The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Moritz Benedikt, the criminal anthropologist and well-known physiologist, found that the posterior cerebral lobe of criminals is relatively small, as in higher apes; he established atavism in this case. In this way, crime is attributed entirely to the physical constitution. Even the soul life is controlled quite mechanically by modern school psychology, the speed of absorption of sensory impressions, strength of memory and so on. The human being is treated like a machine. This has been happening increasingly for 50 years. Even social life should be shaped in this way, as it is through the sentence [...]: Act so that your motive can become the norm for all people. It's like saying, “Wear a skirt that fits all people.” It is Kant's categorical imperative. But even if one achieves excellence in the natural sciences, it does not follow that one could (transfer their results) to the moral field. So it is with Oscar Hertwig, who so brilliantly refuted Darwinism; in the social field, he has not only produced inadequate but also harmful results.

Spiritual knowledge is necessary to gain insight into the possibility and essence of human freedom; knowledge of what man's true nature is leads to love of the human being and is the only basis for true morality and social life of the future, based on brotherhood. Generalized morality, as we have it now, leads to the opposite of what is desired, as current events prove; moral preaching is like telling the stove: get warm without heating.

Thinking, feeling and willing find their correlate in the nervous system, in breathing and rhythm, for example in the blood circulation for digestion or metabolism, for reproduction. The nervous system is degenerative, leads to death, just as thinking in waking consciousness always destroys something. It must merge with imagination if it is to become viable. Volition, the metabolism, leads to life, to being born, when it is connected with intuition. The essence of intuition is love. Feeling in the middle then maintains the balance so that the pendulum does not swing in one direction or the other.

New religions no longer arise since the synthesis in the Christianity of all religions. Anthroposophy should not be confused with all kinds of obscurantism, but is common knowledge and should become more and more so, even if it is currently being rejected. From it will be born a realistic, benevolent socialism, in which all is salvation. Because people today are asleep, it has been possible for a few people to bring about these catastrophic events.

Lecture given in the hall of the Association of Engineers and Architects in Vienna. Leipzig 1892

Much has been written about genius in recent times. In particular, Lombroso's book "Genius and Madness" has caused quite a stir in wider circles. With comprehensive expertise, the Italian scholar examines all the cases in which ingenious expressions of the human mind border on the uncanny realm of mental disorders. A number of the greatest minds either showed signs of insanity in the prime of their endeavors or fell into madness at the end of their lives. This would lead to the assumption that genius is not a stage in the development of the healthy human mind, but an abnormal manifestation of it. This opinion seems to be gaining more and more adherents. Eduard von Hartmann's view differs from this. According to this view, genius, in contrast to fully conscious, intellectual mental activity, lies in the unfolding of elements that rest in the unconscious womb of the soul. Only he in whom these elements work their way up from these mysterious depths into the sphere of the spirit produces genius. If Hartmann characterizes genius in this way as something quite normal, he nevertheless sees it as something qualitatively different from the talent of the normal human being. Brentano is opposed to both of these views. It sees in the work of genius only a quantitative increase of that activity of the mind which every average person continually accomplishes. The mental functions of the ordinary person: perception, apperception, reproduction and combination are only carried out more easily, more quickly and in a way that corresponds more closely to the content of things than is the case with the majority of individuals. The genius is more receptive to secret relationships between things than the average person. What the latter only discovers through painstaking research, the latter penetrates at first sight. Brentano seeks to prove that the creations of Newton, Kant, Goethe and Mozart arose only from this heightening of the intellectual faculties. These explanations are suitable for raising the consciousness of the average person. They aim to bridge the gap that is assumed to exist between first and second-rate minds. It seems to us, however, that the question is not quite the right one. Genius appears to us to be the content-creating faculty of the mind and to form the antithesis of merely formal intellectual activity. Both faculties are present in every human spirit; in the one the first predominates, in the other the second. We call genius a person in whom the content-creating faculty is developed to an outstanding degree. Genius does not appear to us as an enhancement of formal abilities, but as a prominent development of a particular side of the mind that is only slightly developed in the majority of people.

Yesterday we were considering the successive moods of soul that have to be attained if human thinking—if what is ordinarily called knowledge—is to enter the realm of reality, and we came to a condition of soul that we named surrender. In other words, a thinking that has risen to the conditions of soul we described before—a thinking, that is, which has become possessed of wonder, and has then learned what we called reverent devotion to the world of reality and finally what we called knowing oneself to be in wisdom-filled harmony with the phenomena of the world—if such a thinking be not able then to rise still further and enter the region we have described as a condition of surrender, it cannot come to reality. Now this surrender is only to be attained by making the resolute endeavour again and again to face for ourselves the inadequacy of mere thought. We have to take pains to stimulate and strengthen within us a mood that may be expressed as follows. It must be as though we were constantly saying to ourselves: I ought not to expect that my thinking can give me knowledge of the truth, I ought rather solely to expect of my thinking that it shall educate me. It is of the utmost importance that we should develop in us this idea, namely, that our thinking educates us. If you will really take this point of view as a practical rule of life you will find that there are many occasions when you are led to quite different conclusions from those that seem at first sight to be inevitable.

I daresay there are not many of you who have made a thorough study of the philosopher Kant. It is not necessary. I only want here to refer to the fact that in Kant's most important and revolutionary work, “The Critique of Pure Reason,” you will always find proofs adduced both for and against a proposition in question. Take, for example, a statement such as the following. “The world once had a beginning in time.” You will find that Kant puts, perhaps on the other side of the same page, the statement: “The world has always existed, from all eternity.” And then he proceeds to adduce valid proofs for both statements, notwithstanding that the one obviously expresses the very opposite of the other. That is to say, Kant proves in the same manner that the world has had a beginning and that it has had no beginning. He calls this method of reasoning “Antinomy” and thinks it is itself an evidence that the human faculty of knowledge has boundaries, seeing that man is forced thereby to arrive at contradictory conclusions. And, of course, he is right, so long as one expects by thinking to come to conformity with some objective reality. So long as we give ourselves up to the belief that by thinking or by the elaboration of concepts or, let us say, by the elaboration in thought of experiences we have in the world, we can come to reality, so long are we indeed in desperate case, if someone comes forward and shows us that a particular statement and its exact opposite can equally well be proved. For if this is so, how are we ever to arrive at Truth? If, however, we have learned that where the situation demands a decisive pronouncement, thinking can come to no conclusion about reality, if we have persistently educated ourselves instead to look upon thinking as a means to become wiser, as a means to take in hand our own self-education in wisdom, then it does not disturb us at all that at one time one thing can be proved and at another time its opposite can be proved. For we very soon make the following discovery. The fact that the elaboration of concepts does not, so to say, expose us in the least to the onset of reality, is the very reason why we are able to work with perfect freedom within the sphere of concepts and ideas and to carry on our own self-education by this means. If we were perpetually being corrected by reality, then the elaboration of concepts would not afford us a means of educating ourselves in this manner in perfect freedom. I would like to ask you to give careful consideration to this fact. Let me repeat it. The elaboration of concepts affords us a means of effective and independent self-education, and it can only do so because we are never disturbed in the free elaboration of concepts by the interference of reality.

What do I mean when I say we are not disturbed? What sort of disturbance could reality make in the free elaboration of concepts? We can picture to ourselves a little what such a disturbance would be like if we contrast—purely hypothetically for the moment, though, as we shall see later, it does not need to remain entirely in the realm of hypothesis—our human thinking with divine thinking. For we can say, can we not, that it is impossible to conceive of divine thinking as having nothing to do with reality. When we try to picture the thinking of the Gods, we can only conceive of it—still speaking for the moment purely hypothetically—as intervening in reality, as influencing reality. And this leads inevitably to the following conclusion. When a human being makes a mistake in his thinking, then it is a mere logical mistake, it is nothing worse. And when, later on, he comes to see that he has made a mistake he can correct it; and he will at the same time have accomplished something for his self-education, he will have grown wiser. But now take the case of divine thinking. When divine thinking thinks correctly, then something happens; and when it thinks falsely, then something is destroyed, something is annihilated. So that if we had a divine thinking, then with every false concept we should call forth a destructive process, first of all in our astral body, then in our etheric body and thence also in our physical body. If we had active divine thinking, if our thinking had something to do with reality, then a false concept would have the result that we should, as it were, stimulate inside us a drying up process in some part or other of our body, a hardening process. You will agree, it would be important to make as few mistakes as possible; for it might not be long before we had made so many mistakes that our body would have become quite dried up and would fall to pieces. We should, in fact, soon find it crumble away if we transformed into reality the mistakes in our thinking. We actually only maintain ourselves in real existence through the fact that our thinking does not work into reality, but that we are protected from the penetration of our thinking into reality. Thus we can make mistake after mistake in our thinking. If later we correct these mistakes we have thereby educated ourselves, we have grown wiser, and we have not at the same time committed devastation with our mistakes. As we strengthen ourselves more and more with the moral force of such a thought as this we learn to know the nature of the “surrender” of which I spoke and we come at last to a point where we do not at critical moments of life, turn to thinking, in the hope to gain knowledge and understanding of external things.

That sounds strange, I know, and at first sight it seems as though it would be quite impossible. How can we refuse to have recourse to thinking? And yet, although it is impossible to take such a line absolutely, we can take it under certain conditions. Constituted as we are as human beings in the world, we cannot on every occasion suspend judgment on the things of the world. We have to judge and form opinions—we shall see in the course of these lectures why that is so—we have to act in life and cannot always wait to penetrate to the depths of reality. We must judge—but we should educate ourselves to exercise caution in accepting as finally true the judgments and opinions we form. We should, as it were, be continually looking over our own shoulder and reminding ourselves that where we are applying our keenest intellect, just there we are treading on very uncertain ground and are perpetually liable to make mistakes. That is a hard saying for cocksure people! They think they will never get anywhere at all if they are to doubt whether the opinion they form on some event is conclusive. Observe a little and you will see that very many people, when some statement is made, think it necessary at once to say: “But what I think is this”—or when they see something, to say: “I don't like that!” or “I like it!” This kind of attitude must be given up by anyone who does not rest content to go through life with easy self-assurance; it must be given up if we want to set the course of our inner life in the direction of reality. What we have to do is to cultivate an attitude of mind which may be characterised in the following words: “Obviously I have, of course, to live my life, and this means I must form judgments and conclusions. I will, therefore, employ my power of judgment in so far as the practice of life makes this necessary, but I will not use it for the recognition of truth. For that I will be for ever looking cautiously over my shoulder, I will always receive with some degree of doubt every judgment that I happen to make.”

But how are we then to arrive at any thought about truth, if not by forming judgments in the ordinary way? We have already indicated yesterday the right attitude of mind, when we said that we ought to let the things speak, let the things themselves tell their secrets. We have to learn to adopt a passive attitude to the things of the world, and let them speak out their own secrets. A great deal of error would be avoided if men would do this. We have a wonderful example in Goethe, who, when he wants to investigate truth, does not allow himself to judge but tries to let the things themselves utter their own secrets. Let us suppose we have two men, one who judges and the other who lets the things tell their own secrets. We will select a very clear and simple example. One man sees a wolf and describes it. He finds that there are other animals besides which look like this wolf, and he arrives in this manner at the general concept “wolf.” And now he can go on to form the following conclusion. He can say to himself: In reality there are many individual wolves; the general concept of “wolf” which I make in my mind, wolf as such, does not exist; only individual wolves exist in the world. Such a man will easily state it as his opinion that we have really only to do with individual wolf beings, and the general concept of wolf which one holds as an idea is not anything real. There you have a striking example of a man who merely judges and forms opinions. This is the kind of conclusion he develops. And how about the man, on the other hand, who lets reality speak for itself? How will he think of that invisible quality of wolf which is to be found in every single wolf and which characterises all wolves alike? He will look at it in this way. He will say to himself: Let me consider a lamb and compare it with a wolf. I am not going to formulate any judgment on the matter, I am simply going to let the facts speak. And now, let us imagine this man has the opportunity to see with his own eyes how the wolf eats up the lamb. He sees the event take place before him. Then he would have to say to himself: “The substance which before was running about as lamb is now inside the wolf, it has been absorbed into the wolf.” It needs no more than the perception of this fact to see how real the wolf nature is! For if we were to rely on what we can follow with our external senses we might easily be led to the conclusion that if a wolf were deprived of all other food and were to eat nothing but lamb he must gradually—for the metabolism that goes on inside him will produce this result—he must gradually come to have in him nothing but lamb substance. As a matter of fact, however, he never becomes a lamb, he remains always a wolf. That shows quite unmistakably, if one judges the matter rightly, that the material part of the wolf has been quite erroneously assumed to constitute “wolf” as such. When we let ourselves be taught by the external world of facts, then it shows us that besides what we have before us as material substance in the wolf there is something else, something we cannot see and that yet is real in the highest degree. And this it is which brings it about that when the wolf eats nothing but lamb he does not become lamb but remains wolf. All of him that is merely perceptible to the senses has come from lambs.

It is difficult sometimes to draw a sharp line of demarcation between judging and letting ourselves be taught by reality. When, however, the difference has once been grasped and when judgment is only employed for the ends of practical life, while for an approach to reality the attitude is taken of allowing ourselves to be taught by the things of the world, then we gradually arrive at a mood of soul which can reveal to us the true meaning of “surrender.” Surrender is a state of mind which does not seek to investigate truth from out of itself, but which looks for truth to come from the revelation that flows out of the things, and can wait until it is ripe to receive the revelation. An inclination to judge or form opinions wants to be continually arriving at truth at every step; surrender, on the other hand, does not set out to force an entrance, as it were, into this or that truth, rather do we seek to educate ourselves and then quietly wait until we attain to that stage of maturity where the truth flows to us from the things of the world, coming to us in revelation and filling our whole being. To work with patience, knowing that patience will bring us further and further in wise self-education—that is the mood of surrender.

And now we must go on to consider the fruits of this surrender. What do we attain when we have gone forward with our thinking from wonder to reverence, thence to feeling oneself in wisdom-filled harmony with reality and finally to the attitude of surrender—what do we attain? We come at last to this. As we go about the world and observe the plants in all their greenness and admire the changing colours of their blossoms, or as we contemplate the sky in its blueness and the stars with their golden brilliance—not forming judgments but letting the things themselves reveal to us what they are—then if we have really succeeded in learning this “surrender,” all things in the world of sense become changed for us, and something is revealed to us in the world of the senses, for which we can find no other word than a word taken from our own soul life.

Suppose this line (a—b) represents the world of the senses as it shows itself to our view. Suppose you are standing here (c) and you behold the world of the senses spread out before you like a veil. This line (a—b) is intended to represent the tones that work upon your ear, the colours and forms that work upon your eye, the smells and tastes that work upon your other organs, the hardness and softness, etc., etc.—in short, the whole world of the senses. In ordinary life we stand in the world of the senses and we apply to it our faculty of judgment. How else do all the sciences arise? Men approach the world of the senses and by many kinds of methods they investigate the laws that prevail there. You will, however, have gathered from all that we have been saying that such a procedure can never lead one into the world of reality, because judgment is not a leader at all; it is only by educating one's thinking, it is only by following the path of wonder and of reverence, etc., that one can ever penetrate to the world of reality. Then the world of the senses changes and becomes something entirely new. And it is important that we should make discovery of this if we would gain any knowledge of the real nature of the sense world.

Let us suppose that a man who has developed this feeling, this attitude of surrender, in a rather high degree, looks out over the fresh bright green of a meadow. At first sight he cannot distinguish the colours of any individual plants; the whole presents a general appearance of fresh green. Such a man, if he has really brought the attitude of surrender to a high degree of development, will perforce feel within him at the sight of the meadow an inner sense of balance; he cannot help being moved to feel this mood of balance—a balance that is not dead but quick with life, we might compare it to a gentle and even flow of water. He cannot help but conjure up this picture before his soul. And it is the same with every taste, every smell and every sense-perception; they inevitably call up in his soul a feeling of inner movement and activity. There is no colour and no tone that does not speak to him; everything says something, and says it in such a way that he feels bound to give answer with inner movement and activity—not with judgment or opinion but with movement, active, living movement. In short, a time comes for such a man when the whole world of the senses flings off, as it were, its disguise and reveals itself to him as something he cannot describe with any other word than will. Everything in the world of the senses is will, strong and powerful currents of will. I want you to mark this particularly. The man who has attained in any high degree to surrender, discovers everywhere in the world of the senses ruling will. Hence it is that a man who has developed in himself even a small measure of this quality of surrender, feels pain if he suddenly sees a person coming towards him wearing some startling new fashion of colour. He cannot help experiencing this inner movement and activity in response to what approaches him from outside; he is sensible of will in everything and he feels united with the whole world through this will. The world of the senses thus becomes, as it were, a sea of infinitely differentiated will. And this means that while other-wise we only feel it as spread out around us, this world of the senses begins to have for us a certain thickness or depth. We begin to look behind the surface of things, we begin to hear behind the surface of things—and what we see and hear is will, flowing will. For the interest of those who have read Schopenhauer I will here remark that Schopenhauer divined this ruling will in a one-sided way in the world of sound; he described music as differentiated workings of will. But the truth is that for the man who has learned surrender, everything in the world of the senses is Ruling Will.

And now when a man has learned to detect everywhere in the world of the senses this ruling will he can go further, he can penetrate to secrets that lie hidden behind the world of the senses and that are otherwise inaccessible to him.

If we would understand aright the nature of the next step we must ask ourselves the question: How is it we gain any knowledge at all of the sense world? The answer is simple: By means of our senses. By means of the ear we acquire knowledge of the world of sound, by means of the eye knowledge of the world of colour and form, and so on. We know the sense world through the medium of our sense organs. A man who confronts this world of the senses in an ordinary everyday manner receives impressions of it and then forms his judgments. The man who has learned surrender receives impressions in the first place through his senses; and then he feels how there streams across to him from the objects active, ruling will; he feels as if he were swimming, together with the objects, in a sea of ruling will. And when a man has come to this point and feels the presence and sway of will in the objects before him, then his own evolution drives him on of itself to the next higher stage. For then, having experienced all the previous stages leading up to surrender—the stages we have called feeling oneself in harmony with the wisdom of the world, and before that reverence, and before that wonder—then, through the penetration of these conditions into the last gained condition of surrender, he learns how to grow together with the objects with his etheric body also, which stands behind the physical body. He grows together with the objects with his physical body, that is with his sense organs, in the active ruling will. When we see, hear, smell, etc., then as men of surrender we feel the ruling will streaming into us through our eyes and ears, we feel ourselves in true correspondence with the objects. But behind the physical eye is the etheric body of the eye, and behind the physical ear is the etheric body of the ear. We are filled through and through with our etheric body. And just as the physical body grows together with the objects of the sense world when man penetrates to the ruling active will, so too can the etheric body. And when this takes place man finds that he has an altogether new way of beholding the world. The world has undergone a still greater change for him than was the case when he penetrated through sense appearance to the ruling will. When our etheric body grows together with the objects of the world, then we have the impression that we cannot let these objects remain as they are in our ideas and in our conceptions and thoughts. They change for us as soon as we come into relation with them. Suppose a man who has already experienced the mood of surrender in his soul is looking at a green leaf, full of sap. He turns the eye of his soul upon the object before him, and at once he finds he cannot leave it as it is, this juicy green leaf; the moment he beholds it he feels that it grows out beyond itself, he feels how it has in it the possibility to become something quite different. You know that a green leaf, as it grows gradually higher and higher up in the plant, turns at last into the coloured flower-leaf or petal. The whole plant is really no more than a transformed leaf. You may learn this from Goethe's researches into nature. So when the student beholds the leaf he sees that it is not yet finished, that it is trying to grow out beyond itself; he sees, in short, more than the green leaf gives him. The green leaf stimulates him to feel within him something of a budding and sprouting life. Thus he grows together—quite literally—with the green leaf, feeling in himself, too, a budding and a sprouting of life. But now suppose he is looking at the dry and withered bark of a tree. If he is to grow together with that he cannot do otherwise than be overcome with a feeling of death. In the withered bark he sees—not more, but less than is there in reality. If anyone looks at the bark from the point of view of external appearance alone he can admire it, it can give him pleasure, in any case he does not see in the dead bark something that shrivels him, piercing him, as it were, in the soul and filling it with thoughts of death.

There is nothing in the whole world that does not, when the etheric body grows together with it, give rise to feelings either of growing, sprouting, becoming, or of decaying and passing away. Everything shows itself in one or other aspect. Suppose, for example, a man who has attained to surrender and has then progressed a further step turns his attention to the human larynx. He will have a strange impression. The larynx will appear to him to be an organ that is quite in the beginning of its evolution and has a great future before it. From what the larynx itself tells, he will feel that it is like a seed, not at all like a fruit or like a withered object, but like a seed. He knows quite clearly from what the larynx itself brings to expression that a time must come in human evolution when the larynx will be completely transformed, when it will be of such a nature that whereas now man only utters the word, he will one day give birth to man. The larynx is the future organ of birth, the future organ of procreation. Now man brings forth the word by means of the larynx, but the larynx is the seed that will in future times develop to bring forth the whole human being—that is, when man is spiritualised. The larynx expresses this quite directly when one lets it tell what it is. Other organs of the human body show us that they have long ago passed their zenith, and we see that they will in future times be no longer present in the human organism.

