The Rudolf Steiner Archive

We are transported to Rammenau in Upper Lusatia, a place near Kamenz where Lessing was born. 1769, to be precise. A relatively small house stands by a stream. It is known that the ribbon weaving trade has been hereditary in the family since the time of the Thirty Years' War. The house was not exactly prosperous, but rather quite poor. A stream flows past the little house, and by the stream stands a seven-year-old boy, relatively small, rather stocky for his age, with rosy cheeks and lively eyes that are currently filled with deep sorrow. The boy has just thrown a book into the stream. The book floats away. The father comes out of the house and says something like the following to the boy: Gottlieb, what were you thinking of! You throw into the water something your father bought at great expense to give you great joy! The father was very angry because he had given the book to Gottlieb the other day as a gift, to the boy who until then had learned nothing from books except what one can learn from the Bible and the hymnbook.

What had actually happened? Young Gottlieb had absorbed what he had been given from the Bible and the hymnal with great inner strength, and he was a boy who had studied well at school. His father wanted to give him a treat and one day bought him 'Siegfried and the Horned One' as a present. The boy Gottlieb immersed himself completely in reading 'Siegfried and the Horned One', and as a result he was scolded for his forgetfulness and inattention with regard to everything he had been interested in before, with regard to his schoolwork. This upset the boy. He had grown so fond of his new book, 'Siegfried of the Horns', and took such a deep interest in it. But on the other hand, the thought was vividly present in his mind: 'You have neglected your duty!' Such were the thoughts of the seven-year-old boy. So he went to the stream and threw the book into the water without further ado. He received his punishment because he was able to tell his father the facts and what he had done, but not the real reason for it.

We follow the boy Gottlieb in this age into other life situations. We see him, for example, far from his parents' house, standing outside on a lonely pasture, from four o'clock in the afternoon, gazing into the distance, completely absorbed in the view of the distance that was spread around him. He is still standing there at five, still standing there at six, still standing there when the bells ring for prayer. And the shepherd comes and sees the boy standing there. He pokes him and makes him aware that he should go home with him.

Two years after the event we have just assumed, in 1771, Baron von Miltitz is staying with the landowner in Rammenau. He wanted to come there from his own estate in Oberau on a Sunday to have lunch and to socialize with his neighbors. He also wanted to hear the sermon beforehand. But he arrived too late and was unable to hear the Rammenau preacher, whom he knew to be a decent man. The sermon was already over. He was very sorry about that, and his regret was discussed many times among the guests, the innkeeper and the others gathered. Then they said: Yes, but there is a boy in the village who can perhaps repeat the sermon; they know about this boy. And now nine-year-old Gottlieb was fetched. He came in his blue peasant's smock, they asked him a few questions, and he answered them briefly with yes and no. He felt very little at home in the distinguished company. Then someone suggested that he repeat the sermon he had just heard. He gathered himself together and, with deep inward inspiration and the most heartfelt participation in every word, he repeated the sermon he had heard from beginning to end to his landlord's estate neighbor. And he repeated it so that one had the feeling that everything he said came directly from his own heart; he had absorbed it so completely that it was all his own. With inner fire and warmth, growing ever more fiery and warm, nine-year-old Gottlieb presented the entire sermon.

This nine-year-old Gottlieb was the son of Christian Fichte, the ribbon weaver. The lord of the manor of Miltitz was amazed at what he had experienced in this way, and said that he must ensure the further development of this boy. And the acceptance of such a concern had to be something extraordinarily welcome to the parents because of their meager external circumstances, although they loved their boy dearly. For Gottlieb had many brothers and sisters, and the family had grown quite large. The baron's offer of help was most welcome. The baron was so touched by Gottlieb's story that he wanted to take the nine-year-old boy with him immediately. He took Gottlieb to Oberau near Meissen. But young Gottlieb did not feel at home there at all, in the big house that was so different from what he had been used to in his poor ribbon weaver's cottage. In all the grandeur, he felt utterly unhappy. So he was given to a pastor named Leberecht Krebel in nearby Niederau. And there Gottlieb grew up in a loving environment, with the excellent pastor Leberecht Krebel. He immersed himself in everything that shimmered through the conversations that the brave pastor had with the exceptionally talented boy. And when Gottlieb was thirteen years old, he was accepted at Schulpforta with the support of his benefactor.

Now he was plunged into the strict discipline of Schulpforta. This discipline did not particularly appeal to him. He realized that the way the pupils lived together made it necessary to practice some secrecy and some cunning in their behavior toward the teachers and educators. He was completely dissatisfied with the way older boys were placed there as “senior companions,” as they were called, for the younger boys. Even at that time, Gottlieb had absorbed “Robinson” and many other stories. At first, school life had become unbearable for him. He could not reconcile it with his heart that somewhere where one should grow towards the spiritual world, he felt, there was concealment, cunning, deception. What to do? Well, he decided to go out into the wide world. He set out and just went through. On his way, the thought comes to him, deeply carried by feeling: Have you done right? Are you allowed to do this? Where does he go for advice? He falls to his knees, says a pious prayer and waits until some inner hint is given to him from the spiritual worlds as to what he should do. The inner hint was that he turned back. He turned back voluntarily. It was a great stroke of luck that there was an extraordinarily loving headmaster there, Rector Geisler, who let the young Gottlieb tell him the whole story and who had a deep inner sympathy for Gottlieb; who did not punish him, who even put him in a position that young Gottlieb could now be much more satisfied with himself and his surroundings than he could actually only wish for. And so he was also able to join the most talented teachers.

