The Rudolf Steiner Archive

To-day I want to make various comments on matters that have been mentioned lately, and to fill in certain gaps. If you follow with attention current trends, you will have noticed a feeling that the thoughts and impressions and impulses which for a long time have led to such “splendid progress” are no longer capable of helping us to cope with the immediate future. Yesterday one of our members gave me a copy of the Frankfurter Zeitung for last Wednesday, November 21st. There speaks a very learned gentleman ... he must be very learned, for he is not only a Doctor of Philosophy but also a Doctor of Theology, and also a Professor, so naturally he is a very clever man. He has written an article which deals with all sorts of spiritual needs of the present time, and in the course of it he says:

“The experience of the form of being which lies behind things does not require pious dedication or a religious evaluation, for it is itself religion. We are concerned not with feeling and grasping a particular content, but with the great Irrational which lies hidden behind all existence ... Anyone who makes contact with this, so that the divine spark leaps across, goes through an experience which is of primal character and may be called the primordial experience. Anyone who experiences this one thing, together with all that is stirred by the same flow of life, is imbued with—to use a favourite modern phrase—a feeling of cosmic existence.”

Excuse me for reading this to you: I am quoting it not in order to arouse in you any magnificent ideas, but so as to bring before you a sign of the times:

“A cosmic religiosity is coming to birth among us, and how strong is the demand for it is shown by the evident spread of the theosophical movement, which undertakes to discover and unveil the phases of this life beyond the range of the senses.”

It is really difficult to stumble through all these wishy-washy ideas, but you will agree that the article is remarkable as a symptom of the times! He goes on: “In this cosmic piety there is no question of a mysticism which turns away from the world ...” and so on.

It would be hard to discover anything intelligent in all this, but since it is written by a man with all these degrees, one must suppose that some intelligence is there! Otherwise we should have to take it as the obscure stammering of a learned man who has reached a dead end on his own path and now feels impelled to call attention to something which certainly exists and evidently appears to him as not wholly unattainable.

There is no cause for satisfaction in such remarks; we must above all take care not to let them lull us into a comfortable slumber just because it has again been noticed, from some point of view or other, that something lies behind the spiritual-scientific movement. That would be really harmful. People who write in this way are often quite satisfied with having written it. With these misty thoughts they point to something which is trying to make its way into the world, but they are far too complacent to go in for the serious study that Spiritual Science requires. Nothing less than that must lay hold of men's minds if some reality is to be brought into the trends of the times, so that healing can come of it. Of course it is easier to talk of this “surge” of “cosmic feeling” than to give serious attention to those things that are demanded by the signs of the times and must be made known to mankind. For this reason it seems to me necessary to repeat here the remarks I have made in public lectures and shall make again, with particular emphasis now on the distinction between the worn-out ideas which have led into these catastrophic times and those which must take hold of human souls if any sort of progress is to be accomplished.

The old wisdom, through which mankind has been guided up to our time, may give rise to thousands of congresses, world-congresses, people's congresses and so on; thousands and thousands of societies may be founded; but we must be clear that all these congresses and societies will accomplish nothing unless the life-blood of Spiritual Science flows through them. What is lacking among people to-day is the courage to embark on real research into the spiritual world. Strange as it may sound, it must be said—as a first step nothing else would be needed than to spread the little booklet, Human Life in the light of Anthroposophy, in the widest circles. Something would thereby be done to evoke knowledge of a connection between man and the cosmic order. The booklet calls attention precisely to this knowledge by showing in concrete terms how throughout the year the earth undergoes changes in its state of consciousness—and so on. What is said in that booklet and in this lecture is said with full consideration for the needs of our time. Acceptance of it would signify more than all this wishy-washy talk on cosmic feeling and surges and I know not what. I have just read this to you and I can't bring myself to repeat it—it is all put in such a senseless way.

This should of course not prevent us from taking note of such things: they are important and real. What I want to bring home to you is that we must not befog ourselves: we must be absolutely clear as to what we wish to do on behalf of Spiritual Science.

Now I will turn again to the fact that in this fifth post-Atlantean epoch humanity will have to find ways of dealing with great life-problems which in a certain sense were veiled by the wisdom of the past. I have already called your attention to them. One of these great problems will be concerned with finding out how to place the spiritual etheric forces at the service of practical life. I have told you that in this epoch we have to solve the problem of how the radiations from human states of mind are carried over into machines; of how human beings are to be brought into relation with an environment which must become increasingly mechanised. A week ago I pointed out how superficially this mechanisation is treated in a certain part of the world. I gave you the example of how an American way of thinking tries to extend the realm of the machine over human life itself. I told you of the rest-pauses which were used in order to enable a given number of workmen to load up to 47½ tons, instead of a much lower figure; this involves simply the application of Darwinian natural selection to human life.

Where this kind of thing goes on, the wish to yoke up human strength with the strength of machines is always involved. It would be quite mistaken merely to oppose these things. They are not going to fade away; they are on the march. The only question is whether in the course of world-history they are going to be brought on to the scene by men who are unselfishly aware of the great aims of earth-evolution and wish to shape these developments for the healing of mankind, or by groups of men who want to use them for their own or the group's selfish ends. That is the issue. The point is not what is going to happen, for it certainly will happen, but how it happens—how these things are handled. The welding together of human beings with machines will be a great and important problem for the rest of the earth-evolution.

I have often pointed out, even in public lectures, that human consciousness depends on destructive forces. During public lectures in Basle I twice said that in our nerve-system we are always in process of dying. These forces of death will become stronger and stronger, and we shall find that they are related to the forces of electricity and magnetism, and to those at work in machines. A man will be able in a certain sense to guide his intentions and his thoughts into the forces of the machines. Forces in human nature that are still unknown will be discovered—forces which will act upon external electricity and magnetism.

That is one problem: the bringing together of human beings with machines, and this is something which will exert ever-increasing influence on the future.

The other problem is concerned with calling in spiritual relationships to our aid. This can be done only when the time is ripe, and when a sufficient number of people are rightly prepared for it. But we must come to the stage when spiritual forces are brought into action for the governance of life in relation to illness and death.

Medicine will be spiritualised—very highly spiritualised. These things will be caricatured from various standpoints, but the caricatures only show what has to come. Again, the question is whether or not this problem—like the other problem I have mentioned—is handled in an egotistic way by individuals or by groups.

The third great question concerns ways of thinking about human birth and upbringing. I have told you how congresses on this subject have already been held, and how a materialistic form of science will be brought to bear in the future on procreation and the union of man and woman. These things indicate the great significance that attaches to this process of becoming. It is easy enough to ask why those who have the right knowledge in these matters do not apply it. In the future it will be clear enough what the state of affairs is regarding this application, and what are the forces which are even now opposing, for example, a more generous provision for a spiritualised medicine or a spiritualised economic life. All that can be done at present is to speak of these things, until people—I mean those who are ready to accept them selflessly—understand them sufficiently. There are many who think they have already got as far as that, but many hindrances arise from the circumstances of life to-day. These will be overcome in the right way only if understanding goes deeper and deeper, and if we actually refrain, for a time at least, from attempting practical applications on any large scale.

Things have developed in such a way that one can say: Little is known of all that lay behind the old atavistic searchings which continued up to the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. People talk a great deal about the old alchemy; sometimes they call to mind the creation of Homunculus and so on. But most of this talk misses the point. If people would come to understand what can be said about the Homunculus scene in Faust, for instance, they would be better informed: the essential thing is that a mist has been spread over these subjects since the sixteenth century. They have receded into the background of human consciousness.

The law which prevails here is the same law which governs the rhythmic alternation of waking and sleeping in man. Just as a person cannot do without sleep, so mankind could not dispense with the sleep regarding spiritual knowledge which has marked the whole period since the sixteenth century. Man had to fall asleep to the spiritual, so that it could reappear in a new form. These necessities must be clearly seen, but without letting them depress us. We must realise clearly that the time for awakening has now come, that we have to play our part in it, that events often run ahead of our knowledge and that we shall not understand the events going on around us unless we are willing to receive the knowledge and to act in accordance with it.

I have repeatedly told you that certain groups are working esoterically in the direction I have indicated. It was first of all necessary that certain forms of knowledge—called nowadays by such misunderstood words as alchemy, astrology, etc.—should fall into abeyance, so that men should no longer be able to discern the soul-element in outer Nature and should rather be thrown back on themselves. And in order that they should awaken their inward forces, certain things had to appear as abstractions. Now these things must again take on a concrete spiritual form.

During the last centuries three ideas have gradually emerged in abstract guise. They were incorrectly named by Kant, and correctly by Goethe. Kant called them God, Freedom and Immortality; Goethe called them God, Virtue and Immortality. If we look into what lies behind these three words, we find that the same words are taken abstractly by modern man and were taken more concretely—but also more materially in the old atavistic sense—up to the fourteenth or fifteenth centuries. Experiments in the old style were carried out: the alchemists sought to observe processes in which the working of God could be seen. And they tried to produce the Philosopher's Stone.

Something concrete lies behind all these things. The Philosopher's Stone was to enable men to become virtuous—but this was thought of in a more material sense. It was also to lead to an experience of immortality: to bring a man into such a relationship to the cosmic whole that he would experience in himself what lies beyond birth and death. All the nebulous ideas by which people nowadays try to grasp these things no longer correspond with what was really intended. It has all become abstract, and it is of abstract ideas that modern men speak. They want to understand God through an abstract theology, and virtue also as something abstract—the more abstract it is, the better people like it. And it is the same with immortality. Speculation turns on what in man could be immortal. In my first Basle lecture [23rd November, 1917. (Not translated into English.)] I said that the kind of learning which under the name of philosophy occupies itself with such questions as that of immortality is a starveling, under-nourished kind of learning. That is merely another way of describing the abstract terms in which such matters are pursued.

In certain Western brotherhoods, however, a connection with the old traditions has been retained, and endeavours are made to use it for the egotistic interests of the group. It is time to call attention to these things. Of course, if from this Western quarter anything is said about God, virtue or freedom, and immortality, the words are given an abstract sense, but in the circle of initiates it is well known that all this is not mere abstract speculation. For their own part, they look for something much more concrete behind these abstract formulae, and in their own schools these terms are accordingly translated. God is translated as gold, and an endeavour is made to arrive at what lies behind the secret of gold, as it may be called. For gold, the representative of the sun-like within the earth's crust, does in fact enshrine an important secret. Gold stands in the same material relationships to other substances as the thought of God does to other thoughts. The only question is what is made of this secret.

This is linked up with the egotistic use of the mystery of birth, and here, real cosmic understanding is sought. All such understanding has been replaced for modern men by a purely earthly understanding. If someone wants to investigate, for example, how the embryonic life-cell of animal or man develops, he studies it through a microscope and is concerned only with what lies there directly under his lens. But that is far from being the whole thing. It will be realised—and some groups are very near this already—that the forces at work are not contained in the cell but come from the cosmos and its constellations. When a seed of life arises, it does so because the living creature which harbours the seed is receiving forces, cosmic forces, from all sides of the cosmos. And when fertilisation occurs, the results depend on which cosmic forces enter actively into the process.

One thing, not yet seen, will be recognised. To-day the idea is that we have a living creature, a hen, let us say. When a new seed of life appears in the hen, the biologist investigates how the egg arises out of the hen; he looks within the hen itself for the forces which cause the seed to grow. That is nonsense. The egg does not grow out of the hen; the hen is merely the substratum for it. The growth-forces work from out of the cosmos on to the soil which has been prepared in the hen for engendering the egg. The biologist to-day believes that the relevant forces are all to be found within the field of his microscope. Actually, what he sees there depends on stellar forces which work together in a certain pattern at a given point. When we discover the cosmic at this point, then for the first time we shall have got at the reality and the truth: it is the cosmic whole which conjures up the egg in the hen.

All this is connected especially with the secret of the sun, and in earthly terms with the secret of gold. To-day I can give you only a sort of schematic indication of it; these things will become much clearer in the course of time.

When “virtue” is discussed in these same schools, they call it simply “health,” and try to learn how the cosmic constellations are connected with health and sickness in men. By this means they come to know the particular earthly substances, the juices and so on, which are in their turn connected with sickness and health. We shall see develop increasingly from a certain direction a more material form of medical knowledge, but it will rest on a spiritual foundation.

From this side also will be spread the idea that man cannot be made good by learning all sorts of ethical principles, but by ingesting copper, for example, under a certain constellation, and arsenic under another. You can well imagine how ideas of this kind can be used by egotistic groups for enhancing their own power. They need only withhold this knowledge from others, and this will be the best means of dominating large numbers of men. They will not need to talk about such things; it will be enough to bring forward some new titbit. Then they will find openings for this titbit, having first flavoured it appropriately, and they will achieve their purpose when these novelties are accepted in a materialistic sense. We have only to remember that spiritual potencies are hidden in everything material. Only he who knows that in a true sense there really is nothing material, but only the spiritual—only he will penetrate behind the secrets of life.

Similar endeavours are made from the same quarter to transpose the problem of immortality into a materialistic frame, and this, too, can be done by making use of the cosmic constellations. This method certainly does not yield the immortality that is the subject of so many speculations, but immortality of another sort. Given a brotherhood lodge, then—at least so long as life cannot be lengthened by working on the physical body—preparations are made for subjecting a soul to such experiences as will enable it to remain within the lodge after death, so that it may contribute its forces to those at the disposal of the lodge. In these circles, accordingly, immortality is called simply “lengthening of life.”

External signs of all this can indeed be seen. I don't know if some of you may have noticed a book which also came from the West and caused a little stir for a while; it was called “On the Nonsense of Death.” These things all move in the same direction. They are still at their beginnings, for everything beyond that is kept as a closely guarded esoteric secret by the egotistic groups. But these things are really possible if they are given a materialistic colouring; if the abstract ideas of God, virtue and immortality are turned into the concrete ideas of gold, health and lengthening of life, and if what I have called the great problem of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch is utilised for the purpose of an egotistic group. You see, this “cosmic feeling,” which the learned Professor and Doctor of Theology talks about, is already being widely presented to people—and often, unfortunately, in an egotistic sense—as cosmic knowledge. For centuries science has kept its eyes fixed on earthly processes, and has ignored all the most significant influences that come from beyond the earth, but it is precisely in our fifth post-Atlantean epoch that extra-terrestrial forces from the cosmos will be put to use.

And so, just as it is essential for an orthodox professor of biology to have the most powerful microscope available and the most efficient laboratory methods, so, in the future, when science has been spiritualised, it will be of the utmost importance whether certain processes are carried through in the morning or in the evening, or at midday, and whether what has been done in the morning is allowed to be further influenced by an evening activity, or whether the cosmic influences are cut out, paralysed, from the morning until the evening. Processes of this kind will of necessity come to light and will run their course. Naturally, a great deal of water will have to flow under the bridges before the professional chairs and laboratories, at present organised on purely materialistic lines, are handed over to spiritual scientists, but this replacement must come about if humanity is not to sink into utter decadence. For example, if the question is one of doing good in the immediate future, existing laboratory methods must give way to methods whereby certain processes take place in the morning and are interrupted during the day, so that the cosmic stream passes through them again in the evening and is in turn rhythmically withheld again until morning. So the processes would take their course: certain cosmic workings would always be interrupted by day, and the cosmic morning and evening processes would be brought in. All sorts of arrangements would be necessary for this. You will realise that if one is not in a position to take any public action about these things, all one can do is to speak of them.

However, just as gold, health and the prolongation of life are put in the place of God, virtue and immortality, so from the same quarter efforts will be made to work not with the morning and evening processes, but with others. Last week I told you how an attempt will be made to set aside the impulse of the Mystery of Golgotha, while for the West another impulse, a sort of Anti-Christ is introduced; and from the East an attempt will be made to paralyse the twentieth-century manifestation of the Christ Impulse by diverting attention from the coming etheric Christ.

Those concerned to present an Anti-Christ as the real Christ will try also to make use of something that works through the most material forces, but in this very way can work spiritually. Above all they will strive to make use of electricity and earth-magnetism in order to produce effects all over the world. I have shown you how earth-forces rise up into what I have called the human Double, the Doppelgänger. This secret will be opened up. An American secret will be to make use of earth-magnetism, with its north-south duality, and by this means to send over the earth guiding forces which will have spiritual effects. Look at the magnetic chart of the earth and compare it with what I am now saying. Observe where the magnetic needle deviates to East and West and where it does not deviate. I can give only hints about all this. From a certain direction in the heavens, spiritual beings are continually active, and they have only to be put into the service of the earth, and—because these beings working in from the cosmos can mediate the secret of the earth's magnetism—it will be possible for egotistic groups to get behind this secret and to accomplish a great deal in connection with gold, health and the prolongation of life. It will be necessary for them only to pluck up their faltering courage—and in certain circles that will be done readily enough!

From the East an endeavour will be made to strengthen what I have already explained: to place in the service of the earth the beings which work in from the opposite side of the cosmos. In the future there will be a great battle. Human science will stretch out to the cosmic, but will try to get there by different paths. It will be the task of good, healing science to find certain cosmic forces which can reach the earth through the co-operation of two cosmic streams, those of Pisces and Virgo. The great secret to be discovered will be how the influence which works from the direction of Pisces as a power of the sun unites itself with the influence working from the direction of Virgo. It will make for good when it is learnt how the morning and evening forces from the two sides of the cosmos can be brought into the service of humanity. (See diagram at end of lecture.)

These forces, however, will be left aside by those who try to achieve their whole purpose through the polaric duality of positive and negative forces. The forces which enable the spiritual to stream down to earth with the aid of positive and negative magnetism come from Gemini; they are the midday forces. In ancient times it was known that cosmic influences were involved in this, and to-day even exoteric scientists are aware that in some or other way positive and negative magnetism lie behind Gemini in the Zodiac. The aim will be to paralyse all that could be gained through a revelation of the true duality in the cosmos—to paralyse it in a materialistic, egotistic way by means of the forces which stream in particularly from Gemini and can be placed entirely at the service of the human “Double.”

Other brotherhoods, concerned above all to divert attention from the Mystery of Golgotha, will try to make use of the duality in human nature—the duality which in our epoch embraces man as a unity, but includes within him his lower animal nature. A human being is really a centaur in a certain sense: his humanity rests on his lower animal nature in its astral form. This working together of the duality in man gives rise to a duality of forces. This duality of forces will be utilised particularly by certain egotistic brotherhoods, chiefly from the side of India and the East, in order to mislead eastern Europe, whose task it is to prepare for the sixth post-Atlantean epoch. And this will be done with the aid of the forces which work in from Sagittarius.

Whether to conquer the cosmic for mankind in a wrong, twofold way, or rightly in a one-fold way—that is the question facing mankind. From this will come a true renewal of astrology, which in its old form is atavistic and cannot survive. The wise Beings of the cosmos will enter into the struggle; one side will use the morning and evening processes in the way I have indicated; the West will prefer the midday processes, shutting out the morning and evening ones; and the East will prefer the midnight ones. Men will no longer manufacture substances on the basis merely of chemical attraction and repulsion; they will know that different substances arise according to whether they are made with morning and evening processes, or with midday and midnight ones. It will be known that such substances act in a quite different way on the triad, God, virtue and immortality—gold, health and prolongation of life. When the forces of Pisces and Virgo act in co-operation, nothing wrongful can be brought into being. Men will achieve something through which the mechanism of life will be detached, in a certain sense, from man himself, but will not give any one group power and rulership over another. The cosmic forces drawn from this direction will create remarkable machines, but only those that will relieve man of work, because they will carry a certain power of intelligence within themselves. And a Spiritual Science which itself reaches out towards the cosmic will have to see to it that all the great temptations which come from these machine-animals, created by man himself, are not allowed to exercise any harmful influence upon him.

With regard to all this, the essential thing is that people should prepare themselves for it by not treating realities as illusions and by coming to a genuine spiritual conception and understanding of the world. To see things as they are—very much depends on that! But we can see them as they are only if we are in a position to bring the ideas of Spiritual Science to bear on reality. For the rest of the earth's existence the dead will be co-operating actively in the highest degree, and it is how they co-operate that will matter. Here, above all, a great distinction will arise. On one side the attitude of men on earth can rightly lead the co-operation of the dead in such a direction that the dead will be active out of their own impulse, an impulse coming from the spiritual world which the dead are themselves experiencing. But from the other side many endeavours will be made to introduce the dead into human existence by artificial means. Along the indirect path through Gemini the dead will be led into human life, with the result that human vibrations will pass over into the mechanism of machines and will continue to vibrate there in a quite definite way. The cosmos will impart motion to the machines by the indirect path I have indicated.

It will thus be essential, when these problems emerge, that no improper methods should be applied to them, but only those elemental forces which belong to nature on their own account, and great care will have to be taken not to introduce improper forces into the realm of machines. In this occult sphere the human element must not be related to machinery in such a way that the Darwinian natural selection theory is used to determine the working capacity of human beings, in the way of which I gave you an example last week.