Such a vision is compelled to behold everywhere on the one hand a growing, a coming into being, and on the other hand a dying away. It sees both as processes going on into the future. Budding, sprouting life—death and decay; those are the two things that we find intermingled with one another all around us when we attain to this union of our etheric body with the world of reality. In connection with this power of vision man has to undergo, when he is a little further on, a very hard test. For with each single being that he meets and that makes itself known to him he will always find that while some parts of the being arouse in him the feeling of budding and sprouting life, other contents or parts give him the feeling of death. Everything that we see behind the world of the senses makes itself known to us as proceeding from one or other of these two fundamental forces. In occultism what we behold in this way is called the world of coming into existence and of passing away. And so, when we confront the world of the senses we are looking into the world of arising and passing away, and what lies behind is Ruling Wisdom.

Behind Will is Wisdom! I say expressly ruling wisdom, for the wisdom man brings into his ideas is as a rule not active at all, but a wisdom that is merely thought. The wisdom man acquires when he looks behind the active will is united with the objects; and in the kingdom of objective things, wherever wisdom rules, it does really rule and the effects of its working find actual expression. When it, so to speak, withdraws from reality, then begins the dying process; where it flows into reality, there you find a coming into existence, there you find budding, sprouting life. We can mark off these worlds in the following way (see diagram 1). We look at the sense world and we see it first as A, and then we look at B which is behind the sense world—the world of ruling wisdom. From out of this world is taken the substance of our own etheric body, what we behold outside us as ruling wisdom—that we behold, too, in our etheric body. And in our physical body we behold, not merely what sense appearance shows, but also ruling will, for everywhere in the sense world we see ruling will.

Yes, the strange thing is that if we have attained to surrender, then when we meet another man and look at him, his colour, whether it be inclined to red or yellow or green, does not seem to us merely red or yellow or green, but we grow together for example, with the rosy-cheekedness of his countenance. We feel the ruling will there, and all that lives and weaves in him, as it were, shoots across to us through the medium of the colour in his cheeks. People who are naturally inclined to observe and note rosy cheeks will say that a rosy-cheeked person is alone healthy. We approach our fellow-man in such a way as to see in him the ruling will. And we may now say, turning to our diagram, that our physical body, which we will denote by this circle here, is taken from the world A, the world of ruling will. Our etheric body, on the other hand, which I will denote with this second circle, is taken from the world of ruling wisdom, the world B. Here you have, then, the connection between the world of ruling wisdom that is spread around us, and our own etheric body—and the world of ruling will that is spread around us, and our own physical body. Now in ordinary life man does not know of these connections, the power to do so is taken from him. The connections are there all the time, but they are, as it were, withheld from man, he can have no influence upon them. How is this?

As a matter of fact there are opportunities in life where our thoughts and whatever we develop in the way of judgments and opinions are not so harmless for our own reality as they are in everyday existence. In the ordinary everyday waking condition, good Gods have seen to it that our thoughts have not too bad an influence on our own reality; they have withheld from us the power our thoughts might otherwise exercise upon our physical body and etheric body; and it would really go very hardly with us in the world if it were not so If thoughts—let me emphasise once more—were to signify in the world of man what the thoughts of the Gods do in reality signify, then man would evoke inside him with every error in thought a slight death process, and little by little he would be quite dried up. And as for an untruth! If with every lie he told man had to burn up the corresponding bit of his brain—as would have to happen if man had power to work into the world of reality—then we should soon see how long his brain lasted! Good Gods have withheld from our soul the power over our etheric body and physical body. But that cannot be so all the time. For were we never to exercise any influence from our soul upon our physical and etheric body then we should quickly come to an end of the forces that are in these bodies, we should have a very short life. For in our soul, as we shall see in the course of these lectures, are contained the forces that must flow ever and again into the physical and etheric body, the forces we need in our etheric body. This inflow of forces takes place at night when we are asleep. In the night there flow to us from the universe, coming to us by way of our ego and astral body, the currents that we need to dispel fatigue. There you have in actual fact the living connection between the worlds of will and of wisdom and the physical and etheric bodies of man. For into these worlds vanish during sleep the astral body and ego. They enter into these worlds and build there centres of attraction for substances which have then to flow out of the world of wisdom into the etheric body and out of the world of will into the physical body. This must go on in the night. For if man were present in his consciousness, this instreaming could not happen rightly. If ordinary man were conscious during sleep, if he were present with all his errors and vices, with all the bad things he has done in the world, then this would create a strange apparatus of attraction in those other worlds for the forces that are to stream in. Then tremendous disturbances would be set up in the physical and etheric bodies by the forces man's ego and astral body would send into them out of the world of ruling wisdom and the world of ruling will.

Therefore have good Gods made provision that we cannot be present when the right forces must stream into our physical and etheric body by night. For the good Gods have dulled the consciousness of man during sleep, that he may not be able to spoil what he undoubtedly would spoil by his thoughts were he conscious. It is on this account that we have to undergo great pain when we are on the path of knowledge and are making the ascent into the higher worlds; if we are in real earnest it must necessarily bring us great pain. You will find in my book, Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment, a description of how the life of man by night, the sleeping life, is, so to speak, made use of, to help man to rise from the world of external reality into higher worlds. When man begins from out of the world of Imagination to light up his sleep consciousness, when he begins to lighten it with knowledge and experiences, then it is important for him to make sure that he himself gets out of the way and so shuts out of his consciousness all that might cause disturbance to his physical and etheric bodies. It is an absolute necessity, in making the ascent into higher worlds to get to know oneself thoroughly and exactly. When we really know ourselves we cease as rule to love ourselves. Self-love comes to an end when we begin to have self-knowledge; and this self-love—which is always present in a man who has not attained to self-knowledge, for it is an illusion to imagine we do not love ourselves; we love ourselves more than anything else in the world—this self-love must have been overcome if we are to be able to shut ourselves out of our consciousness. We must, in actual fact, come to the point where we say to ourselves: As I am now, I must eliminate myself. We have already gone a long way in this direction in that we have attained to self-surrender. But we must now not love ourselves at all. We must have the possibility at every moment to feel—I must put myself right on one side; for if I do not shut out completely all those things in me that otherwise I quite like to feel in me, errors, trivialities, prejudices sympathies, antipathies—if I do not put these right away then my ascent into higher worlds cannot be made aright.

Because of these errors, disturbing forces will mix with the inflowing stream from higher worlds that has to enter into me to make clairvoyance possible. And these forces will stream into my physical and etheric bodies, and as many as are the errors, etc., so many will be the disturbing processes set up. As long as we are not conscious in sleep, as long as we are not capable of rising into the world of clairvoyance, so long do good Gods protect us and not let these currents from the world of will and the world of wisdom flow into our physical and etheric bodies. But when we carry up our consciousness into the world of clairvoyance, then no Gods are protecting us—for the protection they give consists in the very fact that they take away our consciousness—then we must ourselves lay aside all prejudice, all sympathy, all antipathy, etc. All these things we must put right away from us; for if we have anything left of self-love, or of desires that cling to the personal in us, or if we are still capable of making any judgment on personal grounds, then all such things can work harm to our health—namely, to our physical body and etheric body—when we follow the path of development into higher worlds.

It is exceedingly important that we should be clear about these things. And it is easy to perceive the significance of the fact that in ordinary day life man is deprived of all influence upon his physical and etheric body, his thoughts, in the manner in which he grasps them when he is within these bodies have nothing whatever to do with reality, they are quite ineffective and consequently unable to form any judgment about what is real. By night they would be able to do so. Every false thought would work destructively on the physical and etheric bodies. If we were conscious in the night we should see before us what I have just been describing to you. The world of the senses would appear to us as a sea of ruling will, and behind it would appear the wisdom—the wisdom that builds the world, beating through this will, as it were lashing it up and down into great waves, and with every beat of the waves evoking continually processes of coming into existence and of passing away, processes of birth and of death. That is the true world, into which we have ultimately to look, the world of ruling will and the world of ruling wisdom, and the latter is also the world of perpetual births and perpetual deaths. That is the world that is our world, and it is of immense importance for us to recognise it. For if we once recognise it we begin to discover in very truth a means for attaining to a greater and greater height of surrender; because we feel ourselves interwoven in perpetual births and perpetual deaths, and we know that with every deed we do we connect ourselves in some way with a coming into existence or with a passing away. And “good” will begin to be for us not merely something of which we say: That is good, I like it, it fills me with sympathy. No, we begin to know that the good is something that is creative in the World-All, something that always and everywhere belongs to the world that is arising and coming into being. And of the “bad” we begin to feel how it shows itself everywhere as an outpouring of a process of death and decay. And here we shall have made an important transition to a new world-conception, where one will not be able to think of evil in any other way than as the destroying angel of death, who goes striding through the world, nor of good in any other way than as the creator of continual cosmic births, in great and small. And it is for Spiritual Science to awaken in man a sense of how through this spiritual world-conception he can deepen his whole outlook on life, as he begins to feel that the world of good and the world of bad are not merely as they appear to us in external maya, where we stand before them with our power of judgment and find only that the one is pleasing to us and the other displeasing; no, the world of good is the creative world and the bad is the destroying angel who goes through the world with his scythe. And with every bad thing we do we become a helper of the destroying angel, we ourselves take his scythe and share in the processes of death and decay. The ideas that we receive from a spiritual foundation have a strengthening influence upon our whole outlook on life. This strength is what men should now be receiving that they may carry it into the evolution of the future; for indeed they will need it. Hitherto good Gods have taken care of man but now the time has come in our fifth Post-Atlantean epoch when destiny, and good and evil will more and more be given over into his own hands. Therefore it is necessary to know what good and evil mean, and to recognise them in the world—the one as a creative and the other as a death-dealing principle.

[ 1 ] We have had the activity of higher spiritual Beings within our Cosmos, brought before our souls by means of two examples, that on ancient Saturn and that on the ancient Sun, which is the reincarnation, or the production of Saturn. It will now be necessary to explore the spiritual realm itself in which these higher spiritual Beings are, and consider their action and influence from still another point of view. During the first half of these lectures some things will have to be said which many of you have already heard. But even apart from the fact that there are many listeners here who have not yet heard some of the things which may be called introductory, it is necessary to repeat them, because we have to rise in these lectures to very high regions of spiritual life.

[ 2 ] From what has been said you will have seen that spiritual Beings of the most different kinds have to be active within a cosmic system which is in process of development. What in reality, is this ancient Saturn? Let us make a precise image of it. Of course ancient Saturn has nothing to do with the Saturn of the present day. You can easily imagine that in ancient Saturn were already included the germs of all that belongs to-day to the whole of our solar system; our Sun, Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and so on, all these bodies were within ancient Saturn and have evolved out of it. Imagine to yourselves a globe, or heavenly body which would have the sun as its central point and would reach so far outwards that the Saturn of to-day was contained in it, this globe, larger than our present solar system, would give you a correct idea of ancient Saturn. Our whole solar system came forth, out of ancient Saturn. One might even compare it — not exactly but approximately — with the general Kant-Laplace universal primeval mist, out of which, according to the opinion of many modern people, our solar system has formed itself. But the comparison is not quite accurate, for the majority imagine that a sort of gas was the starting point of our solar system, whereas we have seen that it was a body of warmth, not of gas. Ancient Saturn was a giant body of warmth.

[ 3 ] And so we heard yesterday, that when that ancient Saturn had transformed itself into the later Sun, the Cherubim began to be active from the surrounding circumference of the Universe. You have now to realise that those Cherubim, who were active, in the periphery of the Sun, were also already present in the periphery of ancient Saturn. Only they were not as yet called on to play their part — to put it trivially, they had not yet reached the stage when they could undertake something important, but they were present in the environment of Saturn. Still other Beings were around ancient Saturn, Beings of a degree still higher and still more sublime than the Cherubim, namely, the Seraphim, (Spirits of Love). The Thrones also came from the same region. But the Thrones, who are one grade lower than the Cherubim, let their substance flow downwards to form the warmth-substance of Saturn, as we have already shown. Thus we can imagine Saturn as a giant globe of warmth, surrounded by circles of spiritual Beings who are of a supremely high, sublime nature. Christian Esotericism calls them Thrones, Cherubim, Seraphim. They are the Dhyanic Beings of the Eastern Teaching.

[ 4 ] Whence do these circles of sublime Beings come? Everything in the world, everything in the Universe has evolved. And if we want to form an idea of the place whence come the Cherubim, the Seraphim and the Thrones, we shall do well to turn our thought into our own solar system and to ask ourselves: What will some day become of our solar system? We wish now to give you a short sketch of the development of our solar system.

We know that it has come forth out of ancient Saturn, Saturn transformed itself into the ancient Sun, which again changed into the ancient Moon. In the time when the ancient Sun was Moon, a particular development began. This Moon for the time went forth out of the Sun. In the ancient Moon we have the first heavenly body, which is outside and separate from the Sun. The Sun was able to evolve higher, because it cast from it the coarser substances. The whole system then developed towards our present earth. Our earth came into being because, along with all the remaining Moon and Earth, it divided from the Sun the coarser substances and beings belonging to it. But evolution goes further. The beings who have now to dwell upon the Earth, separated from the Sun, and who have been thrown out of the Sun, although excluded from it are developing ever higher and higher. They have to pass through yet another condition, that of Jupiter. But through all this, they are gradually maturing towards re-union with the Sun. And when the condition of the Venus-development will have come, all the beings who now live and move upon our earth will be re-absorbed into the Sun, and the Sun itself will have reached a higher stage of development, just because it will have again redeemed all the beings it had formerly excluded. Then will come the Vulcan development, the highest state in the development of our system. These are the seven stages of evolution of our system: Saturn, Sun, Moon, Earth, Jupiter, Venus and Vulcan. In the Vulcan development, all those Beings who have evolved out of the small beginnings of the Saturn existence, will be spiritualised in the highest degree, they will have grown not only as far as the Sun, but even higher than the Sun. Vulcan is more than Sun, and with this it has reached the maturity of sacrifice, the maturity necessary to self disintegration.

[ 5 ] The course of evolution is this: a Sun, which from the beginning is included in such a system, has at first to throw off its planets, being too weak to develop further without excluding them. It grows strong, absorbs its planets again, and grows into a Vulcan. Then the whole is dissolved, and from the Vulcan globe is formed a hollow globe which is something like the circles of Thrones, Cherubim, Seraphim, etc. The Sun will thus dissolve in space, sacrifice itself, send forth its Being into the Universe, and through this will itself become a circle of Beings like the Thrones, Cherubim, Seraphim, which will then advance towards new creation.

[ 6 ] Why are the Thrones enabled. to give out of their substance what Saturn needs? Because they have prepared themselves in an earlier system, through seven conditions like those our solar system is now going through. Before a system of Thrones, Cherubim, Seraphim can be evolved, it must have been a solar system at an earlier stage; which means, that when the Sun has got so far as to be reunited with its planets, it becomes itself a circle — a Zodiacal circle. That which we have come to know in the Zodiac, those great, sublime Beings, are the results that have come over to us from an earlier solar system. That which has formerly evolved within a solar system can now send down its influence out of universal space, and produce a new solar system, created out of itself. The Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones are for us the highest Hierarchy among divine Beings, because they have already passed through their solar system evolution and have risen to mighty cosmic deeds of sacrifice.

[ 7 ] Hence it is that these Beings have come into the actual direct vicinity of the highest Godhead of which we can speak at all: the Trinity, the three-fold Divinity. Beyond the Seraphim we have to see that highest Divinity of which we find mention by almost all nations as the threefold Divinity — as Brahma, Shiva, Vishnu, as Father, Word, and Holy Ghost. From out [of] this highest Godhead, this most exalted Trinity, stream forth the plans for a new cosmic system. Glancing back at ancient Saturn we say to ourselves: before any of this ancient Saturn came into Being, the plan of it had grown within the divine threefold Unity. But the threefold Unity has need of Beings to execute its plan. These Beings must first prepare themselves for the task. The Beings who, are so to speak, nearest God Himself, who, as is beautifully expressed in Christian Western Esotericism, ‘bask in the light of God's countenance,’ are the Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones. These take up the plans of a new cosmic system streaming from the divine threefold Unity. This is naturally expressed more figuratively than it really is, for we have to express in human words such sublime activities, for which, in truth, this human language has not been created. No human words exist to express such sublime activity as that, for instance, when the Seraphim, in the beginning of our solar system received the highest plans of the divine Threefold Unity containing the evolution which our solar system has to pass through, namely Saturn, Sun, Moon, Earth, Jupiter, Venus and Vulcan. Seraphim is a name which for those who understand it in its true sense, even in that of ancient Hebrew Esotericism, has always signified that the task of the Seraphim was to receive from the Trinity the highest ideas and aims for a system of worlds. The Cherubim, the next lower rank of the Hierarchies, had the task of building up in wisdom the aims and ideas which they received from the higher gods. Thus the Cherubim are spirits of highest wisdom, who understood how to transpose into workable plans, the inspirations given to them by the Seraphim. And the Thrones, the third grade of the Hierarchies, counting from above, had the task — naturally very figuratively expressed. — of putting things into action, so that what had been thought out in Wisdom — these lofty cosmic thoughts which the Seraphim had received from the Gods, and which the Cherubim had pondered over, should be transformed into active reality.

[ 8 ] We actually see, if we do but try to see with the soul, how the first realisation of the divine plan occurs with the down-flow of the fire-substance of the Thrones. Thus the Thrones appear to us as those Beings who have the power to transform into a primary reality that which has been first thought out by the Cherubim. This takes place because the Thrones allowed their own substance to flow from them, the substance of the primeval original world-fire, into the space, which had been chosen for the new world-system. If we speak very figuratively we can express it thus: An old solar system disappeared and died away. Within that ancient solar system the ranks of Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones had evolved to the highest perfection. They then sought out, according to the inspiration received by them from the highest Threefold Unity, a Sphere within Universal space and said: ‘We will begin here.’ When the Seraphim took up the aims of the new world-system, the Cherubim worked out these aims, and the Thrones poured out of their own Being the primeval fire into that space. Thus we grasp the beginnings of our world-system.

[ 9 ] Other Beings, however, were also present in a certain way, in the former solar system, of which ours is the successor. But these Beings did not rise so high as the Seraphim, Cherubim, Thrones; they stopped on lower Stages, they had come over in a condition when they still had to pass through a certain development, before they could be creatively active, before they could offer sacrifice. These Beings are those of the Second threefold Hierarchy. The First threefold Hierarchy we have just been considering. The Beings of the Second threefold Hierarchy are: the Kyriotetes or Dominions or Spirits of Wisdom; then the so-called Mights, Dynamis (or, as Dionysius, the Areopagite, and after him the Teachers of the West call them, Virtutes, Virtues), or Spirits of Motion, and the Spirits of Form, who are also called by the Teachers of the West — Potentates, which mean Powers.

[ 10 ] We must now ask ourselves: When we glance back at ancient Saturn and see the first threefold Hierarchy surrounding it, where then are the Beings of that second threefold Hierarchy? Where can we search for the Dominions, Mights, and Potentates? We must look for them inside ancient Saturn. If the Thrones have reached, so to speak, to its boundary, we must look for the Dominions, Mights and Potentates, or the Spirits of Wisdom, Motion and Form, inside Saturn. Inside ancient Saturn, within the mass of it, again three ranks of Beings are active, — the Dominions, Mights and Potentates. They are spiritual Beings operating inside the Saturn substance.

[ 11 ] Now we must for once come to an understanding with the extraordinary fantastic modern theory of the origin of the world, and turn our minds again to the Kant-Laplace theory. It has put a mass of fog as a starting point for our solar system, and then has imagined that the whole of this giant mass of gas has begun to revolve. It finds it extraordinarily simple that with the rotation the outer planets gradually split off. At first there are rings. These then contract. The Sun remains in the middle, and the others rotate around it. They picture it quite mechanically. A very nice experiment is shown in the schools to make the thing clearer. It is shown how a solar system is formed in a small way, by taking a vessel full of water, throwing in a large drop of oil, then cutting a piece of paper, representing the equator, and putting a pin into it from above. Then the drop of oil is set into rotation. Small drops of oil split asunder and circle round, and the demonstrator shows it to pupils — sometimes quite old pupils — saying: ‘Now, you have here in small the formation of a world system.’ And the whole thing is made most illuminating. For what can illuminate one more than when one sees with one's own eyes how such a solar system is formed. Why should one not see that there was once upon a time a gigantic cosmic fog which in its rotation loosened the Planets around it, like those little drops, and made the miniature Mercury and Saturn loosen themselves from the large drop of oil. One must marvel at such a naive proceeding. For the man who tries to make the Kant-Laplace System so clear forgets one thing — sometimes it is very good to forget, only in this case it wont do — he forgets himself, he forgets he stood by and made the thing rotate. This is incredibly naive, but the simple-mindedness of modern, materialistic mythology is very great, greater than that of any other mythology. This will be realised in future times. There is someone who starts the whole thing, who makes it rotate. It is necessary if one can think at all, if one has not been forsaken by all the good Spirits of Logic, it is necessary to presume that spiritual powers are occupied out there with the rotation of the universal globes. Apart from the error in placing a primeval gas instead of a primeval fire at the outset, one cannot assume that that mass of gas began to whirl round of itself. One must ask: Where are the forces and powers which put movement into that mass which for us is of primeval fire, so that something begins to happen inside it? We have just enumerated them.

Spiritual forces work from without and from within our system. Those Beings who surround it, and who acquired their faculties in earlier systems, work from outside. Inside are Beings of less maturity, who differentiate the internal mass, who bring about what we had in our minds when we spoke of the shapes of warmth formed inside Saturn. They are Beings of highest intelligence who regulate all that happens there.