His aspirations were not easily satisfied. The young Gottlieb, who already longed for the highest at this age, was not actually allowed to read what he had previously heard about by hearsay: Goethe, Wieland, but especially Lessing, were at that time forbidden reading in Schulpforta. But there was a teacher who was able to give him a remarkable reading: Lessing's “Anti-Goeze”, that pamphlet against Goeze, which is supported by inner strength and contains everything that Lessing had to offer as his creed in a high, but free-minded way of thinking, in a free and frank language.

Thus Gottlieb absorbed at a relatively young age what he could from this “Anti-Goeze”. Not only did he appropriate the ideas – that would have been the very least for him – the young Gottlieb also adopted the style, the way of relating to the highest things, the way of finding one's way into a worldview.

And so he grew up in Schulpforta. When he had to write his final examination paper, he chose a literary topic. A strange final paper. It lacked what many young people do: they intersperse their schoolwork with all sorts of philosophical ideas. Nothing of philosophy, nothing of philosophical ideas and concepts was found in this final paper. On the other hand, it was already evident in it that the young man set out to observe people, to look at them into their innermost hearts, and strove for knowledge of human nature. This was particularly evident in this school assignment.

Now, in the meantime, the charitable Baron von Miltitz had died. The generous support that had been offered to the young Gottlieb, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, dried up. Fichte took his school-leaving examination at Schulpforta, went to Jena and had to live there in deepest poverty. He could not participate in any of the student life that was then in Jena. He had to work hard from day to day to earn what he needed for bare survival. And he could only devote a few hours to nourishing his deeply aspiring mind. Jena proved to be too small. Johann Gottlieb Fichte could not support himself there. He thought he would fare better in Leipzig, a larger city. There he tried to prepare for the position that was the ideal of his father and mother, who were devout people: a Saxon parish, a preaching position. He had, I might say, shown himself to be predestined for such a preaching post. He could become so absorbed in the traditions of Scripture that he was repeatedly asked to give short reflections on this or that Bible passage, even in his father's house. He was also asked to do this when he was with the brave pastor Leberecht Krebel. And whenever he was able to spend a short time at home, in the place where his parents' modest house stood, he was allowed to preach there, because the local pastor liked him. And he preached in such a way that what he was able to say was the biblical word in an independent but thoroughly biblical way, as if carried by a holy enthusiasm.

So he wanted to prepare for his rural theological profession in Leipzig. But it was difficult. It was difficult for him to get a teaching position that he thought he could fill. He worked as a tutor and a private teacher. But this life became hard for him. And above all, he was unable to really advance spiritually during this life. He was already twenty-six years old. It was a hard time for him. One day he had nothing left and no prospect of getting anything in the next few days; no prospect that, if things went on like this, he would ever be able to achieve even the most modest profession he had set his mind to. He could only be supported by his parents in the most frugal way; as I said before, it was a family blessed with many children.

Then one day he stood before the abyss, and the question arose like a wild temptation before his soul: No prospect for this life? — He might not have fully realized it, but in the depths of his consciousness, self-chosen death lurked. Then the poet Weisse, who had become a friend of his, came at the right time. He offered him a position as a private tutor in Zurich and made sure that he could actually take up this position in three months. And so, from the fall of 1788, we find our Johann Gottlieb Fichte in Zurich. Let us try to follow him with the gaze of the soul, as he stands in the pulpit of Zurich Cathedral, now completely filled with his own understanding of the Gospel of John, already completely filled with the endeavor to express in his own way that which is expressed in the Bible. So that when one heard his inspiring words resound in the Zurich cathedral, one could believe that someone had stood up who was able to pour the Bible into a completely new word in a completely new way, as if through a new inspiration. Many who heard him in the Zurich cathedral at the time certainly had this impression.

And then we follow him into another phase of his life. He became a tutor in the Ott household, at the “Zum Schwert” inn in Zurich. He only to a small extent submitted to the peculiar prejudiced view that was held of him there. He got on well with his pupils, less well with their parents. And we sense what Fichte is from the following. One day, the mother of the pupils received a strange letter from the tutor. What did this letter say? It said, roughly, that education was a task to which he – he meant himself, Johann Gottlieb Fichte – would gladly submit. And what he knew about the pupils and had learned from them gave him the certainty that he could do a great deal with them. But the education must be taken up at a certain point; above all, the mother must be educated. For a mother who behaves like that towards her child is the greatest obstacle to education in the home. I need not describe the strange feelings with which Frau Ott in Zurich read this document. But the matter was once again postponed. Johann Gottlieb Fichte was able to work in a blessed way in the Ott house in Zurich until the spring of 1790, so for more than a year and a half.

