and fidelity—walking about with thee and the heavenly virgin in the kingdom of love, serving in the temple of heavenly Death, and forever thine.

Uplifted is the stone—
And all mankind is risen—
We all remain thine own.
And vanished is our prison.
All troubles flee away
Thy golden bowl before,
For Earth and Life give way
At the last and final supper.

To the marriage Death doth call—
The virgins standeth back—
The lamps burn lustrous all—
Of oil there is no lack—
If the distance would only fill
With the sound of you walking alone
And that the stars would call
Us all with human tongues and tone.

Unto thee, O Mary
A thousand hearts aspire.
In this life of shadows
Thee only they desire.
In thee they hope for delivery
With visionary expectation—
If only thou, O holy being
Could clasp them to thy breast.

With bitter torment burning,
So many who are consumed
At last from this world turning
To thee have looked and fled,
Helpful thou hast appeared
To so many in pain.
Now to them we come,
To never go out again.

At no grave can weep
Any who love and pray.
The gift of Love they keep,
From none can it be taken away.
To soothe and quiet his longing,
Night comes and inspires—
Heaven's children round him thronging
Watch and guard his heart.

Have courage, for life is striding
To endless life along;
Stretched by inner fire,
Our sense becomes transfigured.
One day the stars above
Shall flow in golden wine,
We will enjoy it all,
And as stars we will shine.

The love is given freely,
And Separation is no more.
The whole life heaves and surges
Like a sea without a shore.
Just one night of bliss—
One everlasting poem—
And the sun we all share
Is the face of God.

6
Longing for Death

Into the bosom of the earth,
Out of the Light's dominion,
Death's pains are but a bursting forth,
Sign of glad departure.
Swift in the narrow little boat,
Swift to the heavenly shore we float.

Blessed be the everlasting Night,
And blessed the endless slumber.
We are heated by the day too bright,
And withered up with care.
We're weary of a life abroad,
And we now want our Father's home.

What in this world should we all
Do with love and with faith?
That which is old is set aside,
And the new may perish also.
Alone he stands and sore downcast
Who loves with pious warmth the Past.

The Past where the light of the senses
In lofty flames did rise;
Where the Father's face and hand
All men did recognize;
And, with high sense, in simplicity
Many still fit the original pattern.

The Past wherein, still rich in bloom,
Man's strain did burgeon glorious,
And children, for the world to come,
Sought pain and death victorious,
And, through both life and pleasure spake,
Yet many a heart for love did break.

The Past, where to the flow of youth
God still showed himself,
And truly to an early death
Did commit his sweet life.
Fear and torture patiently he bore
So that he would be loved forever.

With anxious yearning now we see
That Past in darkness drenched,
With this world's water never we
Shall find our hot thirst quenched.
To our old home we have to go
That blessed time again to know.

What yet doth hinder our return
To loved ones long reposed?
Their grave limits our lives.
We are all sad and afraid.
We can search for nothing more—
The heart is full, the world is void.

Infinite and mysterious,
Thrills through us a sweet trembling—
As if from far there echoed thus
A sigh, our grief resembling.
Our loved ones yearn as well as we,
And sent to us this longing breeze.

Down to the sweet bride, and away
To the beloved Jesus.
Have courage, evening shades grow gray
To those who love and grieve.
A dream will dash our chains apart,
And lay us in the Father's lap.