[ 12 ] What then is the task of the first Beings of the second threefold Hierarchy? The Spirits of Wisdom or Dominions, or Kyriotetes take that which the Thrones or Spirits of Will bring down out of Universal space, and regulate it so that a harmonious co-relation can come about between the single globe which is originating — between Saturn and the whole Universe. In the interior of Saturn everything has to be so regulated that it corresponds with what is outside. What the Seraphim, Cherubim, and Thrones, bring down to Saturn from the hand of God, must be so appointed that within Saturn these commands can be carried out, and these impulses become realities. The Spirits of Wisdom or Kyriotetes receive from the circumference of Saturn that which comes down through the mediation of the highest Hierarchy, so that they may transform it and make it harmonise with what is in the interior of Saturn.

[ 13 ] What is received by the Spirits of Wisdom, is further worked on and elaborated by Mights or the Spirits of Motion. And while the former inside Saturn hold, as it were, the highest command, the latter undertake the carrying out of these directions. Then the Powers or Spirits of Form — later we shall explain this more in detail, now we are characterising it only in a general way — provide that what is being formed according to the intentions of the Universe, should have duration, so long as it is needed, that it should not be destroyed again at once. These Powers or Spirits of Form are the maintainers — the supporters.

Thus the Dominions or Spirits of Wisdom are the directors inside Saturn; the Mights or Spirits of Motion are those who execute their directions; and the Powers or Spirits of Form are the supporters, the upholders of that which the Mights have built.

[ 14 ] Today, we shall omit how the third threefold Hierarchy works, (we have spoken of them before) the Spirits of Personality, the Archangels or Fire Spirits and the Angels. We shall turn our attention to-day, with our newly acquired knowledge, to the transition from ancient Saturn to ancient Sun. The most essential proceedings were explained at the last lecture. What happens when ancient Saturn becomes Sun, is that the primeval fire changes into a condition of gas or air, so that the ancient Sun consists of what is called the residue of the primeval fire. The primeval fire is intermingled with, and forms the basis of, what has thickened into gas or smoke. Thus two substances are to be found there: primeval fire and a part of that fire which has condensed to gas or smoke — call it what you will. This is the essential characteristic of the old Sun. We shall see that our Sun has grown into something different, through transitory conditions up to the present day; it has developed into something different, although there are people who imagine that the interior of our Sun to-day is also merely a sort of gas.

[ 15 ] If you enter into all the various theories at which our materialistic natural science arrives, you will, if you think, certainly be astounded. There is, for instance, a popular little book, which is much bought because of its cheapness, which claims that our present Sun has in its centre nothing solid, but only gas. Only, this gas — one could not believe it really, but it stands there in a little popular writing — this gas is as thick as honey or tar. The man who soars to such ideas that gas under conditions of pressure can become like honey or tar, I will willingly allow to wander about in such a sluggish land where the air is of the consistency of honey, but I would not wish him to have to move in an air that is a thick as tar! Materialistic theories have such excrescences as these.

[ 16 ] We are not speaking now of our present Sun, but of that ancient Sun which really consists of primeval fire and of what is called fire-mist or fire-air. You find this expression used in Faust, for Goethe knew it well, and you find the expression fire-mist also used in theosophical literature. We must think of the ancient sun as of a mixture of these two substances. This did not, however, happen of itself. Universal bodies do not condense of themselves; spiritual Beings have to bring about this process of condensation.

Which are the Spiritual Beings who carried over the condensation of the substance of ancient Saturn to the ancient Sun? These Beings whom we call the Dominions, or Spirit of Wisdom. It is they who now press inwards from outside and who originally pressed together the mighty mass of Saturn so that it grew smaller. The Dominions brought pressure to bear upon it, until the ancient Sun became the size of a globe, the mass of which, if you place the Sun in its centre, you must imagine as reaching out to Jupiter. Thus Saturn was a gigantic world-globe, which having our Sun in its centre would have reached as far as to the present Saturn, an enormous globe, as large as our present solar system. The Sun of which we have just spoken was a world-globe which stretched a far as the Jupiter of to-day. This point marks the boundary of the ancient Sun-world. You will do well if you picture those outer planets as boundary marks for the limits of the ancient Worlds. [ 17 ] You see that we are gradually approaching the theory of the planets, being led thereto through the activity of the hierarchies,

Let us go further. We know that the next condition is again one of condensation. The third condition of our World system is that of the Ancient Moon. Those of you who have given attention to the communications from the Akashic Record know that the ancient Moon had come into being because the Sun substance had condensed still more, as far as to the condition of water. The Moon contained no solid earth as yet, but was composed of fire, air and water. It had so coordinated the watery element. Gas or air was condensed in it to the element of water. Who effected this? That Hierarchy of spiritual Beings brought this about, whom we call Mights, Virtutes, or Spirits of Motion. Thus it happened through the Virtutes, that the mass of the ancient Moon contracted to the limits of the orbit of the present Mars. Mars is thus the boundary showing the size of the Moon. If you imagine a globe with the present Sun for its centre, and for its limit the orbit of the present Mars, you have the size of the ancient Moon. [ 18 ] We have reached the point when we must remember that when the ancient Moon was formed out of Saturn and Sun, something quite new took place. A part of the dense substance was now thrown out, and two globes came into being. One of the two took up the finer substances and Beings and became a finer Sun, the second became a denser Moon. This third condition of our planetary system developed in such a way that, for a time, it remained one single planet; then it threw off a planet from itself, which remained in its vicinity. At first, so long as it formed one single body, the Moon extended to the orbit of the present Mars; then the Sun contracted, and was encircled by another body; approximately in the place where the present Mars has its orbit, was more or less the periphery of the original single body.

[ 19 ] Through what did this division take place? Through what influence did a single globe split in two? It happened in the time of the domination of the Spirits of Motion, Mights, or Dynamis. For those who have already followed me in this domain, it is not new to hear that [in] the Cosmos things happen very much in the way they happen in ordinary human life. Where beings are evolving there are some who advance and others who remain behind, as many a father knows, who complains that his son in college lags behind whilst others are making good progress. We are concerned, therefore, with a difference in the ‘tempo’ of development. It is the same in the Cosmos. And through certain causes, which we shall learn later, now that the Mights or Virtutes have entered on their Mission, something came into play which is called in all Esotericism, and in all Mysteries, the ‘fight in Heaven.’ This ‘fight in Heaven’ forms an essential, and integral part of all Mysteries; it contains also the primeval Mystery regarding the origin of Evil. At a certain point of the Moon evolution the Mights or Virtutes had reached very different degrees of maturity. Some of them aspired to rise spiritually as high as possible; others again had remained behind, or at least had progressed normally in their development. Some of the Mights on the ancient Moon had progressed much further than their companions. The result of this was that these two classes of Mights divided. The more advanced ones drew out with the body of the Sun, and the others formed the Moon revolving around it.

We have now given a sketchy description of the fight in Heaven, the rending asunder of the ancient Moon, so that the planet accompanying the ancient Moon comes under the domination of those spirits of Motion or Might or Virtutes which had remained behind, and the ancient Sun under the domination of the advanced Virtutes.

[ 20 ] Something of this fight in Heaven still sounds in the first sentences of the divine Gita, where symbolically at the beginning of the battle can still be heard echoes of that mighty fight of the heavens. O, it was a mighty field of battle! From the time when the Dominions or Kyriotetes brought about the formation of the ancient Sun, up to the time of that of the ancient Moon, when the Mights or Dynamis took up their mission, all was a mighty field of battle; a gigantic fight reigned in Heaven. The Dominions had contracted the whole mass of our solar systems to the boundary of Jupiter, then the Virtutes or Mights contracted it to the boundary of the Mars of to-day. Between these two planetary frontiers in the heavens lies the great battlefield of the fight of Heaven. Look at that heavenly battlefield! Only in the nineteenth century has the physical eye discovered again, so to speak, the devastations produced by the Fight in Heaven. You have a host of small Planetoids scattered in between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. These are the wreckage of the battlefield of the fight in Heaven which was fought between the two points of Cosmic time when our Solar System was contracted first as far as Jupiter, then to Mars. And when our Astronomers direct their telescopes towards the heavenly spaces and still discover other planetoids, these are still the wreckage of that great battlefield, of that fight in Heaven between the advanced Virtutes and those who were less advanced, and which also brought about the severing of the Moon from the Sun.

[ 21 ] Thus, we see, when we consider the actions of the divine spiritual beings, how external things appear to us as the expression, the outward physiognomy of those divine spiritual beings.

Naturally a great deal more could be said in conclusion to what I have put before you here. In speaking one is obliged to explain things in words and ideas. What is intended is the unity of character, the unity of force, that one would wish to make stream through the words and ideas. Let me sum up by using a half pictorial form to convey what I still wish to say to you. Elaborate it for yourselves and you will perhaps understand better what I mean.

Now from various aspects I have drawn your attention to how every civilized human being today lives in intellectualism in a life of concepts, which in our epoch has developed in the most intense, penetrating way. Mankind has worked itself up to the most abstract concepts. You need only compare, for instance, how in an age preceding our own, Dante received descriptions of the world from his teacher. Everything was still permeated with soul, everything was still of a spiritual nature; it wafted like a magic breath through the whole of Dante's great poem. Then came the time when humanity molded what was experienced inwardly into abstract concepts. Men have always had concepts but, as I have already explained to you, they were revealed concepts, not concepts that no longer corresponded to inner revelations of the soul. Only when men had wrestled through to concepts no longer springing from revelations did they evolve concepts from observation of external Nature, and from outer experiments—only then did they allow validity to what was received from outside through mere observation.

If we go deeply into the old world of thought, into that of the twelfth, thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, we have the feeling that it was united with the inner being of the soul. There was still an inner life then, a living from within outwards, an experiencing which arose in man because he had united himself with this life.

The conceptual system even of the most primitive human being is acquired from outside today, from external Nature observed by the senses. And even those who still cling to the older concepts no longer hold to this belief with any depth of conviction, not even the peasant. When something is passed on from outside, something established scientifically and verified by Nature, it becomes the ideal towards which people strive. But concepts, ideas, arising out of the inner life of the soul, have the characteristic by thus struggling out of the soul, as I have already explained, of becoming dead concepts. And the human being feels it right that, in so far as they are born out of his inner being, these concepts shall die. But the strange thing that has come to pass during the last few centuries, reaching its culmination in the nineteenth century, is that the concepts dying in the inner being took on fresh life from the outer world. It can actually be proved by a historical phenomenon. Think how Goethe out of his inner being built up a whole conception of evolution. It reached its zenith in his concept of metamorphosis. We have the feeling that we are working out of the living into the dead, but that the human being has to work into what is dead because the living implies coercion. Freedom could only arise by concepts becoming dead. Yet these concepts have taken on new life from outer Nature. Inasmuch as Darwinism, for instance, has come upon the scene—even in our Middle European civilization—we have concepts and ideas which acquire new life from outer Nature. But it is a life which devours the human being.

Today we must feel the full intensity of being surrounded by a thinking bound to Nature but which devours the human being. How does it devour the human being? With the ideas the most advanced kind of thinking draws from Nature, we can never understand man. What does our magnificent theory of evolution provide? It gives us a survey of how animals evolve from animals, and how man stands before us—but only as the culminating point in the ranks of the animal kingdom, and not what we are as men.

This is what modern civilization tells us. Previous civilizations understood the kingdoms of Nature as arising out of man, modern civilization grasps man as arising out of Nature, as the highest animal. It does not grasp to what extent animals are imperfect men. If we fill our soul with what our thinking has become through Nature, there appears in the picture of the man-devouring dragon what is the most potent factor in modern civilization. Man feels himself confronting a being who is devouring him.

Consider how this devouring has taken effect. Whereas from the fifteenth century onwards natural science has been triumphantly progressing, knowledge of man has been more and more on the downgrade. The human being could only keep going with difficulty, by preserving and handing on the old no longer living ideas and traditions. Only with difficulty could man protect himself from having his innermost life devoured by the dragon. And in the last third of the nineteenth century the dragon stood with particular intensity before the human being, threatening in the most terrible way to devour the individual life of the soul. Those who had within them a fully developed life of soul felt how the dragon, who was destined for death, had acquired fresh life in the new age through observation and experiment, but it was a life that devoured the human being.

In more ancient times men played a part in producing the dragon, but endowed with the necessary amount of death-forces, they could master him. In those days man contributed to his experience only as much intellectuality as he could master through forces of the heart. Now, the dragon has become sternly objective; he meets us from outside and devours us as beings of soul.

This is the essential characteristic of civilization from the fifteenth century on into the nineteenth. We see it correctly only when we consider the picture of the dragon; in olden times it had a prophetic meaning and pointed to what would come in the future. But olden times were conscious of having given birth to the dragon, and also of having given birth to Michael or St. George, to forces capable of overcoming the dragon.

But from the fifteenth century and on into the nineteenth, humanity was powerless against this. It was the epoch that has gradually succumbed to complete belief in the material world. As a result it had become so paralyzed in its soul-life that in respect of the deepest treasures of the soul, truthfulness had gone. An era which made the world arise out of the Kant-Laplace primeval nebula which densifies into a globe, and in this process engenders living beings and finally man—could but say: Ultimately such activity must disappear into universal death by warmth, but that will also be the death of everything man has developed in the moral sphere! There have always been people who sought to prove that the moral world-order could find a place in a world-order as conceived by Kant-Laplace, ending with universal death, yet such a view is not sincere. And by no means sincere, by no means honest, was the view that considered moral development to originate in illusions and disappear when the universal death through warmth brings about complete annihilation.

Why did such a view of the world ever arise? Why does it fundamentally live in all souls today? Because the dragon penetrates even to the remotest country cottage—though not consciously recognized—and slays the heart. Why is this so? It comes about because man can no longer understand man.

For what takes place in man? There is taking place every moment in man what occurs nowhere else in the earthly world around us. He takes in the foodstuffs from the surrounding world. He takes them from the kingdom of the living and only to a small extent from what is dead. But foodstuffs as they pass through the digestive system are destroyed, even the most living ones. Man takes in living substance and completely destroys it in order to infuse his own life into what has been killed. And not until the foodstuffs pass into the lymph ducts is the dead made living again in man's inner being.

One can see if one penetrates the being of man that in the human organic process, permeated as it is with soul and spirit, matter is completely destroyed and then created anew. In the human organism we have a continual process of destruction of matter so that matter within the human organism can be newly created. Matter is continually being changed into nothingness and newly created in us.

The door to this knowledge was firmly barred in the nineteenth century, when man arrived at the law of the conservation of matter and of energy, and believed that matter is also conserved in the human organism. The establishment of the law of the conservation of matter is clear proof that the human being is no longer inwardly understood.

But now consider how infinitely difficult it is today not to be considered a fool if one fights against what is regarded in modern physics as a definite fact. The law of the conservation of matter and of energy simply means that science has entirely barred the way leading to man. There the dragon has entirely devoured human nature. But the dragon must be conquered, and therefore the knowledge must gain ground that the picture of Michael overcoming the dragon is not merely an ancient picture but that it has reached the highest degree of reality just at this time! It was created in ancient times because men still felt Michael within themselves permeating their unconscious, and by which they unconsciously overcame what arose out of intellectualism. Nowadays the dragon has become quite external. Nowadays the dragon encounters us from outside, threatening continually to kill the human being. But the dragon must be conquered. He can be conquered only through our becoming aware how Michael, or St. George, also comes from outside. And Michael, or St. George, who comes from outside, who is able to conquer the dragon, is a true spiritual knowledge which conquers this center of life (which, for man's inner being is a center of death)—the so-called law of the conservation of energy so that in his knowledge man can again become man in a real sense. Today we dare not; for so long as there is a law of the conservation of matter and of energy, moral law melts away in the universal death through warmth—and the Kant-Laplace theory is no mere phrase!

Man's shrinking away from this consequence is the fearful untruth that has penetrated right into the human heart, into the human soul, and has seized hold of everything in the human being, making him a being of untruth upon the earth. We must acquire the vision of Michael who shows us that what is material on earth does not merely pass through the universal death through warmth, but will at some time actually disperse. He shows us that by uniting ourselves with the spiritual world we are able to implant life through our moral impulses. Thus what is in the earth begins to be transformed into the new life, into the moral.

For the reality of the moral world-order is what the approaching Michael can give. The old religions cannot do this; they have allowed themselves to be conquered by the dragon. They accept the dragon who kills man, and by the side of the dragon establish some special, abstractly moral divine order. But the dragon does not tolerate this; the dragon must be conquered. He does not suffer men to found something alongside him. What man needs is the force that he can gain from victory over the dragon.

You see how profoundly this problem must be grasped. But what has happened in modern civilization? Well, every science has become a metamorphosis of the dragon, all external culture too is an outcome of the dragon. Certainly, the outer world-mechanism, which lives not only in the machine, but also in our social organism, is rightly called a dragon. But besides, the dragon meets us everywhere, whether modern science tells us about the origin of life, about the transformation of living beings, about the human soul, or even in the field of history—everywhere the result proceeds from the dragon. This had become so acute in the last third of the nineteenth century, at the turn of the nineteenth century and on into the twentieth, that the growing human being, who longed to know what the old had received, saw the dragon coming towards him in botany, zoology, history, out of every science—saw himself confronted in every sphere by the dragon waiting to devour the very core of his soul.

In our own epoch the battle of Michael with the dragon has for the first time become real, to the highest degree. When we penetrate into the spiritual texture of the world, we find that with the culmination of the dragon's power there also came—at the turn of the nineteenth century—Michael's intervention with which we can unite ourselves. The human being can have, if he will, Spiritual Science; that is to say, Michael actually penetrates from spiritual realms into our earthly realm. He does not force himself upon us. Today everything must spring out of man's freedom. The dragon pushes himself forward, demanding the highest authority. The authority of science is the most powerful that has ever been exercised in the world. Compare the authority of the Pope; it is almost as powerful. Just think—however stupid a man may be yet he can say: “But science has established that.” People are struck dumb by science, even if one has a truth to utter. There is no more overwhelming power of authority in the whole of man's evolution than that of modern science. Everywhere the dragon rears up to meet one.

There is no other way than to unite ourselves with Michael, that is to say to permeate ourselves with real knowledge of the spiritual weaving and being of the world. Only now does this picture of Michael truly stand before us; for the first time it has become our essential concern as man. In olden times this picture was still seen in Imagination. That is not possible today for external consciousness. Hence any fool can say that it is not true that external science is the dragon. But it is the dragon all the same.

Yet some saw themselves confronting the dragon but were not able to see Michael: those who grew up with science and were not so bewitched by the dragon that they quietly let themselves be devoured, who reacted against the soul being investigated by apparatus for testing the memory—who found no answer to their search for man, because the dragon has devoured him. This lived in the hearts of many human beings at the beginning of the twentieth century—they felt instinctively that they saw the dragon, but could not see Michael. Hence they removed themselves as far as possible from the dragon. They sought for a land which could not be reached by the dragon; they wanted to know nothing more of the dragon. The young are running away from the old because they want to escape from the region of the dragon. That also is an aspect of the Youth Movement. The young wanted to flee from the dragon because they saw no possibility of conquering the dragon. They wanted to go where the dragon was not.

But here there is a mystery and it consists in the fact that the dragon can exercise his power everywhere, even where he is not spatially present. And when he does not succeed in killing man directly through ideas and intellectualism, he succeeds by so rarefying the air everywhere in the world that one can no longer breathe.

And this will certainly be the case—young people who ran from the dragon so as not to be injured, and who came into such rarefied air that they could not breathe the future, felt intensely the nightmare of the past because the air had become unwholesome where it was formerly possible to escape the immediate influence of the dragon. The nightmare that comes from within is, as regards human experience, not very different from the pressure that comes from without, from the dragon.

In the last third of the nineteenth century, the older generation felt direct exposure to the dragon. The young people then experienced the nightmare of the air corrupted by the dragon—air that could not be breathed. Here, the only help is to find Michael who conquers the dragon. Man needs the power of the victor over the dragon, for the dragon receives his life out of a world quite different from that in which the human soul can live. The human soul cannot live in the world out of which the dragon receives his life-blood. But in the overcoming of the dragon the human being must acquire the strength to be able to live. The epoch from the fifteenth century to the nineteenth, which has developed the human being so that he has become quite empty, must be overcome. The age of Michael who conquers the dragon must now begin, for the power of the dragon has become great!

But it is this above all that we must set going if we want to become true leaders of the young. For Michael needs, as it were, a chariot by means of which to enter our civilization. And this chariot reveals itself to the true educator as coming forth from the young, growing human being, yes, even from the child. Here the power of the pre-earthly life is still working. Here we find, if we nurture it, what becomes the chariot by means of which Michael will enter our civilization. By educating in the right way we are preparing Michael's chariot for his entrance into our civilization.

We must no longer nurture the dragon by cultivating a science with thoughts unconcerned with penetrating into the human soul, into man, so as to develop him. We must build the chariot, the vehicle for Michael. This needs living manhood, a living humanity such as flows out of super-sensible worlds into the earthly life and manifests there, precisely in the early periods of human life. But for such an education we must have a heart. We must learn—speaking pictorially—to make ourselves allies of the approaching Michael if we want to become true teachers. More is accomplished for the art of education than by any theoretical principles, if what we receive into ourselves works so that we feel ourselves Michael's confederates, allies of the spiritual being who is entering the earth, for whom we prepare a vehicle by carrying out a living art of education of the young. Far better than all theoretical educational principles is to lift up our eyes to Michael who, since the last third of the nineteenth century, has been striving to enter our outworn dragon-civilization.