But Fichte was not at all suited to confine what his soul embraced to his profession. He was not at all suited to turn his gaze away from what was going on in the intellectual culture around him. He grew into what was going on spiritually around him through the inner zeal and the inner interest he took in everything that was going on in the world around him. Yes, he grew into all of it. In Switzerland, he grew into the thoughts that filled the minds of all people at the time, thoughts that were passed on from the erupting French Revolution. I would like to say that we can eavesdrop on him as he discusses with a particularly talented person in Olten the questions that were occupying France and the world in such a significantly intervening way at the time; how he found that these were the ideas should now be pursued; how he incorporated everything that occupied him internally, arising from his deep religiosity and keen intellect, into the ideas of human happiness, into the ideas of human rights, of lofty human ideals.

Fichte was not a solitary being who could only develop his soul rigidly out of his inner self. This soul grew together with the outside world. This soul felt, as if unconsciously, the duty of a human being not only to be for himself, but to stand as an expression of what the world wants in the time in which one lives. That was a deepest feeling, a deepest sentiment in Fichte. And so it was that at the very time when he was, one might say, most receptive to the growing together of his soul with what lived and breathed in his spiritual environment, he grew together with the Swiss element, and from this Swiss-German element we always find an influence in the whole of Fichte, as he later works and lives.

One must have an understanding of the profound difference between what lives in Switzerland and what, I would say, lives a little to the north in Germany if one wants to grasp the impression that Fichte's Swiss environment, Swiss humanity and human striving made on him. It differs, for example, essentially from other Germanic peoples in that it imbues everything that is spiritual life with a certain self-confident element, so that the whole cultural element takes on a political expression; that everything is thought in such a way that the person feels placed through the thought into direct action in the world. Art, science, literature, they stand as individual tributaries of the whole of life for this Swiss Germanic spirit.

This was what could also combine with Fichte's soul element in the most beautiful way. He was also a person who could not think any human activity or any human aspiration individually. Everything had to be integrated into the totality of human activity and human thought and human feeling and the whole human world view. In Fichte's work, what he could achieve was directly connected with his increasingly strong and powerful personality. Anyone who reads Fichte today, who engages with his writings, which often appear so dry in content, with the sparkling spirit of individual treatises, individual writings, will have no idea of what Fichte must have been like when he put all his inner fire, his inner presence in what he meant spiritually and what he had spiritually penetrated, into speech. Because what he was flowed into his speech. That is why he tried – it was a failed attempt – to found a school of rhetoric even back then in Zurich. For he believed that by the way the spiritual can be brought to people, one can indeed work in a completely different way than just through the content, however solid it may be.

Fichte also found a stimulating and soul-stirring relationship in Zurich, in the house of Rahn, a wealthy Swiss at the time, who was Klopstock's brother-in-law. And Fichte developed a deep affection for the daughter, Johanna Rahn. He was connected with Klopstock's niece by a close friendship that developed more and more into love. At first, the position as a private tutor in Zurich was no longer tenable. Fichte had to look further. He did not want to somehow become a member of the Rahn family and live off the Rahn family's funds, even though he was now, before he had made a name for himself in the world (he often spoke of this at the time). He wanted to continue to seek his path in the world; we must not say “his luck” when it comes to him, but rather “seeking his path in the world”.

He went back to Germany, to Leipzig. He thought he would stay there for a while; he hoped to find there what could be his real profession, to find that form of spiritual expression that he wanted to make his way in life. Then he wanted to return after some time to freely elaborate what he had united with his soul. Then something unexpected happened that changed all his plans for life. Rahn collapsed and lost all his wealth. Not only was he now tormented by the worry that the people he loved most had fallen into poverty, but he now had to take up his wanderer's staff and move on into the world, had to give up his favorite plans that had opened up to him from the depths of his soul.

Initially, a position as a private tutor in Warsaw presented itself to him. However, as soon as he arrived there and introduced himself, the aristocratess in whose house he was to enter found that the movements of Fichte, which were already then and later firmly and energetically found by some, were actually clumsy; that he had no talent at all for finding his way into any society. They let him know that. He could not bear that. So he left.