I am making these remarks—obviously they cannot exhaust the subject in so short a time—in the belief that you will meditate on these things and will try to build a bridge between them and all those experiences of life which can be encountered, particularly in this difficult time. You will see how things become clear to you if you contemplate them in the light that can come from such ideas as those I have been placing before you. The real point is not that in our time powers and constellations of powers are standing opposed to each other, as we are always being told in external exoteric life. The real point is quite different. It is that a kind of veil is now meant to be spread over the true impulses at work. Certain human powers are intent on saving something for themselves—what is it? Their aim is that impulses which up to the time of the French Revolution were justified, and were represented also by certain occult schools, shall now be taken charge of in an Ahrimanic-Luciferic sense, so as to maintain a form of society which is generally thought to have been overcome since the end of the eighteenth century.

Two powers, especially, stand in opposition to each other: the power representing the principle that was overcome at the end of the eighteenth century and the power representing the new age. A great many people, of course, are instinctively supporters of the new age. Therefore the representatives of the old impulses, those of the eighteenth, seventeenth and sixteenth centuries, must be yoked by artificial means to the forces which emanate from certain brotherhoods who are working for group-egotistic ends. The most effective principle for extending power over as many men as may be needed is to-day the principle of economic dependence. But that is only an instrument: the real thing is quite different. The real issue you can gather for yourselves from all the various hints I have given. The economic principle is connected with everything which seeks to enlist a great number of men all over the world as a kind of army in the service of these principles.

These are the powers which stand opposed to each other. And this indicates what it is that is really battling in the world to-day. In the West we have the principle which is really rooted in the eighteenth, seventeenth and sixteenth centuries, but which passes unnoticed because it clothes itself in the phrases of revolution and democracy. It wears them as a mask and by this means strives to gain all possible power for itself. These endeavours are favoured if as many people as possible do not exert themselves to see things as they are, and in this field allow themselves to be lulled to sleep again and again by the illusion that to-day there is a war between the Entente and the powers of Central Europe.

In reality there is no such war; only by going behind this illusion can one get at the real struggle, but light can be thrown on it if it is approached along the lines which, for certain reasons, I only hint at. At least we should endeavour not to take illusions for realities: then gradually the illusion will be dispelled as far as it need be. Above all we must strive to see these things objectively, as they really are.

If you bring together all that I have been saying, you will see that an apparently casual remark I made in the course of these lectures was not so at all. When I quoted something that Mephistopheles said to Faust, “I see you know the Devil” (he would certainly not have said this to Woodrow Wilson), it was by no means a casual remark: it can throw a great deal of light on the present situation. We must really look at these things objectively, without sympathy or antipathy; above all, we must be able to see how much in a particular case depends on the setting and how much on the capacity of an individual, for behind an individual's capacity there often lies something quite different from what lies behind the setting. Ask yourselves without prejudice—how much would Woodrow Wilson's brain be worth if it were not throned on the Presidency of the United States? Consider how it would be if this brain had a quite different setting: then its individual capacity would be revealed! The setting is what matters.

Let me now speak abstractly and radically, of course without discussing in detail the particular case I have mentioned—in a neutral country that would not be appropriate. If you take any individual brain, it can be revealing to ask whether it is worth something because it is illuminated and activated by a particular spiritual soul-force—whether it has the kind of spiritual significance I have been speaking of here—or whether it is worth no more than its weight, measured on a pair of scales.

In the eyes of people to-day, all this is grotesque; but what seems grotesque to them must come to seem obvious, if certain things are to be diverted from an unhealthy stream into a health-giving one. And what good is it to be always talking about them? You must come to see that there is no point in wishy-washy talk about “cosmic religiosity” or “how strong the striving for it is,” or of “the movement which aims at discovering and revealing the circulation of the life behind the senses,” and so on. All this does is to spread a mist over things which must be brought out clearly in the world, and should above all be carried as practical moral-ethical impulses into human life.

I can give you only indications. I leave you to build on them in your own meditations. I have been speaking aphoristically in many respects. But you will have the possibility of drawing a great deal out of the relationships shown in this picture of the Zodiac, if you truly use it as a subject for meditation.

When I tried in the last lecture to explain the influence exercised on man by the part of the Earth on which he as physical man develops, I had chiefly in mind to point out very distinctly that the whole Earth is an organism, an ensouled organism, permeated by spirit. For, as an organism has its separate, distinct differentiated members, each of which has a special task,—the arms have not the task of the legs, nor the heart that of the brain, and so on, if we consider the Earth as one whole, as an ensouled organism permeated by spirit, each part of the Earth has its own special task. The special task of the separate human organic members is perceptible in the form of these separate members. The arms are formed differently from the legs, the heart from the brain. This difference is not so marked as regards the Earth with respect to the physical. To an external materialistic geographer, who observes the separate continents or any other parts of the Earth arranged according to this or that point of view, it does not occur straight away that these different parts of the Earth have different sorts of activity; that only occurs to one who can, to a certain extent, grasp the nature of the psychic and spiritual element of the Earth. To understand this, really signifies rising concretely to the perception that the Earth is an ensouled, spiritual organism, and that man, living on Earth as physical man, is a member of this organism. All kinds of questions arise if one takes this into account, and he looks at the life of man as if it only ran its course once between birth and death, will not come to any very reasonable conclusions about them. For man, as physical man, can indeed only become a member of a particular part of the Earth. He would therefore be condemned to be quite specialized and differentiated by this particular part of the Earth, and would in a sense not be able to be in any way a complete whole, but only a part of the Earth's organism. On the other hand an important discovery results from this insight into the ensouled spiritualized part of the Earth; the discovery that the real deeper being of man, to which he says “I,” can in the real sense, only be connected indirectly with this differentiation of man over the Earth, that's the psycho-spiritual kernel of man's being in a sense only dwells in what is in us specialized through the peculiarity of the Earth. Thus man can obtain, from this very circumstance, the knowledge that his spiritual-psychic kernel cannot subsist in what immediately confronts us in man; that with which, in a sense, man confronts us, can only be the “dwelling place,” the dwelling place of man determined by virtue of the special circumstances of the Earth. I do not mention this because it might appear to those already acquainted with spiritual science as a very weighty truth; of course it cannot be that. But it is to show that a real searching into and pondering over the relationships of the Earth can lead man to build himself up in spiritual science, by this means, in a purely logical manner. For the belief that Spiritual Science can only be comprehensible to one who sees into the spiritual world, must be swept away as one of the most fatal prejudices. This is a prejudice which has over and over again to be taken into account. I might say, for the satisfaction of all the comfort-loving ones who, because they like to believe that they could never acquire clairvoyant cognition, would like to represent Spiritual Science chiefly as a kind of provisional arrangement, or as something which does not concern mankind at all, that in truth, comprehensive, penetrating thought can really understand the spiritually scientific. Only the thought must be really accurate and comprehensive! It must be prepared to relate the phenomena of life to what Spiritual Science confirms. He who brings what is within his grasp in the way of knowledge of the characteristic traits of the different nations of the Earth, and of the different inhabitants of the Earth, to bear upon what Spiritual Science says, will soon acknowledge that what was here explained in the last lecture is verified. We must really relate what life offers to this knowledge; we must be ready to test, free from prejudice, the teachings of Spiritual Science by the experience of life; then a reasonable penetration of the matter will lead to the acknowledgment of Spiritual Science.

It is very important to emphasize this at the present day. For we may say that traditions, containing many of the truths of Spiritual Science, are far more numerous than is usually believed. There is a certain opinion, however, which was fully justified up to the approach of the recent historical age—but which has also been propagated in our own times by many who possess Spiritual Scientific knowledge—the opinion that one should not communicate publicly certain deeper knowledge about life. I have often explained the reasons which people who know something of these things have, for thus withholding these communications, and I have also pointed out why these reasons no longer hold good at the present day. In a certain respect however these facts present a difficulty. For not only have we the opposition to Spiritual Science of by far the greatest part of mankind to contend with, but we also have to contend with the opinion of those who do know something;—the opinion that one who gives publicity to things which come from the fountain of Spiritual Science as one gives publicity to other truths, is wrong. Those who believe that the veil of secrecy over certain things must not be raised, will be healed of this error when they recognize the importance of what has been said, certainly in a somewhat scientific form, but clearly enough, it seems to me, in the foreword and introduction to my book “Riddles of Man.”

It is necessary to comprehend that the conception of truth and righteousness which most men still have today, will indeed have to be overcome. Most men have the idea: One thing is right—and another is wrong. But I must emphasize the fact over and over again, and have also done so more particularly in the preface to “Riddles of Man,” the man's separate view of things from one particular side is like a photograph of an object from one side only. If one photographs a tree, first from the one side and then another, the second picture is still a picture of the same tree, only it looks different. Now today, when men have become so very abstract, when they have become so accustomed to the theoretical, in spite of believing themselves to be men of reality, one view of a thing is reckoned as all-comprehensive, as comprising the whole reality. People believe that it is possible to express reality in thoughts—or in something else. They are particularly arrogant in this belief of being able to express the reality by means of thought. I mean the “arrogant” somewhat in the following sense. People say, “We today have the Copernican world-conception ... but with regard to the men who lived before Copernicus (this is not expressed so abruptly, but still they think it) they were all children (indeed we might say ‘duffers’), for they did not yet have the Copernican world-conception. That alone is correct, all the other world-conceptions are false.” This is an attitude which must be overcome. Even the Copernican world-conception is just one view, it is one definite way of making pictures, thoughts and ideas of things. Certainly there are men to-day, who oppose Spiritual Science as soon as they observe that it gives one a view, a real and regular view of a thing, by placing something else in opposition to it. No one will contest this who knows that there are different points of view about a thing. Today, however, many people wish for something else, something quite special, which may be compared somewhat to the person in the room saying: “When we have lighted up the room from one point and look at it from there, this gives only the view in perspective; it is not the reality; let us turn out the light and make the room quite dark and touch everything separately, then all who have thus touched the things will have the same opinion.” We all know that when we look at the room in the light, one who stands there has this view, and another who stands somewhere else has that view and so on. So today certain ideal of natural science would be to turn out the light and only ‘touch’ everything. Spiritual Science must certainly “turn the light” on to that. Thus the different points of view implies something surveyed from different places.

Now more especially by us should the effort be made to go about trying to form opinions from different points of view. This has already been striven after for many years. Many might object that the one contradicts the other, but that is precisely the essential thing, that in the above-mentioned sense one view should contradict another; for thereby we get an all-round view of a thing, which is what we want. But this is not at all easy, or people would prefer to have a little book, as slender as possible, in which a whole world-philosophy is tabulated. Or, if they wish to have world-philosophies discussed, they would like to have the same thing reeled off, over and over again. Of course this cannot be. Our printed cycles are increasing, are becoming more and more numerous, so that things may be illuminated from different sides, that we may obtain concepts and views from various sides, which only then give a complete picture of reality. We must certainly offend people in a certain respect (and what has just been said will make this comprehensible to you) if we have to repudiate more and more the accepted prejudices, by the truths of Spiritual Science. But chiefly when we thus ‘sin’ against the demand of certain occultists not to communicate important things publicly, we must speak about things which shock people, perhaps even anger and excite them; for these things, like many others, give offense for instance to all those who say that things can only be ‘correct’ or ‘incorrect.’ Rather must we acquire the view that in the successive stages of the evolution of mankind there can never be a condition in which one can really say: “Now we have the absolute truth in regard to any particular matter for thought,” or: “We now know, what is absolute untruth.” There cannot be absolute truth or absolute truth. Searching great conceptions of life do not originate in order at last to give men what is ‘correct,’ so that they may now look arrogantly upon their forefathers as upon children; they spring up from very different reasons.

Let us call to mind something we all know. In the 15th century of our era, mankind entered the fifth cultural epoch of the Post-Atlantean development, which we call that of the “development of the human Consciousness or Spiritual Soul.” What especially appeared in the fifth cultural epoch began with the 15th century A.D. Till then it was the Intellectual or Rational Soul which, in the course of the cultural development of mankind was specially developed. In order then that the Spiritual Soul might arise, certain thoughts, certain kinds of concepts, took on a quite distinct character. Not because the Copernican world-philosophy is the absolutely correct one—I have affirmed often enough that it had to appear; and that in a certain respect it is the right one for us in accordance with the times. I shall declare again and again—not because it is the absolutely correct one did it appear, but because it serves the evolution of man, in that he can best attain the development of the Spiritual Soul if he allows the Copernican world-philosophy to enter his flesh and blood, if he reaches the point of being able to calculate certain constellations of stars through the Copernican world-philosophy, as has been done in more recent times.

What is then really good in the Copernican world-philosophy? Not that at last it has told us the truth in contradistinction to the ‘untruth’ of former centuries, but that it erected a spiritual wall between Earth and Heaven, between the physical world and the spiritual world. Of course this appears frightfully paradoxical, something which excites opposition as a matter of course among those who have the above-mentioned prejudices. But it is true that man has begun to conceive the circumference, a cosmic circumference of the Earth in the Copernican manner, in that by transferring the Copernican conceptions into the circumference of the Earth, he has constructed this spiritual wall which he cannot get through. He is cut off from the spiritual thereby, and can remain with his concepts limited to the environs of the Earth, and there he develops the Spiritual Soul. Thus, in order that man should limit himself as ‘egotistically’ as possible to what is earthly, the Copernican world-philosophy, which erects its virtual wall around the Earth, fell to his lot. The more completely the Copernican world-philosophy is developed, the more certain is it that, through external perception, man is cut off from the spiritual world; but it also becomes the more necessary that he should again through inner perception, and by animating his inner life, find the connection with the spiritual. Remarkable things, very remarkable things run parallel. When such things are uttered, it is rather difficult to follow them, but if in the whole wide world there are none but the anthroposophists to understand them, they must take all the more trouble to do so.

There exists today a something like a “Theory of Knowledge;” that particular philosophical science which is based on Kant is called “Theory of Knowledge.” Yet this theory of knowledge is really—one might say—a nail in the coffin of human knowledge. Take a main thought about the ordinary theory of knowledge which as a rule runs in the minds of people today. It is said: Over there is an object: but what is out there is really only the vibration of ether, it has nothing to do with color or sound but is the movement of the smallest particles in space. The air moves out there, soundless; these concussions of the air approach our ear,—Schopenhauer spoke somewhat disrespectfully of the theory of knowledge, he said that these concussions ‘drum’ on the ear—and afterwards become what we call ‘sound.’ All is silent without, there are merely ‘concussions’ in the air. Then there are waves of ether outside. They strike upon the eye. But the matter does not end there; the waves strike upon the eye and the image is produced on the retina. Man knows nothing of this image, however, until it is investigated by science. The processes continue further with the optic nerve. These can only be of a material nature however; they go as far as the membrane covering the brain and there a quite mysterious process takes place. Then the soul comes in to make a concept of what is outside, of what is ‘dark and silent,’ a shining and colored concept, a warm and cold concept and so on; it creates the objects there within itself, and ‘dreams’ the whole world.

It is very remarkable that that is the road along which the Theory of Knowledge would penetrate from the external material world to the human spirit. But what is really the substance of this Theory of Knowledge? It is strange: if one remains at the things which have sound and color (the Theory of Knowledge calls what uneducated people believe ‘simple realism’), then at least one has a resounding and a colored world. But now, through the Theory of Knowledge, one brings this world for example before one's eyes. One has the image on the retina; within one has only the continuation of the image in the workings on the optic nerve; in the cerebrum there is nothing of the outer world, but the inner being charms forth the whole world again from the ‘vibrations.’ This makes one feel it is Baron Münchhausen again drawing himself up by his own tuft of hair! First, everything is eliminated and one has nothing left but brain-vibrations; and afterwards the soul recreates the outer world which has first been put away; then like Münchhausen, one lays hold of oneself by one's own tuft of hair and draws oneself up. But this is ‘basic philosophical knowledge,’ anyone who has not this, does not stand at the height of present-day knowledge.

If we try to follow up the whole diversified world as far as man himself, what have we finally? The processes in the membrane covering the cerebrum are not nearly as complicated as those in the optic nerve; they are the simplest of all. If we investigate how the world is in man we come to something extremely simple. We look for the spirit, but yet only come to a spirit which ‘dreams’ the world. There we must make a leap for so far no one has succeeded in distilling the spirit. In the quest of the spirit we come first to the brain vibrations, and we must then make something, which is nothing. This is the method science has followed in order to get to the spirit from the external sense-world.

On the earth we have many different conditions of life, and of life-influences, before the manifold variety of which we stand in respect and awe. Then we observe the difference in human beings in the different parts of the world—no matter whether the individual human characters are sympathetic or unsympathetic to us—if we consider the differentiations in mankind, we find that it is really as diversified as the sense-world outside is in its relation to man. In that bygone period in which the so-called childish ‘duffers’ lived, men try to understand the multiplicity of the Earth by rising to Heaven, by rising from the sensible to the spiritual. This they no longer do today. As we ascend farther and farther away from the diversified Earth, we have the same feeling as if we were coming from the external sense-world to the human Spirit through the eye and the brain; we come to what Copernicanism represents to us as the great Spiritual Cosmos. Just as the physiological theory of knowledge adopted the method of erecting a barrier in the vibrations of the brain in order to avoid coming to the human soul by way of the outer world, so in the same way does Copernicanism board up the world spiritually in the direction of the spiritual world. If we wish to realize the value of a world-conception we must know the point of view from which it is conceived. The point of view of Copernicanism does not pretend to place the true in the place of the false, once and for all; but it ‘boards up the world with planks’ so that man shall cultivate his consciousness soul within this ‘earthly tenement.’ This is the secret of the matter. We must look at these things in cold blood and with energy. We must first be able to shatter in our own selves that on which the easy-going people, who accept the world-philosophies of today, believe themselves to stand so firmly. As long as we are not able to shatter this in ourselves, as long as we are not able to see that really through Copernicanism the world is ‘boarded up with planks’—so long shall we not reach the point of acquiring a relationship to Spiritual Science, for which many things are necessary.

Just imagine for a moment what the Cosmos consists of, apart from the Earth. According to the Copernican world-conception, it is a calculation! It can never be that to Spiritual Science but something that presents itself to spiritual cognition. Why have we a geology which believes that the Earth has only evolved from the purely mineral world? Because the Copernican world-conception has to produce the present-day materialistic geology. For it has nothing in itself which could prove that the Earth, from the point of view of the Cosmos or spiritual world, might be conceived as an ensouled, spiritualized being. A universe as conceived by Copernicus could only be a dead Earth! An animated ensouled and spiritualized Earth must be conceived as coming from a different Cosmos, really from quite another Cosmos from that of Copernicus. But of course one can only mention a few features of the Earth's being, as it appears when viewed from the Cosmos

Is it a quite unreal conception to imagine the Earth's being as coming from the Cosmos? It is no unreal conception, it is a very ‘real’ one. A conception which, for example, once existed in the imagination of Herman Grimm, but he excused himself immediately after having written it. In an essay written in 1858 he says: “One might imagine—(but he immediately adds: I am not presenting an article of faith, this is only a fancy picture)—that when the soul of man is freed from the body it moves around the Earth freely in the Cosmos and that in this free movement it would observe the Earth from the outside; what happens on the Earth would then appear to man in quite another light.” That was the fancy of Hermann Grimm.‘Man would become acquainted with all occurrences from a different point of view. For instance he would look into the human heart “as into a glass beehive.’ The thoughts arising in the human heart would spring up as from a glass bee-hive!” That is a fine picture. And he pictured further that this man who had hovered around the Earth for a time, and had looked at it from the outside, now reincarnated on the Earth. He would have a Father and Mother, a Fatherland and everything usual on the Earth, and would have to forget everything he had experienced from another point of view. And if he were perhaps an historian in the sense of today (Hermann Grimm is here describing from a subjective point of view) he could not then do otherwise then forget what went before, for one cannot write history with the other concepts.

This is a fancy which comes very close to the truth. For it is absolutely true that the human soul between death and rebirth is, as it were, floating around the Earth, and—as I have often depicted—conditioned by karmic relations, it looks down upon the Earth. The soul that has altogether the feeling that this Earth is an ensouled and spiritualized organism—and the prejudice that considers it as something without soul, something purely geological, ceases. And then the Earth becomes very greatly differentiated; to man's perception between death and rebirth it becomes so differentiated that in fact the East looks different from the American West. It is not possible to speak about the Earth to the dead, as one would to geologists; for the dead do not understand the geological conceptions. But they know that looking down from cosmic space at the East—from Asia across into Russia—the Earth appears as if covered with a bluey sheen; blue or bluish-mauve. Thus does that side of the Earth appear, seen from cosmic space. When we come towards the Western Hemisphere, to the American side, it then appears as more or less a fiery red. There we have a polarity of the Earth, as seen from the Cosmos. Of course the Copernican world-conception cannot of itself give this; but it is another perception, from a different point of view. It will be comprehensible to anyone who has this point of view, that this Earth, this ensouled Earth-organism, appears different in its Eeastern half from its Western half, when viewed from outside. In its Eastern half it has a blue covering, in its Western it has something like a flashing-forth from within outwards; hence the fiery red seen externally. Here you have one example by which man between death and rebirth can direct himself by what he then learns. He learns to know the configuration of the Earth, it's a different appearance when seen from the Cosmos and the spiritual world; he learns to realize that on one side it is bluish-violet, on the other fiery red. And in accordance always with the spiritual needs which he will develop from his karma, this knowledge decides for him where he will reincarnate. Of course one must imagine things as being much more complicated than this; but from such conditions does man between death and rebirth, develop the forces which occasion him to reincarnate in a child body having a certain inheritance.