This is the fundamental impulse of all educational doctrine. We must not receive this art of education as a theory, we must not take it as something we can learn. We should receive it as something with which we can unite ourselves, the advent of which we welcome, something which comes to us not as dead concepts but as a living spirit to whom we offer our services because we must do so, if men are to experience progress in their evolution. This means to bring knowledge to life again, it means to call forth in full consciousness what once was there in man's unconscious.

My dear friends, in olden times when an atavistic clairvoyance was still natural to human beings, there were Mystery centers. In these Mystery centers, which were at the same time church, school, and center of art, the pupils sought also for knowledge, though more of a soul nature, in their development. Many things could be found in such centers—but libraries did not exist. Do not misunderstand me—no library in our own sense. Something existed akin to our library, that is to say, things were written down; but everything that was written down was read with the purpose of working upon the soul. Nowadays a great deal of what constitutes a library is only there to be stored up, not to be read. The bulk is used only when a thesis must be written because there such things are discussed. But people would prefer entirely to eliminate livingness. What is supposed to come into these theses must be quite mechanical. The aim is for the human being to enter into them as little as possible. Man's participation in spirituality has been wrested from him.

Spirituality, but now in full consciousness, must become living again, that we do not merely experience what can be perceived by the senses but experience once more what can be perceived by the spirit. The age of Michael must begin. In fact everything that has fallen to man's lot since the fifteenth century has come to him from outside. In the age of Michael the human being will have to find his own relation to the spiritual world. And learning, knowledge, will acquire a quite different kind of value.

Now in the ancient Mysteries what was in the libraries was more of the nature of monuments upon which was inscribed what was intended to pass into man's memory. These libraries contained what cannot be compared in any way with our books. For all leaders in the Mysteries directed their pupils to another kind of reading. They said: Yes, there is a library—but they did not call it so—and this library is out there in the human beings walking about. Learn to read them! Learn to read the mysteries that are inscribed in every man. We must return to this. Only we must come to it, as it were, from another side so that as teachers we know: All accumulation of learning, of knowledge, is worthless. As such it is dead and gets its life only from the dragon. We should have the feeling that in wishing “to know,” knowledge cannot be stored up here or there, for then it would at once fall apart. In literature, what is Spirit can only be touched upon lightly.

How can you really find within a book what is Spirit? For the spiritual is something living. The spiritual is not like bones. The spiritual is like the blood. And the blood needs vessels in which to flow. What we recognize as spiritual needs vessels. These vessels are growing human beings. Into these vessels we must pour the spiritual in order that it may hold together. Otherwise we shall have the spirit so alive that it immediately flows away. We must so preserve our knowledge that it can flow into the developing human being.

Then we shall make the chariot for Michael, then we shall be able to become Michael's companions. And what you seek, my dear friends, you will best attain through being conscious of wishing to become companions of Michael.

You must once again be able to follow a purely spiritual Being who is not incarnated on the earth. And you will have to learn to have faith in a human being who shows you the way to Michael. Humanity must understand in a new and living way the words of Christ: “My Kingdom is not of this world.” For it is just through this that it is in the true sense “of this world!” For the task of man is to make the Spirit, which without Him would not be on earth, into a living content of this world. The Christ Himself came down to earth. He did not take man away to an earthly life in the heavens. The human being must permeate his earthly life by a mediating spirituality which gives him power to conquer the dragon.

This must be understood so thoroughly that one can answer the question: Why did human beings tear each other to pieces during the second decade of the twentieth century?—They tore each other to pieces because they carried the battle into a region where it does not belong, because they did not see the real enemy, the dragon. To the conquest of the dragon belong the forces which, only when developed in the right way, will bring peace upon earth.

In short, we must take seriously our entrance into the Michael age. With the means available at present, we shall have to guide man again to the experience of being surrounded by the picture of Michael, powerful, radiant; for Michael, through the forces developing in man towards a full life of soul, can overcome the dragon preying on humanity. Only when this picture can be received in a more living way than formerly into the soul, will there come forces for the development of inner activity out of man's knowledge that he is of the company of Michael. Only then shall we participate in what can lead to progress and bring peace between the generations, in what can guide the young to listen to the old, and the old to have something to say which the young long to receive and understand.

Because the older generation dangled the dragon in front of youth, they fled to regions poor in air. A true youth movement will only reach its goal when instead of being offered the dragon, the younger generation finds in Michael the forces to exterminate the dragon. This will show itself by older and younger generations having something to say to each other and something to receive from each other.

For, in fact, if the educator is a complete human being he receives as much from the child as he gives to the child. Whoever cannot learn from the child what he brings down from the spiritual world, cannot teach the child about the mysteries of earthly existence. Only when the child becomes our educator by bringing his message to us from the spiritual world will the child be ready to receive from us tidings of earthly life.

It was not for the sake of mere symbolism that Goethe sought everywhere for things that suggest a breathing—outbreathing, inbreathing; outbreathing, inbreathing—Goethe saw the whole of life as a picture of receiving and giving. Everyone receives, everyone gives. Every giver becomes a receiver. But for the receiving and the giving to find a true rhythm it is necessary that we enter the Michael Age.

So I want to conclude with this picture for you to see how the preceding lectures were actually meant. Their aim was that you should not merely carry away in your heads what I have said here, and ponder over it. What I should prefer is for you to have something in your hearts and then to transform what you carry in your hearts into activity. What the human being carries in his head will in time be lost. But what he receives into his heart, the heart preserves and carries into all spheres of activity in which man is involved. May what I have ventured to say to you not be carried away merely in your heads—for then it will certainly be lost—but if it is carried away in your hearts, in the whole of your being, then, my dear friends, we have been talking together in the right way.

Out of this feeling, let me give you my farewell greeting today by saying: Take what I have tried to express as if I had wanted, above all, to let something that cannot be uttered in words penetrate to your hearts. If hearts have found some connection with what is meant here by the Living Spirit, then at least in part what we wanted to achieve in these gatherings will have been fulfilled. With this feeling we will separate today; with this feeling, however, we shall also come together again. Thus we shall find association in the Spirit, even though we work apart in different spheres of life. The chief thing will be that in our hearts we have found each other; then the spiritual, all that belongs to Michael, will also flow into our hearts.

[ 1 ] Concepts and ideas, therefore, comprise part of the given and at the same time lead beyond it. This makes it possible to define what other activity is concerned in attaining knowledge.

[ 2 ] Through a postulate we have separated from the rest of the given world-picture a particular part of it; this was done because it lies in the nature of cognition to start from just this particular part. Thus we separated it out only to enable us to understand the act of cognition. In so doing, it must be clear that we have artificially torn apart the unity of the world-picture. We must realize that what we have separated out from the given has an essential connection with the world content, irrespective of our postulate. This provides the next step in the theory of knowledge: it must consist in restoring that unity which we tore apart in order to make knowledge possible. The act of restoration consists in thinking about the world as given. Our thinking consideration of the world brings about the actual union of the two parts of the world content: the part we survey as given on the horizon of our experience, and the part which has to be produced in the act of cognition before that can be given also. The act of cognition is the synthesis of these two elements. Indeed, in every single act of cognition, one part appears as something produced within that act itself, and, through the act, as added to the merely given. This part, in actual fact, is always so produced, and only appears as something given at the beginning of epistemological theory.

[ 3 ] To permeate the world, as given, with concepts and ideas, is a thinking consideration of things. Therefore, thinking is the act which mediates knowledge. It is only when thinking arranges the world-picture by means of its own activity that knowledge can come about. Thinking itself is an activity which, in the moment of cognition, produces a content of its own. Therefore, insofar as the content that is cognized issues from thinking, it contains no problem for cognition. We have only to observe it; the very nature of what we observe is given us directly. A description of thinking is also at the same time the science of thinking. Logic, too, has always been a description of thought-forms, never a science that proves anything. Proof is only called for when the content of thought is synthesized with some other content of the world. Gideon Spicker is therefore quite right when he says in his book, Lessings Weltanschauung, (Lessing's World-View), page 5, “We can never experience, either empirically or logically, whether thinking in itself is correct.” One could add to this that with thinking, all proof ceases. For proof presupposes thinking. One may be able to prove a particular fact, but one can never prove proof as such. We can only describe what a proof is. In logic, all theory is pure empiricism; in the science of logic there is only observation. But when we want to know something other than thinking, we can do so only with the help of thinking; this means that thinking has to approach something given and transform its chaotic relationship with the world-picture into a systematic one. This means that thinking approaches the given world-content as an organizing principle. The process takes place as follows: Thinking first lifts out certain entities from the totality of the world-whole. In the given nothing is really separate; everything is a connected continuum. Then thinking relates these separate entities to each other in accordance with the thought-forms it produces, and also determines the outcome of this relationship. When thinking restores a relationship between two separate sections of the world-content, it does not do so arbitrarily. Thinking waits for what comes to light of its own accord as the result of restoring the relationship. And it is this result alone which is knowledge of that particular section of the world content. If the latter were unable to express anything about itself through that particular relationship established by thinking, then this attempt made by thinking would fail, and one would have to try again. All knowledge depends on man's establishing a correct relationship between two or more elements of reality, and comprehending the result of this.

[ 4 ] There is no doubt that many of our attempts to grasp things by means of thinking, fail; this is apparent not only in the history of science, but also in ordinary life; it is just that in the simple cases we usually encounter, the right concept replaces the wrong one so quickly that we seldom or never become aware of the latter.

[ 5 ] When Kant speaks of “the synthetic unity of apperception” it is evident that he had some inkling of what we have shown here to be an activity of thinking, the purpose of which is to organize the world-content systematically. But the fact that he believed that the a priori laws of pure science could be derived from the rules according to which this synthesis takes place, shows how little this inkling brought to his consciousness the essential task of thinking. He did not realize that this synthetic activity of thinking is only a preparation for discovering natural laws as such. Suppose, for example, that we detach one content, a, from the world-picture, and likewise another, b. If we are to gain knowledge of the law connecting a and b, then thinking must first relate a to b so that through this relationship the connection between them presents itself as given. Therefore, the actual content of a law of nature is derived from the given, and the task of thinking is merely to provide the opportunity for relating the elements of the world-picture so that the laws connecting them come to light. Thus there is no question of objective laws resulting from the synthetic activity of thinking alone.

[ 6 ] We must now ask what part thinking plays in building up our scientific world-picture, in contrast to the merely given world-picture. Our discussion shows that thinking provides the thought-forms to which the laws that govern the world correspond. In the example given above, let us assume a to be the cause and b the effect. The fact that a and b are causally connected could never become knowledge if thinking were not able to form the concept of causality. Yet in order to recognize, in a given case, that a is the cause and b the effect, it is necessary for a and b to correspond to what we understand by cause and effect. And this is true of all other categories of thinking as well.

[ 7 ] At this point it will be useful to refer briefly to Hume's description of the concept of causality. Hume said that our concepts of cause and effect are due solely to habit. We so often notice that a particular event is followed by another that accordingly we form the habit of thinking of them as causally connected, i.e. we expect the second event to occur whenever we observe the first. But this viewpoint stems from a mistaken representation of the relationship concerned in causality. Suppose that I always meet the same people every day for a number of days when I leave my house; it is true that I shall then gradually come to expect the two events to follow one another, but in this case it would never occur to me to look for a causal connection between the other persons and my own appearance at the same spot. I would look to quite different elements of the world-content in order to explain the facts involved. In fact, we never do determine a causal connection to be such from its sequence in time, but from its own content as part of the world-content which is that of cause and effect.

[ 8 ] The activity of thinking is only a formal one in the upbuilding of our scientific world-picture, and from this it follows that no cognition can have a content which is a priori, in that it is established prior to observation (thinking divorced from the given); rather must the content be acquired wholly through observation. In this sense all our knowledge is empirical. Nor is it possible to see how this could be otherwise. Kant's judgments a priori fundamentally are not cognition, but are only postulates. In the Kantian sense, one can always only say: If a thing is to be the object of any kind of experience, then it must conform to certain laws. Laws in this sense are regulations which the subject prescribes for the objects. Yet one would expect that if we are to attain knowledge of the given then it must be derived, not from the subject, but from the object.

[ 9 ] Thinking says nothing a priori about the given; it produces a posteriori, i.e. the thought-form, on the basis of which the conformity to law of the phenomena becomes apparent.

[ 10 ] Seen in this light, it is obvious that one can say nothing a priori about the degree of certainty of a judgment attained through cognition. For certainty, too, can be derived only from the given. To this it could be objected that observation only shows that some connection between phenomena once occurred, but not that such a connection must occur, and in similar cases always will occur. This assumption is also wrong. When I recognize some particular connection between elements of the world-picture, this connection is provided by these elements themselves; it is not something I think into them, but is an essential part of them, and must necessarily be present whenever the elements themselves are present.

[ 11 ] Only if it is considered that scientific effort is merely a matter of combining facts of experience according to subjective principles which are quite external to the facts themselves,—only such an outlook could believe that a and b may be connected by one law to-day and by another to-morrow (John Stuart Mill).¹ Someone who recognizes that the laws of nature originate in the given and therefore themselves constitute the connection between the phenomena and determine them, will not describe laws discovered by observation as merely of comparative universality. This is not to assert that a natural law which at one stage we assume to be correct must therefore be universally valid as well. When a later event disproves a law, this does not imply that the law had only a limited validity when first discovered, but rather that we failed to ascertain it with complete accuracy. A true law of nature is simply the expression of a connection within the given world-picture, and it exists as little without the facts it governs as the facts exist without the law.

[ 12 ] We have established that the nature of the activity of cognition is to permeate the given world-picture with concepts and ideas by means of thinking. What follows from this fact? If the directly-given were a totality, complete in itself, then such an elaboration of it by means of cognition would be both impossible and unnecessary. We should then simply accept the given as it is, and would be satisfied with it in that form. The act of cognition is possible only because the given contains something hidden; this hidden does not appear as long as we consider only its immediate aspect; the hidden aspect only reveals itself through the order that thinking brings into the given. In other words, what the given appears to be before it has been elaborated by thinking, is not its full totality.

[ 13 ] This becomes clearer when we consider more closely the factors concerned in the act of cognition. The first of these is the given. That it is given is not a feature of the given, but is only an expression for its relation to the second factor in the act of cognition. Thus what the given is as such remains quite undecided by this definition. The second factor is the conceptual content of the given; it is found by thinking, in the act of cognition, to be necessarily connected with the given. Let us now ask: 1) Where is the division between given and concept? 2) And where are they united? The answers to both of these questions are undoubtedly to be found in the preceding discussion. The division occurs solely in the act of cognition. In the given they are united. This shows that the conceptual content must necessarily be a part of the given, and also that the act of cognition consists in re-uniting the two parts of the world-picture, which to begin with are given to cognition separated from each other. Therefore, the given world-picture becomes complete only through that other, indirect kind of given which is brought to it by thinking. The immediate aspect of the world-picture reveals itself as quite incomplete to begin with.

[ 14 ] If, in the world-content, the thought-content were united with the given from the first, no knowledge would exist, and the need to go beyond the given would never arise. If, on the other hand, we were to produce the whole content of the world in and by means of thinking alone, no knowledge would exist either. What we ourselves produce we have no need to know. Knowledge therefore rests upon the fact that the world-content is originally given to us in incomplete form; it possesses another essential aspect, apart from what is directly present. This second aspect of the world-content, which is not originally given, is revealed through thinking. Therefore the content of thinking, which appears to us to be something separate, is not a sum of empty thought-forms, but comprises determinations (categories); however, in relation to the rest of the world-content, these determinations represent the organizing principle. The world-content can be called reality only in the form it attains when the two aspects of it described above have been united through knowledge.

• 1. John Stewart Mill (1806–1873). A stern parent, James Mill taught his son Greek at the age of three, and at seven he studied Plato's dialogues. When he was eight he had to teach his sister Latin. His introduction to the utilitarian teachings of Bentham (the greatest happiness to the greatest number) at the age of fifteen was decisive for his life. His great work, System of Logic, 1843, is the analysis of inductive proof. He was a great champion of human rights, and in the second half of the i9th century his influence throughout Europe was very great. Today it is recognized that—to use Mill's description of Bentham—“He was not a great philosopher but a great reformer in philosophy.” For details on Mill's life and thought, consult any standard encyclopedia.

An epistemological study. Leipzig 1892

Eduard von Hartmann represents the so-called transcendental realism in epistemology. This assumes the ideality of the world of appearances given to us, but claims that the content of the same must be related transcendentally to a trans-subjective thing in itself. It is based on the view that our world of sense and thought, which exists in the forms of space, time and causality, has a thoroughly subjective character, but that this world comes about through the influence of an objective world on our subject. In this way, he believes he can overcome the illusionism that threatens to dissolve the whole of reality into a sum of subjective phenomena, behind which there is nothing objective. This epistemological view arose from the realist elements of Kant's "Critique of Pure Reason", which is a very unclear confusion of idealism and realism. Anyone who looks at this transcendental realism with a reasonably unbiased eye must come to the conviction that the "thing in itself" hypothetically assumed by it is nothing more than a depository for all kinds of unclear ideas. The Christian belief in revelation can place its entire heaven with all its angels, the spiritualist all his spirits in that dark region where the "thing in itself" proliferates. That the latter case can really occur is fully demonstrated by the book before us. Dr. Koeber embeds the whole spiritualistic belief of Aksakov and his comrades in the comfortable camp of the "thing in itself". Transcendental realism is opposed to immanent monism, which is rooted in the following propositions: 1. the world given to us can be explained by itself, without the aid of an external principle. 2. there is no necessity for the assumption of a "thing-in-itself" in our entire conceptual system. 3. the assumption that the world given to us is merely a sum of ideas is an unjustified one.

Because transcendental realism makes the assumption indicated in point 3, it must declare the world to be an illusion if it is not founded in a "thing-in-itself". In this assumption, however, lies the fundamental error of this view. To declare the entire content of the world to be an illusion makes no sense at all. The idea that something is an illusion is only justified if it turns out that this "something" is not truly the same as the thing it was thought to be according to certain characteristic properties. For this to be the case, however, the other thing with which the confusion has taken place must exist at all. The entire content of the world cannot, however, be confused with any other. Such an absolutization of the concept of illusion is a contradiction in terms.

Eduard von Hartmann's great philosophical creations are based on the fact that he does not take transcendental realism as the basis for natural and historical science, but rather immanent, concrete monism. In this way he founded that idealistic-evolutionist direction of science which alone leads to a rational world view. Because of this fact, I am not about to count the "Phenomenology of Moral Consciousness" and "The Religious Consciousness of Mankind" among the most important philosophical creations that exist. But "transcendental realism" seems to me to spring from an error and to lead to innumerable aberrations. Koeber's book is one of them.

During meditation or after it one could ask oneself: Where is the Christ? Where do I have to look for him?

A man's memory goes back to a time between birth and the change of teeth; that's when ego-consciousness began. The physical body's form is already finished then, it only grows some more. One could ask what things would be like if one's memory only went back to age ten. Suppose that someone who awakened to self-consciousness at 10 asked to be awakened at a certain time. Then on waking he would have the impression that he went to his door himself, knocked, and woke himself up. Or on awaking by himself he would see himself coming in as a light figure, walking towards himself, opening his eyes and awaking himself thereby. He would be able to know: In the realm from which his light form comes to him, there the Christ is also.

Many people will experience this in the near future, even though man's self-consciousness arises already during the first seven years. We're standing at an important turning point, and this must be pointed out. A man will then experience that the light form of his astral body is floating towards him, and he'll know that this light form is consuming his physical body, and that every time it leaves the latter it takes a piece of it along, as it were. And when the apparition takes possession of the physical body again in the morning, the man will see that he's living at the cost of a dying process. This knowledge can make men very sad and melancholic. They'll no longer value their physical body. And whereas men's courage will be tremendously increased by outer culture, air vehicles and other technological attainments, at the same time life will be considered to be of little value. Men will be overcome by deep sadness and melancholy, and the number of suicides will rise sharply. While outer courage is growing in sensory life, inner courage will necessarily decline and give way to a disguised cowardice. Men become ever more materialistic and don't want to know anything about the soul and spirit. Angels inspired Kant to set up his limits to knowledge, so that men could develop outer courage. But just as a compressed rubber ball springs back, so this will produce a reaction in souls, and then men's courage will want to turn to the attainment of knowledge of spiritual worlds again.

Men who don't find their way to the Christ see the figure of death walking beside them. But we know that Christ lives in the earth's aura and that we're always connected with him. If we know this and keep it alive in us, the picture of death takes on Christ's features and he walks beside us like a man, even if we don't see him clairvoyantly. Then we know where to look for the Christ. We can't escape the spirit of the times, it works everywhere. But the knowledge that Christ lives and that we can get to him will keep our souls from desolation, deep melancholy and disdain of life. We'll understand the word in our rosicrucian verse: In Christo morimur. If we let all of this become really alive in our souls in quiet moments it can become a big help to us.

Dear attendees! In yesterday's lecture, in which I took the liberty of characterizing the essence of spiritual science as it is meant in these considerations, I pointed out how this spiritual science did not arise out of the arbitrariness of an individual or a few people in the present, but how it has become a necessity precisely through the emergence of natural science, which has shown such great success; how it must stand alongside this natural science, because this natural has been compelled, in order to arrive at its brilliant results, to develop such methods, such forms of research, such a way of looking at things, which are actually only useful if one wants to survey and recognize the field of external nature, but which prove unsuitable if one wants to get to know the field of spiritual life in its true form, in which it can be accessible to man.

Yesterday I already hinted at how this scientific approach, in a sense, asserts between the lines of its work that only the human urge for knowledge directed towards the sensory world can lead to a true science, and how this scientific approach condemns from the outset what wants to come from other, if not less strict sources of knowledge to a science about the spirit.