His path now led him to the place where he could first believe that he would find a person whom he held in the highest esteem among all the people not only of his own time but of the entire age, and whom he had approached after having been completely absorbed in the world view of Spinoza for a while ; a man whom he had approached by studying his writings, in which he had completely, completely found his way, so that, as the Bible or other writings had once stood before him, so now, in a very special new form, the writings of this man stood before him – namely Immanuel Kant. He made his way to Königsberg. And he sat at the feet of the great teacher and found himself completely absorbed in the way his soul could reflect what he considered to be the greatest teaching ever given to mankind. And in Fichte's soul, what lived in his soul out of his pious mind, out of his musings on the divine governance of the world and on the way in which the secrets of this governance have always been revealed to humanity, to the world, united with what he had learned and heard from Kant. And he developed the thoughts that arose in his soul into a work to which he gave the title “Critique of All Revelation”. Fichte was born in 1762, and was thirty years old when he wrote it. A strange thing happened at that time. Kant immediately recommended a publisher for the work that had so captivated him: “Critique of All Revelation.” The work went out into the world without the name of the author. No one thought it was anything but a work by Immanuel Kant himself. The good reviews flew in from all sides. This was unbearable for Fichte, who in the meantime, again through the mediation of Kant, had been offered a position as a private tutor in the excellent Krockow household, near Danzig, which he now found very appealing, where he could also freely pursue his intellectual endeavors. It was unbearable for him to appear before the world in such a way that when people spoke of his work, they actually meant someone else's. The first edition, soon out of print, was followed by a second, in which he named himself. Now, however, he had a strange experience. Now, to say almost the opposite of what one had said earlier was not possible, at least for a large number of critics; but one toned down the judgment one had had earlier. It was another piece of human knowledge that Fichte had acquired.

After he had spent some time in the Krockow house, he was able to make the plan, in the way he was now placed in the world, not outwardly, but spiritually - he had shown that he was capable of something - to go back to the Rahn house; only in this way he wanted to win Klopstock's niece for himself, now he could do it. And so he went back to Zurich again in 1793. Klopstock's niece became his wife.

Not only did he now continue to work in the deepest sense on what he had absorbed as Kantian ideas, but he also delved further into all that had already occupied him during his first stay in Zurich; he delved into the ideas of human goals and human ideals that were now going around the world. And he wove together the way he himself had to think about human endeavor and human ideals with what was now going through the world. And he was such an independent nature that he could not help but tell the world what he had to think about what the most radical natures were now thinking about human progress. “Contributions to the Correction of the Public's Judgments of the French Revolution” was the book that appeared in 1793.

At the same time as he was working on this book, he was constantly working on the ideas of the world view that he had gained from the Kantian world view. There must be a Weltanschhauung, he said to himself, which, starting from a supreme impulse for human knowledge, could illuminate all knowledge. And this Weltanschhauung, which asks about the highest in such a way that one could never find a higher for knowledge, that was Fichte's ideal.

In a strange way, the circumstances are linked. While he was still busy with the inner elaboration of his ideas, he received a letter from Jena, from Jena-Weimar. Such an impression had been made there by what Fichte had achieved that, when Karl Leonhard Reinhold left the University of Jena, Fichte was invited to take up the professorship of philosophy on the basis of what he had achieved. Those who were involved in the intellectual life of the University of Jena at the time greeted the idea of bringing this spirit, who on the one hand seemed to them to be a sparkling mind, but on the other hand, especially in matters of world view, to be striving for the highest, with the greatest satisfaction.

And now let us try to visualize him as the administrator of the teaching position that has been taken up. What had emerged as his Weltanschauung he wanted to convey to those who were now his pupils, starting from the year 1794. But Fichte was not a teacher like others. Let us first look at what had emerged in his soul. It is not possible to express this directly in his words – that would take too long – but it can be characterized entirely from his spirit. He was searching for a supreme being, one with whom the human spirit could grasp the stream of the world, the secret of the world, at one point, where the spirit was directly one with this stream of the world, with this secret of the world. So that man, by looking into this secret of the world, could connect his own existence with this secret, could thus know it. This could not be found in any external sensual existence. No eye, no ear, no other sense, no ordinary human mind could find it. For everything that can be seen with the senses externally must first be combined by the human mind; it has its being in the external world; one can only call it being if one's being is, so to speak, confirmed by what one observes with one's senses. That is not true being. At least, we cannot form any judgment at all about the true being of that which presents itself only to the senses. The source of all knowledge must arise from the innermost part of the I itself. But this cannot be a finished being, for a finished being within would be the same as that which is given to the outer senses as a finished being. It must be a creating being. That is the I itself, the I that creates itself anew every moment; the I that is not based on a finished existence but on an inner activity; the I that cannot be deprived of existence because its existence consists in its creating, in its self-creating. And into this self-creating flows everything that has true existence. So out of all sensory existence with this ego, and into the spheres where spirit surges and weaves, where spirit works as creativity! To grasp this spiritual life and activity where the ego is united with the spiritual activity and weaving of the world; to interpenetrate with that which is not external, finished existence, but what the ego creates out of the source of the divine life of the world, first as ego, and then as that which is the ideals of humanity, what the great ideas of duty are.