I have only mentioned two modifications of color, but there are of course other modifications besides those of color, many others. For the present I will only mention that in the center between the East and the West, for example, in our regions, the Earth is more of a green shade when seen from outside. So that this gives us a three-foldness which can throw a deal of light on the way in which man can determine, by what he beholds between death and rebirth, whether he is to appear in the East or West or elsewhere on the Earth.

If we bear this in mind we shall gradually gain the idea that in the relations between the man incarnated here in the physical body and the discarnate man, certain things come into play which, for the most part, are not taken into consideration at all. If we go into a foreign land and wish to understand the people, we must learn their language. If we wish to understand the dead you must gradually acquire the language of the dead. But this is at the same time the language of Spiritual Science, for it is spoken by all the so-called living and all of the so-called dead. It is this which passes to and fro between us and the beyond. It is particularly important to acquire pictures such as these of the universe, and not mere abstract concepts. We get a picture of the Earth if we imagine a sphere hovering in space, on the one side glowing bluish-mauve, on the other burning a flashing reddish-yellow, and between these a green zone. Pictorial representations gradually carry man over into the spiritual world. That is the point. One is of course obliged to set up pictorial representations when speaking seriously of the spiritual world, and it is further necessary not merely to think of such pictorial representations as a sort of fiction, but to make something out of them. Let us once again recall the bluish-violet glimmering Orient and the reddish-yellow flashing Occident. Here various differentiations come in. When a dead person in our present era observe certain places, then from the place which here on Earth is known as Palestine, as Jerusalem, something with a golden form, a golden crystal form, is to be seen in the middle of the bluish-mauve color and this becomes animated. That is the Jerusalem as seen from the spirit! This it is which also in the Apocalypse (speaking of imaginative conceptions) figures as the heavenly Jerusalem. These are not ‘thought-out’ things, they are things which can be observed, seen spiritually. The Mystery of Golgotha appeared like what physical observation precedes when the astronomer directs his telescope to space and beholds something which fills him with wonder like, for example the flashing-up of new stars. Seen spiritually, from the Universe, the Event of Golgotha was the flashing-up of a star of gold in the blue aura of the Eastern half of the Earth. Here you have the Imagination for what I developed at the close of my lecture the day before yesterday. It is really a question of acquiring, by means of such Imaginations, ideas of the Universe which bring the human soul into union with the Spirit of the Universe.

Try to think with someone who has passed over, of the crystal form of the heavenly Jerusalem building itself up into golden splendor in the bluish-violet aura of the Earth, and that will bring you near to him; for that is something which belongs to the realm of the Imaginations into which she entered at death: “Out of God we are born, and in Christ we die.”

There are means by which we can shut ourselves off from the spiritual reality and there are means by which we can draw near to it. We can shut ourselves off from spiritual reality by trying to ‘calculate’ it. Certainly mathematics do belong to the realm of the spirit, pure spirit; but in their application to physical reality they are the means of cutting us off from the spiritual. In so far as you calculate, just so far do you cut yourself off from the spirit. Kant once said: “There is just the same amount of science in the world as there is mathematics.” But one might also say, from the other point of view, which is equally justifiable, that there is darkness in the world to the same degree as man has succeeded in judging the world by means of calculation. We approached the spiritual life when we press on from external perception, and particularly from abstract concepts, towards Imaginations, to pictorial ideas. Copernicus has led man to calculate the universe; the opposite perception must lead men once more again to picture the universe, to imagine a universe with which the human soul can identify itself, so that the Earth appears as an organism shining into the universe, blue-violet, with the heavenly Jerusalem radiating golden light on the one side, and the yellowish-red flashing on the other side.

Whence comes the blue-violet on the one side of the Earth-aura? When one sees this side of the Earth-sphere, the physical part of the Earth disappears from external view, the aura of light becomes transparent, and the dark part of the Earth disappears. This creates the blue which penetrates through. You can explain the phenomenon from Goethe's theory of color. But because in the Western Hemisphere the inner part of the Earth flashes up—flashes up anyway which verifies what I described the day before yesterday: namely, that in America man is determined by the subterranean element, by what is under the Earth—for that reason the inner part of the Earth rays out and flashes like a red-yellow shimmer, like a reddish-yellow sparkling fire radiating into the Cosmos. This is only meant to be a picture sketched in quite fine outlines, but it should show you that it is indeed possible to speak, not merely in ordinary abstract thoughts, but in very, very concrete concepts about the world in which we live between death and rebirth. Finally, all this is adapted to prepare our souls to obtain a connection with the spiritual world, with the higher Hierarchies; with that world in which man lives between death and rebirth. But I intend to speak specially about this tomorrow; today I should only like to mention just one other thing.

The present era of human evolution, the fifth Post-Atlantean epoch, which exists for the development of the Spiritual or Consciousness Soul, contains manifold secrets. One of these is especially well guarded by those who believe that such truths should not yet be communicated to the humanity of to-day. This again is somewhat difficult. But since in the whole wide world there is no one else inclined to receive such things, you must really condescend to recognize them. In the course of this culture epoch, which began in the 15th century of our era, a remarkable longing began to make itself felt in men, along which lives chiefly in the subconsciousness, but must ever more and more be brought up into consciousness. This longing proceeds from a very definite cause.

I have often said that man is a twofold being. He is a being composed of many more than two parts; but particularly he is a twofold being, and consists as such as head and the rest of the body. The head is in particular that to which we should apply the Darwinian theory, the head is that which can be traced back to animal forms. During the Old Moon period man had animal forms, not those of the present animal kingdom, but a more spiritual, etherical animal form. This has hardened into the human head, and now, when animals on the Earth are developing as they are, man is not developing under the same conditions as were suitable for the head, for that he has inherited; but, according to the requirements of the rest of his body. This however does not descend from the animals. The head descends from the animals, but only from the etheric animals. We therefore carry an animal nature in our head, but it is an etheric animality. That entered men's unconscious nature in the fifth post-Atlantean epoch. They noticed more and more that there is something of the animal in man, but they could no longer think of it as anything spiritual. They got it into their heads that man must have ‘animal’ feelings, and this culminated in the Darwinian theory of the descent of man from the animal. This was not only expressed in the Darwinian doctrine of descent. The animal has a different perception from man; it stands in a more intimate connection with things than does man. Man is the superior being of the Earth just because he has cut himself off from the things so as to be obliged to build a bridge again from himself to them. The animal experiences the outer world much more inwardly than does man; if it were philosophically inclined it would not speak of ‘boundaries of knowledge,’ because there are no boundaries to knowledge for the animal such as those of which man speaks; these only exist because of the higher organization of man. The animal feels in a sense the whole universe within it through its group-soul; it has no boundaries of knowledge, knows nothing of them. Man began to feel more and more that he carries an animal within him. He did not wish to conceive this relation spiritually, supersensibly, etherically; he thought man was related to the animals physically. He then wanted to have a knowledge subconsciously, such as the animal has. He was however obliged to prove that he could not have that. The animal lives with the ‘thing in itself.’ The ‘thing in itself’ is unknown to man, when he says: “I should really like to be an animal, I should like to be as well off as the animal, but I cannot be as well off.” To affirm a ‘thing in itself’ which limits our knowledge, proceeds from the longing of man to feel himself animal, while he yet knows that he cannot have such a knowledge as the animal. This is the secret of Kantism. What can be said of the boundaries of knowledge is intimately connected with the impulse of modern humanity towards the consciousness of the animal. The Ancients knew that the animal has no boundaries of knowledge; for that reason they considered it good fortune to understand, for example, the language of the animals. You all know the fable connected with this.

That is one thing which the Ancients knew: that the animal has no boundaries of knowledge, in the sense in which man has them in modern times. But they knew something else as well: they knew that the beings belonging to the Hierarchy of the Angels are free beings, beings with freedom of will. And they knew that man is on the way to become an Angel. When the Earth shall have completed the Jupiter-stage man will have reached the stage of the Angel. He is now on the way to freedom. Freedom is developing within him. But what is left for the epoch which is gradually appearing with the evolution of the Spiritual Soul, if mankind turns away from his evolution to the stage of the Angels? There remains only the thought: freedom is an illusion! Man, in respect to his activity, is subject to the necessities of nature. To the degree in which boundaries of knowledge are erected does man turn away from his development to freedom. This is intimately connected with what has appeared—only in a coarser way—in the declaration of the descent of man from the animals; whereas in reality man has a very complicated descent, as I have often explained.

Today I have burdened you with some of the more difficult concepts. But they were necessary, and tomorrow we shall be able to speak principally on the connection between the present earthly life in the physical body and the life between death and rebirth, from a certain point of view. The concepts will then not be so difficult; but what you were so good as to listen to today in respect to more difficult concepts will help you tomorrow in regard to others.

It has been some time since it has been possible to have a branch meeting here in Mannheim, and today we are once again able to fulfill such a task. In recent times, you, my dear friends, have attentively and eagerly acquired the knowledge that can be called the more important ideas and insights of our spiritual scientific worldview. Therefore, it is perhaps not inappropriate for us to speak today about something that, on the one hand, turns our gaze to the whole of our spiritual scientific movement and, on the other hand, also gives us the opportunity to utilize what we have acquired in spiritual knowledge, namely about the human being and his development , to utilize it, so to speak, in the service to which every human being should be devoted, and which, for anthroposophists in particular, should take on a special form through their insights, through the perceptions they can gain from the spiritual-scientific world view. You know, my dear friends, that the development of humanity is progressing, that epoch follows epoch, age follows age, and each age has its special task. We can distinguish between larger and smaller ages in the historical development of humanity, and in each age there are very special moments when it is necessary not to fail to penetrate the actual task, the actual mission of that age. We may note that in the successive periods of time, tasks are set for people from the spiritual worlds, tasks that are very special for this or that age, and for us humans it is then a matter of doing the right thing, of knowing something about these tasks, of absorbing into our soul a realization of these tasks. We really live in an age in which it is urgently necessary for a number of people to gain knowledge again of what is to be done today or in our presence, preferably in the spiritual realm. I would like to begin by bringing two periods of time that are very close to us to your mind's eye, two periods of time that are close to us because one of them belongs to the past and much of its spiritual wealth and products still extends into our present; but the second period has hardly begun. We are standing at the beginning of a new period, a smaller cycle or period of humanity, standing, so to speak, at the boundary. Therefore, it is of very special importance to understand these two periods a little. The one period covers approximately that epoch which began with Augustine and ended with the approach of the 16th century. In occult science it is said that this period covers the time from Augustine to Calvin. Then, following this, we have another period that covers the time from Calvin to the last third of the 19th century. And we are again at the starting point of a period with new tasks, the observance of which is extremely important for the immediate future of humanity. Let us now try to form a rough idea of what happens at the beginning of a new period. When one period ends and another begins, something is ending and something is beginning. Something is decaying and something is germinating, as if rooted, like a new dawn for a sunshine that is preparing as the sunshine of a new age. And the peculiarity of such a transitional age – you know that people speak of transitional ages in different senses, but we are really dealing with a transitional age today in a very meaningful sense – is that new forces of culture must be added to humanity.

To characterize this, I will consider a great task for all of humanity; that is the advent of Christianity. If we form an idea of the way in which Christianity arose, we have to say: Actually, it was rejected by precisely those who were at the forefront of culture. But at the same time, those who were at the forefront of culture had reached a state of decline. Try to imagine Roman culture in decline and try to imagine the communities to which Paul preached. These were people who, so to speak, naively but with fresh energies faced the culture, with a lively sense of what was to come, which one did not really count among the highest blossoms of the culture of the time. These were the new forces, but sometimes even born from the lowest layers of the people. Because the complicated social life of the upper leading circles, when it has developed for a time, must come down, but especially because science, with its concepts, ideas and so on, arrives at a point where it cannot develop further, something new, something popular, must intervene. We have put a major turnaround in front of us. In a sense, we are facing another turning point today. What has been achieved with great dedication as scientific thoughts and ideas has actually reached a point where everyone who is insightful must say: it really cannot go any further – the scientific concepts and ideas that are being pursued today in official currents are on the verge of decay. And the whole way in which spiritual life is approached, where the great currents of this spiritual life flow, is in full decline. I would like to describe with a few stark words how this decline could actually be observed with relatively rapid steps by those who observe such things at all.

If you took part in this life, as it was expressed in literature, through books and the like, in science, then you grew up with a seriousness, with a seriousness that is now regarded as old-fashioned, that is no longer understood. The tone of weekly magazines, for example, was quite different in the 1970s than it is today. It was, if we may use the expression, much, much more dignified. Back then, there were very specific views within this intellectual current regarding how to relate to drama, poetry, and so on. That has changed, as one thought back then. In those days there was also a certain way of writing poetry, in which one satisfied less strict demands, for example, writing plays for small festive occasions, more for fun, for a joke. Sometimes there was quite a bit of talent in it. In particular, the students at their assemblies performed plays in which there was quite a bit of talent. Now one got a little older and could look around at the literary currents, and one found among them esteemed products that were, however, exactly the same as what had previously been considered only good for the day. That became literary maturity for the intellectual movement. In order not to cause too much offence, I do not want to mention any names. Today we are already at the point that we have nothing but printed trivialities in the broadest sense – entire bookstores are filled with them. Just thirty to forty years ago, one would have been sorry for the ink to write them down. When a person is going through such a change, they do not judge things starkly enough, but this is how cultural history will have to characterize our late 19th century. Indeed, we are facing a decline of traditional intellectual life, and this could easily be demonstrated by the decline of scientific theories. Therefore, we should not be surprised if what is to emerge as a new spiritual movement, what is to bring something new to human development, finds little support among what is today called the official intellectual life; if the members of these circles say: There are such associations of half-wits who call themselves Theosophists, who are basically quite uneducated people mostly — and so on. These are necessities that are present in every transitional age. Fresh forces must come from below, and what springs up in this way will then become necessary for the later age in order to really create an ascending movement. Now I said: we have seen two ages go by. The age from Augustine to Calvin, for example, was an age that sought to internalize all the soul forces of man, all the forces of man. This tendency to introspection was to be seen in all fields during this time; external natural science was less practised, people's attention was less directed to the outer laws and phenomena of nature. In the starting point of Augustine himself, in which we see our spiritual-scientific structure of the human being prefigured in a certain way, we find the idea of the influence of supersensible powers that make use of the human being as an instrument. As this epoch continued, what strange phenomena we encounter: the mysticism of Meister Eckhart, Suso, Johannes Tauler and many others. Although outer science receded into the background during this epoch, we find in it another remarkable way of embracing nature with a genius-like intuitive gaze. We see how this is elevated in such people as Agrippa von Nettesheim, for example. Phenomena such as Paracelsus and Jakob Böhme present themselves to us as the fruits of this deepening of the human soul in those centuries. Such a current can only last for a certain length of time. It has an ascending direction, a culmination, a high point and a descending line. As a rule, such a direction is replaced by something that appears to be a counter-image in a certain way.

In fact, the following centuries are a counter-image to this trend. The internalized image of the human soul is gradually forgotten. Times are coming when natural science has achieved such infinite triumphs. The great phenomena of a Copernicus, Kepler, Galilei occur, right up to those of the 19th century such as Julius Robert Mayer, Darwin and so on. A vast amount of external facts is brought to light.

And yet, people at the beginning of the new epoch were different from those of later times. A man like Kepler, for example, who had such a significant impact on physical science, was a pious man, a man who felt deeply, deeply connected to Christianity in his innermost being. And Kepler, the discoverer of Kepler's three laws, which are basically nothing more than time and space laws clothed in mathematical formulas, something quite mechanical, oh, this Kepler - he spent much more time than on such explain how things were in the great world at that time, when the mystery of Palestine took place on earth; how Saturn, Jupiter and Mars were related to each other when Christ Jesus was born. Kepler's great thoughts were directed towards this. He was able to give mankind what he had to say about the science of the stars in purely mathematical terms. What he carried in his heart, in his deepest heart, remained his property in an age that only served the outer life.

Or take Newton. Where would you not refer to Newton as the discoverer of the laws of gravity? But where would it also be emphasized - when Haeckel, for example, talks about the epoch-making phenomenon of Newton - where would it be emphasized that Newton was so Christian that in his quietest and most sacred hours he wrote a commentary on the Apocalypse in his own way? But he could not give it to humanity. He was able to give humanity the purely mechanical law of gravity in the age dedicated to the external summarization of natural phenomena. And this age has just expired with the last third of the 19th century.

Now an age is beginning that must necessarily be a counter-image to the previous one. And the task of preparing this counter-image, which is to continue to work in such a way that everything we have often spoken of can come to pass, is the spiritual-scientific world view, which in turn must bring a deepening of the human soul. But each age must work differently than the one before. It would be wrong to simply study as it was done correctly from Augustine to Calvin. We may let such phenomena have their effect on us, but we must know that today, after such an age of natural science, we must seek the spiritual world differently than in the past. Is there anything else, apart from what man can think in the abstract, from which one can recognize that man is really compelled and forced to grasp the world anew in every age?

If you study Paracelsus today, for example, you will find that he is an unfathomable spirit for today's trivial external research, a spirit who has particularly looked deeply into the secrets of healing and medicine. And anyone who delves into what he had to say about healing this or that form of illness will be able to learn something quite tremendous and magnificent from Paracelsus. Let us assume that a physician who is at the level of the real level of the spiritual life of our time would delve so deeply that he would want to apply what would result from Paracelsus' instructions. For certain great things, quite correct things would arise, but the physician of the present day could no longer acquire some of them. For if he were to apply some of the remedies indicated there, it would not help, because human nature has changed since the 16th century, because everything in the world changes and everything progresses. Things outside do not obey our arbitrary knowledge, which moves in steps. They move forward, and we have the task of investigating with our knowledge, our insight. We must learn anew, as Paracelsus learned. And if we most faithfully do as he did, we will find something quite different in many respects. Thus, we have very special spiritual tasks in our time.

Now I would like to characterize in a few broad strokes how it is written in the stars that human culture must progress in the near future. It is not left to the hand of man alone to give this culture a direction. The old views would not fit the change in the real circumstances. Things take their course, and spiritual science has the task of saying what course things are taking, it gives us the guidance to understand our time.

We are standing at the dawn of a completely new human life and thinking. Three things are of particular importance and significance in human spiritual life: firstly, religion; secondly, science; and thirdly, the way people live together, the feelings and perceptions that people develop for each other, and what takes place in the social sphere. These three are the most important, so that it is of particular importance to follow in the successive epochs what forms these three must take, that which comes into consideration as religion, as science or social life. And there are certain demands that man simply must understand, that are beyond his control.

Why must religion, science and social life change from epoch to epoch? Simply because human nature changes. We do not learn that human nature consists of different parts for the sake of learning that. We do not learn that the human being consists of a physical body, a life body and an astral body with sentient, intellectual and conscious soul so that a few people can have something to do with it and can acquire these classifications. We learn these classifications because they have a far-reaching significance for human life. And you can sense this far-reaching significance if you think back to the culture that was Egyptian-Chaldean, for example, when it was the sentient soul that was primarily important. There, the higher beings primarily worked through this. And in the Greco-Latin period, in the time of the emergence of Christianity, everything that came from the divine-spiritual heights and worked into humanity worked on the mind soul. And today it works on the consciousness soul. We understand nothing at all about the relationship between the human being and the great forces of the world if we do not know how this human nature is structured. What are we preparing today by devoting ourselves to spiritual-scientific insight? In our time, it is especially the consciousness soul that is cultivated. All external thinking and knowledge, all useful thinking, this thinking according to the principle of usefulness, is based to a certain extent on the development of the consciousness soul. But something like the light of the spirit self is already pushing its way into this. Now the remarkable thing is that in our time we have two parallel currents, one that rushes down into decay and one that rises to future glory. The one that rushes down into decay has not yet arrived at that decay. At the same time, it is the source of great discoveries that still have a tremendous future. This too has its beneficial effects. Certainly, for a long time to come mankind will benefit from that which is, after all, heading towards decay. But the kind of thinking that invents balloons is the thinking of decay. And the thinking that deals with the structure of humanity is the thinking of the future of humanity.