Now it can be said, dear assembled guests, that not only does natural science in this respect make it more difficult for spiritual science to come into existence – one can still say today – but also that the particular natural scientific attitude that is generated in this field gives rise to habits of thinking and ways of feeling that are averse to genuine spiritual research. Nevertheless, spiritual research has an aim that cannot be repelled by the human soul. Therefore, just at a time when spiritual research is rejected by recognized science on the one hand, and on the other hand, habits of thought and ways of feeling are developed that make spiritual research unappealing – just at such a time, when one wants to turn to science because of general educational prejudices – at such a time, the need to know something about the spirit must awaken all the more.

And it is awakening even in the circles of natural scientists. But there one is accustomed to devote oneself to such thinking, to such research, which proceeds by the hand of that which external nature offers in the way of facts, of entities, of events, which one can extract from it through experiments. We are accustomed to looking at the things to which the soul's life of research is directed and guided by the external. And so, precisely where even among scientifically minded people the need has arisen to learn something about the eternal, the immortal in human nature, one also wants to explore this area in the same way as one explores the area of nature itself.

Then one can only rely on very specific phenomena, phenomena that, so to speak, do not require the soul itself to be prepared by means of all kinds of exercises, as I discussed yesterday, so that it can conduct research in a particular field. A certain reluctance arises to explore that which, so to speak, must first be summoned up because it is hidden from the ordinary consciousness. One would also like to explore the soul by approaching something that presents itself externally in the same way as natural phenomena present themselves.

Therefore, a certain area that extends into the ordinary consciousness of the human being, so to speak, that mysteriously extends into this consciousness, a certain area of existence has been repeatedly considered in recent times: the broad area of what is summarized today with the rather broad-hearted, one could also say uninformative, expression of the “unconscious”. And since spiritual science is confused with many a subject that is brought into the unconscious, into the category of the unconscious, spiritual science itself is obliged to clarify its own approach to this area of the so-called unconscious. And so I have taken the liberty of announcing a second lecture, a consideration that, from a spiritual-scientific point of view, focuses on the revelations of the so-called unconscious.

Of course, since this is a broad area, I can only consider certain groups of what is considered to be in the realm of the unconscious. And so today we shall consider the phenomenon of a broad and wonderful area that is well known to every human being in its manifestation: the phenomenon of dream life. Then, honored attendees, we shall consider those other phenomena in which so many today seek to gain insight into something that underlies the human being as soul and spirit. We shall consider the phenomena which are summarized under the term somnambulism, which includes everything that is still observed by many people today with such hopes of insight: the phenomena of mediumship and the like.

But then there is a human field of activity in the realm of the unconscious that everyone knows, that is, so to speak, everyone's life companion, but which one is sometimes afraid to look at because one believes that by looking at it one takes away the magic of this realm: I am referring to the field of artistic creation, of which everyone can be convinced by an external observation that it belongs to a certain extent to the field of non-comprehensible, non-fully conscious human activity, but flows from a certain unconscious or subconscious source of human nature.

And finally, these areas of the unconscious include the spiritual activity itself, of which I spoke yesterday as the method of spiritual research. It includes the spiritual activity through which the spiritual researcher wants to prepare his soul to look into the spiritual realm in such a way that one can truly recognize the spiritual world that surrounds man and to which man belongs. Today I would like to subject these groups of unconscious phenomena to a kind of observation before you, although I must limit myself to a strictly spiritual scientific observation.

The realm of dreams is familiar to everyone, and yet, for anyone who begins to delve more intimately into the realm of dream life, it becomes more and more wondrous and wondrous, so to speak. Man's dream life is a field that one only passes by without astonishment when one looks at it superficially. The more intimately one looks at it, the more one senses that there is something in this dream life that announces itself as the higher nature in the human soul, even if it announces itself chaotically in the dream life. Of course, we bring our personal, our selfish interests into every area, including the area of dream life, and so it happened that the most superstitious, the most unscientific interpretations were attached to the dream life, which of course would have to be ruled out if it were a matter of a truly cognitive interpretation of this dream life.

He who believes that he is viewing such experiences from the dream life from a scientific perspective, which relate to all kinds of superstitious hopes, will not be able to come into his own in the face of a scientific consideration of the dream life. But on the other hand, one need only look at this dream life and one will find that the surging dreams of human sleep or half-sleep interpose themselves in a remarkable way into the existence of man, into the entire human life. On the one hand, we see how dreams can be influenced by sensory stimuli that are only partially effective. Everyone is familiar with something like, say, falling asleep near a light. If they were awake, they would see the light near the light. They fall asleep. The light makes an impression on his eye that is not processed in the usual way, and he may dream, as a result of the incomplete impression of the light, of a conflagration, to which he then attaches all kinds of dream images! He can attach a whole inner drama to these sensory stimuli. And one could tell many stories if one wanted to tell all the kinds of dreams that are connected to sensory stimuli.

On the other hand, we have those dreams that arise more from the human bodily mood, from the overall feeling of the person, whether the person is in any overall mood, for example, an overall mood that seems to him like a lukewarm bath in which he is comfortable while lying in bed and dreaming pleasantly. Or if he dreams of a boiling stove and wakes up with a pounding heart, so that the heart has symbolized itself in the stove in the dream. We are dealing here with what is lived out in the dream from inner stimuli of the organism.

And we have, in turn, the other broad area of dreams that connects to memory, to what lies in our memory, from which a particular area is then brought up through the images of the last few days, and is presented to us in a dream with inner drama. But through such, I might say, pedantic classification, that which everyone knows enough about the wonderful world of dream life is evoked. Some peculiarities of dream life, which are also more generally known, are already suitable for leading into that which we then want to observe about the dream of its essence.

Everyone knows that in dreams we are quite different people than in our waking lives. For example, dream images can make us commit crimes that we would never commit in ordinary life. The images show you in a moral condition that would be severely condemned, that you could never get into in ordinary life. The succession of images shows that they do not contain what is called the application of ordinary logic. Logical connection of the dream images is something that rarely occurs in these dream images, and when it does, the logic of the dream is in turn only a dreamt one; we remember something in a dream-like way that we have already thought through logically, and the logical only appears to us as coming from memory. But it is shown to those who can observe dream life that they are not able to apply logic to the dream during the dream itself.

A peculiarity – I just want to emphasize the things that can lead us to understand the essence of dreams from a spiritual scientific point of view – a particular peculiarity of dream life is actually also philosophically in science or otherwise deal with it, far too little appreciated, and we will see that we can appreciate it even more when we consider other phenomena of life that belong to the unconscious realm of life. It is the fact that in our dreams we do not actually emerge from the overall state in which we are during sleep, in relation to the outside world and our own body. I have, however, indicated that dreams occur that arise from external sensory stimuli, and it seems as if we relate to the outside world in our dreams, while we are unaware of it in our dreams.

This is only apparent. We do not perceive the sensory impressions as we do when we are awake, but in a symbolically transformed way. Something must happen to them first, they must be transformed into an image. We cannot absorb the sensory impression itself. We have no relationship to the external world when we dream; we have no relationship to the external world with our senses, we are cut off from the external world in our dreams, even though our dreams ebb and flow, just as we are cut off from the external world in dreamless sleep.

And again, the other area of life in the sense world, the area of action, the area of bodily movement, of activity through bodily movement, is excluded from normal dreams. It is already an abnormal dream when someone goes from dreaming to sleepwalking or the like. In a normal dream, we have the image of doing this or that. But this acting out of an action or an activity is not something we carry out through our locomotor system; we do not establish any kind of relationship to the outside world. All of this remains locked within us, just as we ourselves are locked within us when we are asleep in the dream life. Thus, when we dream, we have a real relationship not to the sense organs, not to our locomotor system, but to our own body. The normal dream is something that draws into the life of sleep, that flows through the life of sleep, but it does not bring the dreamer into any other relationship or state with respect to the outer world than he is in dreamless sleep.

This area, which can be defined as I have now defined it, this area of dream life, must be clearly distinguished – and we will then go into the important differences in the essential consideration of dream life – from everything else that occurs in human life in such a way that, so to speak, the unconscious, not belonging to human consciousness, enters this human life. There are good researchers who believe that the dream image as such, the image of a normal dream, should be considered the same as a hallucination. A hallucination is also something that, like visions and the like, rises from the subconscious into human consciousness; a hallucination is also an image.

But, dear readers, anyone who compares a hallucination to a dream image is very much mistaken. Above all, it must be emphasized that a person who dreams does not fall into a state through dreaming over which he is powerless with his waking consciousness. The hallucination must be characterized by the fact that the person is powerless against it with his waking consciousness. The hallucination intrudes into the ordinary consciousness, and one must become aware that the reason why this is so is a change, albeit a hidden change, in the human body itself; it is some part of the human body that gives rise to the hallucinations.

The soul and spirit of man are initially powerless in the face of changes in the human body. Only from the body can that which man faces powerlessly arise. The dream enters into human life and leaves the bodily constitution, the bodily structure, unchallenged, so that when man returns to waking life, he finds himself in the normal bodily constitution. And then he will be able to have, I would say, the right state of consciousness towards the dream, if he does not place it in ordinary life, which the hallucinator does with this hallucination.

Already the observation of the hallucination clearly shows that one is dealing with something very different from the dream image and that it is connected to the human body. But then one can also clearly see from the hallucination, the obsessions and the like, that they arise without any stimulus from the external world, that they arise, if indeed they arise from the nature of the body, then at least from the inner nature of the human being; and this is what the hallucinations have as their peculiar feature, this is what the visions have as their peculiar feature, the obsessions as their peculiar feature that this physical nature of man works without the organs that bring man into connection with the external world of reality, without the organs that are involved in the way they usually are in waking life, in the production of hallucinations, visions, and obsessions. This is no longer the case when that state of human nature occurs which is designated by the word “somnambulism”.

It can be said that through somnambulism, through mediumship, human nature is incited to transfer the irregular bodily constitution, which is experienced by the healthy person through inner perception, to the relationship of the human being to the external world. The senses, and also, in a sense, the human locomotor system, are infected by the inner irregularity of the bodily organization when a person acts as a somnambulist or medium. This can lead to the somnambulist not perceiving what is experienced in the world in a normal, regular way, but rather, because he does not activate his senses as they are formed by the world, but rather infects them from the nature of the body, so that he perceives the environment in such a way that he does not perceive it through ordinary sensory activity.

This is where we enter a realm that has a sensational effect on people and that is a dangerous and seductive realm. It seduces people into seeking out all kinds of mysteries in order to find answers to anything they want to know that does not present itself in normal life. We can see that even people who think well in terms of natural science, out of their natural scientific view of the world, repeatedly and again and again come to an inner dissatisfaction, that they come to a higher yearning for knowledge in relation to the spiritual and that they then somehow try to satisfy this yearning for knowledge precisely in the field that is now under discussion. It can be seen that great naturalists can be completely taken in by what appears to them as 'wonderful revelations' in this field. Many examples could be cited from history and from present-day life where natural scientists, who are extraordinarily important in their own field when they want to explore the spiritual, repeatedly fall back on the phenomena related to somnambulism in order to find out something about a spiritual realm.

Among the many cases, I will mention only one of the most recent ones, which happened to the English philosopher and scientist Sir Oliver Lodge. Sir Oliver Lodge lost his son at the French front. Even before his son was sent to the front, a friend of his in America had written to him that something would happen to his son, but that when it did, the soul of a person who had already passed through the gates of death, who had died a long time ago, would stand by his son's side and help him. At first, of course, this friendly hint was kept rather vague. One could think that the son would be in danger in the war and that the soul of the long-dead personality would intervene from the spiritual world to protect the son. One could also think quite differently. In short, the son fell on the battlefield.

Now the person who had written to Sir Oliver Lodge from America thought that he could, of course, turn the matter around so that, since the son had died, his soul would now be in the spiritual world and that this soul in the spiritual world would be fetched by the friend's soul that had been there for a long time. At the same time - I can say this after a close study of this case - at the same time, so to speak, mediumistic persons were played into the environment of Sir Oliver Lodge. And Sir Oliver Lodge, who wrote a detailed book about the whole situation, which really comes across as a strictly scientifically written book, like a book written by someone who is not only familiar with the scientific way of thinking, but is also familiar with all the conscientiousness that must be peculiar to a scientific researcher, Sir Oliver Lodge was placed in an environment of mediums. He carefully recorded what these mediums, as a manifestation of the soul of the Son, had revealed from the beyond.

The whole course of the apparitions was such that Sir Oliver Lodge, in observing what was going on, I would say, proceeded like a chemist, with the same conscientiousness. Now much is being enumerated. The following was decisive for Sir Oliver Lodge and for others – because this case has been discussed a lot, caused a lot of sensation, and convinced journalists who, from the outset, were rather unapproachable to such things due to their attitudes – the following was decisive: Through one of the mediums, a message came from the son, supposedly from the spiritual world. This message stated that the son had himself photographed on the battlefield where he fell, with a group of other comrades. It was also said that several pictures had been taken, as is usually the case. It was described which hand position was shown by the son when taking the pictures, in one picture and in another picture, where it was slightly different. The photographs were one thing that the whole of society in London knew nothing about, the photographs were simply not there.

And lo and behold: after two or three weeks – the post takes a long time these days – the photographs themselves arrived, two or three weeks after the experiments had been carried out, and it turned out that the descriptions made by the medium were correct. This was astounding for Sir Oliver Lodge. This was what is called in natural science research an “experimentum crucis”. The medium and all the people who were present could not receive anything by thought transference either. They knew nothing about these photographs, which only arrived later. Nevertheless, the photographs were correctly described by the medium's manifestations. In this particular case, which was certainly close to him due to the death of his son, Sir Oliver Lodge was tempted to look at such a thing with a certain prejudice; on the other hand, however, to have the cross-proof, so to speak, provided by a meaningful experiment, that without any knowledge in the earthly realm, something from the spiritual world came out through a somnambulant person.

I cite this case, which I judge in the same way as the other case I want to discuss today, for the reason that it shows how the longing to recognize the spiritual arises particularly in serious, great and important natural scientists, but how even in a man like Sir Oliver Lodge, who would be far from accepting the path that is described here as the true path of spiritual research, how such a person feels the need to seek something in certain abnormal phenomena of human life, such as somnambulism and mediumship, that provides information about the world of the spiritual.

In the case of somnambulists and mediums, certain phenomena that occur in connection with them are reminiscent of dreams. But, dear attendees, above all, in the case of the somnambulistic personality, the contagion that I have spoken of, which goes from the inside of the body to the senses, can also pass over to the locomotor system. Then, in particular, rhythmic movements easily occur, movements that are difficult to control and through which all kinds of seemingly spiritual connections are carried out by the medium, such as table turning and so on. I can only hint at what I want to discuss here today.

The third area, which you are well acquainted with, is that which flows from artistic creation, and we value it as a manifestation from the other world precisely because we know that when a person devotes himself to abstract concepts and abstract ideas, he almost disturbs his artistic creation and also his artistic enjoyment. Something indeterminate flows in, both into the creative process and into the enjoyment of artistry. And for many who would otherwise not be able to cope with the spiritual, the way in which the artist's work appears will at least be something that teaches them the conviction that a spiritual element extends into human life. For it will take a very stubborn, materialistic mind to say, like Ingersoll, the famous materialist, that Hamlet, Shakespeare's Hamlet, is actually the product of the metabolism in Shakespeare. This saying is well known. But it really does not take much to be able to say: That which projects into human life through artistry is such that it cannot be directly explained from the body, nor can it be derived from ordinary consciousness because it is disturbed by it.

And a fourth area, dear attendees, that is particularly important for this consideration, is the area that I characterized yesterday as the path leading to the path that, in the sense of the spiritual science meant here, leads into the spiritual world. I already hinted yesterday, and you can read about it in the books I also mentioned yesterday, that only by directing his soul life consciously, actively, and willingly in a certain direction can a person elevate this soul life to such a sphere that this soul life itself can encounter the spiritual phenomena of the world as a spiritual being.

Of course, I cannot repeat what I hinted at yesterday, but what I want to say is that it is particularly important, on the one hand, to follow the course of external phenomena through the world of ideas to which one is otherwise accustomed, and to allow oneself to be guided by it, and, on the other hand, to introduce the element of will into it, so that the power of thought, the inner life of thought, is permeated by will. And I have characterized that through this the human being enters into a state of soul through which he stands out from the ordinary life of the body, that through this he encounters a spiritual world as he otherwise encounters the physical world. I have shown that stepping out of the body is promoted by learning to understand and develop self-observation, by learning to develop not just anything as a spiritual activity, but by becoming its spectator at the same time.

Through all these exercises, which you can read about in my books “How to Know Higher Worlds”, “Occult Science” and “The Riddle of the Human Being”, the human soul is able to develop certain dormant powers to such an extent that the soul itself becomes something completely different, and a spiritual world comes face to face with it, just as a sensual world comes face to face with the senses. However paradoxical it may appear to many people, such powers lie in every human soul, and they can be brought forth from every human soul, even if this requires patient and energetic work.

I would like to speak about this area, which I call the area of the seeing consciousness, because if one calls it clairvoyance, as it would have to be called in reality if the term were not misused; but it is very easily confused with what arises from somnambulism and the like, and it is of great importance, in order to avoid misunderstandings, that true spiritual science is not confused with it I would therefore call it, instead of “clairvoyance”, the “visionary consciousness”, as I have called it in my book “Vom Menschenrätsel” (The Riddle of Man), in which I have also characterized the field of this visionary consciousness, where the soul has found the spirit in itself, so that man as spirit-soul faces the spiritual-soul of the external world and is able to observe this spiritual-soul.

As I said, with regard to the development of the seeing consciousness, the development of that which I would like to call, in a certain figurative sense, with Goethe's words, the development of “spiritual eyes” and “spiritual ears.” The specific description of how one achieves this, I must leave to my books for the special description of how one arrives at this, but before I characterize dream, somnambulism, artistic creation and artistic enjoyment as unconscious human life phenomena, I would like to characterize this field of true clairvoyance, this field of the seeing consciousness itself a little. Because, dear ladies and gentlemen, those phenomena that we have now summarized in certain groups can only be truly observed from the point of view of spiritual research. Therefore, I must first explain what the peculiarity of the mind of the spiritual researcher is.

I said yesterday: What the spiritual researcher can investigate presents itself differently in many respects than one would expect when the spiritual researcher travels the path into the spiritual world. It is precisely through this that objectivity and reality are demonstrated: that one does not allow a fanciful preconception to apply within oneself, but that one is confronted with a spiritual reality. But the fact that things turn out differently is not only evident in what one researches in the spiritual worlds, but even in what one develops as previously hidden powers of knowledge, as the powers of the seeing consciousness in one's soul. The way in which the human soul relates to the spiritual is quite different from what one might initially expect. When one describes the way in which the human soul relates to the spiritual world in a cognitive way, it resembles what the human soul knows from the sense world.

At first this sounds paradoxical! Above all, one thing must be said: a defining moment in all life in the physical world is that one encounters certain events in life, that one lives through them, takes them up into the soul and that one later remembers the events in one's waking consciousness. The events can be recalled from the life of imagination, from memory. The strange thing is that when the soul, which has developed the seeing consciousness within itself, is able to see a spiritual fact, a spiritual being, to observe it, it cannot easily remember this soul experience, although it is usually only perceived as an inner soul experience. It passes. This does not produce memories in the usual sense.

This is how truly spiritual observations, which also only seem to exist in the life of the imagination, differ from the phenomena of ordinary imaginative life: the latter can be remembered in the normal way, but not the spiritual experience. They pass by. Now you will say: Yes, if they pass by and cannot be remembered in later life, then one cannot actually know anything about them! If you are unable to take what you have experienced spiritually and incorporate it into your imagination, as you would an external sensory phenomenon or a being of the senses, if you are unable to transform what you have observed into an idea yourself, into an ordinary idea as you have it on the physical plane, then you cannot remember.

Therefore, to research in the spiritual world, it is necessary to be able not only to experience what you experience spiritually, but also to translate it into ordinary ideas; then you can remember the idea. You can remember not the spiritual experience, but the idea into which you have translated the spiritual experience. In this respect, the spiritual experience has exactly the same peculiarity as a sensual experience. One can remember the idea that one has formed from the sensual experience. But if I have passed a tree and no longer have it in front of me, I cannot see it in reality; I have to go back to see it. So I have to face the spiritual experience again if I want to have it a second time. But it is precisely this that guarantees its reality. When one becomes a spiritual researcher, one gets used to facing spiritual reality as one faces sensual reality.

One peculiarity is that the spiritual experience as such does not evoke any memory. It is a fleeting moment. And another thing that occurs as a peculiarity in the spiritual experience is that the way in which the spiritual experience works is different from the way in which the events and activities of ordinary life work on people. When we perform some task over and over again, we become accustomed to it; we perform it better and better. Otherwise we would not be able to learn anything, to acquire any skill, if it were not the case that we would do what we do with difficulty at first, then habitually.

This is not the case with spiritual experiences. They occur when they are repeatedly sought. Then they occur less and less strongly, and it takes more and more effort to summon them to mind. One does not acquire a habit by merely repeating an experience, but by repeating it one becomes less and less able to acquire it. To their surprise, some who seek the way to the spiritual world have to be convinced of this.

By doing such exercises, some people relatively soon experience certain phenomena that are purely spiritual. They occur after the person has only done such exercises for a short time. But after they have occurred hardly two or three times, or perhaps only once, the person loses the ability to see them again. He is then unhappy. The true spiritual researcher must learn, must learn again through careful exercises, to create new conditions so that he can have the experience again in a renewed form. It cannot be achieved by mere evocation in the old way. This is another way in which the seeing consciousness differs from the ordinary experience of the ordinary consciousness: nothing is produced habitually, but on the contrary, the more often we have an experience, the less habitual it becomes for us to have it.