This was how Kantian philosophy had become embedded in Fichte's soul. And so he did not want to present his listeners with a finished doctrine; that was not what mattered to him. Fichte's lectures were not like any other lecture; his teachings were not like any other teaching. No, when this man stood at his lectern, what he had to say there, or rather, what he had to do there, was the result of long hours of meditation, during which he felt that he was inwardly immersed in the divine being, in the divine spiritual weaving and working that permeates and flows through the world, in a state that was elevated above all sensual being. After long inner communion with himself, in which he had communed with the world-spirit of the soul concerning the secrets of the world, he went forth to his listeners. But it was not his intention to impart what he had to impart, but to spread a common atmosphere from himself over his listeners. What mattered to him was that what had come to life in his soul through the secrets of the world should also come to life directly in the souls of his listeners. He wanted to awaken spiritual life, awaken spiritual being. He wanted to draw out of the souls of his listeners self-creative spiritual activity by making them cling to his words. He did not merely impart. What he wanted to give his listeners was something like the following. One day, when he wanted to illustrate this self-creative aspect of the ego — how all thinking activity can become in the ego and how man cannot come to a real understanding of the secrets of the world other than by grasping this self-creative aspect in the ego — as he was grasping the spiritual world with his listeners, as it were leading each spiritual hand into the spiritual world, 'wanted to achieve this, he said, for example: “Imagine a wall, my listeners!” Now, I hope you have now thought of a wall. The wall is now as a thought, as an idea in your soul. Now imagine the one who thinks the wall. Completely abandon all thought of the wall. Think only of the one who is thinking the wall!

Some listeners became restless, but at the same time, in the deepest part of their being, they were seized by the direct way, by the direct relationship in which Fichte wanted to place himself in relation to his listeners. The spirit from Fichte's soul was to grasp the spirit in his listeners.

And so the man worked for years, never giving the same lecture twice, always creating and reshaping it anew. For that was not what mattered to him, to communicate this or that in sentences, but to always awaken something new in his listeners. And he repeated again and again: “What matters is not that what I say or what I have to say should be repeated by this or that person, but that I should succeed in kindling in souls such flames which will become the cause for each person to become a self-thinker; that no one says what I have to say, but that each person is inspired by me to say what he himself has to say. Fichte did not want to educate students, but to educate self-thinkers. If we follow the history of Fichte's influence, we can understand that this most German of German philosophers did not actually educate any students of philosophy; he did not found a school of philosophy. Energetic men emerged everywhere from this direct relationship that he established with his students.

Now, Fichte was aware – and indeed had to be aware, since he wanted to lead the consciousness of man to the point of directly grasping the creative spiritual reality – that he had to speak in a very special way. Fichte's whole manner was difficult to grasp. Basically, all those who somehow participated in his way of teaching had not yet heard anything like what he practiced in Jena at the time. Even Schiller was astonished at this, and to Schiller he once spoke about the way in which he actually imagined his work in his own consciousness, for example as follows: When people read what I say, they cannot possibly understand what I actually want to say the way they read today. He then took one of his books and tried to read aloud what he thought was necessary to express what he wanted to say. He then said to Schiller: “You see, people today cannot recite inwardly. But because what is contained in my periods can only be brought out through true inward recitation, it just does not come out.

Of course, Fichte brought out something quite different from his own periods. What he spoke was spoken language. Therefore, even today, Fichte should be sought in the center of all the soul life to which one can devote oneself as the soul life of the whole German people; even today one should still have the effort to take in, with inner declamation, with inner listening, what otherwise seems so dry and so sober in Fichte.

Thus, as we let Fichte's intellectual development pass before our soul, we stand, as it were, on one of the intellectual summits of his being. And our gaze may well wander back to this remarkable intellectual journey.

We have visited Johann Gottlieb Fichte as he stood before Baron von Miltitz in his blue peasant's smock, a true red-cheeked, stocky peasant child, with no education other than a peasant child could have, but such that this education was already the innermost property of the soul in the nine-year-old. We have here an example of how a soul grows out of the German people, entirely out of the German people, which at first receives nothing but what lives within this German people, lives in the direct way of life of this people. We follow this soul through difficult circumstances, this soul, which is actually regarded as an ideal in the people, but must remain in the people, but must be left to the innermost impulse, the innermost drive of its being. We follow this soul as it rises to the highest heights of human inner activity, work, as it becomes a human shaper in the way we have just been allowed to describe it. We follow the path that a German soul can take, which grows directly out of the people and rises to the highest heights of spiritual being only through its own strength.

Fichte continued his teaching post in Jena until the spring of 1799. There had been all sorts of disagreements before then. For Fichte was certainly not a person who was easy to get along with, a person who would be inclined to make all sorts of detours in life and to make all sorts of soft gestures in his behavior towards people in order to make it easy to get along with him. But one important thing emerges that is significant for German life at that time.