But these two do show a common transition. We can see that in all fields. I would like to start by giving you a very practical example: the field of monetary transactions. This changed quite considerably in the 19th century. A tremendous turnaround has taken place. If you follow the period immediately preceding the last third of the 19th century, all monetary speculation was tied to the individuality, to the personality. It was the purely financial and speculative genius of the Rothschilds that introduced money everywhere and led it back again to and from the money centers. And if we follow the history of the great banking houses, we have examples everywhere of how monetary transactions took place entirely out of the nature of the human being, based on the consciousness soul, on the individual human being. This has changed. We just do not talk much about it yet because it is only just beginning. Today, the consciousness soul no longer exclusively rules in monetary transactions; today, something of a kind of grouping prevails: the share capital, the company, the association, that which is supra-personal.

Try to follow what is only just beginning to emerge today and what will come more and more. Today it is almost irrelevant who stands as a personality here or there. What human beings have worked into the circulation of money is already working without personality, is already working by itself. In a descending current, you have the spread of the consciousness soul to the spirit self.

Here we have it in the current of decay; and we have it in the current of ascending life, where we seek that which the individual capable personality has achieved, where we seek to gain the help of those powers through inspiration, which will give us the inspirations from the spiritual world again. There, too, we go from the personal to the superpersonal. Thus, there are common characteristics for the ages with regard to both the declining and the ascending currents. In particular, however, one must be careful not to take into account in any age what authority is present in that age. As long as one does not have spiritual insight, one can go very far astray.

This is particularly the case in one area of human culture, in the area of materialistic medicine, where we see how exactly that is decisive, which the authority has in its hands and more and more lays claim to, where that wants to lead to something much, much more terrible and dreadful than any rule of authority of the much-criticized Middle Ages. We are already living in it, and it will become ever stronger and stronger. When people mock so terribly at the ghosts of medieval superstition, one might well ask: Has anything changed in relation to that? Has the fear of ghosts gone away? Don't people fear many more ghosts today than they did back then? It is much more terrible than is generally believed what goes on in the human soul when it is presented with the fact that there are 60,000 germs on the palm of the hand. In America, it has been calculated how many such germs are in a single male mustache. Should we not, then, decide to say: These medieval ghosts were at least decent ghosts, but today's bacillus ghosts are too puny, too indecent ghosts, to justify the fear that is only just beginning and that makes people, especially here, in the field of health, fall into a terrible belief in authority. We must say that we see the character of the transition period everywhere. We must only look at the phenomena in the right way, and we see this character everywhere.

Now we ask ourselves: What do the stars, the teachings and revelations of theosophy tell us about further development in these three most important areas of life? What must it become in the future and how must we work so that the creative, fruitful spirit self can be guided over into the consciousness soul in the right way in the spiritual sense? The prophetic stars, that is, the teachings of spiritual science, tell us the following about this future form: According to the whole way in which people have tried to bring religion into the currents of humanity, in the past centuries, religion is an amalgamation of two things, one of which, in the strict sense of the word, cannot actually be called religion; the other is religion.

What then is religion in reality? It is something that we must characterize as an attitude of the human soul: an attitude towards the spiritual, towards the infinite. Basically, we can characterize it well if we start with the basics of these attitudes, which then only have to be developed to the highest degree. If we walk across a meadow and have an open soul for what is green and blooming there, we will feel something joyful for the glories that reveal themselves through the flowers and grasses, through that which is reflected in the landscape, which glistens in the dew. If we can muster such an attitude, if our heart opens up, then it is not yet religion. It can only become religion when this feeling intensifies for the infinite that is behind the finite, for the spiritual that is behind the sensual. When our soul feels in such a way that it senses communion with the spiritual, then this mood corresponds to what is alive in religion. The more we can intensify this mood for the eternal within us, the more we foster religion in ourselves or in other people.

But now the necessary development of the times has brought about a situation in which what should basically be impulses that direct human feeling and perception from the transitory to the non-transitory has been combined with certain ideas and views of what it is like in the realm of the supersensible. But through this religion has become connected in a certain sense with what is actually spiritual science, with what must actually be regarded as science. And today we see how religion in this or that form can only be maintained in this church belief if very specific dogmas are maintained at the same time. But this produces what can be called the rigid dogmatic adherence to certain ideas about the spiritual world. Such conceptions should naturally progress as the human mind progresses. And it is this progress that should give the truest religious feeling the greatest joy, for it shows the greater the glories of the divine spiritual world and the greater their significance.

True religious feeling would not have consigned Giordano Bruno to the stake, but would have said: Oh, it is great for God to send people of this kind down to earth and to reveal such things through them. - In this way, the field of scientific research would necessarily have been recognized alongside the religious field, a field that extends to both the external and the spiritual world. This must progress, it must be suited from epoch to epoch to the human spirit, which progresses. In regard to this scientific research, a great change occurred when the 16th century approached. Before the age of Copernicus, Kepler and Galilei, things looked very strange at the teaching institutions and universities. Aristotle is certainly a great sage, but what he did was the greatest thing for his time. What the Middle Ages did with him was a very strong misunderstanding of his spirit, and in the end they no longer understood it at all, had no more idea of what he meant. Nevertheless, they always taught according to him.

In order to show you how knowledge must change from epoch to epoch as the human spirit progresses, so that misunderstandings do not arise, I would like to go into more detail about an event connected with Aristotle. Aristotle worked from a time when there was still an awareness that a body of ether was present in human nature, not just blood, nerve cords and so on. If one were to draw the etheric body, for example, one would get a very different drawing from what today's anatomists find and draw of this human being. How one draws it today was not given much importance in the time in which Aristotle created, because the etheric human being was still known. If you wanted to draw that, you would have to see a center here where the heart is, and draw rays emanating from there, important rays, but then going to the brain and having to do with the whole way a person thinks. Thinking is regulated when we look at the etheric body, from a center near the physical heart. Aristotle described this to illustrate the peculiar nature of thought. Later, people no longer understood what Aristotle meant, and they began to confuse the word for 'nerve' with the material nerve. It was believed that Aristotle meant the physical nerve cords when he described the etheric currents. With the transition to the materialistic period, Aristotle was no longer understood. So you can see that something completely wrong was learned. It was said that the main nerves emanate from the heart. Now came the scientific materialistic research, as inaugurated by Copernicus and Galileo, and then people came to the conclusion that the nerves emanate from the brain, namely the physical cords. And then they began to say: Aristotle is wrong. Thus Copernicus, Galileo and Giordano Bruno were opponents of Aristotle. The medieval Aristotelians did not adhere to the teachings of Aristotle, but to what they dreamt up about Aristotle. Thus it could happen that when Galileo showed a friend of his, who was an Aristotelian, the nerves running to the brain on a corpse, this friend preferred to trust Aristotle rather than his own observations. He believed in what he had imagined from the teachings of Aristotle. We see, then, how the stream of spiritual science was diverted in Aristotle's time into material science, the merits of which are not to be denied, and which has worked and continues to work for the benefit and salvation of humanity. But now we are in a time when we have to come up into the spiritual.

We are on the threshold of a time when science will again have to learn to understand the spiritual reality, when science will have to become what is called pneumatology in occultism, that is, spiritual teaching. What was science in the past century? The teaching of abstract ideas and natural laws that no longer had any connection with real spiritual life. Science is on the verge of becoming pneumatology, of returning to the spirit. This is written in the stars of theosophy. And since religion must always create an atmosphere for the spiritual, only in those ages can science and religion work in harmony when science works the spirit into pneumatology. Then science can be the right interpreter of spiritual life and support the mood that should in turn live in religion.

What is beginning is in such stark contrast to what has passed. Take, for example, what has passed in the various Protestant religious denominations: how they have tried not to let any scientific thinking into the area that should be dedicated to faith. Think of Luther and Kant. Kant said that he had to suspend knowledge so that he could have free rein for faith in freedom, immortality and God.

At that time, science was directed towards the external, sensual physical, it knew no interpretation of the supersensible, the spiritual. Therefore, what had been handed down in sacred documents had to be preserved as unadulterated as possible. This had its good justification. Now we are facing a different age, where theosophy guides us into the spiritual world, and now we will see how, little by little, a time is approaching when what is emerging is to be achieved by science being supported and enlightened precisely by theosophy. Religion and science will work together again in the next age. Science will become something that must gradually apply to all people. It will become understandable for everyone. Therefore, what is emerging as a parallel course of religion and science will, in the broadest sense, produce what could be called individualism in religion: every single heart will find its way into the spiritual world in an individual religious way. It is preordained for our age that that which can be common science in the spiritual will serve as an interpreter and guide in the religious realm in the most individual and personal way.

Again, it is shown in a remarkable way how, even here in decline, the personal moment points to something super-personal. The signs of decline also show this. And how does this pointing to a super-personal reality show itself in certain church conditions? What was it, then, when in a certain church those who are its custodians appealed to inspiration? [...] The things must be seen in relation to their spiritual character. Much of what is evident today, particularly in the religious life of the various denominations, points to this shining of the spirit self into what we call the consciousness soul, in both the ascending and descending sense.

This is particularly evident in the third of the three areas of human spiritual life. There will be a spreading of knowledge, knowledge of which today's practice of life has no real idea. One principle of this realization will be that the happiness of an individual human being can never be bought at the expense of the lesser happiness of others. In the future, the personal moment will be transferred into the transpersonal, and the egotistical into the trans-egotistical, into that which connects people. Gradually, a person will not want to be happy without knowing that others are equally happy. This mood, which is the opposite of our current way of life, is being prepared. There is only one way to create this mood, and that is through the realization of the real human essence and its composition, as spiritual science gives it to us. One must know man if one wants to be man.

We see these three things at the starting point of their development. What is the purpose of spiritual science? It should teach us to understand everything that must come. Now I want to say radically how people can relate to this. I will hypothetically assume for a while that what is today Theosophy and still represents a very small current would be seen by those who come into contact with it as a fantasy and reverie, and that it would be suppressed. Those who hold the anti-theosophical point of view would simply make it impossible for theosophy to flourish, because anti-theosophy is heading towards science. Then it would be impossible to gain an understanding of what has been described to you as the necessary development of science, religion and human life practice, written in the stars. Then people would exclude themselves from understanding these things. In which case, what would people be like? People would then be on Earth like a herd of some kind of animal that had ended up in completely alien climatic conditions that it cannot adapt to. The consequence of this would be that the animals would wither away and gradually perish. In this way, people would all fall prey to decay, decadence, premature destruction. Not through extinction, for instance. They would become more beast-like, which would be much worse than extinction, so that only the base passions and instincts and desires would really still be alive; that people would only desire to eat this or that, and they would use all their thinking to be able to produce that food. They would build factories to produce the best flour and the best bread, ships and balloons to bring fruit from the most distant regions and to deliver the products they want to enjoy. They would use tremendous ingenuity for the “rise of culture” – that is what they would call it. They would use infinite intelligence and mental power for this, but only to set the table in the end. Just think about what the phrase “rising culture” means from this point of view! Isn't the essential thing that infinite mental power is applied to it? If we only use it to telegraph: I need so many sacks of flour - then great intellectual power is used to produce something that ultimately only serves what we might call the animal in man. Materialism has led to a peak of intelligence and intelligent culture. But that has nothing to do with spirituality. Let us assume that people would be eliminated. What would the gods have to do? They would say to themselves: Now we have had a generation that did not understand the mission on earth. So we have to send down another generation, a generation of souls that will accomplish the mission on earth.

But small circles will already find understanding for what spiritual life of the future must be, and therefore the earth mission will be completed by people, and that which our fifth post-Atlantic culture, dedicated to the consciousness soul, will replace as the sixth, will already be achieved by a small circle of people who will spread throughout the rest of humanity. But this can only be achieved if people's free will intervenes. For once the ego has taken hold in human nature, man must also develop free will for the development of the ego. So it depends on each individual whether he wants to show understanding for spiritual development, or whether he wants to steer the descent that humanity is taking today.

A way of life must be developed that is based on the principle that the happiness of the individual cannot be attained at the expense of the happiness of another. If man does not want to understand this, he promotes the downward, withering, brutalizing development of humanity. Today we as human beings stand before this decision in a certain respect: to want or not to want spiritual science, and that means to want either the ascent or the decline of humanity. We should feel this in everything we do, we should feel that through our karma we have been placed like a new material in the development of humanity, like those who are to give up their powers as elementary powers, who must work their way up.

When we feel this way, we already have a practical sense of theosophy, a practical feeling, and we are aware of what we are actually doing when we develop the seemingly insignificant activity that we develop in such anthroposophical branches. Not as a hobby, a quirk of individuals, but as an understanding of the deepest needs of a newly emerging age.

I wanted to show you how things are interrelated so that we can truly understand the progress of humanity. Think for a moment about the sentence that man is a self-conscious being, that he must therefore know what he is, and only by knowing himself in his essence can he fulfill his destiny in the world; that therefore all those who do not want to know anything about the essence of man do not have the will to place themselves in the world in the right way. Do you remember how a spirit spoke that had an inkling of much of what is emerging today as Theosophy? Johann Gottlieb Fichte once spoke of his lofty ideas in the lectures 'On the Destination of the Scholar'. When he wanted to write a preface to these lectures, it occurred to him that now this will reach people who will just say: Yes, very nice ideas, but impractical. How can one introduce into life what is being said here? Yet Fichte was well aware that life is constantly guided by ideas.

Let us point out one example here. Who built the Simplon Tunnel? No engineer today can work without differential and integral calculus. Leibniz, who invented differential and integral calculus, is basically building all the tunnels and bridges in our time. The spiritual is everywhere the guiding force in all of life, and we can learn from what Fichte wrote, learn to strengthen ourselves in our theosophical consciousness when people say, “Oh, those are such eccentric ideas, nothing practical.” Fichte says in response: We know that ideas cannot be directly translated into life, and so do those who hold this against us. Perhaps we know it even better. But the fact that others do not want to know anything about ideas at all merely proves that the wise world government, the divine world government, will not be able to count on them. May a benevolent Nature, in which they believe, give them, at the right time, rain and sunshine, good digestion and, if possible, some good thoughts. In a way, we can strengthen ourselves by saying: we do know that, as Theosophists, we must cultivate an understanding for what must come. May a kind nature give them what Fichte said, but also what they need in spirit, what they believe they do not need. May the spirit give them ever wiser and wiser thoughts, so that they too will see spiritual science not as a reverie, but as an important impulse for humanity!

[ 1 ] Let us take another step toward thinking. Until this point we have merely looked at the position thinking takes toward the rest of the world of experience. We have arrived at the view that it holds a very privileged position within this world, that it plays a central role. Let us disregard that now. Let us limit ourselves here to the inner nature of thinking. Let us investigate the thought-world's very own character, in order to experience how one thought depends upon the other and how the thoughts relate to each other. Only by this means will we first be able to gain enlightenment about the question: What is knowing activity? Or, in other words: What does it mean to make thoughts for oneself about reality; what does it mean to want to come to terms with the world through thinking?

[ 2 ] We must keep ourselves free of any preconceived notions. It would be just such a preconception, however, if we were to presuppose that the concept (thought) is a picture, within our consciousness, by which we gain enlightenment about an object lying outside our consciousness. We are not concerned here with this and similar presuppositions. We take thoughts as we find them. Whether they have a relationship to something else or other, and what this relationship might be, is precisely what we want to investigate. We should not therefore place these questions here as a starting point. Precisely the view indicated, about the relationship of concept and object, is a very common one. One often defines the concept, in fact, as the spiritual image of things, providing us with a faithful photograph of them. When one speaks of thinking, one often thinks only of this presupposed relationship. One scarcely ever seeks to travel through the realm of thoughts, for once, within its own region, in order to see what one might find there.

[ 3 ] Let us investigate this realm as though there were nothing else at all outside its boundaries, as though thinking were all of reality. For a time we will disregard all the rest of the world.

[ 4 ] The fact that one has failed to do this in the epistemological studies basing themselves on Kant has been disastrous for science. This failure has given a thrust to this science in a direction utterly antithetical to our own. By its whole nature, this trend in science can never understand Goethe. It is in the truest sense of the word un-Goethean for a person to take his start from a doctrine that he does not find in observation but that he himself inserts into what is observed. This occurs, however, if one places at the forefront of science the view that between thinking and reality, between idea and world, there exists the relationship just indicated. One acts as Goethe would only if one enters deeply into thinking's own nature itself and then observes the relationship that results when this thinking, known in its own being, is then brought into connection with experience.

[ 5 ] Goethe everywhere takes the route of experience in the strictest sense. He first of all takes the objects as they are and seeks, while keeping all subjective opinions completely at a distance, to penetrate their nature; he then sets up the conditions under which the objects can enter into mutual interaction and waits to see what will result. Goethe seeks to give nature the opportunity, in particularly characteristic situations that he establishes, to bring its lawfulness into play, to express its laws itself, as it were.

[ 6 ] How does our thinking manifest to us when looked at for itself? It is a multiplicity of thoughts woven together and organically connected in the most manifold ways. But when we have sufficiently penetrated this multiplicity from all directions, it simply constitutes a unity again, a harmony. All its parts relate to each other, are there for each other; one part modifies the other, restricts it, and so on. As soon as our spirit pictures two corresponding thoughts to itself, it notices at once that they actually flow together into one. Everywhere in our spirit's thought-realm it finds elements that belong together; this concept joins itself to that one, a third one elucidates or supports a fourth, and so on. Thus, for example, we find in our consciousness the thought-content “organism”; when we scan our world of mental pictures, we hit upon a second thought-content: “lawful development, growth.” It becomes clear to us at once that both these thought-contents belong together, that they merely represent two sides of one and the same thing. But this is how it is with our whole system of thoughts. All individual thoughts are parts of a great whole that we call our world of concepts.

[ 7 ] If any single thought appears in my consciousness, I am not satisfied until it has been brought into harmony with the rest of my thinking. A separate concept like this, set off from the rest of my spiritual world, is altogether unbearable to me. I am indeed conscious of the fact that there exists an inwardly established harmony between all thoughts, that the world of thoughts is a unified one. Therefore every such isolation is unnatural, untrue.

[ 8] If we have struggled through to where our whole thought-world bears a character of complete inner harmony, then through it the contentment our spirit demands becomes ours. Then we feel ourselves to be in possession of the truth.

[ 9 ] As a result of our seeing truth to be the thorough-going harmony of all the concepts we have at our command, the question forces itself upon us: Yes, but does thinking even have any content if you disregard all visible reality, if you disregard the sense-perceptible world of phenomena? Does there not remain a total void, a pure phantasm, if we think away all sense-perceptible content?

[ 10 ] That this is indeed the case could very well be a widespread opinion, so we must look at it a little more closely. As we have already noted above, many people think of the entire system of concepts as in fact only a photograph of the outer world. They do indeed hold onto the fact that our knowing develops in the form of thinking, but demand nevertheless that a “strictly objective science” take its content only from outside. According to them the outer world must provide the substance that flows into our concepts. Without the outer world, they maintain, these concepts are only empty schemata without any content. If this outer world fell away, concepts and ideas would no longer have any meaning, for they are there for the sake of the outer world. One could call this view the negation of the concept. For then the concept no longer has any significance at all for the objective world. It is something added onto the latter. The world would stand there in all its completeness even if there were no concepts. For they in fact bring nothing new to the world. They contain nothing that would not be there without them. They are there only because the knowing subject wants to make use of them in order to have, in a form appropriate to this subject, that which is otherwise already there. For this subject, they are only mediators of a content that is of a non-conceptual nature. This is the view presented.

[ 11 ] If it were justified, one of the following three presuppositions would have to be correct.

[ 12 ] 1. The world of concepts stands in a relationship to the outer world such that it only reproduces the entire content of this world in a different form. Here “outer world” means the sense world. If that were the case, one truly could not see why it would be necessary to lift oneself above the sense world at all. The entire whys and wherefores of knowing would after all already be given along with the sense world.

[ 13 ] 2. The world of concepts takes up, as its content, only a part of “what manifests to the senses.” Picture the matter something like this. We make a series of observations. We meet there with the most varied objects. In doing so we notice that certain characteristics we discover in an object have already been observed by us before. Our eye scans a series of objects \(A\), \(B\), \(C\), \(D\), etc. \(A\) has the characteristics \(p\), \(q\), \(a\), \(r\); \(B\): \(l\), \(m\), \(b\), \(n\); \(C\): \(k\), \(h\), \(c\), \(g\); and \(D\): \(p\), \(u\), \(a\), \(v\). In \(D\) we again meet the characteristics \(a\) and \(p\), which we have already encountered in \(A\). We designate these characteristics as essential. And insofar as \(A\) and \(D\) have the same essential characteristics, we say that they are of the same kind. Thus we bring \(A\) and \(D\) together by holding fast to their essential characteristics in thinking. There we have a thinking that does not entirely coincide with the sense world, a thinking that therefore cannot be accused of being superfluous as in the case of the first presupposition above; nevertheless it is still just as far from bringing anything new to the sense world. But one can certainly raise the objection to this that, in order to recognize which characteristics of a thing are essential, there must already be a certain norm making it possible to distinguish the essential from the inessential. This norm cannot lie in the object, for the object in fact contains both what is essential and inessential in undivided unity. Therefore this norm must after all be thinking's very own content.