And a third thing that occurs in this observing consciousness is that the person must acquire the ability to quickly grasp an event – I am, of course, talking about spiritual events. Because what prevents us from looking into the spiritual world is that, when we observe, we are usually so slow in starting the observation that the event has already passed by the time we want to observe it. I would say that the exposure time, the time during which the event occurs before us, is so short that you have to be quick to observe what you can call presence of mind. Therefore, one prepares oneself well if one strives to develop presence of mind in one's physical life, if one tries to overcome what is so characteristic of human nature: that one muddles around until one can make up one's mind.

When you develop the ability to make a decision quickly that is appropriate to the situation when you are faced with something, in short, when you gradually develop presence of mind as an inner quality, then this leads to the fact that you can really develop that presence of mind in your soul as well, which is necessary to really face the spiritual world in its manifestations. The spiritual researcher absolutely must be able to make an observation with the same lightning speed as certain subordinate phenomena occur in the outer life. If a fly tries to alight on your eye, you quickly close your eye, as they say, by reflex action, without thinking about it. If someone had to think as long to close the eye as he usually thinks, he would have already fallen prey to the fly before the eye is closed. The spiritual researcher must develop something that comes as close as possible to this involuntary, unconscious activity. One returns to certain primitive activities of life, only in a spiritual way.

Another peculiarity of this spiritual perception is that in such representations, as one is accustomed to applying in the physical world, the spiritual world cannot appear before the searching soul, but it appears in pictorial representations. And when one describes the spiritual world, what one expresses it with is a translation into ordinary language. When you read my book 'Occult Science', you must not believe that the way in which things are expressed is an immediate reproduction of the vision itself, but it is translated into ordinary language and must be translated into ordinary language. For that which presents itself directly to the spiritual researcher is the same as what he puts into words, into concepts, into ideas, but it appears in a pictorial way. Hence one can also say: Consciousness is not the ordinary logical, rational consciousness, but an imaginative one that arises first. I could still bring out many more characteristics of the seeing consciousness. Above all, however, I must discuss the other phenomena, which I have listed in groups, precisely from the standpoint of this seeing consciousness.

One can discover what a dream is, what somnambulism is, what the other phenomena are, one can discover them from the moment one regards them from the point of view of the seeing consciousness. For just when one regards a dream in intimate beholding, one finds that it becomes ever more wondrous. Above all, it becomes more and more wonderful for the simple reason that one is not in a position to compare what one encounters in a dream with any other experiences. The dream enters into the life of consciousness as something that completely falls outside of this life of consciousness and everything that one can understand in relation to the life of consciousness. Just think of what occurs in the waking consciousness when a dream occurs! It would break through the whole consciousness. If you had to remember the dream, you would have to feel insane. You cannot compare the dream with anything that the waking consciousness understands.

The seeing consciousness is primarily familiar with the pictorial experience of the human being. And so the seeing consciousness can compare the dream with what occurs in the soul when one encounters the spiritual world through the seeing consciousness as a spirit. One can compare the pictorial nature of the dream world with the world that can be grasped in imaginative consciousness. Then one will find that the dream world is indeed fantastic at first, that the imaginative consciousness leads one into spiritual reality, that it differs like fiction from the truth, from the imaginative world, but that on the other hand one has a possibility for comparison. Because one has this, one can, by observing the 'dream, arrive at what this dream actually is.

Dear attendees, you cannot say anything about dreams through research if you cannot observe the dream with a seeing consciousness. But if you can observe the dream with a seeing consciousness, then you can describe its nature and essence through the seeing consciousness. Then one knows, above all, to say about the dream who is really the dreamer, who is actually dreaming. One does not know this in the ordinary waking consciousness, who is actually dreaming, then one has images before oneself. But to live in these images as one otherwise lives as a human being in the experiences of the day – one does not know this in the ordinary waking consciousness. One comes to know it when one can compare the images of the dream world with what one experiences in the seeing consciousness. Then one experiences that what actually dreams in us is really the spirit-filled human soul; that the body as such has nothing to do with the dreaming process in subjective terms, in terms of activity; that it is not the human body that dreams, but the dreamer himself is really the spiritual soul of the human being.

If one learns to recognize through the observing consciousness what the spiritual-soul is, then one can also know through comparison that one acts in dreams as the same as one acts in the observing consciousness. Here again is an important difference. With the seeing consciousness, one sees into a spiritual world that has nothing to do with the ordinary physical world. With the seeing consciousness, one sees with the eternal that is in oneself, into the eternal of the world.

The eternal beholds the eternal. This is different in dreams. In dreams, it is the same spiritual-soul person who dreams. But what he beholds, what he can behold, is not the spiritual world that lies beyond physical experiences, but rather it is pieces, parts, and links of his own personal life. The eternal in him beholds the temporal in him. He looks at what he can inwardly experience between birth and death in any way. But he does not look at it in the way he is otherwise accustomed to looking at the external world with his body, but rather, so to speak, he looks at his transitory human nature from the spiritual-soul point of view.

That is the essence of the dream, that is also what clarifies the dream. In dreams, one sees oneself as an eternal human being. And it is really the case that in the world of dreams, the eternal human being, who goes through births and deaths, places himself in the ordinary human reality, but that the human being is not aware of the eternal world itself, but rather looks back at his temporal world; looks at temporal objects from the eternal point of view. The world of dreams, when observed correctly, gives the certainty that from the moment of falling asleep until waking up, the human being is outside of his physical body with his actual being, is outside of his corporeality altogether. Only that which takes place in the body, which cannot be seen at all with the ordinary senses in the ordinary bodily state, that which lies deeper, that which is hidden in the memory, that which expresses itself not in the sense stimuli but in the sensual-supersensory individuality, which has become more involved in the bodily, that is what the human being observes in dreams.

Now the spiritual researcher, simply by being able to see into the spiritual world, knows from his stay in the spiritual world, from his knowledge of the spiritual world, that it is completely wrong to say, for example: Man is a spiritual-soul being, and earthly life is life in a vale of tears, a life of imprisonment perhaps, to which one is condemned, while one is in truth called to a higher spiritual life. Of course one is, but in the cosmic process everything is in its right place, and the spiritual researcher in particular learns to recognize, by getting to know the supersensible life, that the sensory life has its good meaning. If man were to live only in the spiritual and soul world, if he were a human being (it is not the case with other beings as it is with humans), if man were not led into the sensory world through birth or conception, then man would not be able to incorporate into his being that which he, as a human being, can only incorporate into this being in the sensual world.

Above all, there are two things: first, as strange as it sounds, as strangely as it contradicts all possible philosophical worldviews – these philosophical worldviews know nothing about this spiritual world – logical thinking, the ability to link one's thoughts in a logical, conscious way, is only acquired by man by going to his senses in the teaching. In this sense, logical thinking is the least spiritual. It is what we abstract from the sense world. The senses are the teachers of our logical thinking, and if we were not in a sense world, we would not be able to learn logical thinking. That is one thing.

The other is that by being active in the sensory world, we carry out actions and are present with our human nature in these actions, that by living in the sensory world we acquire that which belongs to the realm of morality, the realm of moral judgment of the world. Man must be placed in the sensory world if he is to implant in his nature what is the moral conception of life. Other things that belong to the human being, the human being incorporates or, if I may coin the expression, the human being ensouls himself in the spiritual-soul world when he passes through the gate of death, in the spiritual world. But this life in the physical world has its good significance. The human being, when he stands as a spiritual researcher in the physical world, gets to know the great weight of the physical world; he gets to know that the wise order of the world has, so to speak, placed him in this world so that he can acquire the logical and the moral to the other qualities of his being.

By recognizing the essence of the dream, by knowing that it is the same being that dreams and that he is, by looking into the spiritual world, the spiritual researcher also learns to recognize those qualities of the dream that I have enumerated; that we do not think logically in dreams and that we carry out all sorts of things in dreams that we ourselves morally condemn. Because we are lifted out of the physical-sensual world in which we acquire logic and morality, we cannot develop logic in our dreams, nor morality.

In this way, things reveal themselves that would remain enigmas if we only looked at the phenomena, if we were unable to observe these phenomena from the point of view of spiritual research, if we gained the right insight into them. In purely scientific terms, by numbering all the different parts of the brain under the cerebral cortex, we do not get to know the essence of these things. Now we can also understand why: because only the soul is grasped in dreams, because the human being is removed from the body, he has no relationship to the external sense world in dreams, as to the actions of the body. If the body were involved, it would have to show.

But we must not put forward hypotheses. We must, so to speak, perceive as a mystery why man has no sensory perceptions in relation to the external world and why he has no movements in his dreams. We then experience through the observing consciousness that the person as a dreamer is really in the spiritual world, that is, the sensory world, and has also been transported beyond his own physical body, that he is in the spiritual, in the supersensible. Therefore, he cannot perceive a sensory world, nor can he perform actions in it. Thus, the human being is completely immersed in the soul when he dreams, and does not touch his physical self as such with the events of the dream. Only by the fact that he, I might say, comes up against this physical and also against that which is higher than the physical in the physical body, only by that does resistance present itself to him, only by that is his activity as a spiritual-soul being called upon, and only by that does he observe from the point of view of the eternal that which is temporal in him.

The case of somnambulists is quite different. Of course, spiritual research must also ask: What is it that is active in the somnambulist? What is happening to this person? So the spiritual researcher must also ask: Who is it that actually carries out the actions of the somnambulist? Here one must say: When one learns to recognize what it is in us, when one researches the spiritual world, one can compare it to that which acts on the somnambulist personality that the ordinary consciousness has tuned down. Here one must say: in a sense, it is also the spiritual that is active in the somnambulistic being. But this spiritual does not directly intervene in the soul, as it does in dreams, but rather, as in the case of hallucinations and visions, it directly intervenes in the body.

Now the real, full human life consists in the fact that the spirit in man, even one's own spirit, does not intervene in the physical without this intervention being mediated by the soul, that which I called the true soul yesterday. This is the peculiar thing about somnambulism, that a spiritual being directly intervenes in the physical. The soul is eliminated. The somnambulist thus becomes a physical-spiritual automaton, and as such he appears. In this way he has eliminated from himself that which, although bound to the body between birth and death, has, however, a connection with the forces that draw it out of the body - the connection with the true spiritual world from which man comes, in which he is rooted with one's own eternal being, this connection is interrupted when one becomes somnambulistic, and one has only a spiritual connection with that which exists as a spiritual being in the ordinary physical world; after all, this too is directed by the spirit. Man is indeed a spiritual-soul being, but still an automaton. The spiritual that can emerge in him is a limited spiritual, and is above all not the spiritual in which man is rooted in his own being. His own eternal being, although it is active in the somnambulistic body, remains completely in the twilight darkness of the unconscious, even when the somnambulist is active. The consequence of this, honored attendees, is that the somnambulist cannot enter into a spiritual relationship with the spiritual world.

The true mediator for the human body in the spiritual world is the soul. But because the true soul is excluded and only the soul-like effect of the body occurs in the spiritual-soul automaton, the person only comes into contact with a limited spiritual world as a personality. The consequence of this is that what the somnambulist experiences through this or that revelation, through automatic speaking, automatic writing or the like, are only fragments, scraps of what is spiritually buzzing around in the physical world itself, what is spiritually active there, but that the somnambulist cannot bring down any revelations from the real spiritual world. Everything that comes from somnambulists in the broadest sense, and also from mediums, can never come from the real spiritual world in which the person finds himself when he has passed through the gate of death, or from which he emerges when he enters physical life through the gate of birth or conception.

As long as one does not see through this, one can be the greatest naturalist, one can be a conscientious scientist, one can have the greatest yearning for the eternal, for the supersensible, one can be deceived by the facts themselves. It is characteristic, after all, how the great naturalist Sir Oliver Lodge was deceived by the facts themselves. He was dealing with a medium. He wanted to obtain communications from the spiritual world through the medium. What did he obtain? He obtained a cross experiment. It caused a great stir throughout England, especially in this war time, when so many long for knowledge of the spiritual world as a result of external events, in this war time when so many of our loved ones are passing away. What could be more tempting than a message coming through a medium that gives something completely unknown to society, where it could not be a matter of thought transfer, which one could otherwise assume?

So what was it that was going on? Well, anyone who is familiar with the relevant world of somnambulism knows what it was. And it is nothing short of miraculous that a conscientious natural scientist is open to these things and does not try to learn for himself what can be known in this field. Anyone who knows these things is well aware that through the infection I have described, when the spirit has such an immediate effect on the physical that it turns a person into a spiritual and soul automaton, that a person works under the influence of the world around him as a clock works according to spiritual laws that the clockmaker has implanted in it, everyone knows that the senses are infected, that one can perceive things that the outer senses do not perceive; that one can perceive things in such a way that these perceptions are not bound by the ordinary laws of spatial and temporal perceptions, everyone knows that, without looking into a spiritual world, one can nevertheless see to a certain extent when the senses are infected by the spiritual-soul automaton – that one can see that which is not present but future.

One does not see into a spiritual world, but one simply sees through more refined senses than those through which the ordinary sensory life proceeds, according to different laws. And in the case of Sir Oliver Lodge, the medium acted in exactly the same way as a somnambulist in another case, who saw how he would ride once in three weeks and fall off the horse; who thus saw a future event against the ordinary laws of temporal succession, but nothing but that.

Thus, in the case of Sir Oliver Lodge, the medium saw nothing other than what actually took place in the future, namely, that photography came before the eyes of society and the family, which arrived later and was not yet there at that time. And in such a case, no proof has been provided that a manifestation has come from the world through the medium, in which the soul of the son was. Of course, it is extremely useful, especially in the scientific sense, to become acquainted with such extraordinary phenomena, and it would be good to thoroughly investigate these phenomena in order to educate oneself about the truly spiritual.

But it must also be clear that the soul does not reveal itself by leaving it inactive and turning man into a physical and mental automaton, but it speaks to the human soul that has awakened the slumbering forces within itself, through which one can come into contact with the spiritual world. There is no other way from the so-called living to the so-called dead, who have passed through the gate of death and live in the time that one spends between death and a new birth, than through the correspondence between the soul itself, in the silent interior, but which becomes inwardly speaking, and the soul that no longer carries a body. That which comes from the concrete spiritual world can already speak into the soul itself, but not in a roundabout way through some physical-mental automaton. This, most honored presence, must be emphasized in relation to somnambulism and mediumship, because it is precisely through the recognition of this pure, true spiritual that it is put in the right light.

And on the other hand, somnambulism also leads to action. It leads them out of their spiritual and mental automatons. Whatever should be done logically, whatever should be done through the body in which the soul dwells, the body of the somnambulist does in an automatic way. When the somnambulist acts, what happens then? He performs actions, be it speaking or something else. He performs actions that, according to the laws of the world, should only be performed by the human body in the sense world. For we have seen that spiritual research shows us that man does not have his sensual existence for nothing. He acquires a moral conscience and moral judgment. That which should be conveyed through the sensual body is realized with the exclusion of the soul.

Thus the somnambule is in the same situation as someone who is given material to distribute among crowds of people; he does not distribute this material, but keeps it for himself to adorn his own existence. This is how the somnambulist acts. What should only take place in a social environment with other people, from human body to human body, what a person should only develop in a human community, the activity here in the physical world, the somnambulist claims as an activity that only originates from his own being. He effectively withdraws what belongs to the commonality of people from this commonality.

As strange as it may sound, this is the reason why – because the somnambulist, in a field where morals apply, automatically acts out of the spirit and does not enter the field where man should acquire morals should acquire morality. The somnambulist, when he habitually indulges in somnambulism, can very easily go astray morally, and it is basically quite rare for mediums not to go astray into fraud. It is very interesting to occupy oneself with the phenomena that arise from a person becoming a mental and physical automaton, but at the same time it must be clear that the spiritual can only be sought and found in a spiritual way, that it cannot be found in this external way that resembles nature.

The third area, which accompanies people like a faithful companion, is artistic creation, artistic feeling and artistic enjoyment. This artistic creation, artistic enjoyment – we know that, in a sense, it flows out of the unconscious. We also know that this artistic feeling, artistic enjoyment and artistic creation comes entirely from the soul. It is also known that insightful people have always considered the process of the great philosopher Plato, the poetic power of man, poetic enjoyment, and the whole artistic process to be akin to dreaming – and rightly so. Why? Because the dream is pictorial, because the dream comes from the spiritual and soul life.

Now the dreamer, as I said, is judged with his entire being, although he is in the eternal, in the temporal, in his personal temporal experiences and possibilities of experience. I would like to say that the artist, the true artist, turns with his soul to the other side. The dreamer stands in the spiritual-soul realm, but is turned towards the side of the body; the artist stands in the body, but looks into the spiritual world. But what he now experiences in the spiritual world does not immediately come to his consciousness. He cannot look into the spiritual world in such a way that he sees the process that takes place in his spiritual environment while his soul and spirit stand face to face with this spiritual environment. The process must already be over before the result of the spiritual experience enters into the ordinary waking consciousness of the day.

Therefore, what the true artist presents, even artistic enjoyment, which is based on similar foundations, rightly gives the impression of the unconscious. It is experienced unconsciously; from the unconscious, after it has happened, it enters into what man can know, what man can experience. Therefore, to those who have a feeling for such things, the manifestations of true art do indeed appear as manifestations from the spiritual world. Therefore, it is right that the artist's creative work appears to be affected when the artist mixes ordinary imagination, ordinary conscious logic, ordinary observation of the physical world into that which is actually supposed to be a message from a spiritual world. The fact that true artistry has such an origin is connected with everything that can be said as a valid judgment about real, genuine art.

The fact that a materialistic time has gone astray through so-called artistic naturalism and wants to bring everything else today as messages from the spiritual world will only be put right in judgment when it is recognized through spiritual science what true artistry is. True artistry is the penetration of a spiritual experience into consciousness, but one that is itself experienced as a spiritual experience in the unconscious. True artistry is, in the truest sense of the word, a revelation of the unconscious. Every time ordinary conscious life forces its way into artistic creation, art is, in a sense, destroyed. That is why Goethe, who was a true artist in this respect, so often compared his work to dreaming, because he could not bring into ordinary consciousness what he had already experienced in his unconscious when he had it in his ordinary consciousness, the experience itself of the spiritual world.

If you take stock of what we have considered, you will say to yourself: True clairvoyance, true insight into the spiritual world, which I have taken the liberty of calling “the observing consciousness”, looks at that in which man, with his own eternal, faces the eternal, with his spiritual-soul nature, the outer spiritual-soul nature. And the spiritual researcher brings into the conscious world from the great realm of the unconscious nothing but what lives in every human being. In every human being who merely walks about on earth, there takes place in the realm of the unconscious what the spiritual researcher attempts to illuminate only with the light of spiritual insight. While the artist, after experiencing something in the spiritual world, still brings a relatively individual experience into consciousness that not everyone can experience, the one who is a spiritual researcher brings from the spiritual world what every soul actually experiences in truth, but only leaves in the unconscious.

Therefore, a true spiritual insight is a true revelation of an unconscious that really lives in every human soul and is really active there. Again and again, I have to say what I have already said here in earlier years: It is important to realize that one does not just glimpse a generally hazy spiritual realm through spiritual eyes and spiritual ears, as one looks into and listens to the physical world through physical eyes and physical ears, but rather that one beholds a concrete spiritual world through spiritual insight.

When you say that, you encounter prejudice. In the physical world, we distinguish four realms, and no one in the physical world would think of saying: Oh, quartz, amethyst and so on, everything is nature! But when it comes to the spiritual, people find it more convenient to speak vaguely of pantheism, to view the general spirit pantheistically, as if one did not look at individual minerals and plants and animals and just always say: nature, nature, nature. Real spiritual research looks into the realms of the spiritual soul, spiritual research looks at those beings who, just like us here as humans, are structured into body, soul and spirit, who do not descend into the physical body but remain spiritual-soul, but belong to higher realms, just as animals, plants and minerals belong to the lower sensual-physical realms.

You can become familiar, dear attendees, through real spiritual vision with those entities that, just as our animal nature here mediates that we can live physically in the physical world, mediate that nature to us that we can acquire when we enter through the gate of death into a spiritual world. Just as we have to acquire the animal nature here, so we have to acquire an essential spiritual nature there, and just as we are surrounded by animal creatures here as subordinate beings, so in the spiritual world there are such beings that stand above man as animals stand among men. As we enter the world of animals, plants and minerals through birth, so we enter the spiritual world into the realm of those beings with whom we are related when we pass through the portal of death.

We enter the realm of those entities of the kingdom to which we belong through having a vegetative nature within us; but we also have the mineral nature within us. We enter the realms of concrete spiritual entities. And while we are here between birth and death with the beings around us from the animal, plant and mineral kingdoms, we are there together with the beings to whom we are related, and we experience with them the life between death and a new birth in that world, through which that which is the eternal self passes as it passes through the physical world here.

But then, when we get to know what the concrete, real spiritual world is like – I am not afraid to say it, because I want to give you real results of spiritual research and not just beat around the bush – then the outer nature will also appear to us as the outer body of a spirituality, just as our own body appears to us as an expression of a spirituality. Just as we see through our own body, through its lawful processes, into the spiritual and soul life that reveals itself through the body, so we learn to see through natural phenomena into a spiritual world. Spiritual research thus truly opens up the spiritual world to man, broadening his field of experience. Man is raised above the possibility, which unfortunately otherwise presents itself to him, of regarding the outer world only as material, with the consequence that he must then regard himself as if he arose only as material substance from a material world.