The one person who was particularly pleased – and who agreed with Goethe on this point – was Karl August, who was able to appoint Fichte to his university in Jena. And I believe one can safely say, as an example of Karl August's complete lack of prejudice, that he appointed to his university the man who had applied Kantian philosophy to revelation in the freest way possible, but not only that – he appointed to his university the man who had advocated the freest humanistic goals in the freest, most unreserved way. I believe that one would not do justice to Karl August, this great mind, if one did not point out the high degree of lack of prejudice that this German prince needed at the time to appoint Fichte. A daring act, Goethe called this call. But I would like to say that Karl August and Goethe, who above all were and had to be the soul of this call, took it upon themselves to bring Fichte to Jena against a world of prejudice. I say it would almost be a wrong not to draw attention to the degree to which Karl August's lack of prejudice had developed. And for this purpose, I would like to read a sentence from Fichte's book, which is entitled “Contributions to the Correction of the Opinions of the Public on the French Revolution”: “They” – he means the princes of Europe, including the princes of Germany – “who are mostly educated in inertia and ignorance , or if they know anything, they know a truth expressly fabricated for them; they, who are known not to work on their education once they come to rule, who read no new writing except perhaps some watery sophistries, and who are always, at least during their years of rule, behind their age... .” That was in the last book that Fichte had written – and Karl August summoned this man to his university.

If you delve a little into the whole situation in which Fichte and those who appointed him found themselves, you come to the conclusion that the people who were of the mindset of the great, liberal-minded Karl August and Goethe actually waged a campaign against those who were in their immediate environment and who agreed with the appointment of Fichte as little as possible. And it was a campaign that was not at all easy to undertake, because, as I said, making a scene in the sense that one likes to make a scene in the world was not possible with Fichte. Fichte was a person who, through his crookedness, through his brusqueness, hurt everyone whom one would actually like to not hurt. Fichte was not a person who made a soft movement with his hand. Fichte was a person who, when something was not right for him, made his thrusts into the world with his fist. The way in which Fichte, with his full strength at the time, put what he had to tell the world into the world was not easy for Goethe and Karl August; it was very difficult for them, they groaned a little under it.

And so little by little the thunderstorms drew up. Fichte, for example, wanted to give lectures on morality, lectures that were printed as “Lectures on Morality for Scholars.” He found no hour but Sunday. But that was terrible for all those who believed that Sunday would be desecrated if one were to speak about morality in Fichte's sense to students in Jena on Sunday. And all manner of complaints were made to the Weimar government, to Goethe, but also to Karl August. The entire Jena Senate of Professors expressed the opinion that it caused an enormous stir and discord when Fichte held moral lectures at the university on Sundays – and he had in any case chosen the hour when the afternoon service was held. Karl August had to give way to Fichte's opponents in this matter, too, I would say first. But it would not be good if it were not made clear today how he had done it. Karl August wrote to the University of Jena at the time:

“We have therefore resolved, at your request, that the aforementioned Professor Fichte should only be allowed to continue his moral lectures on Sundays, in the hours after the end of the afternoon service, as a last resort.” The decree explicitly referred to the fact that “something as unusual as giving lectures on Sundays during the hours set aside for public worship” had occurred. But in issuing this decree, Karl August could not avoid adding the words: “We have gladly satisfied ourselves that if Fichte's moral lectures are similar to the excellent essay attached to this, they can be of excellent use.” But it continued to bother people. One could say that the opponents did not let up. And so it came about in 1799 that there was that unfortunate atheism dispute, as a result of which Fichte had to resign his teaching position in Jena. Forberg, a younger man, had written an essay in the journal that Fichte published at the time, which had been accused of atheism from a certain point of view. Fichte thought that the young man had been imprudent in what he had written, and he wanted to make a few marginal notes on it. But Forberg did not agree with this. And Fichte, in his free manner, which he not only used in the big things but in the smallest details, did not want to reject the essay just because he did not agree with it. He also did not want to make marginal notes against the will of the author. But he sent ahead an essay of his own, “On the Basis of Our Belief in a Divine World Government.” It contained words that were steeped in true, sincere worship of God and piety, words that may be said to have been elevated to the most spiritual level, but elevated to the most spiritual level, to that spiritual, of which Fichte wanted to say that it is the only real thing; that one can grasp reality only if one feels oneself with one's ego moving in the spiritual, standing in the spiritual current of the world. One must then grasp the existence of God not through some external revelation or external science, but in the living activity and weaving. One must grasp the creation of the world by flowing within it, creating oneself unceasingly and thereby giving oneself its eternity.

But Fichte's essay was accused of atheism all the more. It is impossible to recount this dispute, this accusation of atheism, in full detail. It is basically terrible to see how Goethe and Karl August had to take sides against Fichte against their will; but how Fichte cannot be dissuaded, now, I would like to say, from striking out with his fist when he believes that he has to push through what he has to push through. So it comes about that Fichte hears that they want to do something against him, want to reprimand him. Goethe and Karl August would have liked nothing better than to have been able to give this reprimand. Fichte said to himself: To accept a reprimand for what one has to scoop out of the innermost sources of human knowledge would be to violate one's honor - not the honor of the person, but the honor of the spiritual endeavor. And so he first wrote a private letter to the minister Voigt in Weimar, which was then put on file, in which he said: He would never allow himself to be reprimanded; no, he would rather resign. And when Fichte wrote about things of this nature, he wrote as he spoke. It was said: He spoke cuttingly when it was necessary. So he also wrote cuttingly – to everyone, whoever it was. There was no other way to avoid a complete collapse in Jena than to accept the resignation that Fichte had not actually offered, because a private letter had been put on record. So it came about that Fichte had to leave his very beneficial teaching post in Jena in this way.