[ 14 ] This objection, however, does not yet entirely overturn this view. One can say, namely, that it is an unjustified assumption to declare that this or that is more essential or less essential for a thing. We are also not concerned about this. It is merely a matter of our encountering certain characteristics that are the same in several things and of our then stating that these things are of the same kind. It is not at all a question of whether these characteristics, which are the same, are also essential. But this view presupposes something that absolutely does not fit the facts. Two things of the same kind really have nothing at all in common if a person remains only with sense experience. An example will make this clear. The simplest example is the best, because it is the most surveyable. Let us look at the following two triangles.

[ 15 ] What is really the same about them if we remain with sense experience? Nothing at all. What they have in common—namely, the law by which they are formed and which brings it about that both fall under the concept “triangle”—we can gain only when we go beyond sense experience. The concept “triangle” comprises all triangles. We do not arrive at it merely by looking at all the individual triangles. This concept always remains the same for me no matter how often I might picture it, whereas I will hardly ever view the same “triangle” twice. What makes an individual triangle into “this” particular one and no other has nothing whatsoever to do with the concept. A particular triangle is this particular one not through the fact that it corresponds to that concept but rather because of elements lying entirely outside the concept: the length of its sides, size of its angles, position, etc. But it is after all entirely inadmissible to maintain that the content of the concept “triangle” is drawn from the objective sense world, when one sees that its content is not contained at all in any sense-perceptible phenomenon.

[ 16 ] 3. Now there is yet a third possibility. The concept could in fact be the mediator for grasping entities that are not sense-perceptible but that still have a self-sustaining character. This latter would then be the non-conceptual content of the conceptual form of our thinking. Anyone who assumes such entities, existing beyond experience, and credits us with the possibility of knowing about them must then also necessarily see the concept as the interpreter of this knowing.

[ 17 ] We will demonstrate the inadequacy of this view more specifically later. Here we want only to note that it does not in any case speak against the fact that the world of concepts has content. For, if the objects about which one thinks lie beyond any experience and beyond thinking, then thinking would all the more have to have within itself the content upon which it finds its support. It could not, after all, think about objects for which no trace is to be found within the world of thoughts.

[ 18 ] It is in any case clear, therefore, that thinking is not an empty vessel; rather, taken purely for itself, it is full of content; and its content does not coincide with that of any other form of manifestation.

Dr. Steiner: We should talk about everything that has happened during this long period.

They discuss a letter to the Ministry of Education about the students who will take the final examination.

Dr. Steiner: Why was it necessary to add that it lies in the nature of block instruction that some subjects have not been taught? In such official things, the smartest thing to do is not to get people upset by telling them things they don’t want to hear. What still needs to be done in literature?

You need to proceed efficiently. Some of the things you want to teach should be taught, but for the examination you do not need to teach the students anything about Goethe as a natural scientist, nor will they be asked questions about his letters on aesthetic education. His poetry will cause them some pain because it is not so easy. Hauptmann’s Hannele is better than Die Weber. They don’t have any idea about Goethe as a natural scientist. For such examinations it would be a mistake to feel you need to set up such a curriculum. Those things are not expected even for someone who is working toward a doctorate. They cannot be done in two years in school. Look here, here we have Faust, Part I.

I would like to know how you could do all that in school. Do you think you will find some themes for German in them? You need to cover what will come up in written examinations.

If you go to the ministry too often, they will think you have a bad conscience, and will get the feeling that things are not going right here. You should not go into such things so much, but only answer when the ministry writes. We will see how things go, we can always withdraw.

In the last part of school, you need to be sure that the students write and answer as much as possible themselves. They need to be much more active individually. If a student does not already know something, you should not be so quick to help. They need to develop their will and find the answers themselves. This is much better than it was before, when the students had to do nothing more than listen. I need to go through all the classes again and will do so at the next opportunity.

They present a letter inviting the Waldorf School to present some student work in Berlin.

Dr. Steiner: It would be good if we had more exact information. You need to find out what he wants. Exhibits of student work have a real purpose only when a course is being undertaken, that is, when the entire context and content of the Waldorf School are presented. But just displaying work? As long as people do not know exactly what the goals of the Waldorf School are, those who look at the work will not know what we expect of the students. It is the same as if we said we want to present only the pictures from an illustrated book of children’s tales. People will not understand anything. The people in Berlin need to say whether they will support the Waldorf School.

They discuss C.H. in the eleventh grade.

Dr. Steiner: His relationship to the class needs to come from his character. You should have him draw what is on the object, not the object itself. How light affects the object. The illuminated side and the shadow side. Not the table, but the light upon the table and the table’s shadow. He lacks a sense of perspective in painting. It is a clear defect, and it is good to work on his deficiencies. Let him try to draw a human face, but he should not draw a nose, only the light upon it and the shadows from it. You need to try to speak with him about things. He is disturbed. You need to make him imagine things sculpturally. He will be better in arithmetic than geometry, so you will need to make sure he understands geometry and isn’t just doing it from memory.

Cliques in the eleventh grade are discussed.

Dr. Steiner: Give them “Outsiders and Sociable People” as an essay topic, so that they have to think things through.

A teacher asks about eleventh-grade English. They have read Macaulay’s Warren Hastings.

Dr. Steiner: You could also read some English poetry, for example “The Sea School.” In addition, you could give them some characteristic prose, for example a chapter by Emerson such as the ones about Shakespeare and Goethe. Have them read that and then try to show the abrupt changes in the style of his thoughts. Discuss aphoristic and nonaphoristic styles and things in between, and show the relationships of those styles, how they arise. You should discuss that with the students and bring in a little psychology also. Emerson’s method of writing was to take all the books out of his library and spread them in front of himself. He then went around, walked around the room, read a sentence here or there, and wrote it down. He did the same thing again and then wrote down another sentence, independent of the first, and so forth. He found his inspiration in the library, and you can see the resulting jumps in his writing. Nietzsche wrote about the things he read by Emerson, for instance about Nature. In his own copy, Nietzsche circled certain things and then numbered them. Anyway, read poetry and Emerson.

A teacher: What should we read in tenth-grade French? Could we read Poincaré? A number of students want to leave.

Dr. Steiner: That is still a dangerous, a strange thing. In principle, you could do that, but not with Poincaré because there is so much untruth in it.

For those who want to leave, perhaps you should choose something that appears to be foreign to life, but actually leads to it. Something like Bulwer-Lytton’s Vril. That could be read in the tenth grade.

There is a collection of French essays by Hachette that contain essays by the other Poincaré, the mathematician. There is also a second part about technical thinking. That is something that might be useful.

For twelfth-grade English, you might also consider MacKenzie’s Humanism. We cannot go along with dropping French as they are doing in public schools.

A eurythmy teacher asks about difficulties with the upper grades. Some of the students want a different teacher.

Dr. Steiner: You need to treat that with some humor. Appear to agree and then develop it ad absurdum. There are always some students who want a different teacher. You need to be firm in your position and take it with some humor. You could perhaps ask, “What do you have against me? I am really a very nice lady; there is no reason for you to hate me.” Sometimes, you can quiet things in a couple of minutes that way.

A teacher asks about P.Z. in gymnastics class.

Dr. Steiner: He does not align the main direction of his body with gravity. You should try having him do exercises on the high bar so that he hangs. I mean that literally. Such an exercise would free his astral body. Sometimes you have children who look as though their astral body is too large, so that it is like a loose-fitting cloak around their I. Through such exercises, the astral body will become more firmly connected with the I. They feel good when their feet are off the floor, for instance, when they climb a ladder and sit there quietly. With such children, you will usually notice that they have something like oily or fatty skin when they hang their astral body. It will be like that in some way. Or, they may have wrinkled and loose skin.

Perhaps you can arrange gymnastics class so that groups of children do what is necessary according to their temperaments.

A teacher asks about the dramatic presentations done by the children at Miss MacMillan’s school.

Dr. Steiner: They do many things there that are not appropriate for the age of the children. It is impossible to put on dramas with children younger than ten, though afterward that goes quite well. It is not the method, but Miss MacMillan’s strength and spontaneity, that is effective. The method is strongly affected by the English tendency to do things too soon. That arises from the unusual relationship English people have to their experience of themselves as human beings. They want to be seen as human beings, and that is something taught them through such things. Such people have a strongly developed astral body, which limits their I to a certain level. That is not the case in other European countries. Spiritually, Englishmen look like human beings who go around not fully clothed, who do not have a collar. That is how their I lives within them and how they are in their surroundings. They have a certain human sociality in their character that makes up their national character. They like dramatic presentations of the human being, also Bernard Shaw. They want to do something that has validity, something others will recognize.

A teacher: S.T. in the ninth grade is very clumsy in his written expression. Should I have him do some extra work in writing essays?

Dr. Steiner: You should work with his handwriting, very basically, through exercises. As an extra task, you could have him write a quarter page while paying attention to how each letter is formed. If he would do that, if he would pay attention to forming each letter, it would affect his entire character.

Aside from that, his lines of vision converge at the wrong place. His eyes do not properly fix upon the object. We should correct that. Remind him often so that his eyes look in parallel. You can also have him read as though he were shortsighted, although he is not. His eyes droop just like he droops when he walks. He does not walk properly, he drags his feet. Have you ever noticed, for example, that when he is at the playground and wants to run from one place to another, he never does it in a straight line, but always in some kind of zigzag. You should also look at how his hair always falls across his forehead. He also has no sense of rhythm. If he has to read something rhythmic in class, he gets out of breath. In gymnastics, you could have him move firmly, stamp his steps along.

Karmically, it is as though he has two different incarnations mixed together. In his previous incarnation, his life was cut off forcefully. Now, he is living through the second part of that incarnation and the first part of the present incarnation at the same time. Nothing fits. He has already read Kant. He cannot do things any other child can do, but he asks very unusual questions that show he has a very highly developed soul life. Once, he asked me if it is true that the distance between the Sun and the Earth is continually decreasing. He asked whether the Sun was coming closer to us. He asked such questions without any real reason.

You need to show him other perspectives, and have him do odd things in a disciplined way, for instance, some mathematical things that pique his curiosity, that are not immediately clear to him. You could, for example, have him make knots with a closed loop. Oskar Simony discusses that in his paper on forming knots with closed loops.

Since this was unknown to most of the teachers, Dr. Steiner showed how a strip of paper pasted together to form a closed loop crossed itself in the middle when twisted one, two, or three times. One twist resulted in a large ring; two twists resulted in two rings, one within the other. With three twists, the result was a ring knotted in itself. While doing this Dr. Steiner discussed Oskar Simony in detail.

Dr. Steiner: Simony counted the prime numbers. He once said that in order to bear occult events, you need a great deal of humor. That is certainly true.

Simony was like S.T. He drags himself around, has little sense of rhythm and needs to learn to observe what he does. Everything he does that causes him to think about what he has done is good. St.B. should do eurythmy exercises in which he has to pay attention to forming the letters with his arms toward the rear. He should pay attention to doing the exercise without it becoming a habit. He cannot integrate his etheric body into the periphery of the astral body.

We cannot consider K.F. a Latin student. Perhaps it is quite good for him to sit there like a deserted island. Sitting there in isolation may not be bad at all. I just now am clear that it is good if he is isolated.

A report is given about L.K. in the first grade. She does not like fairy tales or poetry.

Dr. Steiner: She should make the letter i with her whole body, u with her ears and forefinger, and e with her hair, so that she does all three exercises with some sensitivity. She needs to awaken the sensitivity of her body, so she should do that for a longer period of time.

A teacher: S.J. in the seventh grade is doing better writing with her left hand than with her right.

Dr. Steiner: You should remind her that she should write only with her right hand. You could try having her lift her left leg so that she hops around on her right leg, that is, have her jump around on her right leg with her left leg drawn up close to her. She is ambidextrous.

If there are children who are clearly left-handed, you will need to decide. That is something you can observe. You need to look at the left hand. With real left-handed children the hands appear as though exchanged; the left hand looks like the right hand in that it has more lines than the right hand.

This could also be done through the eyes. You could have children who are really left-handed raise the right hand and look at it with both eyes. Observe how their eyes cross as they move their gaze up their arm until they reach the right hand and then move their gaze back. Then have them stretch their arm. Do that three times.

The different incarnations of the human individuality are a kind of swinging of the pendulum to and fro until the rhythm is brought to rest and the higher part of man has found in the physical a fitting expression, a suitable instrument. Approximately ever since human beings have reincarnated, the position of sun, moon and earth has existed as it is now. We must understand that man belongs to the great cosmic organism. In the times in which great changes take place in the life of humanity, mighty changes also occur in the cosmos. Earlier than this, before there was reincarnation, sun, moon and earth were not yet separated as now. Kant and Laplace made their observation from the physical plane only, and to this extent their theory is quite correct, but they did not know the connection with spiritual forces. When out of the primal fire-vapour sun, moon and earth came into existence as separate bodies, man also began to incarnate. When human incarnations will have come to an end, the sun also will be re-united with the earth. On the large scale as in the single details, one must bear in mind these relationships of man to the universe.

You will often have heard that man usually incarnates after a period of about two thousand years. One can investigate when people who are alive today had their earlier incarnation. The souls who are now incarnated, one finds as a rule about 300 to 400 years after the birth of Christ. In addition, however, one finds others who are incarnated at various times, some earlier, some later. But there is another way to determine incarnations, a way which leads more certainly to the goal. One can say: Were the human beings who die today to return in a short time they would meet almost the same conditions as now. But man ought to learn as much as possible on the Earth. This can only happen when in the next incarnation he finds something new which is essentially different from the earlier conditions.

Let us for instance imagine ourselves back into the time about 600 to 800 years before Christ; that is about the time of the Iliad and the Odyssey. With the advanced peoples of that time the conditions of life were quite different from what they are now. One would for instance be astonished to see with what curious implements people ate. At that time also people had not yet learnt to write. The great poems were transmitted by word of mouth. When a person of those times is reincarnated today he must as a child learn quite other things. As a child he must learn to write. The stream of culture has meanwhile progressed. One must distinguish between the stream of culture and the development of the individual soul. As a child one must catch up with the civilisation and for this reason one must be born again as a child.

Now we must ask: What causes such utterly different conditions on earth? This is connected with the progression of the spring equinox. About 800 years before Christ the sun in spring entered the constellation of Aries, of the Ram. Every year at the vernal point it shifts a little. Because of this the conditions on the earth are always slightly changing. Eight hundred years before Christ the sun stood in the constellation of Aries. Earlier it stood in the constellation of Taurus, still earlier in Gemini and still earlier in Cancer. Now already for some hundred of years it rises in the constellation of Pisces. After this comes Aquarius. The advance of civilisations is also connected with the progression of the sun from one constellation to the other.

At the time when the sun rose in the constellation of Cancer the ancient Vedic culture of the Indians, the culture of the Rishis reached its highest point. The Rishis, those still half-divine beings, were the teachers of men. The Atlantean civilisation had met its destruction; a new impulse broke in. In occultism this is called a ‘vortex’ (wirbel). This is also why, in the age in which the sun stood in the constellation of Cancer, the sign was made in this way:

Cancer signifies a breaking in of something new, a ‘vortex’ (a double spiral).

The second cultural epoch is named the constellation of the Twins. At that time the dual nature of the world was understood, the opposing forces of the world, Ormuzd and Ahriman, Good and Evil. Thus the Persians also speak of the Twins.

The third cultural epoch is that of the Sumerians in Asia Minor and of the Egyptians. The constellation of the Bull corresponds to this epoch. This is why in Asia the Bull was venerated and in Egypt, Apis. At that time in Babylon and Assyria the Sumerian language was the language of wisdom. Then the Bull fell into decadence and the Ram came into the ascendant. The first indication of this is the Saga of the Golden Fleece.

The fourth culture is that of the Ram, or Lamb; Christ stands in the sign of the Ram, or Lamb; hence he calls himself the Lamb of God.

As fifth culture the external materialistic civilisation follows, in the constellation of the Fishes. This developed principally from the 12th century onwards and reached its climax about the year 1800. This is the culture of the Fifth sub-race, the present time.

In the constellation of the Water-Man in the future, the new Christianity will be proclaimed. ‘Water-Man’ is also the one who will bring it, he who has already been here: John the Baptist. Later he will again be the forerunner of Christ, when the Sixth, the spiritual sub-race will be founded. The Theosophical Movement should be the preparation for that time.

In the New Testament the expression ‘on the mountain’ is used on various occasions. ‘On the mountain’ means: in the mystery, in the innermost, in the intimate. Even the Sermon on the Mount is not to be understood as a sermon for the people, but as an intimate teaching for the disciples. The Transfiguration on the Mountain has also to be understood in this sense. Jesus went up into the mountain with the three disciples, Peter, James and John. There, we are told, the disciples were caught up out of themselves; then Moses and Elias appeared on either side of Jesus. For a moment space and time were extinguished and the disciples found themselves with their consciousness on the mental plane. Those who were no longer physically present, Moses and Elias, appeared. In direct revelation they had before them: ‘I am the Way, the Truth and the Life.’ The way = Elias, Moses = the truth, Christ = the life. This appeared here to the disciples in actual form. Jesus once said to them: ‘Elias has come again;²⁹ John was Elias, he has only not been recognised.’ But he said further: ‘Tell it to no man until I come again.’ Christianity was not to teach reincarnation for two thousand years, not for any arbitrary reason, but on educational grounds. People were to know nothing of it for two thousand years. In the gospel of St. John there is an indication of this in the miracle of the wedding at Cana where water is turned into wine. In the old Mysteries only water was distributed, but in the Christian Mysteries wine. For in the priesthood, through the partaking of wine, knowledge of reincarnation was blotted out. Whoever partakes of wine cannot attain to any true knowledge of Manas, Buddhi and Atma. He can never comprehend reincarnation. By his coming again Christ means his reappearance in the Sixth sub-race when he will be proclaimed by the ‘Water-Man’. Theosophy actually carries out the testament of Christianity and works towards this epoch of time.

Every time the sun progresses from one sign of the Zodiac to another incisive changes take place in civilisation. In between there elapses a period of about two thousand six hundred years.³⁰ If we take the moment of time when the sun entered the sign of the Ram or Lamb, about 800 years before Christ and 1800 years after Christ, then we have two thousand six hundred years. About the year 1800 we entered the sign of the Fishes. This is the time when materialistic culture reached its highest point. It was prepared for in the Middle Ages and has now begun to decline. About the year 4,400 mankind enters the sign of spiritual culture, that of the Water-Man. Preparation has also to be made for this.

Thus conditions change also with the constellation. With the progression from one sign to another new conditions also arise, so that rebirth has meaning. The human being is reborn approximately every two thousand six hundred years, but the experiences he makes as man and as woman are so radically different that two such incarnations, as man and as woman, are reckoned as one. About one thousand three hundred years elapse between two incarnations as man or as woman, and about two thousand six hundred years between such double incarnations if one reckons both as one. The human being is only man or woman in regard to the physical body. When the physical body is masculine the etheric body is feminine; and vice versa, when the physical body is feminine the etheric body is masculine. Only the astral body is at the same time masculine and feminine. The human being bears within him the opposite sex as etheric body. Thus in the etheric the man is feminine and in the etheric the woman masculine. The physical woman has therefore many concealed masculine qualities; the physical incarnation is present only exoterically. The human being therefore goes through a constellation every time as man and as woman. This is why the Master said to Sinnett that the human being is incarnated about twice in a sub-race. Occultly both incarnations are reckoned together as one. There must come a time in which the woman actually approaches the culture dominated by the man. The present woman's movement is to be recognized as the preparation for another later and quite different woman's movement. In the future, sex differentiation will be totally overcome.

There was a special reason why, for about two thousand years, the teaching of reincarnation was completely suppressed. The human being was to learn to know and value the importance of the one life. Every slave in Ancient Egypt was still convinced of the fact that he would return, that one day he would be master instead of slave, but that he had to pay his karmic debts. The single life was therefore not so important to him. But the lesson people now had to learn was to gain firm ground under their feet; thus during one life, reincarnation was to remain unknown. Christ therefore expressly forbade any teaching about reincarnation. But from 800 years before Christ until about 1800 years after Christ, the time had elapsed during which nearly everyone had gone through the one life without experiencing anything of reincarnation. The great Masters³¹ have the task not always to impart the whole truth at any one time, but only that part needed by man. This withholding of the consciousness of reincarnation came to poetic expression in this epoch in Dante's Divine Comedy. In monastic esotericism on the other hand, reincarnation was definitely taught when the occasion arose. The Trappists³² had to remain silent throughout one incarnation, so that in the next they might become eloquent speakers. They were intentionally trained in this way to become eloquent speakers, for of these the Church can make good use. When St. Augustine put forward the doctrine of predestination he was entirely consistent.³³ Because in the age of materialism reincarnation was not to be taught, the Augustinian doctrine of predestination had to make its appearance. Only in this way could the differences in people's circumstances be explained.