The fact that, over the centuries, humanity has increasingly approached a state in which it does not see the spirit has led to people having a true, genuine longing for the spirit, a true, genuine longing for the spirit - who also have an inkling that external nature is not merely the body, but that it is the body of a spiritual world —, that such people could not find their satisfaction in what has emerged as seemingly true science in recent centuries.

How has this science developed? It is well known – I have emphasized it here several times in previous years – it is well known what is called the Kant-Laplace theory: our whole earth is said to have developed out of mere material fog, which then coalesced into all that is peculiar to us as humans, to animals, to plants; the material is said to have arisen from the material alone. It would be as if we believed that we had developed as material human beings from the material environment, that a spiritual element from the spiritual world had not been involved.

Just as our being descends from a spiritual world, so the whole universe descends from the spirit. How does something like the Kant-Laplace theory develop? It has been calculated how the beings on earth change over time. So one can calculate how they were formed 1000, 2000, millions of years ago, the beings of the earth. This gives us a calculated idea, a truly correctly calculated idea, of what the earth was like millions of years ago. It is as if we calculated from the change of the heart, the stomach, how these changes, [these organs] were two, six, ten years ago, and then draw a conclusion as to how these changes brought about a condition 200 years ago. This is just as scientific as the Kant-Laplace theory. Or the so-called geological changes of the earth can be calculated in this way. You can find out what the human body was like 300 years ago, according to the observed changes, only the person in question had not yet lived. The same mistake is made when developing the Kant-Laplace theory, when geological hypotheses are formulated that are common practice today. One comes back to the state that can be calculated - only the earth did not yet exist at that time, but it went from a spiritual state into the present state much later.

Spiritual science also leads us back to a spiritual view with regard to the cosmos. And people who, based on their sense of knowledge, have always felt that a merely materialistic approach is insufficient, could speak as an outstanding man of the nineteenth century spoke about this Kant-Laplace theory. Hermann Grimm says about this theory:

Long ago, in his – Goethe's – youth, the grand Laplace-Kant fantasy of the Earth's origin and former destruction had taken hold. From the rotating nebula – as children learn at school – the central drop of gas forms, which then becomes the Earth, and, as it solidifies into a sphere, it goes through all the phases, including the episode of habitation by the human race, , only to finally plunge back into the sun as burnt-out cinders: a long process, but one that is perfectly comprehensible to today's audience, and one that requires no external intervention other than the effort of some external force to maintain the sun at the same temperature. No less fruitless a prospect for the future can be imagined than the one that is supposed to be imposed on us today as scientifically necessary in this expectation. A carrion bone that a hungry dog would go around would be a refreshing, appetizing piece compared to this last excrement of creation, as which our earth would finally fall back to the sun, and it is the curiosity with which our generation absorbs it and believes it, a sign of a sick imagination, which the scholars of future epochs will one day spend a lot of ingenuity explaining as a historical phenomenon of the times. Goethe never allowed such bleakness entry.

This is how a healthy soul feels about what must deny the spirit. True spiritual science will lead mankind back to what it must long for in the present: to the knowledge of the spirit. And just as what is presented as spiritual science as a whole has been sensed by people at the height of human education, even though spiritual science can only arise today, so too have the individual parts, the individual links, above all the spiritual-scientific attitude, always been sensed. And in a spirit such as Goethe's, the mood of the human soul has also been recognized, which must always announce itself as a fulfillment of [longing], as Goethe said in his beautiful writing about Winkelmann:

When the healthy nature of man works as a whole, when he feels himself in the world as a great, beautiful, dignified and valuable whole, when harmonious comfort grants him pure, free delight, then the universe, if it could feel itself, would exult as having reached its goal and admire the summit of its own becoming and being.

Goethe, after all, spoke with a sense of anticipation, as does the intuitive mood of spiritual science. For that which Goethe sensed is a reality in every human soul. The universe exults in the subconscious in the human soul, in that in the depths of the human soul the universe as spiritual encounters the eternal-spiritual in man himself, the universe as spirit confronts the spirit of man, who is able to spiritually contemplate this universe as emerging from his own being and weaving. What Goethe has presented as the exultation of the universe at its goal in the human soul, as something worthy of admiration, is really recognized by spiritual science as the greatest unconscious in the depths of the human soul. And spiritual science is there to bring this, which is directly connected with the human being, with the eternal in human nature, from the realm of the unconscious into the realm of the conscious. Spiritual science wants to be the revelation of this spiritually unconscious greatest secret in human nature.

My dear friends,

Our spiritual-scientific world-conception should not only further the, development and rise of individual souls, hut above all it should really help us to gain new aspects for a conception of life. In the present time we should take it to heart that such encompassing aspects have to be gained in order to judge life. Of course, it is a great and also a significant task for the individual to further his own development by what he can win as a fruit of spiritual-scientific self-education. Only the fact that individuals progress, enables individual souls to cooperate in the development of mankind. Our attention should, however, not only be turned to this fact, but as followers of the anthroposophical world-conception we should also be able to experience the great events of our time from a high standpoint, from a truly spiritual standpoint. When judging the things which are taking place, we should really be able to transfer ourselves, as it were, to a higher standpoint. To-day it may perhaps be appropriate to advance a few aspects connected especially with the great events of the present time, because, my dear friends, our meeting is being held in a fateful time, fraught with destiny.

Let us now set out from something which closely affects us as human beings. At certain times people are seized by illness. As a rule, illness is looked upon as something which injures the organism. But this, generally adopted view is not always justified. There are indeed certain illnesses which must be judged from this standpoint, which invade our organism, as it were, like a foe, but this is not always the case. It does not even apply to the majority of illnesses, for as a rule illness is something quite different. Illness is generally not an enemy, but a friend of the human organism. What is inimical to the organism generally precedes illness, it develops in us before the external, visible illness breaks out. Opposing forces are in the organism, and the illness which breaks out at a certain moment is an attempt on the part of our body to defend itself against these opposing forces which had remained unnoticed. When an illness breaks out, the organism frequently begins a work of healing. Through illness the organism fights against the inimical influences which precede the illness. Illness is the last form of the whole process and it implies a battle of the sound fluids in the organism against the forces which are lurking below. Illness exists for the sake of driving out what is lurking below. Only if the majority of illnesses is looked upon in this light, can a right conception of the pathological process be reached. Illness therefore indicates that something preceded its outbreak, something which must be expelled from the organism by the illness itself.

It is easy to discover what has just been said, if such phenomena of life are viewed in the right light. The causes may lie in many different spheres. But as explained, the essential point is to view illness as a defence of the organism against forces which must be driven out.

I do not think that it is possible to make a better comparison in regard to the whole complex of the significant and deeply incisive events in a great part of the world which are taking place since the beginning of August 1914,—I do not think that a better comparison can be found between these events and a pathological process affecting the whole human development. What should strike us above everything else is that these war-events really constitute a pathological process. But it would be wrong to think that we can deal with it by grasping it wrongly, as so many other pathological processes are grasped, namely by considering it as something inimical to the organism. The cause which we must envisage, precedes the pathological process.

Particularly in the present time it may strike us how little inclined people are to envisage truths which are immediately evident to these who take in a spiritual-scientific world-conception not only with their intellect, but also with their feeling.

We have had to pass through many painful experiences during the past 9 months—painful experiences connected with people's lack of judgment. When reading the books and articles which are most popular to-day and which are spread in many different countries of the world, do we not find that those who judge the present events admit that everything began, say in July 1914? The most distressing experience which we had to pass through in addition to all the other painful things, was to see that particularly the people who counted, most, that is to say, those who write newspaper articles and form public opinion, regally do not know anything about the development of events and only bear in mind the things which lie closest! This gave rise to endless discussions, to entirely useless discussions on the real cause of the present war.

Again, and again people ask: Is this or that party responsible for it? and so forth. But in every case, they omit to go back further than. July, or June 1914 at the incest. I mention this because it really characterizes our materialistic age. One generally thinks that materialism only brings with it a materialistic way of thinking. But this is not true. Materialism does not only produce a materialistic way of thinking, but also short-sightedness; materialism produces laziness of thinking and lack of insight. The materialistic way of thinking leads to the opinion that one can prove and believe anything. The self-training implied by Anthroposophy, if this is grasped in the right way, also enables us to recognise that it is possible to prove and to believe anything if one remains in the field of materialism. Let us take an example:

You see, in the past years, when one brought forward the spiritual-scientific world-conception in this or in that place and certain people thought that they had to assert their own views in the face of the spiritual-scientific world-conception, one could frequently hear the following argument: Kant has already proved by his philosophy that there are limitations to man's knowledge; human knowledge cannot reach the spheres which the spiritual-scientific world-conception tries to reach. Then they bring forward certain interesting things showing how Kant is supposed to have proved that human knowledge cannot reach the spiritual world. If spiritual science was upheld in spite of all, then they came along and said: This person rejects everything that has been proved by Kant! Of course, this more or less implied: What a foolish person he must be, for he rejects strictly proved facts!

But this is not the case: The spiritual scientist does not deny that Kant is absolutely right, for it is evident that he demonstrated this clearly. But my dear friends, suppose that someone had stated that the plant consists of minute cells, at a time when the microscope had not yet been invented, but that these cells could not be found because human eyes are unable to see them. It might have been proved that the cells do not exist and this would have been quite correct, for the constitution of the human eye does not permit us to penetrate into the plant's organism to the extent of seeing these tiniest cells. The proof would be absolutely correct and it could not be overthrown. Yet in the course of human development the microscope was discovered as an aid to the human eye, so that in spite of the strictest proof to the contrary, people were able to recognise the existence of these tiniest cells.

When people will grasp that proofs are useless for the attainment of truth, that proofs may be correct, but that they do not mean anything special if we wish to progress in the attainment of truth, then it will be possible to stand upon the right foundation. For then it will be possible to know: Though proofs may be correct, they cannot lead us to the truth, this is not their task!

Bear in mind the comparison which I made, for it will show you that the proof according to which the human power of vision is unable to reach the plant's cell is just as valid as the proof that, according to Kant, human knowledge is unable to reach the supersensible worlds. These proofs may be absolutely correct, yet real life transcends them. This too is something which we obtain, as it were, along the path of spiritual research, for by extending our horizon we really reach the point of appealing to. something which is not only limited to the human, intellect and its proofs.

Those who restrict themselves to materialistic ideas are really led to an unbounded belief in proofs; if they have a proof in their pocket, they are convinced of the truth. But spiritual science shows us that in reality it is possible to prove either the one or the other thing; intellectual proofs are however meaningless for the attainment of real truth. It is therefore an accompanying symptom of our materialistic age that people should fall into this intellectual short-sightedness. And if this is mingled with passions, it gives rise to something which we do not only see in the armed conflict of European nations, but also in the hostile attitude consisting in the fact that one accuses the other, without any outlook (I distinctly say, without any outlook, for this does not only apply to the present time of war) of their ever convincing each other. These who naively think that a neutral country might perhaps arbitrate in the case of diverging statements between two hostile countries, are really simple minded! Of course, the facts advanced by one side may be just as well supported by proofs as the facts advanced by the other side. Insight, my dear friends, can only be gained by penetrating into the deeper foundations of the whole human development.

In my lecture-cycle on the Folk-Souls of Europe and their influence on the individuals belonging to the different nations, which I gave a few years before the outbreak of the present war, I already tried to throw some light upon the reciprocal relations of the different nations and I tried to show that different forces are at work in the various, nations.¹ Let us complete this to-day by drawing in some new aspects.

Our materialistic age has far too abstract a way of thinking; Above all it does not consider the fact that in life there is a real course of development and that man should allow that which is in him to mature, so that it gradually ripens into real judgment. We know—for this has been set forth sufficiently clearly in The Education of the Child that the human being passes through a course of development; during the first seven years he develops above all his physical body, from the seventh to the fourteenth year his etheric body, and so forth. Little attention is paid to this progressive course in mans individual development, and less still to the parallel phenomenon, to the equivalent course of development in mankind.

The processes which take place in the nations and their connections are guided (we all know this through spiritual science) by the Beings belonging to the higher Hierarchies. We speak of FOLK-SOULS, or FOLK-SPIRITS in the true meaning of the word. We know, for example, that the Folk-Soul of the Italian nation inspires what we designate as Sentient Soul; the French Folk-Soul inspires what we call the Intellectual Soul; the inhabitants of the British Isle are inspired through their consciousness soul; in Central Europe the inspiration takes place through what we designate as the human Ego.

This does not imply any verdict in regard to the individual value of the different nations, it simply states the facts. It states for example, that the inspiration of the nation which inhabits the British Isle is based on the fact that it has to bring into the world influences produced by the inspiration of the Consciousness Soul through the Folk-Soul.

It is strange how nervous people get on this subject. During the war I once more emphasized in this or in that place certain things which I had already explained in the above-mentioned cycle of lectures. Yet some people almost considered it as an insult to the British nation to say that it had the task to inspire the Consciousness-Soul, whereas, the Folk-Soul pertaining to the German nation has to inspire the human Ego. It is just as if it were taken as an insult to say that salt is white and Cayenne pepper red! It is a plain characteristic, the description of an existing truth, and it has to be accepted as such, to begin with.

It will be much easier to deal with the connections existing between the single members of human nature if we bear in mind the characteristics of the various nations, if we do not mix everything together, as is done by the modern materialistic conception. Of course, the individual rises above that which he receives from, his Folk-Soul, and it is pre-eminently the task of our Anthroposophical Society to lift the individual out of the Group-Soul life into the life of humanity as a whole. But nevertheless, there remains the fact that in so far as the individual stands within his own nation he is inspired in a certain direction; the Italian Folk-Soul speaks, for example, to the Sentient soul; the French Folk-Soul to the Intellectual Soul, the British Folk-Soul to the Consciousness Soul. We should therefore imagine that the Folk Soul soars above that which individuals do within single nations.

But in the same way in which we can see a course of development in individual life and are able to say in the case of individual people that the Ego reaches a certain stage of development at a definite moment in life, so it is also possible to speak of a development, a real development in the case of the Folk-Soul. But this development of course differs somewhat from that of individual human beings.

Let us single out, for example, the Italian nation. There we. have this nation and the Folk-Soul belonging to it. You see, the Folk Soul is a Being of the supersensible world, it belongs to the world of the higher Hierarchies. It inspires the Sentient Soul, and this until the nation, the Italian nation, lives (we are speaking of this particular nation), yet it inspires the Sentient Soul at different times in a different way.

There are times in which the Folk-Souls inspire the members of single nations in such a way, that their inspiration is, as it were, one of the soul. The Folk-Soul soars in higher regions of the spirit, and its inspiration is of such a kind that it only transmits soul qualities. Then there are times in which the Folk-Souls descend and engage mere strongly the individual members of the nations; their inspiration is so strong, that they do not only send it down into the soul and its qualities, but right down into the bodily qualities, so that people depend on their Folk-Souls even bodily. As long as a nation submits to the influence of its Folk-Soul so as to receive only soul-spiritual qualities, the national type is not so distinct. The forces of the Folk-Soul do not yet work in such a way as to seize the whole human being, right down into the blood. Then comes a time when one can gather by the way in which a person looks about, by the characteristic shape of his head and his physiognomy, how the Folk-Soul influences him. The influences are so strongly marked, because the Folk-Soul has descended deeply; it claims the whole human being in a strong and intensive way.

You see, in the case of the Italian nation, the middle of the 16th century, around the year 1550, was the period mentioned by me, when the Folk-Soul came down and worked in such a way that its mark may be found in the individual people. Then the Folk-soul soared back, as it were, and these influences were transmitted to the descendants by heredity. The most intensive union of the Italian nation with its Folk-Soul was around the year 1550. It was the time when the Italian Folk-Soul descended most deeply, when the Italian nation acquired its definite character. If we go back to the time before 1550, we see that the characteristic traits are not so clearly traced, they do not confront us so clearly as after 1550, Only in that epoch began the characteristic essence which we know as Italian character. At that time the true marriage took place between the Italian Folk-Soul and the Sentient Soul of. individual people belonging to the Italian nation.

In the case of the French nation (you see, I am not speaking of individual men, who can rise above the nation) a similar moment, when the Folk-Spirit descended most deeply and permeated the whole nation, set in around the year 1600, at the beginning of the 17th century. There the Folk-Soul seized the whole Intellectual Soul.

In the case of the British nation this moment arose in the middle of the 17th century, around the year 1650. Then the British nation obtained as it were its external British expression.

Many things will be clear to you if you know such facts, for now you can, for example, face quite differently the question: “What about Shakespeare and his connection with England?” Shakespeare worked in England before the time when the British Folk-Soul exercised its strongest influence upon the English nation. Shakespeare lived before that time. This explains why he was not completely understood in England. We all know that there are Shakespeare editions in England which suppress everything that is not quite in keeping with the taste of governesses. Shakespeare has often been moralized, so to speak, in the most extreme sense. We know that the deepest, understanding for Shakespeare is not to be found in England, but in the Central European, development of spiritual life.

You will now ask: When did the Folk-Soul come into contact with the members of the Central-European nation? There matters stand as follows: Through the fact that the Ego is the essential thing in Central Europe, that the Folk-Soul soars down and withdraws, again soars down and withdraws—through this fact, we have repetitions. Thus we have a descent of the Folk-Soul, when it unites with the individual souls, around the time in which the wonderful Parsifal legends arose, the legends of the Holy Grail. Then the Folk-Soul withdrew and its next descent is between the years 1750 and 1830. At that time Central-European life is most deeply seized by the Central-European Folk-Soul. Since 1830 it has withdrawn again.

You may therefore see why Jacob Böhme lived, for example, in an epoch in which he could obtain little from the German Folk-Soul. For it was not a time in which the Folk Soul united with the individual souls of the nation. Although Jacob Böhme is called the “Teutonic Philosopher,” he is therefore a man who, in regard to the time in which he lived, is not dependent on his Folk-Soul; he faces us, as it were, like one who is not rooted in his time, like something eternal.

If we take Lessing, Schiller, and Goethe, they are German philosophers who are deeply rooted in the German Folk-Soul. It is a characteristic fact that these thinkers who live between 1710 and 1830 are deeply rooted in their Folk-Soul. This is their characteristic trait.

You therefore see that it is not only essential to know that

1. in the Italian nation, the Folk-Soul works through the Sentient Soul,

2. in the French nation, it works through the Intellectual Soul,

3. in the British nation, through the Consciousness-Soul,

4. in the Central-European nation, through the Ego—

but that it is also essential to know that they exercise their influences at given times. The events which take place can only be grasped from a historical aspect, if we really know these things. The nonsense pursued in the form of science, where documents are taken and events are enumerated in sequence, with the conclusion that one must be deduced from the other—this nonsense of historical investigation does not lead to real history, to an understanding of human development, but only—one might say—to a falsification of the forces working in human history.

If we now see in how many different ways the forces which drive the nations work upon each nation (of course, other nations might also be characterized), we discover the contrasting things which are there. We then see that the events which are taking place in the present time have not only arisen during the. past few years, but that they prepared themselves throughout the centuries.

Let us look across to the East, to the region which is the home of Russian culture. Russian culture is characterised by the fact that it can only unfold when the Russian Folk-soul will have united with the Spirit-Self. (This too is mentioned in the cycle of lectures The Mission of the Folk-Souls). That is to say; A future epoch must come in which the characteristic qualities of the European East will take on a definite form. This will be entirely different from what takes place in Western or in Central Europe. To begin with, however, it is clear that what pertains to Russian culture does not exist as yet, for Russian culture is connected with tin Spirit-Self in the same way in which the individual human being is now connected with it, that is to say, it must always look up to it. Individual Russians, even the deepest Russian philosophers, do not speak in the same way Central Europeans when they express the loftiest things, but in an entirely different way. Here we come across something very characteristic.

You see, we must ask: What is the most characteristic trait of the spiritual life of Central Europe? You all know that there was a time in which the great mystics lived; Meister Eckhart,Tauler,and others were active then, and others too. With their feeling soul they all sought the Divine Essence contained in the human soul; they looked for the God within them, ... they sought to find within their own soul “the little spark in feeling,” as Eckhart expressed himself. Within the soul (they said), within the soul there must be something where; the Godhead is present in a direct way. This gave rise to the striving to unite the human Ego with the Godhead within the human soul. This Divine Essence, this Godhead, was to be striven for; it called for an active striving, for development.

This characterizes the whole life of Central Europe. Think of the infinite soul-depth and feeling of a man who stands in a completely international way in Central European culture, in the spiritual life of Central Europe. Angelus Silesius, who says in one of the beautiful mottoes contained in his Cherubinisher Wandersmann: “When I die, it is not I who die, but God in me.” Consider the great profundity of these words! The man who uttered them, had a living grasp of the idea of immortality and he felt that when death comes to the individual human being, it is because he is filled by the Godhead. Death is a phenomenon which is not connected with man, but. with God, and since God cannot die, death must only be an illusion. Death can therefore not mean a destruction of life. A person who can say, “When I die, it is not I who die, but God in me,” knows of the existence of the immortal soul. This infinitely profound feeling lived in Angelus Silesius. It is a result of the fact that the inspiration passes through the Ego.

When the inspiration passes through the sentient soul, something may arise which appeared, for example, in Giordano Bruno: This friar penetrated with greatest passion into everything discovered by Copernicus and he felt that the whole world was filled with life. If you read anything by Giordano Bruno you will find the confirmation of the fact that in so far as he grew out of the Italian nation, he proves that the Italian Folk-soul is inspired through the sentient soul.