We see him soon after that appearing in Berlin. We see him there appearing, now grasping the standing of the ego in the weaving and ruling world spirit from a new side: “The Destiny of Man” he wrote at that time. But he wrote it in such a way that he put his whole being, his whole nature, into this work. In this work he wanted to show how those who only look at the world of the senses from the outside, and only combine it with the intellect, lead to a world view that is without substance. How this only leads to a dream of life is the content of the first part. How to get away from seeing the world as a chain of external necessities is the content of the second part. And the content of the third part of 'The Destiny of Man' is the examination of what happens to the soul when it tries to grasp in its inner being that which creates the inner life, and which is thereby not only an imprint but a co-creation in the great creation of all world existence. After finishing the work, Fichte wrote to his wife, whom he had left behind in Jena at the time: “I have never had such a deep insight into religion as when I completed this work ‘The Destiny of Man’.”

With a brief interlude in 1805, during which he stayed at the University of Erlangen, Fichte then spent the rest of his life in Berlin, first giving private lectures in a wide variety of homes, lectures that were very forceful; later he was called to help at the newly founded university, which we will talk about in a moment.

I said that, with a brief interlude in Erlangen, he had now returned to Berlin. For what he had to give people was something he was always drawing from his soul, and casting anew in ideal form. In Erlangen, he presented his scientific theory and his world view with great zeal. It is strange that while he had an increasing number of listeners when he began his lectures in Jena, and the same was true in Berlin, the audience in Erlangen halved during the semester. Well, we know how professors usually accept this decrease; anyone who has experienced this knows that it is simply accepted. This was not the case with Fichte. When the number of students in Erlangen had fallen by half, he spoke out – admittedly only to those who were present, not to those who had left, but he assumed that they would find out – and delivered one of those thunderous speeches in which he made it clear to the people that if they did not want to hear what he had to say to them, they would only be open to external historical knowledge, not to reasonable knowledge. And after he had added what man becomes in life if, as a spiritual seeker, he does not want to acquire this reasonable knowledge, he said: “The time in which I read? I have indeed heard how little satisfaction there is with the choice of the hour. I do not want to take this too strictly, concluding from principles that actually go without saying and that would have to be applied here. I just want to consider those who are affected to be ill-informed and report it better. They may say that it has always been this way. If this were true, I would have to reply that the university has always been in a very poor state... I myself have a similar college to this one in Jena, where I read to hundreds of people from 6-7 o'clock in the summer and winter, which used to get very crowded towards the end. I just have to say: when I arrived here, I chose this hour because there was no other left. Since I have recognized the way of thinking about it, I will choose it with care and do so in the future. The reason for all these abuses is that there is a deep inability to deal with oneself, and a wealth of shallowness and boredom when, after lunch has been consumed at 12 o'clock, one can no longer stand in the city. And if you were to prove to me – which, I hope, cannot be done – that this has been the custom in Erlangen since its founding, that it is the custom throughout Franconia, indeed throughout southern Germany, I will not shy away from replying that, accordingly, Erlangen and Franconia and all of southern Germany must be the home of shallowness and lack of spirit.” He delivered a thunderous speech. You can think of such a thunderous speech as you like, but it is genuinely Fichtian, Fichtian in the way that Fichte wanted to be in it and always was in it in what he wanted to bring to people spiritually; that Fichte did not just want to say something with what he said, but to do something for the souls, to reach the souls. Therefore, every soul that stayed away was a real loss, not for him, but for what he wanted to achieve for humanity. For Fichte, action was the word. He was rooted in the spiritual world, and this enabled him to stand with others in the spiritual world at the same time as in a common spiritual atmosphere; that he really did not just theoretically advocate the proposition: the outer sense world is not the real thing, but the spirit, and the one who knows the spirit also sees the spiritual being behind all sense being.

For him, this was not just theory, but a practical reality, so that later in Berlin the following could happen: He had gathered his audience in his lecture room. The lecture room was near the Spree Canal. Suddenly, a terrible message came: children, including Fichte's boy, had been playing down below, a boy had fallen into the water, and it was said to be Fichte's son. Fichte set out with another friend, and while the audience were all standing around, the boy was pulled out of the water. The boy looked very much like Fichte's son, but he was not. For a moment, however, Fichte had to believe that it was his son. The child was pulled out of the water dead. He took care of the child. Those who know what a close family life there was in Fichte's house between Fichte, his wife Johanna and their only son, who remained the only one, know what Fichte went through in that moment: the greatest horror he could have gone through, and the transition from the greatest personal horror to the greatest personal joy when he could take his son back in his arms. Then he went into an adjoining room, changed his clothes and continued his two-hour lecture in the way he had always given lectures before, completely immersed in the subject.