Connected with this is the deeply materialistic character of traditional Christianity, which lies in the fact that the Beyond is made dependent on one physical existence. This materialistic teaching of Christianity has, so to say, borne its fruit. Today there is no longer any consciousness of the Beyond. Social democracy is the ultimate consequence of traditional Christianity. But now a new impulse must come into the world. When one epoch comes to an end something new breaks in. Christianity worked towards the gradual dawning of the materialistic age. In order to bring about the materialistic civilisation, human beings for a period of one thousand three hundred years had to have such a teaching as was brought by Christianity; namely, that man should make the whole of eternity dependent upon one earthly life. Urban bourgeoisie then became the actual founder of the age of materialism. Already at the time of Christ the spiritual had to be betrayed by the purely material. Judas Iscariot had to betray Christ. One can however say: had there been no Judas there would also have been no Christianity. Judas is the first to attach prime importance to money, that is to say, to materialism. In Judas was incarnated the entire materialistic age. This materialistic age has obscured and darkened the spiritual. Through his death Christ becomes the Redeemer of materialism.

• 29. Matthew, Chapter 17. 12 – 13
• 30. Later Rudolf Steiner indicated these epochs more precisely. According to this the point at which the sun rises on the vernal equinox moves backwards through the 12 constellations of the Zodiac in 12 x 2160 = 25,920 years—the Platonic World Year—generally speaking, re-embodiments are connected with these epochs of 2160 years (though there are exceptions). See: Theosophy of the Rosicrucian, Rhythms in the Cosmos and in the Human Being (Typescript) 20.25.28.7.1923
• 31. According to Rudolf Steiner these are beings of great significance for the evolution of mankind. ‘These lofty beings have already left behind them the path that the rest of mankind has yet to tread. They work now as the great Teachers of Wisdom and of the Harmony of Feeling.’ (Letter to a member 2.1.1905.) See also lecture 13.10.1904.
• 32. Order founded in 1140 in the Cistercian monastery of La Trappe in France. The reform in 1665 imposed strict ascetic practices and silence.
• 33. The teaching of God's eternal decree which results in only a part of humanity being chosen for salvation while the other part is doomed to perdition. Compare lecture 7.10.1917 ‘The Crumbling of the Earth and the Souls and Bodies of Men’ Anthroposophical Quarterly Volume 19 No. 1.

Whether this applies to Romance and Germanic peoples is not necessary to discuss further here. It is a disaster for a people when those who are or are supposed to be leaders speak a different language and have different thoughts. Today there is one area where such a gap exists: it is the area of religious life. I will speak of the basis of this religious gap: the Bible.

Questions that occupy all people are: Where do people come from, what is the meaning, the goal of life, what is the essence and what is its form? Endless layers seek the solution to such questions in the Bible; but precisely what matters, the living feeling and attitude to the Bible, is lacking. There is a gulf between the theologians who study the Bible and the believers, and when someone says, “We want it to close,” for the time being it is only a wish. There are enough reasons, even without resorting to mysticism and occultism, to believe that the gulf is widening. There comes a time when teachers and believers no longer understand each other. People usually do not realize how great this gap is. Teachers of the past, who studied the Bible, based their teachings on the highest truths. There was a sense that what the Bible contains is something unspeakably high, that one is wise at the beginning, becomes wiser as one understands more and more. Teachers were formed through this wisdom-filled study of the Bible, and there were teachers. Those who listened, who listened intently, felt that this was where wisdom could be found. This is not to say that there are no such men today.

If we look back 150 years, there was still something of that feeling towards the Bible, a feeling of sacred awe, that such writing should be treated quite differently. Goethe was also familiar with this. Today, all this seems difficult to understand. We must realize that the spirit of materialism is not very intrusive where it appears as theoretical materialism. We see this in Haeckel's views. These are not the worst. The worst is the one that guides people to understand things materially and to see only what is tangible and to overlook the meaning behind it.

We want to touch on two things: biblical criticism and inspiration.

Tell a materialist about inspiration and he will laugh at you. Nevertheless, it is the current that we now call theosophical that is reawakening the dulled sense of the concept of inspiration. Inspiration, that is, inspiration from a higher world, would take a different position on what is in the Bible than on another book. The writer of those books was a point of passage, a conduit for the transmission of higher knowledge. This is a crude way of expressing the concept of inspiration, which is completely misunderstood, even in theology. Materialistic believers have suffered the greatest harm.

We will now only talk about what some Bible scholars say. Older and newer ones state that certain statements are made to us that prove that Moses could not have written the books in question, that passages must have been written centuries after Moses, that therefore the passages in question cannot be from him. I will mention one example that most likely makes people head shy. It is the twofold account of the creation of man. First it says: God created man male and female (Gen. 1:27). To make it quite clear: it does not say male and female. Then it says that God created man first and then the woman, his rib (Gen. 1:21-22). What is the basis for this? This is particularly characteristic. It was said that one and the same personality could not give rise to two different descriptions, so they must have been welded together.

So they searched the Bible for contradictions. Furthermore, they found certain differences in style and expression, so they concluded again that these are different sources and that some collector has combined both.

Let us take the six- or seven-day work. It presents in lofty thoughts the creation of the world from the first formation to the day on which God rested. It is a cosmic work that points out to us in vivid terms and intense images that we are dealing with an ancient document of inspiration. The creation of Adam, the leading to the animals, Eve's fall into sin, the snake as a symbol of sin (Genesis 3) led to the assumption that the six- or seven-day work came from a different source. Supercritical Bible researchers found the two designations: Elohists and Jahvehists; others found other discrepancies, so that finally it became clear what is now called the Rainbow Bible.

Thus the Bible work is fragmented. Now you may think that my word should be Bible criticism. That is not the case at all. I only know that in few areas so much diligence, ingenuity and intellect has been applied as to the fragmentation of the Bible. The original fervor, the devotion to this book, as inspiration from another world, has suffered. Now it is necessary to shine a light into this cleft in order to bring it back together again. It depends on the meaning behind it. I would like to use an example to illustrate the state of the art of this question. I will use a simple experience - I have experienced it - to explain. For many years I worked in the Goethe Archive in Weimar. In the records Goethe organized in the 1880s, there was a foreign transcript whose content he mistook for his own thoughts. However, he could not remember how he came to have this essay. When I came to Weimar in 1889, there were doubts that the essay was actually by Goethe. It was a scholarly question. I was able to prove that at that time Goethe had a man by the name of Tobler at his side, of whom Goethe said that he had an excellent memory. I thought that this settled the question; Goethe expressed the thoughts that Tobler wrote down, and so Goethe is the author. It is the passage that you find in the last Goethe volume: “Nature we are” and so on to the final sentence “Love is the crown”. A famous Goethe scholar – I won't mention any names, we owe him a great debt of gratitude – was keen to prove that the ink for these words had not flowed from Goethe's pen. It is not a sufficient comparison, but it is similar to biblical research. Efforts are made to prove when the content was created historically, factually, sensually, because thinking has a materialistic tendency. The sense of the spirit has been lost.

Now something else has to be added. Again, I can best make it clear with an example. Take geometry, this very ordinary school geometry. You can understand it from itself. You do not need to know how it came about. What does a schoolboy know about Euclid? What do we care who wrote it first? What matters is to explore it. When a learned house for all languages, which knows nothing about geometry, approaches Euclid, he is not yet explored by that. So something monstrous can come out at times. No philologist, no matter how famous, will understand Vedanta philosophy just because he is a philologist. If you know geometry, you know Euclid.

The question that now arises is: Is there any possibility at all of investigating the Bible? One must first know the worlds of which the Bible speaks, only then is one a qualified investigator. Is there access to the great riddles of existence? This is the path followed by the theosophical worldview. Just as there are ways to understand geometry, there are means and ways to penetrate into the spiritual world. A number of people are already walking these paths; they are seeking wisdom about the higher worlds. The result is that with each step one takes, the old religious documents arise before him in ever new forms. What does it matter from which sources, if we have the truth?

You know that for theosophical views, this world that we can see and touch is considered one world. This world would be different for us if we had other senses. Fichte once used the example: Imagine you are the only seeing person among blind people and enter the world of people who only grope around. You would be considered a fantasist if you still ascribed the quality of color to things. No one has the right to say that something is not. A person's perception depends on their organs, and how many of them they have.

Through the principle of initiation, an inner sense reveals itself to man, and with it the next world opens up to him, the imaginative or astral world, so called because it works in images. This pictorial consciousness can be tapped into. Those who apply the method described will enter this world. There is nothing, absolutely nothing of magic about it. The imaginative world presents itself as a flowing sea of light and color. These are not mere spots, but clearly defined forms, inwardly glowing and bright. So you rise to the world from which you come.

Develop these organs further and you will enter the world of inspiration. The School of Pythagoras called this world the harmony of the spheres. This is not an image, it is reality. It is not a sensual sound. Goethe and others point to this harmony of the spheres. Christianity calls it the Kingdom of Heaven or the Heavenly Kingdom. Goethe has his Faust say: “The sun resounds in the ancient way” and so on. That is not a poetic image. He knew that this was how to describe the characteristic. In the second part, Goethe says, “Sounds for spiritual ears” and so on, and by that he means the same thing.

This, then, is the world of inspiration, and beyond that is the world of intuition. There, there is an experience of the “thing in itself”, as our great philosopher Kant called it. There, love is something much higher, there is a merging with things.

Those who engage with the meaning of the concept of inspiration know what it means. In this way, a person can go through the world in his development. First, with the sensual eyes and the physical mind, the materialistic development of the human being begins. His astral development preceded this. Just as ice is related to water – water in another form – so your body is soul. Before it took on this form, it was merely soul. You lived in a world that can only be perceived by the imaginative senses. If you examine the world only with the outer senses, you can describe what Haeckel describes. It is all true, but only insofar as the ice remains only ice.

Go back even further, and the human soul was not yet condensed into the physical. The line does not end with imaginative knowledge. The soul has lived much earlier and comes to a point in its development that opens up the soul of man. Imagine this development in such a way that the soul lived separately because the physical world was not yet ready to offer it a suitable body. The world was a kind of stream in which the human being floated.

What enabled man to reclassify? A very specific organ, a kind of swim bladder was transformed into lungs. These were the times when the body became capable of being a condensed soul. In the Bible this is referred to as: “God breathed into the man the breath of life and he was a living soul.” (Genesis 2:7) There is an even higher world than that of inspiration. If we go even further, man was spirit. The body is a condensed soul; the soul is a condensed spirit.

As soon as one enters inspiration from imagination, male and female disappear. The Bible says: God created man male and female – undifferentiated. (Genesis 1:27) They all were in the spiritual body. Even without taking the Bible into consideration, we can establish this. Anyone who approaches the Bible quite freely today will feel it literally.

There are four possible attitudes towards the Bible:

1. The naive person takes it as it is offered to him.
2. the enlightened person sees it as a childish folk fantasy. These are the freethinkers. But some of them, and one of their most important representatives, Bruno Wille, has come to a symbolic interpretation.
3. Those who are beyond cleverness find a mystical-symbolic meaning for the Bible.
4. The theosophist adopts a literal interpretation.

Then comes the time when the person says to himself, “Now you are beginning to understand some of it.” One comes to assume that where one cannot keep up, one just does not yet understand. The Bible is conquered in such a way that the gap is filled again, and those who create the means to do so are inspired men. Those who grasped this initially did so under the influence of inspiration. We are heading towards a new conquest of the Bible and a new relationship between wisdom and the Bible.

Automated Translation

My experience in reading this writing

A discussion of ¹ with the anthroposophy of Alois Mager could be of profound interest to me. This prompts me to write down here, as a kind of soliloquy, the thoughts that have arisen in me while I was studying Mager's writing “Theosophy and Christianity”. (I must confess that I have only now found the time to read the writing, which was published as early as 1922).

There are few people who believe that one can be fair to an opponent. But regardless of the reasons that such people have for their opinion, it seems to me that there are few conditions for me to be unfair to Alois Mager from the outset, even if he appears as my opponent.

He belongs to an order that I hold in high esteem and love.

Not only do I have many memories of noble, lofty, and far-reaching intellectual achievements that can be attributed to the order in general, without going into the work of the individual members of the order to whom this achievement is owed; but I have also had the good fortune to know and esteem individual members of the order. I have always had a sense for the spirit that prevails in the writings on science by such personalities. While I feel that much of what comes from other contemporary scientific works is foreign to me, there is not a little that comes from this side that touches my soul without any foreignness, even when the content seems to me to be incorrect, one-sided, or prejudiced.

And so I was also able to take up with much sympathy what Alois Mager wrote without reference to anthroposophy. This applies to his thoughts on the life of the soul in the presence of God, which are deep in mind and spirit, in particular.

I expected Alois Mager to be an opponent. For I know that from the side to which he belongs, either only silence about my anthroposophy can come, or opposition. Anyone who has illusions about this knows little about the world.

But what Mager presents had to seem significant to me.

And I would like to write down here the thoughts that have come to me about this, like a soliloquy.

The essay “Theosophy and Christianity” discusses in four chapters, essentially the Anthroposophy I have described. Mager admits this. On page 31f. we find the words: “I consider it futile to broadly present the goals and teachings of neo-Indian theosophy. We must devote a separate treatise to Steiner's Anthroposophy and its relation to science. There the essentials of Theosophy will be discussed as well.

The first chapter, “Theosophy in the Past and Present,” contains a spirited argument that what Mager calls Theosophy was revealed in a great spiritual way in the non-Christian world in Plotinus and Buddha. Mager sees the search of the human soul to come into contact with the divine in a way that naturally follows from the nature of this soul, most vividly realized in the two minds mentioned. For, what appears on Christian ground in this way, Mager does not judge, of course, as coming naturally from the nature of the soul, but as a result of the prevailing divine grace.

It seems unnecessary to me to point out here that, especially in earlier times, the state of soul indicated, even if not in the scientific formulation of Plotinus or in the religious depth of Buddha, was much more present in the spiritual life of humanity than Mager assumes when he orients his whole presentation towards the two personalities.

But what strikes me most is this: Mager wants to judge the anthroposophy I have presented. He wants to discuss what part of humanity is actually seeking by taking the anthroposophical path of the soul among many others. He wants to develop the content of what is alive in anthroposophy, otherwise what should give meaning to his investigation. Now the whole essence of what I have called anthroposophy is immediately distorted if, in order to explain its content, one refers to earlier descriptions of the spiritual worlds.

I have said that I am recording these thoughts as a soliloquy. I do this in order to be able to present unreservedly what only I myself can know with complete certainty from the subjective experience of the matter immediately, but which I must know in just this way.

And here I cannot do otherwise than to emphasize again and again that everything essential to my anthroposophy comes from my own spiritual research or insight, that I have borrowed nothing from the historical record in the matter or in the substantiation of the matter. If something I had found myself could be illuminated by being shown in some form or other as already existing elsewhere, then I did so. But I never did it with anything but what had been given in my own view before. Nor did I have any other method while I was referring to the theosophical society's own writings in my own writings. I presented what I had researched and then showed how one or the other appears in those writings.

Only the terminology has been borrowed from what already existed, where an existing word made such borrowing desirable in terms of its content. But this has as little to do with the essential content of anthroposophy as the fact that language is used to communicate what has been self-explored has to do with the independence of what is said. One could, of course, also assume that a well-known linguistic expression is borrowed when one uses it in a presentation of something completely new.

In the strictest self-knowledge, I have repeatedly asked myself whether this is the case, whether I can speak with my own exact knowledge when I say that what I present as a spiritual view comes from my directly experienced view, and that the historical given plays no role in this. In particular, it was always important to me to be clear about the fact that I did not take any details from what had been handed down historically and insert them into the world of my views. Everything had to be produced within the immediate life of contemplation; nothing could be inserted as a foreign entity.

In wanting to bring this into clarity within myself, I have avoided all illusions and sources of illusion with the greatest effort of consciousness. After all, one may rely on a clarity of self-awareness that knows how to distinguish between what is experienced in consciousness in direct connection with the objective being and what emerges from some uncontrollable depths of the soul through something read or otherwise absorbed.

I now believe that anyone who really engages with the presentation in my writings should also be able to see through my relationship to spiritual observation as a result. Alois Mager does not do this. For if he had tempted correctly, he would not have presented the content of anthroposophy with reference to Plotinus and Buddha first, but would have shown first how this content arises from the continuation of the development of modern consciousness on the basis of the spirit of science.

But what led Mager to write his first chapter leads him in the sequel (page 47) to say: “What strikes us most and most irrefutably about Steiner's Anthroposophy is that it is composed of pieces of thought and knowledge from all peoples and all centuries. Greek mythology, which Steiner became acquainted with at the gymnasium, provides him with the Hyperboreans, Atlanteans, Lemurians, and so forth. He borrowed from the oriental mystery religions, from the Gnostic and Manichaean teachings. The Kant-Laplacean Urn Nebula served as a model for his spiritual primeval world being...

This conclusion drawn by Mager about my anthroposophy is a complete objective untruth, in view of the true facts. It is dismaying to see that a fine mind, which wants to apply the means of its objective search for truth correctly in order to arrive at a true-to-life context, misses the truth and presents an illusion as reality.

This sense of dismay overshadows all the other feelings I have about Mager's writing, for example that it is antagonistic towards me, that it becomes quite strangely unjust in many places and so widens.

My consternation is heightened when I come across another objective untruth. In the second chapter, “Anthroposophy and Science”, Mager gives a commendable account of anthroposophical ideas, considering the brevity of the presentation to which he is obliged. Indeed, he proves himself to be a good judge of certain impressions that are given to spiritual perception as a finer materiality, for example, between the material and the soul. One can see that he has many qualities that enable him to engage with anthroposophy, if it were not for the inhibitions that come from other sides.

But now, in this chapter, there is another objective untruth. Mager first tries to put my way of spiritual thinking on the same level as spiritistic or vulgar occult practices. He even uses Staudenmaier's book “Magic as Experimental Science” for this purpose, which a sense of spiritual differences should have protected him from.

But now he comes to the following assertion: “The world view that Steiner presents to us, which at first glance appears imposing and seemingly complete, is not the result - as a philosophical world view is - of rational, scientific knowledge, but is gained through spiritual vision, anthroposophical clairvoyance” (page 45). “Steiner has all the knowledge he ever sipped and caught in his life, as he floated and wandered through all fields of knowledge, with an incomparable skill in clairvoyant threads into a bizarre unity.” Mager presents everything as if I had given my ideas about the spiritual world on the basis of an unchecked, unscientifically applied clairvoyance.

Is there nothing to be said against such an assertion, considering what can be found in my writings about Goethe, in my “Theory of Knowledge of Goethe's World View”, in “Truth and Science”, in my “Philosophy of Freedom” ? I have presented this as a philosophical primal experience, that one can experience the conceptual in its reality, and that with such an experience one stands in the world in such a way that the human ego and the spiritual content of the world flow together. I have tried to show how this experience is just as real as a sensory experience. And out of this primal experience of spiritual knowledge, the spiritual content of anthroposophy has grown. I endeavored step by step to use 'intellectual, scientific knowledge' with the precision that I acquired in the study of mathematics to control and justify the spiritual view and so on. I only worked in such a way that the spiritual view emerged from 'intellectual, scientific' knowledge. I have strictly rejected all spiritualism and all vulgar occultism.

Again, Mager's scientific approach does not lead to an understanding of the true facts, but to the assertion of objective untruths about anthroposophy and my relationship to it.

Indeed, one is bound to be dismayed when one sees that an 'investigation' into anthroposophy gradually erodes the very soil in which anthroposophy is to be found.

The anthroposophical spiritual researcher sees through the reasons for such mental states, which cannot come to objective facts, from his insights; but Mager is not to be presented here from the point of view of anthroposophy, but merely from the point of view of ordinary consciousness, which he indeed wants to assert in his writing.

I ask now: can it still be fruitful to deal with what an opponent presents, when one sees that everything falls to nothing, that he presents to the world about Anthroposophy? Can one discuss assertions that cannot possibly refer to Anthroposophy because they not only paint a distorted image of it, but a complete opposite?

(It is no wonder that Mager is unjust to me even in small matters. A clear misprint in one edition of my Theosophy, where the numbering of “mind soul” and “sentience soul” is incorrect – despite the fact that what comes before and after makes it quite clear that this is a misprint — he uses it to make the following comment: “It is characteristic of Steiner's scientific method that he places the intellectual soul before the sentient soul here, which contradicts his usual presentation.”

In view of what has been presented, there is no opportunity to enter into a discussion about whether, in Mager's description of Aristotle's psychology in the third chapter, “Soul and Soul Migration”, which Mager even finds quite stimulating, there is the seed for transforming ideas about the soul from what can be observed externally to what is seen spiritually internally; whether, then, the path from Aristotelian intellectualism to anthroposophy does not emerge as a more straightforward one.