Cartesius (Descartes) was born at that characteristic moment of French development when the French Folk-soul completely united itself with the French nation. Read a page by Cartesius, the French philosopher; you will find everywhere the confirmation of the truth discovered by spiritual science, namely that the inspiration of the Folk-Soul influences the Understanding Soul.

Read Locke or Hume, or any other English philosopher up to Mill and Spencer,—everywhere you will come across the inspiration of the Consciousness Soul.

When you read Fichte, who strives within the Ego itself, you will find that the Folk-soul inspires the Ego.

It is characteristic that the Central European Folk-Soul is experienced in the Ego, so that the Ego is the truly striving part, the Ego with all its strength and errors, with all its mistakes and victories. A man of Central Europe who has to find the path to Christ, must give birth to Him within his own soul.

Try to find in the spiritual life of Russia the idea (it should not be taken over superficially from the civilisation of western Europe) that Christ or God should be experienced within the soul. You will not be able to find it; Russians always expect that the forces which penetrate into the historical course of events penetrate into it like a “miracle,” to use Solovioff's expression. The spiritual life of Russia is very much inclined to look for the resurrection of Christ in the spiritual world, to worship th influence of an inspiring, power, yet this inspiring power speaks as if man were below and as if the inspiring element soared on high above mankind like a cloud, as if it did not penetrate into the human Ego. This intimate union of the Ego with its God, or if Christ is thought of, with Christ, this desire that Christ should be born within one's own soul, can only be found in Central Europe. If the culture of Eastern Europe will one day reach the stage of development which is appropriate to it, it will appear in a civilisation soaring above man, setting forth a kind of Group-soul life, but upon a higher stage than in the past. At present we must find it natural that Russians, and even Russian thinkers, should always speak of a spiritual world soaring above the world of man, of a spiritual world which they can never approach as intimately as Central Europeans approach it, when their Ego seeks to draw nigh to the Divine Essence surging and weaving through the world. On many occasions, when I myself spoke of the Godhead that surges and weaves through the world, my words were inspired by the feelings of a Central European, for no other nation in Europe can grasp such truths in the way in which Central Europeans grasp it. This characterizes the Central European nation.

These are the forces that live in the different nations and that confront one another in such a way as to compete with each other again and again. Sudden explosions must occur, resembling the discharge of clouds which bring lightning and storm.

But do we not see (this is how one might express it now) how a word resounded in the East of Europe, which was like a watchword and was also meant to act as such, just as if the civilisation of Eastern Europe were beginning to overspread the unworthy west of Europe, overflooding it? Do we not observe the rise of Slavophils, of Panslavs and Panslavism, particularly in men of Dostojevski's kind, and similar ideas? Dostojevski came forward with the special points of his programme staging; “You western Europeans, the whole lot of you, have a culture which is rotten to the core; it must be supplanted by the impulses coming from Eastern Europe.” A whole theory was set up, which culminated above all in the fact that people said: In the West, everything has grown rotten and decadent, and it must be replaced by the fresh forces of the East. We have our good orthodox religion which we do not oppose, we accept it like the cloud of the Folk-soul soaring above the people ... and so forth. Very clever theories were thus built up, dealing with what might already constitute the principles, the aims of the ancient Slav life, and stating that from the East the Truth should begin to spread over Central and Western Europe.

I said that the individual may rise above his nation. In a certain sphere, Solovioff, the great Russian philosopher, was such an individual. Although every line he writes reveals that he writes as “Russian,” he nevertheless stands above his nation. In his youth Solovioff was, one might say, a Panslav. But he penetrated more deeply into the ideas which the Panslav and Slavophils set up as a kind of philosophy of nations, as a kind of world-conception of nations. And what did Solovioff discover? What did Solovioff, the Russian find? He asked, himself: Does that which constitutes the true Russian-being really exist in the present time? Is it to be found among those who represent Panslavism, who follow the Slavophils?—He did not rest until he discovered the truth. What did he discover? He investigated the statements of the Slavophils, to whom he himself had belonged in the past, he pressed upon them. And he discovered that the majority, of the thought-forms, statements and intentions had been taken from the French philosopher de Maistre, who sympathized with the Jesuits; he was the great teacher of the Slavophils in the field of a world-conception. Solovioff himself proved that these ideas had not grown out of Russian soil, but that these Panslav and Slavophil thoughts had been taken from de Maistre. And he proved other things besides. He unearthed a long-forgotten German book, from the 15th century, unknown to everyone in Germany. The Slavophils copied whole portions of it in their literature.

What is the strange phenomenon which confronts us here? People believe that from the East come impulses which are of Eastern origin, whereas they are a purely western importation. They came from the West and were then sent back again to the western people. The western people become acquainted with their own forms of thought ... because the East does not yet possess its own forms of thought.

When things are closely investigated, one always finds the confirmation of the statements made by spiritual science. They prove to be correct. We therefore have something elemental in the forces, which come rolling towards us from the East, something which will unfold one day if it will absorb the forces which developed in Central Europe with the same love with which Central Europe once absorbed the Greek and Latin life coming from the South.

In the course of mankind's development, the later epochs absorb what was contained in the past epochs. And the FAUST mentality of Central Europe, which I described in my public lecture [Lecture of May 8th, 1915. “Man's Destiny in the Light of a Knowledge of the Spiritual Worlds.”] when I spoke of the year 1770, was felt by Goethe as a Faustic striving and he expressed it in the words:

Habe nun, ach! Philosophie,
Juristerei und Medizin,
Und, leider, auch Theologie!
Durchaus studiert mit heißem Bemühen.
Da steh' ich nun, ich armer Tor!
Und bin so klug als wie zuvor.

(Alas! Philosophy, law, and medicine,
and unfortunately, also theology
I studied with hot endeavour.
But there I stand now, poor fool!
and am as clever as I was before.)

There arose in Germany an immensely rich life of the spirit, an immensely intensive rich striving in the spiritual life of Germany.—But if Goethe had written his Faust 40 years later, he would certainly not have begun with: “Habe nun ach, Philosophie ...” I have, alas! studied philosophy, etc. ... and have become the wise man of all ages ... but he would have described his Faust exactly as he did in 1770.

This living striving comes from the Folk-soul's inspiration, of the Ego, from that intimate connection of the Ego with the Folk-soul. This is a fundamental quality of the Central-European civilisation of the spirit. And the civilisation of eastern Europe must unite with it warmly and lovingly. The forces which bad to flow into Central Europe were once absorbed, received from the civilisation of the South. To-day it is not otherwise, and if the elemental wave of development comes rolling along from the East, it is just as if the pupil were furious with his teacher because he must learn something from him and wants to whip him for it. The comparison is somewhat trivial, but it is one which explains things precisely.

Groups, masses of people endowed with entirely different forces of development live together in Europe. These different forces of development must actively compete against each other; they must assert themselves in different ways. The opposing forces, those which come into conflicts with the others, prepared themselves long, long ago. Particularly when studying the fine nuances, we see everywhere the truths revealed by spiritual science.

Do we. not find it expressed in a wonderful way that the wave of European development should concentrate itself so as to show the whole of mankind, symbolically as it were, how Central Europe must feel the life-union between the Ego and the spiritual world, how God should be experienced in the “sparklet within the soul,” how Christ should be experienced in “the small spark within the soul?” Christ himself must become active within the human Ego. For this reason, in Central Europe the. whole development tends towards what we call the Ego, the “Ich.” And Ich means “I, C, H” : ICH. The Ich—Jesus Christ, faces us in Central Europe like a mighty symbol, intimately working together with, what can be the soul's holiest possession, intimately working together with the soul itself!

This is how the Folk-soul works, he inspires the nation and expresses the underlying facts in characteristic words. I know that some people laugh when such things are said, when one gives expression to the truth that the Folk-soul worked for centuries in order to give rise to the word ICH, which is so symbolically full of meaning. But let them laugh! After a few decades they will no longer laugh, and call such things more significant than what people now designate as “laws of Nature.” The influence of this wave of development was very characteristic. Only a very small portion of the truth sometimes rises up in human consciousness; but the forces which are active in the sub-conscious depths express themselves in a far more truthful way.

We speak, for example, of the Germanic peoples. The working Genius of Speech forms the words. One part of the inhabitants of Central Europe calls itself “German.” But when we speak of the Germanic races we must include Germany Austria, Holland, the Scandinavian nations and also the inhabitants of the British Isles. The word “Germanic” has a very wide meaning and embraces a large field. But the inhabitant of Great Britain rejects it. To him a “German” is an inhabitant of Germany. In English there is no special word for “Germane” (Germanic). The German language embraces a far larger field with that word. The German language as such is inclined to set the word at the service of selflessness; The German does not only call himself Germanic, but he includes the others in it. But the Briton rejects it.

Try to penetrate into the wonderful essence of the Genius creating speech, and you will discover the truly wonderful element in it. Maya, the great illusion, arises in connection with that which lives in the consciousness of men. But the forces, which work, in the subconscious depths are far more true. They express something immensely significant and profound.

Compare now the intimate way in which we must work in order to understand the European play of forces, compare this inmate way of working with the coarse way in which one generally views the reciprocal connections of the European nations. It will show you the devastation in the human power of judgment resulting from the materialistic age. The fact that people have begun to think that “matter carries and supports, everything” is not the worst; the worst thing of all is that people have become short-sighted, that they are unable to see the fundamental facts and do not even make one step to reach the world which lies behind that veil which is woven over truth as Maya; this is really a calamity.

Materialism very skilfully prepared its aims. Here too genius was at work, but the genius who is the leading power in materialism is Ahriman. He exercised a powerful influence during the past centuries, a very powerful influence indeed!

Let me now refer to a chapter which people perhaps prefer to ignore to-day. But I must draw attention to it, even though people may look upon this as a special form of insanity.

You see, the easiest, way of influencing people is to drip into the soul and thoughts of still youthful persons forces which will develop later in life. Older people can very seldom be taught anything thoroughly. Consequently, Ahriman could never have a better chance of preparing souls in a genuinely materialistic way than by dripping into the souls of young children and youthful persons certain forces which will continue to work in their sub-consciousness. By absorbing materialistic forms of thought at an age, when one does not yet think materialistically, people are taught to think materialistically. When materialism is implanted into the souls of children, people learn to think in a materialistic way.

Ahriman did this by inspiring a writer of the materialistic age to write Robinson Crusoe. If our spirit is clear-sighted and submits to Robinson's influence, we shall see that ideas which are completely materialistic are at work in Robinson. This may not appear at once, yet the whole … the way in which the book is built up, the way in which Robinson is led to all kinds of outer experiences in his adventurous life, until finally even religion grows out of the soil like cabbage,—all this prepares the child's soul excellently for a materialistic way of thinking.

And if we consider that at a certain time there existed a Bohemian, a Portuguese, a. Hungarian, etc., etc. Robinson, in imitation of the original Robinson Crusoe, we must admit that the work was done very thoroughly. The reading of Robinson books contributed greatly to the development of materialism.

In contrast to such phenomena we should point out that there is something which children should take in until late in life: namely the fairy-tales of Central Europe, above all those collected by the brothers Grimm. This is far better reading for children than Robinson Crusoe.

And if to-day the terrible, difficult, fateful events among the nations of Europe are looked upon as a warning to study more closely the whole way in which things occur in the present time by developing out of the hidden depths of events, it will be possible to recognise above all that in reality the essential thing doe s not lie in the fact that a few German scientists sent back their decorations and titles to England!

If the warning of the present time is strong enough to enable us to recognise the whole significance of the materialistically inspired consciousness-soul of the British nation, we shall also recognise what it means to let children read Robinson-books and we shall extirpate the whole Robinson literature. If the warnings of the present time are really taken into consideration in the right way we shall work far more thoroughly, far more radically.

You see, I began to interpret Goethe 35 years ago by explaining his spiritual-scientific task. I tried to explain that Goethe's theory of evolution really contains a truly great theory of evolution, in keeping with spiritual views. The time must come in which larger circles of people recognise this. For Goethe gave us a great, powerful theory of evolution, which is truly spiritual. People found it difficult to understand. In the materialistic age, Darwin was far more successful for he gave in a coarser, materialistic form the truths contained in a fine, spiritual form in Goethe's theory of evolution. A thorough Anglicising took hold of Central Europe. Consider how tragic it is that the most English scientist in Germany, Ernst Haeckel, who swore by Darwin, should have felt such a furious hatred against everything English, and when this war broke out he was one of the first who returned the decorations and titles which had been given him in England. He will have been too old to send back the English-tinted Darwinism, but this would have been the important, essential fact.

The things which matter, lie deeply concealed and are immensely significant. And they are connected with the necessary spiritual deepening of our epoch. If one day we shall recognise the immensely greater depth of Goethe's Colour Theory in comparison with Newton's Colour Theory, and the immensely greater depth of Goethe's Theory of Evolution in comparison with Darwin's, we shall recognise the forces concealed in the spiritual life of Central Europe also in regard to these highest subjects.

By explaining to you all these things, I wish to awaken in your souls a feeling for the great warning which we must see in the present difficult and fateful events. It is a warning to work, to bethink ourselves of what lies concealed in the spiritual life of Central Europe, to undertake the responsibility of drawing out these forces. This is what I meant in my public lecture, yesterday, when 1 said that the spiritual life of Central Europe contains seeds which must unfold into flowers and fruits.

If we recognise again and again that the conscious life of the soul lies on the surface and that below it lies all the things explained to you in these days, we may turn our thoughts towards the fact that also in the present time the impulses of many people contain forces besides those of which they are conscious. Do not think that the people in the West and in the East who have to. defend the great fortress of Central Europe are only fighting for something which lives in their upper consciousness. You should envisage above all the impulses of which so many men who are now passing through blood and death are not conscious,—nevertheless these impulses exist. When we look to the East and to the West, spiritual science should give us the feeling that the impulses of the men who bring these sacrifices contain forces which the future will bring to birth in external life, although the fighting men are hardly conscious of this. Only if we consider the present events in this light, we are filled with the true feelings, with the feelings enabling us to grasp them.

But let us consider how many souls involved in these events—so great in their warlike character that they cannot be compared with anything else in the conscious history of mankind—let us consider how many souls are now passing through blood and death and let us remember that they will look down upon the death which they were condemned to suffer by the present time. Let us remember that in the meaning off what I told you yesterday, youthful etheric bodies fill the spiritual atmosphere of the earth. Let us consider that in the spiritual world will exist not only the souls, and the individualities of these men, but that useful impulses going out from these young etheric bodies will permeate the spiritual atmosphere. Let us set out from this point and try to bear in mind the warning calls which must be heard by those who remain behind on the earth. Indeed, each individual soul that passed through the portal of death reminds us of the great tasks which must be fulfilled in the civilisation of Europe. These warning calls must be heard. Out of the depths of spiritual life, we must be willing to draw feelings born out of knowledge, which show us the true nature cf the world in which we live. And one day, when we shall feel that each soldier who fell on the battlefield is a warner calling for mankind's spiritualization in the civilisation of Europe, we shall have grasped the events in their true meaning. Not only an abstract knowledge should go out from centres such as Dornach, the knowledge that man consists of physical body, etheric body, astral body and Ego, that he passes through many incarnations, that he has a Karma and so forth, but the souls who belong to our spiritual-scientific movement should be stirred in their innermost depths to that feeling life of which I have just spoken, enabling them to experience in the near future the warning calls of those who died in young years. The most beautiful experience which followers of spiritual science can win is that of the living stream which should pass like a breath through the ranks of those who count themselves as belonging to our movement. Not the mere knowledge of this fact, not only its recognition, but its life, the realisation of this life.

Indeed, recently several of our members have left the physical plane. Among them, a young helping friend, our dear FRITZ MITSCHER. Karma brought it about that I had to speak at the cremation in Basle, I had to send certain words to the departing soul. Among other things which I said to this soul, were the words that we know that he will remain a helping friend also now that he has passed through the threshold of death. I had to say this, guided by the consciousness of the fact that the truths which animate every one of us do not only stand before us as a theory, but that these truths uttered as if they were theoretical thoughts, must fill our whole soul with life, full life.

In that case, our attitude towards those who passed through the threshold of death must be the same as towards those who still live here on earth. Indeed, we should not hesitate, to say: Those who still live in the physical body are handicapped in many ways, so that they cannot live a full spiritual lire, they cannot live it to the fill. How many handicaps can be observed in people during their physical life on earth, when it is a question of recognising the truly great tasks of evolution—and still more, when it is a question of FULFILLING THEM! We may rely far more on the dead.

This feeling, that the dead live among us, of a special mission entrusted to them, guided me, when p spoke the parting words for our fried, Fritz Mitscher, who passed through the portal of death so early in life. The words spoken for him apply to many others who crossed the threshold of death. In the dead we have our beat and most important helpers and you will not misunderstand me when I say: In our spiritual work we may rely far more upon the dead than upon the living.

But in order to be able to say this, we should stand in a living way within that which our spiritual movement can give us. I rely on the fact that those who crossed the threshold of death are—particularly in the external field—our most important helpers in the spiritualization of human civilisation in the future, for they look back upon death, and death will be their great teacher. Many people to-day need stronger teachers than those whom life can give them. Many examples prove this.

Let me give you one example (though many others can be given): A few years ago, a sensational article directed against the spiritual science I represent, appeared in Hochland, a periodical published in South-Germany. This article caused a real sensation. It convinced many people, because it was written by a very famous philosopher. The editor of Hochland accepted the article, so that he propagated—at least he thought so—a very conspicuous article on this mad spiritual science.

You see, it is not important to defend ourselves against such things with external measures. It is quite comprehensible that clever modern people should think that spiritual science is foolish ... But since the outbreak of war something else occurred. The editor of that paper is a staunch German, a man with German feelings. The author of the article which had been accepted, addressed certain letters to him and these were printed in the Sueddeutschen Monatsheften for the publisher was guided by, let us say, his blessed “innocence.” Try to read these articles. They are full of venom against the spiritual culture of Central Europe; the letters which that very same philosopher wrote to the editor of Hochland are full of venom, so that the editor felt obliged to say: “In Central Europe, men with such ideas can only be found in a mad-house.”

Consider the immense significance of this criticism. There is a man who edits a paper in South-Germany. He accepts an article winch he considers important as a weapon for the destruction of spiritual science and he says: “Here, at last, we have a good article on spiritual science written by a famous thinker!” After a while, the same author sends him letters which he must designate as coming from a person who should be in a mad-house.

If one arrives at conclusions by a truly living logic, one would have to say: That man is a fool now, consequently he must have been a fool before! The editor simply did not recognise that he had to deal with a fool, when that man first wrote against spiritual science. This is living logic, life-logic. Sometimes, however, people cannot wait until this logic works and shows its effects. Nevertheless, it is active in life and so we may sometimes experience things of this kind.

The article in question was directed against my spiritual science. People read it and said: “O, that article was written by a famous philosopher and Platonist and he is a very clever man!” The editor thought: “An article on spiritual science written by such a clever man, must be a specially good article.” But after a while that same editor had to admit: “That man is a fool.” First, however, he needed proofs for this, as described.

Such things may occur among those who live on the earth. People who do not have a very firm ground under their feet, as in the case of the editor of that South-German periodical, have to be taught their lessons by the recent events which come from the spiritual world and are offered by life itself, in a far deeper meaning than one generally likes to admit.

You will therefore understand me, when I add the following remark to what I already explained to you: There are many opposing forces in the present time, and it is permissible to designate war as a disease. This war is the result of something which was enacted long ago, and it is a healing force eradicating many evils which would gradually harm the life of our whole, civilisation. By designating war as a disease in this meaning, but by looking upon disease as a self-defence, we can understand it, and the fateful events of the present with its significant hints and admonishments. In that case we experience it with all the inner forces of our soul, so that we can direct our attention towards the souls who passed through the threshold of death and look ahead into the near future, the souls who really grasp the inspiration which they are able to send into the hearts of those who are willing to listen to them, namely that a spiritual deepening must take hold of them, it must penetrate into them for the sake of human progress and salvation which the future needs.

If your souls can rightly take in the meaning which I wish to convey with these words, you will really be followers and upholders of our spiritual-scientific world-conception in the full meaning of the word. If you can make up your minds to become souls who turn their attention to the messages whispered from above by those who passed through the portal of death as a result of the fateful events of our times, you will be true followers of spiritual science.

In the near future, spiritual science will have to build a bridge connecting the living with the dead, a line of communication for the inspiring elemental forces of those who in the present time made the great sacrifice of their life, a path along which their messages can reach us.

For this reason, I wished to give you these explanations, by appealing to your souls and by stimulating certain feelings. These should be expectant, listening feelings, able to grasp what the difficult, fateful present reveals to human souls.

In this meaning, let me again conclude with the words already spoken the day before yesterday; they should work in our souls like a Mantram, transforming them into expectant souls, ready to receive the inspirations which come from the dead, from souls filled with a growing life in the Spirit:

Aus dem Mut der Kämpfer,
Aus dem Blut der schlachten,
Aus dem Leid Verlassener,
Aus des Volkes Opfer taten
Wird erwachsen Geistesfrucht,
Lenken Seelen geistbewusst
Ihren Sinn ins Geisterreich.

(Translation)
From the courage of the fighters,
From the blood shed in battles,
From the sorrow of the abandoned,
From the nation's deeds of sacrifice,
Will spring forth a spiritual fruit,
If souls, spiritually conscious, turn
Their senses towards the Spirit-realm.

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• 1. See Rudolf Steiner: The Mission of the Folk-Souls in Relation with the Germanic-Nordic Mythology.