Those who represent spiritual science in the truly scientific sense, as it is meant here, cannot be surprised at the numerous biased judgments and rejections that it still encounters from all sides today. For they are able to see the scope and scope of the scientific results of the present and the recent past, which many people assume contradict this spiritual-scientific world view. On the part of those who believe that they stand on firm ground in the results of present-day research and can form a world picture for themselves that does not take into account the ideas of spiritual science, it is understandable that they do not yet engage in a real examination of what spiritual science has to say about its results. And so it turns out that it can be shown that spiritual science not only harmonizes with all the justified scientific results of the present day, but that these scientific results, when looked at closely, confirm what spiritual science has to say; and yet, one must find opponents, which becomes even more understandable when one considers the methods of scientific research in more concrete, specific things.

Not so long ago, Professor Dewar gave a lecture at the Royal Institution in which he attempted to speak about a future end state of earthly existence based on the view he has gained from the scientific results of the present. Let us consider for a moment what ideas this physicist, whose physical research has my full and unstinting approval, has about a final state of earthly existence, a state in which the human inhabitants of the earth, who now walk this earth, can no longer exist. Professor Dewar tries to utilize the physical ideas that are available to him today and finds, with a certain one-sided justification, that one must assume, according to the processes that can be observed by the physicist, that the earth is cooling down. And he calculates an end state in which the earth will have cooled down to, say, minus 200 degrees Celsius. He suggests that the Earth is evolving towards this final state. He is clear about the fact that everything that is now water in the oceans will of course have long since solidified; that the air that makes up our atmosphere today will be liquid, and that at a height of ten meters the Earth will be covered by this liquid air, in the form of a sea. The cold that will then prevail, he believes, will make much of what is on the earth today appear different. Of course, not only the temperature will change and with it the aggregate states of the individual bodies, but also many other things in the appearance of what will then be found on earth. Thus Professor Dewar, again quite correctly starting from physical ideas, finds that milk, which of course will then be solid, will glow in blue light. I don't know how this solid milk will be produced, but according to physical ideas it will shine in blue light. And there's more: egg white will be so luminous that you can read a newspaper by this light, which you can produce by painting the walls of the room with this egg white. I don't know who will read newspapers then, since I suspect that people will have long since frozen to death, but Dewar still uses this argument to form an idea of the former state of our Earth according to his world view, and many other things. On the liquefied air, which will then be the sea, there will only be very gaseous light bodies, hydrogen, helium, neon, krypton. He describes very nicely how one will feel quite differently then, because of course the resistance of these light gases will not be as strong as the resistance of the air for the present organism.

One can, by following the ideas of today's physics, paint this final state of the earth in great detail, and such a lecture is of course in our present time by the “non-authoritarian” people - one must say that out of courtesy, because today, of course, no one believes in authority - be said, because today, of course, no one believes in authority — is accepted as something extraordinarily significant, which finally shows how the “exact physicist” has to think about a valid world view.

If you recall what I said about the most important conditions necessary for spiritual scientific research, it was that through the inner exercises that the soul has to go through, it gradually comes to what I have called, using Goethe's words, the beholding through the eyes of the soul; that it has to undergo, in particular, a life in conceptions that are modeled on outer moral thinking. Not that it is to be confused with this, but the whole soul mood that the spiritual researcher has to develop within himself must be such that his own self relates to the ideas saturated with reality, which he must strive for, in the same way that a person relates externally to things that he considers morally good and to things that he considers morally bad. Here one is not satisfied with the fact that certain things can be designated as morally good and others as morally bad, but one knows that when one's affect speaks of the good, one must follow the good impulses, and when one's affect speaks of evil, one must suppress it. And when a person's soul is fully developed, he will act accordingly in his outer life. In this way, the relationship between the spiritual researcher and his own conceptual world must become a living one, not just a logical one. And in the life of the idea, of the concept, it happens that one cherishes certain concepts because they are capable of penetrating into reality. While other ideas announce themselves in such a way that they can be compared to what is to be avoided in the realm of moral life; they must, as it were, be pushed away from the horizon of consciousness. In this inner life of the soul, the ascent of the spiritual worlds is revealed, which can then be contemplated.

People like Professor Dewar are led away from such a striving for reality-imbued ideas precisely by their prejudices or, better, “prejudices”. For the spiritual researcher, it then becomes clear where the error actually lies in the structure of such a world view. In the style of this world picture, one could draw a comparison with regard to the final state of the earth if someone, on the basis of quite correct physical, chemical and physiological premises, calculates the development of, let us say, certain metabolic phenomena in man. One could interpret certain metabolic phenomena in the human body and calculate future conditions on the assumption that this metabolic process occurs in time at a constant rate, let us say, between the 30th and 40th year of the person's life. One observes individual processes and then calculates how these must take shape in 150 years according to the very correct assumptions of science. The only objection is that after 150 years people will no longer be alive, that the state will have already been reached where the soul has left the body and the body no longer follows the laws that are imposed on it by being filled with a soul, but instead follows external physical and chemical laws of the earth's environment.

If you say something like that today, you may be accused of saying something quite grotesque, something quite foolish. Nevertheless, anyone who does not thoughtlessly follow the scientific research of the present day, but who engages with the way in which certain assumptions are used to draw conclusions, knows that what I have just mentioned as a comparison is deeply justified. For it is absolutely true that after the time when milk would shine so beautifully in a blue light, when you could paint the walls with egg white so that you could read newspapers while doing so, the earth would be just as absent as the human body is after 150 years.

Today, the opinion is widespread that spiritual science forms lightly-dressed ideas out of thin air. And because of this assumption, the comparison of spiritual science and natural science naturally turns out in such a way that one says: on the one hand there is natural science, which reaches its results in an exact, thorough way; and on the other hand there is spiritual research, which indeed claims to be in full agreement with natural science, but which obtains its concepts through some kind of fantasy! Prejudices of this kind must first be overcome if spiritual science is to be further recognized. And spiritual scientific results are not to be had for nothing. One can study the difficulties that stand in the way of real results in spiritual research by considering people of knowledge who dedicate their lives to the struggle for real knowledge, who do not merely repeat what the course of external research is today, but who, being familiar with all the details of modern research, also strive for knowledge of the spiritual conditions of the world.

Recently, we were reminded of such a personality of knowledge, as the psychologist of the soul, whom I mentioned here recently in a different context, Franz Brentano, died a few days ago. The honored audience, who are here often, know that I rarely speak about myself. But today I would like to make one comment: that I really followed Franz Brentano's, the soul researcher, research path from its beginnings to his later struggles. And with him in particular, one could see very clearly how, for someone striving for knowledge of the spiritual world, it is difficult in the present day to achieve full strength, insofar as this is possible in everyone, even in today's age, due to opposing prejudices. Many obstacles stood in the way of Franz Brentano, which arose precisely from the fact that he did not live in the scientific age, which would have been his good fortune, but in the prejudices of the scientific age. And so it came about that Brentano, after writing some brilliant, profound works on Aristotle, then published a “psychology” in 1874. It was intended as the first volume of a multi-volume work in which he sought to ascend to an understanding of the actual life of the mind and soul. He never got beyond the first volume, and only in smaller writings did Brentano go on to add, I would say, a few splinters of what he had to say.

To be sure, Brentano's outer life was full of changes; and if one regards things only superficially, one could perhaps say that this changing outer life prevented Franz Brentano from finding the composure necessary to complete his “Psychology.” But that is not the case; rather, it turned out that Brentano failed because of the riddles of the life of the soul itself. He began to present them in the first volume of his “Psychology” in such a way that the path would have led him precisely to the point where the spiritual science that is meant here stands. But he could not get through because of his adherence to scientific prejudices. And since he did not want to develop mere concepts, but concepts containing reality, he left the whole matter alone.

Now, even at the time when he wrote his Psychology, Brentano started from the principle that the inner mental life can admittedly be perceived but not observed. It is a saying that seems as well-founded as possible for the simple reason that we ourselves are the mental life that we develop. So one can say: When any representation arises, we must have it; we cannot confront it and observe it. When we observe it, it has already passed, and so it must first be brought up again from memory. These and other difficulties are present. Therefore Brentano thinks that one can perceive the mental life, but not observe it. But he has not seen that if one could observe as he means, namely that this observation would be completely in line with the model of natural science, then one would never arrive at a science of the mental. If one could observe in this way, that is, if one's soul life were at a standstill, one would perceive nothing in this soul life but mirror images, mirror images of a reality. From these mirror images, just as little could be found out about reality as one can grasp the images of a mirror or the like. One cannot observe the soul life at all if one only wants to observe it in the immediate present. That is why I had to say here a few weeks ago: What matters when observing the soul and spirit is not that you, so to speak, place yourself in opposition to this soul and spirit and then observe it like a scientific object, but what matters is that you bring about such inner processes as, for example, this is: one gives oneself, as one says, to a very specific idea in a meditative state, again and again, but one then also observes how this idea works without being present; one hands over, so to speak – there is no need to decide on this from the outset – what one imagines to the objective course of the world. Whether it is pushed down into the so-called subconscious or handed over to some other sphere of the world's existence will become apparent in the further course of the performance. One lets what one has called into consciousness take effect without being present. And if one has then performed the other amplifications of consciousness described in the book “How to Know Higher Worlds,” then one does indeed find that one cannot observe this soul-spiritual that reigns in oneself as Brentano wanted, but that one must observe it by considering it in its workings in time. The soul reveals itself only when we observe it in the course of a person's life; not by confronting it in the present, but by seeing how this soul works between birth and death. And this observation of the soul takes place with the same exactitude as external scientific research.

As I said, if I may add a personal note, I may perhaps say that in the last two lectures here I spoke about the relationship of the soul to the nervous human being, to the breathing human being, to the metabolic human being, and I tried, in full harmony with science, to show a result that I believe can be of tremendous importance for understanding the interrelation of the world. I have not formulated what I said in the last two lectures in this way before, but it is now exactly thirty-five years since I, as a very young man in Vienna, began the research that could ultimately lead to expressing what I have in the last two lectures. And I have been unremitting in this research. I have tried to pursue this research as I have also described recently: by handing over the ideas to objectivity, to see what becomes of the ideas themselves when they work spiritually without one being present. One will just realize that spiritual research is just as exact as external scientific research. This may be necessary if the circle of those who see in this spiritual science what is necessary for the future development of humanity is to become larger. It turns out, however, that in the path of this spiritual research, the ideas in the soul do not proceed as abstractly as they do when one does external scientific research, or when one reflects in the way one is accustomed to with regard to the external life. Rather, I would say that on the other side, when we are no longer personally present, the images that are pursued in their own course connect with the spiritual life, with the spiritual events, through their own inner essence, in a way that is different from the way they connect with the external world of the senses. Only in full swing, when one participates, can the spiritual world be observed.

An observation, as I now want to cite it, will, if undertaken without the prerequisite of an inner schooling of spiritual research activity, lead to nothing right, just as when working in a chemical laboratory, for those who cannot handle things, they lead to nothing; only after one has created the inner experimental things does the matter show up in the right light. What appears in its true form is what some thinkers have suspected, although they have hardly progressed beyond mere suspicion. All the soul life that we develop by coming into contact with the outside world, whether inanimate or animate, all this soul life, which usually lies within our consciousness, is accompanied by another soul life. And anyone who has created the inner conditions to observe such things correctly inwardly can become aware of how the soul — Eduard von Hartmann would call it: in the unconscious, but this unconscious, which I mean here, differs from Hartmann's precisely in that it can become conscious — is constantly working in this unconscious. Alongside the currents of the conscious soul life, there is another that constantly flows along, which - if one can direct the soul's gaze at it - is not subject to the laws that govern the external soul life, and which naturally correspond to the course of natural events. This soul life is also subject to laws, but they do not correspond to the laws that prevail in the ordinary conscious soul life. For the spiritual researcher, this subconscious soul life comes to the surface. For ordinary life, it also comes to the surface, but one does not know that it is coming to the surface. For example, one often believes that one has formed a particular idea or thought, and assumes that the whole process lies in the ordinary conscious soul life. It does not, but emerges from the subconscious soul life. The spiritual researcher can now observe how these two currents of soul life work together. And basically, when one speaks of clairvoyance not in a superstitious or theoretically mystical sense, but in an exact sense, this clairvoyance is nothing other than the ability to truly raise this parallel soul life and to be able to convince oneself that it is indeed subject to its laws, but that these laws are different from those of the conscious soul life. He who rises in a healthy way to such observations, as described in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds”, will not be driven into any kind of morbid or pathological states. On the contrary, what I indicated in the last lecture will happen here: he will make his soul life healthier and healthier if he proceeds correctly. But such a spiritual researcher will acquire a certain ability of the subconscious soul life to interact with the ordinary soul life. And while in ordinary life, for example when one listens when someone reads something to one, one believes that one is now completely absorbed in what is being read to one, as a truly trained spiritual researcher one no longer thinks so. One knows that the subconscious soul life runs away and often goes completely different ways than the ways of the ideas that are being read. And if one has sufficient skill not to become inattentive while listening, then between two words that one hears, things arise from the subconscious that are just as much the product of the soul as the things of the conscious soul life, but that run parallel to the stream of the conscious soul life; things of a completely different soul life. Certain thinkers have sensed this, for example by pointing out that a person not only dreams while sleeping, but that the dream life actually continues throughout the day while awake, only to be overshadowed by the ordinary conscious mental life. This is also true – and yet, again, it is not true. It is only something similar to the dream life. The dream life is only a chaotic shadow of what is going on. In the subconscious, there is a parallel current that is as fleeting for today's ordinary soul life as dreams are, and can therefore be compared to dreams, but which arises from a spiritual reality.

By observing these two currents — the soul-spiritual and the soul bound to external nature — in their interaction, one gradually learns to ascend to a conception that cannot be substantiated in this one lecture in its details, but which is to be presented according to its result. One learns to recognize that the ordinary life of the soul, as it is rightly described by the physiological psychologists of the present day, by the type of Theodor Ziehen, for example, whom I recently quoted, has as its necessary condition the outer physical life of the body. If we now pursue this outer physical life with the means of spiritual research, we find that this outer physical life and with it the soul experiences of ordinary consciousness bound up with it are connected with those effects that take place between Earth and Sun. These effects are only of a refined nature, but they are similar to the effects of the sun's surroundings, say, on the plant world and the like. We learn to recognize the real connection between the tools of our ordinary conscious soul life and the earth and sun, I could also say: of our whole world system, as astronomy or astrophysics speaks of this world system. But we also learn to recognize that the course of the other currents is fundamentally different from the laws that are implanted in the physical and thus also in the soul of the human being through the sun-earth life. In its own laws it is not connected with the laws of the processes of which the human being is conscious in body and soul. On the contrary, it often contradicts them. Whereas in the outer life of the soul the psychologist speaks of association, of the bringing together of ideas, here the inner subconscious life of the soul carries out a separation, and vice versa.

These are only hints at the far-reaching differences between external and internal experience. And if we recognize the connection between the soul and the body to a much greater extent, and again the connection between the human body and the whole solar-earthly existence, then we also get ideas about a final state of the earthly existence itself; ideas whose formation is difficult to describe even in today's language. I can only say: Everyone knows how the astronomer can calculate a future star constellation from a present one, how one can calculate future solar and lunar eclipses. What happens here through calculation happens when one finds the right relationship to what one learns about the two currents that I have indicated, in their relation to the final state of the earth. What is calculated there is seen inwardly here. We are not dealing with vague analogies in the sense intended by Fechner, but with a real inner vision of the final state of the earth. For one learns to recognize that something, which of course cannot be expounded in its details in a lecture, turns out to be a necessary result. I will lead up to this result by way of a comparison.

It is true that the way in which man as a physical being goes through the world is only possible because the soul — I do not want to say permeates him, lest one believe that I am making some kind of hypothesis — proves effective in him. If it can no longer prove itself effective, then this body follows different laws than those it follows between birth and death. It then follows the laws that it must follow because of its relationship to the external physical environment of the earth. It merges completely with its own laws into the surrounding laws of the earth. I would like to compare this with the result that emerges with regard to the life of our earth. Our Earth is progressing in its evolution, but in doing so it is undergoing inner transformations. These transformations cannot be known unless one is aware that the one real factor in the process of our Earth is what all spiritual beings perceive in their subconscious and develop in the manner indicated. Just as one cannot comprehend the development of a plant if one cannot form an idea of how the plant germ of the next year is prepared in the plant of this year in all its growth laws, if one does not see in all the shooting up of the leaves and so on the development of the fruit germ of the next plant, so one cannot comprehend our earth if one only applies the physical laws to it, as the geologist does. For what we experience in our subconscious manifests itself as something germinal in our earthly existence. If I may use an expression that is not quite correct, we will understand each other: it works and lives with us, but it is something that is not at all connected with the relationships of earth and sun. And so it turns out: just as a point in time occurs for the physical human being when his soul experience is separated from the physical, and the physical passes into the outer earthly environment, so a point in time occurs for the earth when the earth-sun effects cease. Just as the soul effects in the body cease from within, so the sun effects on the earth cease from without. Just as the body and soul, when separated, cannot be mixed, but dissolve, so from a certain point in time the Earth will become an impossible body in the universe. And just as the human body merges into its earthly environment, into its physical and chemical laws, so from a certain point in time the Earth will merge into the laws that we now follow in the indicated current.

As you can see, the reverse is the case with the earth and with man. The body of man passes over into the earthly environment. That which is earthly-solar in the earth passes over into the spiritual. Then, when this moment occurs, the lawfulness that we can perceive in the parallel current, which does not at all agree with the external laws of nature, prevails in this earthly body, which will then have died in the way I have described. And here the peculiarity comes to light, which today still looks like a crazy paradox: that the laws that we call natural laws today, are only valid until the end of the earth. And if someone tries, like Professor Dewar, to apply these laws beyond the end of the earth, he makes the same mistake as someone who calculates the laws of metabolism beyond physical death, for 150 years. The Earth will no longer exist at the point in time calculated by Professor Dewar because it will have been transformed into spiritual substance. And all spiritual and soul substance that can be observed in the second current, as I have described it, is absorbed into the spiritual and soul substance of the Earth, and lives within it, towards other formations of the world, towards future formations of the world that cannot be described at this time. But we are looking forward to a future final state of our earth, in which this earth will have gone through its death in such a way that it will have merged with a spiritual realm. Not even solidified milk will glow bluish, and egg white will serve as a candle, but everything that is now on earth under the law of the earth and sun, under what we today call natural laws, will one day live under completely different laws, under spiritual and soul laws, which will arise in the way I have described, from our own inner life. For we are already connected today, in a germinal way, with that which the earth is to become, through which the earth is immortal. Therefore, what lives down there in the soul life seems like a dream. It is precisely the germ of future worlds, and we are immortal because we live with this immortality of the general spirit.

In this way, one comes to a much more concrete view of the spiritual world than if one uses the abstract buzzwords of “mystical pantheism” and so on, which so many people still use so much today. In the spiritual science meant here, one should not seek a vague, nebulous pantheism, but concrete results based on exact spiritual and psychological observation.

The general thinking of our time is still averse to such reality-saturated conceptions, to which the spiritual researcher must advance in order to arrive at a world picture that encompasses all reality that we can attain, not just the outer physical. Anyone who has consciously followed the course of education in recent decades has been able to see how people basically do not love to immerse themselves in reality with their concepts. To grasp the living spiritual life by wanting to come to ideas that themselves live in a spiritual world - without being personally present, but only observing the inner life - is something that people in recent decades have not taken the time to do at all. Hence these numerous people, whom I would like to mention, the 'button counters' of spiritual science. I would like to call them button counters for the following reason: if you have consciously grown up with what many people have been concerned with as important concepts in recent decades, you can certainly understand that it has happened that way, but you also have to grasp it. For several centuries, certain people have repeatedly reflected on the social coexistence of people. Some have come to more individualistic concepts, others to more social concepts. Individualism and socialism have played a role in the most diverse variations in recent times when considering human coexistence, which must be thought of as imbued with the spirit. To those accustomed to concepts saturated with reality, this splashing about among all the socialists and individualists of recent times and down to our days, when one follows the lines of thought by which one became an individualist or a socialist, really does not appear to be based on deeper spiritual grounds, but rather as if one were counting at the buttons: Individualist-Socialist, Individualist-Socialist, and would have counted which button it stops at; only that it is not so noticeable when this button counting happens in thoughts. You splash around in such concepts that are not at all suitable for reaching into true reality, like these conceptual shadows that have been so idolized as individualism and socialism in recent decades.

But there is a very serious background to this, and it is connected with much that is already extraordinarily important for certain conditions in the present. For man does not always need to know how the general world picture, which arises from his ideas, feelings and will impulses, is connected with ordinary daily life, with social life. But he will cause tremendous harm if he, in particular, stands at an important point and proceeds from ideas and feelings that are not steeped in reality. When he theorizes about mere scientific concepts of a world view, as Professor Dewar does, these concepts appear to spiritual science as delusions, which he imposes on his listeners. It is one thing to view a world view from a scientific point of view, but if someone with the same spirit is involved in social work and transfers the same kind of spiritual to this external aspect, then it has a highly destructive effect, and often in life we look for what is actually missing in completely different places than where it should be sought. Because everything that happens on earth is connected. And just as a doctor sometimes has to diagnose an illness as something completely different from what one would initially believe after a superficial examination, so too does the person who has an overview of the situation sometimes have to look for the origins of some illnesses and some devastating effects in completely different places than what appears to be the case after a superficial examination. I would like to give an example of this, but how should I do it in this day and age, when, precisely with regard to this example, I could be seen to be allowing myself to be influenced in my judgment by the events of the times that affect us all so painfully? But precisely with regard to this example, I have a way of avoiding this appearance. In 1913, in Helsingfors, that is before the war, I gave a series of lectures on a completely different subject, but in the course of which, to mention just one example, I had to make an allusion to Wilson, and I will read out what I said about Wilson at the time in a different context. You will also see from what I said at the time that I certainly did not fail to recognize a certain significance, and also a certain spirit, that can be attributed to Wilson, but you will also see that it was not necessary, in order to form an opinion about this man, to first let the events of the last few years or weeks sink in – perhaps even – as was necessary with some people. I said at the time:

“There are some very remarkable essays that have appeared recently by the President of the United States of North America, Woodrow Wilson. There is an essay on the laws of human progress.”

Of course, Woodrow Wilson was already talking about the laws of true human progress back then.

"In it, he explains quite nicely and even ingeniously how people are actually influenced by the prevailing thinking of their age. And he explains very ingeniously how, in the age of Newton, when everything was full of thoughts about gravity, one felt the Newtonian theories, which in reality only applied to the heavenly bodies, to have an effect on social and even state concepts. One feels the after-effects of thoughts about gravity in particular in everything. This is really very ingenious, because one only needs to read up on Newtonism and one will see that words like attraction and repulsion, etc. are used everywhere. Wilson emphasizes this very ingeniously. He says how inadequate it is to apply purely mechanical concepts to human life, to apply concepts of celestial mechanics to human affairs, by showing how human life at that time was virtually embedded in these concepts, how these concepts influenced state and social life everywhere. Wilson rightly criticizes this application of purely mechanical laws in the age in which, so to speak, Newtonism has brought the whole of thought under its yoke. You have to think differently, says Wilson, and now constructs his concept of the state in such a way that, after he has demonstrated this from the age of Newtonism, Darwinism now peeps out everywhere.

What I wanted to say at the time was that Wilson now sees, by looking at a previous age: Newton was included in the concepts of the state, and people now followed that. What does he do? He now includes Darwinism because it is a comrade of the age of Darwin, just as people were contemporaries of Newton at the time. He is doing exactly the same thing, but he is naive enough not to notice it.

If all sorts of people have played with the concepts of individualism and socialism, and they have remained playing, well, that may be so; but if, with such defective thinking, as I wanted to say at the time, an important position is managed, then that has a completely different meaning. If you want to get to know our age, then you will have to get to know how to work with concepts that are divorced from reality, that are only shadows of something, where these concepts are justified, as in Wilson's case these social concepts, how to work with such shadowy, unrealistic concepts. One may still be quite far from such insight; but one will not understand reality and come to no conception of the world that corresponds to this reality, if one is not able to see through what kind of conceptual shells are used today in science and in the social fields. That is why people are least able to gain an insight when it comes to entering the real spiritual world and gaining a world view from it or through it. There are people who, whether through their own inner development or through external circumstances, are seized by the longing to know the spiritual. But where do they often look for it? They cannot bring themselves, because of a certain inner laziness of thought, to seek the spirit where it can really be found: on the path of the spirit itself. This is difficult, although, even if things have taken 35 years, it is entirely possible, when the results come to light, to find them immediately plausible. Above all, it requires that the inner soul be brought into such a mood and state that it is often not appreciated by exact researchers of the present day. This can be seen most clearly when an exact researcher who rightly has a reputation in the field of external natural science delves into the spiritual world.

Among the books that have caused the greatest sensation in the English-speaking world in recent months, apart from war literature, is the one that the naturalist Sir Oliver Lodge has written as his latest book. This book has a special reason. The reason for this is that the son of the naturalist Lodge, Raymond Lodge, was killed on the Western Front in August 1915. Now, Oliver Lodge always had a certain inclination towards the spiritual world. The death of his son added to his desire to penetrate into the spiritual world. And so it came about - I can only tell these things briefly, so some things will be inexplicable, but I still want to tell the case to confirm what is connected with the attracted train of thought - it came about like this: Even before the son fell, Sir Oliver Lodge had been made aware from America that something had happened to this son. When you read what was written to the Lodge family from America, indirectly through a medium – as these personalities are called – then a scientifically minded person – and Oliver Lodge is that, too – or let us say, a spiritually minded person , the impression is: Yes, what has been written to him could mean anything; at best, it can be interpreted to mean that Frederick Myers, the editor of a work on the scientific study of the soul's life, who died long ago, would take care of Sir Oliver Lodge's son. But the matter could be interpreted in one way or another. If Raymond Lodge had not fallen, it could be interpreted that Myers would protect him from death in battle; after death, it could be interpreted that he would be his helper and guide in the hereafter. I do not want to go into what is behind such things; they are not as harmless as one might think. Now Raymond Lodge fell. And Sir Oliver Lodge - who would completely refuse to intrude on the ways into the spiritual world to get to the immortal soul, which is represented in the spiritual science meant here - he came into contact with mediums that were, in his opinion, beyond reproach , and then it soon turned out for him that through these mediums the soul of Raymond Lodge communicated through the mediums, telling all kinds of things: how she was now living, what her wishes were with regard to the father, the family and so on. I would not mention this matter if I only wanted to relate what ordinary spiritualists report, because they lack objectivity; even where Lombroso and Richet are involved, objectivity still prevails. But Oliver Lodge is really a person who knows the exact methods, and who therefore also proceeds exactly in such a matter, so that also someone who has enjoyed an education in the methods of natural science in his scientific thinking and research, and who has learned to to develop real conscientiousness in natural science, which basically the spiritual researcher should also have, could have a certain respect for the exactness with which Oliver Lodge proceeds in describing the things he shares in his thick book. And while in the case of ordinary reports, it is of course always immediately apparent, if one is somehow even a little familiar with the things, where the observers have not seen anything, where the messages are missing about the arrangements and so on, with Sir Oliver Lodge one sees that a person is reporting who really knows how to handle and describe scientific methods.

Now, one thing that Sir Oliver Lodge states has made a particularly great and deep impression. I will not tell the other things, because they are, despite being stated exactly, according to the pattern of other sessions. But the one that made a particularly great impression is this: Sir Oliver Lodge relates that through the impeccable mediums – I can tell all this because you know I do not represent this direction – it has come out that Raymond Lodge had himself photographed with comrades before he was killed on the Western Front. And now Raymond Lodge's soul describes the picture through the medium, and in three photographs, as they are taken one after the other by the photographer, where, when one group is photographed, the same group sits, and only sometimes one, while in one shot he put his hands on his knees, then puts them on the chair or on the shoulder of the neighbor. With great accuracy, this medium describes, let us say, these photographs. While one – Oliver Lodge also admits this – could find some connections in the other things, so that some kind of quiet suggestion, as it usually is with such things, took place, or some other process that every spiritual researcher knows to transfer to the medium, what memories, reminiscences, especially subconscious reminiscences of the deceased Raymond Lodge came to life – while it went with everything else that was there, it did not go with this incident, because nobody could know about these photographs. These photographs were taken in the very last days before Raymond Lodge died, and had not yet arrived in England. Nobody knew anything about them, neither any of the family nor the medium. And indeed, a fortnight or three weeks later, the three photographs arrived, exactly as described by the medium. Now this naturally became an experimentum crucis for him, a proof of the cross, because here it was directly demonstrable: Nobody could know anything about it, it came from a world that is not the world in which Raymond Lodge used to live before he went through the gate of death.

This has not only had a great effect on Sir Oliver Lodge, who had a great affinity for such things, but it has made a great impression on the whole audience interested in such things. Oliver Lodge was indeed completely convinced and was also able to convince his family members who had previously been skeptical; the circle then expanded more and more. It is now strange how satisfying it is, especially today, not to have to face discomfort in order to penetrate into reality, how one can easily form ideas about the spiritual world in a light-hearted way.

The spiritual researcher knows that if something comes out in this way, it is certainly not a manifestation of a truly spiritual world. That is why in the last lecture I called what comes to light in this way the most soulless of all, the thing from which the spirit has been driven out completely, although it can sometimes imitate the spirit. When something comes out in this way, it is related to the spirit as the dead shell of a mussel is to the living oyster, when the oyster is outside. The shell comes out, the most material, the most sensual, the most sensual remnant, which sometimes reproduces the spiritual in its forms. For the spirit must be sought in a spiritual way. But how could Oliver Lodge, one may say this if one is familiar with real spiritual research, how could he yield to such dilettantism? Simply because he lacks the reality-saturated concepts to judge such things. If he had read just a little of the abundant German literature on these matters, which of course is also little considered today, but which is there, especially from the first half of the nineteenth century, is there in great numbers, then he would have known that, admittedly, he is not dealing with anything other than what was relegated to the field of deuteroscopy in German intellectual life in the first half of the nineteenth century. There have been reports of phenomena such as the often-cited case of someone who, through a particular state of mind — even Schopenhauer mentioned it — in a kind of dream consciousness, comes to the conclusion: Then and then you will have an accident here and here. Some somnambulists describe such accidents in the not-too-distant future so precisely that, for example, if they fall off a horse, they describe the scene in great detail. We are not dealing here with something that could expand human insight into the real spiritual world, but with a mere expansion of perception that relates to sensory reality. We are dealing with the transgression of the ordinary perception of space and time, which is entirely possible within certain limits. Now, in the case of Raymond Lodge, there was obviously nothing different than what happens in such cases. What did the medium tell Oliver Lodge? Nothing more than what happened afterwards. Although the photographs had not yet arrived at the time the medium described them, they did come later. Oliver Lodge and his family were waiting for them. There was an event that occurred; just as a somnambulist dreams, in a fortnight he will fall off a horse. So it is not something that would show someone who is truly a spiritual researcher the way into a real spiritual world, but rather something that relates to the real spiritual world as the oyster shell relates to the oyster. It reproduces it. But in what comes to light, can one suspect something, when one takes the things seriously? But because it is more comfortable than the actual entering into the spiritual world, many a person will love to investigate something of the spiritual world in this way. But one has to do with something much more belonging to materiality in a spiritualistic phantom than one has to do with the real bodily human being. This is precisely the peculiar thing about the way in which real spiritual research must become part of people's educational lives, that this spiritual research will deduce from the aberrations to which even great thinkers are exposed, people who are quite familiar with the exact methods of external research into nature.

Now, just as one must say that the laws of nature, as we abstract them from natural phenomena and apply them to the world, are not applicable in the characterized way for the final state of the earth, since the earth will change with all human soul and spiritual life as it has been described, so one can also say that for the initial state. There one must indeed learn how memory - that is, the life of representations that already live in our soul by themselves, so that we are no longer present - actually relates to the bodily life. And if one studies this in the same way as I have indicated for the soul life that one needs for the final state on earth, then one finds that an initial state of the earth cannot be calculated in the same way as current geologists do, who simply take the physical laws and then calculate what the earth might have looked like according to these physical laws so many millions of years ago. You could also take the laws of digestion and calculate what a seven-year-old child might have looked like as a physical being forty years ago. In this case, one would use exactly the same method as the geologist uses when calculating the state of the earth millions of years ago. It is really the case that the calculation is completely correct, and that the physical methods are also correctly applied, when one calculates from the metabolism of a seven-year-old child what that child might have looked like forty years ago – only it was not yet alive at that time. And so it is just not right that for the point in time for which the geologist gives such beautiful things – as I mentioned earlier, that Professor Dewar gives for the final state of the earth – the earth was not yet there. It had not yet emerged from its different life in the sun, it had not yet emerged, it had not yet lifted itself out. And for the initial state of the earth – I can only give a brief description of this – the situation is as follows: As we have to do with the final state of the earth, with the rising of the material earth in the sun-earth-law into a spiritual-soul state, so that we carry our own immortal-supernatural with us through future world cycles, so at the beginning of the earth's development we have to do with a descent - if one wants to use the expression, which is not very beautiful, of a spiritual-soul-like one; but in such a way that it does not become more spiritual, but is taken up, as it were, by what comes from the solar, so that within the material the spiritual-soul-like comes to realization, one can already say: is embodied. Here we have to do with the reverse process: with the origin of a spiritual from a spiritual that surrounds itself, envelops — “wraps,” one might say, in contrast to “develops” — in a material from the world of space, from the world of time. And here again we notice that for the beginning of the evolution of the earth the laws hold good which I have already mentioned for the parallel currents of the subconscious, and that the ordinary laws of mathematics come to an end there. However grotesque it may sound, it is nevertheless true. And I would like to say: Kant grasped a quarter-truth about this, in that he showed in his antinomies how it can be conceived that for certain initial and final conditions, it is possible to think in such and such a way; but just because he found a quarter-truth, the whole thing had more of a paralyzing effect on the world picture of reality than that it could have been beneficial. For Kant would not only have had to believe that space and time are tied to the human faculty of perception, but he would have been able to recognize, if he had penetrated to the real spiritual research, how that which lives in man as spiritual-soul is closely connected with the spiritual spiritual-soul happenings of the entire outer existence, first of all of the earthly existence, and how a thorough study of the spiritual-soul life yields a truly spiritual-scientific picture of the world, so that one can say: our world of space and time is bound to man's intercourse with the earth. Therefore, what we can discern through them is only valid from the beginning of the earth to the end of the earth. And one must get to know the other laws that are in the other current if one wants to talk about the beginning and end of the earth in such a way that a true, real picture of the world emerges. Then one recognizes that the human soul is older than the earth; that the human soul was already present in that spiritual, which has wrapped itself up, involved itself in that law of the earth, which comes about in the intercourse of the earth with the life of the sun.

Spiritual science thus goes beyond the world view that I recently mentioned, which made such a repulsive impression on Herman Grimm, who of course did not know these connections. I have already shared Herman Grimm's words at the time, I have shared them many times before, but they are so interesting that one can always let them affect one's soul again. For in them we have words that prove how a healthy, sensitive soul must relate to such worldviews, as Professor Dewar has presented them to the world in the manner described, and how they are so firmly entrenched in the education of the present that one is naturally still considered a real crank today if one agrees with such words as Herman Grimm has expressed. Herman Grimm was forgiven for that. They would say: oh, he is an art historian, he is – well, he is not generally familiar with the rules of exact natural science and its results; it is of no consequence. That is a good reason. But the serious spiritual scientist will not be forgiven if he cites Grimm's words, which he said in connection with Goethe's world view:

How could the children not believe it, how could they not indulge in this scientific fantasy! It's so easy to show. One need only pose as a teacher, take a 'droplet' formed from a certain substance, take a piece of card and slide it into the equatorial plane of the droplet, stick a needle in at the top, place it on the water; then turn it and show how the little droplets are formed, how the little world systems are formed. How could anything be more conclusive than this, that the great cosmic structure also came into being according to the Kant-Laplace theory? Unfortunately, sometimes it is good to forget oneself, but in this case, when one is conducting scientific experiments, one must not forget oneself – namely, the teacher forgot himself. Because if he had not turned, then none of the world system would have come about. If he wanted to describe this process correctly, he would have to think of a giant professor standing in space.

In short, the fact that today, despite being generally accepted by the scientific community, Herman Grimm can say:

Thus spiritual science provides a different picture of the world, one that can incorporate the spiritual and soul into the beginning and end state of the earth in such a way that this incorporation is truly supported, like any other scientific fact. The only difference is that these things must be investigated from the spiritual-mental side, and cannot be worked out on the basis of what applies only to the material processes of the earth, as long as the earth is this material body that it is.

People today are not even aware of the conceptual shadows in which they actually live. Only sometimes does one think a little more sharply; he then does not come away from these conceptual shadows, but he thinks a little more sharply and sometimes comes to very strange assertions. For example, Eduard von Hartmann, who could not get away from physical ideas, but who could think. Hartmann came to think about physical ideas as well. He thought in terms of these physical ideas and had the courage to express what arose from them. Take a very nice saying:

“That there is a real nature, and that the laws established by physics apply in this real nature, is itself only a hypothesis.”

What is actually behind this? That is to say: physics establishes laws; if you really think about it, the whole of nature is only a hypothesis. It is really only a hypothesis, because with the physical concepts you cannot grasp reality. And if those who form a world picture out of physical concepts do not – thank God – see the real nature illuminated by the sun, it would remain a hypothesis for them. Only external reality counts for them.

In the spiritual realm, one must achieve reality by being fully active in penetrating it. This is not so comfortable. It does not present itself automatically, like external nature. But a saying such as Eduard von Hartmann's shows quite clearly that the concepts prevailing in the physical field are also powerless to reach real nature. For he who can really think, who knows that nature is out there, but what the physicist wants to absorb from it, that only gives a hypothetical nature.

It is a momentous thought that Hartmann expresses, although it is, of course, a completely insane thought. It will come about that spiritual science enters into the educational life of humanity because the conditions for it are present. But some things will have to be understood again that are no longer understood today, that are only taken in by the sound of the words.

I have often referred to the first step of the view that one can arrive at when observing this second current of human soul life, which can become conscious, as imaginative presentation. One must penetrate to this imaginative presentation, which is not a form of self-conceit but a life in spiritual reality, in order to grasp reality at all. We shall have to understand such ideas that can inwardly quicken this penetration into spiritual reality. We shall have to understand not merely the sound of the words, but their deeper inner value, such as can be found by the hundred in the fragments, thrown down just so, of a great spiritual man who died only young: Novalis. And from what has been said today about life, death and immortality in the universe, one will get an idea of the depth that lies, for example, in such a word of Novalis: “We will only become physicists when we make imaginative substances and forces the measure of natural substances and forces.” That is to say, when we can also recognize from the imaginative, when we approach external nature.

Of course, people's attention had to be diverted from the spiritual for a time so that great progress could be made in the external, natural sciences. But man must not cut himself off from the spiritual world. The connection to real spiritual research must be found again.

Now, one should not think that one must break with all reason, with all that is sound, if one does not give in to the ideas that arise from a false interpretation of physics, as given by a man like Professor Dewar. However, the matter also has a moral aspect in a sense. And with regard to much, a different scientific attitude will have to prevail than the one that often dominates scientific people today if one wants to approach the study of the spiritual worlds in the right way in order to find that inner peace of mind that makes it possible to experience the spiritual world in such a way that the spiritual world becomes objective, that the spiritual world is really there before the soul's eye, not as a vague pantheism or mysticism. One will also have to develop certain things with regard to the inner eye of the soul, above all a certain composure and humility with regard to inner experience. I do not mean it in the sentimental sense, as some who call themselves mystics do, because I think nothing of all these stereotyped labels. But one will have to acquire a certain mood. For the tendency of the times has also become similar to those concepts, which only cling to the surface, and people believe that they are developing particular idealism when they use the usual shadow concepts to do a little abstraction from external sensual reality. We shall have to develop a different attitude, for even the attitude of science has surrendered to mere clinging to the outer life, an attitude which I will now summarize in a few words at the end. Not my words, but the words that a sensible German personality used when she translated a spiritual-scientific book — the sensible Matthias Claudius. Let me conclude with his words, in which I would like to show, so to speak, the soul power that must enter into the inner mood as a soul attitude if one is to go beyond such scientific delusions, as I have also characterized them today. Matthias Claudius said on this occasion, when he translated a book from the field of spiritual science - as was appropriate for the time, not as it would be for the present time - he said in his preface:

“... whether a man is vain and foolish about a moustache or about metaphysics and Henriade, or hates and envies a man because of a larger pumpkin” — he means the head “or because of the invention of differential and integral calculus, in short, whether one lets oneself be held and hindered by one's five yoke oxen” – he means the five senses – ‘or by one's polyhistorey’ – that is, by one's external erudition – ‘on the rope, seems basically the same and not different.’

And since inner soul life is really very closely connected with the soul's attitude, it will be necessary to pour out a yearning for an exploration of the spiritual world, as expressed in these beautiful words of Matthias Claudius. For when a person has realized within himself what is implied in these words, then he really does have a relationship with the spiritual world through his feelings. And that is a preparation for clearing away all the mists that arise, especially in the spiritual world, when one allows all the different kinds of arrogance and pride to take effect, which are particularly present in the present state of spiritual development.