But not only that. Fichte often provided examples of such engagement in intellectual life. For example, during his time in Berlin, we find him giving lectures that were supposed to be a critique of the contemporary era, a severe indictment of this era. He took a similar approach when reviewing the individual eras of history. That alone, in which he lived, he said, was the one in which selfishness had reached its highest point. And into this age of selfishness he found himself placed as the one who embodied selfishness in the person of Napoleon. Fichte basically never thought of himself as anything other than the opponent in spirit to Napoleon at that time, while the Napoleonic chaos was descending on Central Europe. And there is one characteristic of Napoleon which may be said of him: in the image of the man of Germanic stock, in the blue coat, which was the image of the peasant boy as described earlier, there arose an image of Napoleon, which was just as much the product of the most profound Germanic strength and Germanic outlook as it was of the highest philosophical view of life. We have arrived at a time in human existence, as Fichte said, when we have lost the realization that the spirit and spiritual essence pulsates through the world and also through human life, runs through human development, and that man is only of value in the course of history to the extent that he is carried by what is preserved of moral impulses, of moral world order from epoch to epoch. But they know nothing of this. We have arrived at an age in which we see generation after generation in the world appearing like links in a chain. The best have forgotten, as Fichte said, what must run through these chain links as a moral worldview. Napoleon has been placed in this world. A source of tremendous power, but a human being, as Fichte said, in whose soul individual images of freedom can be found, but never a real idea, a real concept of true, comprehensive freedom, as it works from epoch to epoch in the moral ideal of human beings, in the moral world order. And from this fundamental defect, that a personality which is only a shell, which has no soul-core, can develop such power, from this phenomenon Fichte derived the personality and the whole misfortune, as he said, of Napoleon.

If we compare Fichte, the most powerful German world-view man with his idea of Napoleon, and Napoleon himself, then, in order to make the whole situation clear, we must refer to a saying of Napoleon's, which, as is told, he did on St. Helena after his fall, because it is only through this that the whole situation is fundamentally illuminated: everything, everything would have gone. I would not have fallen against all the powers that rose up against me. There was only one thing I did not reckon with, and that actually brought about my downfall: the German ideologues! Let the little minds talk about the ideology of this or that, this self-knowledge of Napoleon's weighs, I think, more than anything one might want to object to Fichte's idealism, which was, however, thoroughly practical.

That it is not difficult for an idealist like Fichte to be practical at times can be proved by Fichte himself, and in a truly historical way. It became necessary for him to join his father's business as a partner, after his brothers had taken it over. There he was, a partner in the ribbon-making business of his family. His parents were still alive. And now we can see how he fared as a partner in a ribbon-making business. He was a good, careful businessman who really was able to help his brothers, who remained pure business people, a lot. In the face of all those who say, “Ah, these idealists, they understand nothing of practical life, they are dreamers!” — Fichte, speaking from the very essence of his entire existence, was able to say, especially in the lectures he gave on “The Task of the Scholar,” words that must always be repeated in the face of those people who speak of the impracticality of ideals, of the impracticality of the spiritual world in general. When Fichte spoke about the destiny of the scholar, he said the following sentences in the preface: “That ideals cannot be represented in the real world, we know perhaps as well as they, perhaps better. We only claim that reality must be judged by them, and modified by those who feel the strength within themselves to do so. Even if they cannot be convinced of this, they lose very little by it, once they are what they are; and humanity loses nothing by it. It merely makes it clear that the plan for the ennoblement of humanity does not rely on them. The latter will undoubtedly continue on its way; let benign Nature rule over the former and give them rain and sunshine, wholesome nourishment and undisturbed circulation of the fluids, and with that - wise thoughts, in due time!” This German man already knew about the meaning of ideals, and also about the meaning of practical life in the right sense. But Fichte was precisely this nature that was turned in on itself. One may call this one-sidedness, but such one-sidedness must appear in life from time to time, just as forces in life must act in such a way that they occasionally overshoot the mark, so that in overshooting the mark they achieve the right result.

Certainly, there was some harshness mixed into Fichte's behavior when he did not just want to give moral lectures to the people in Jena, but also wanted to practically fight all of the students' idleness, all of the drinking, all of the loafing around. He had already gained a certain following among the student body. In addition, a number of people had submitted a petition that this or that association, which was particularly idle, should be abolished. But he was a gruff character, he was a person who did not know how to make soft hand movements, but instead sometimes beat the air roughly with his fist – all of course meant symbolically. So then what happened was that a large part of the Jena student body was quite opposed to Fichte's practical moral effectiveness. And they got together and broke his windows. Which then prompted Goethe, who admired Fichte and was admired by Fichte, to the good joke: Well, that's the philosopher who traces everything back to the ego. It is indeed an uncomfortable way to be convinced of the existence of the non-ego when one's windows are broken; that's what you get for being the non-ego, its opposite!

But all this cannot be proof to us that Fichte's way of philosophizing was not in complete harmony with Goethe's way of philosophizing. And Fichte felt this deeply when, on June 21, 1794, soon after he had begun his lectures in Jena, he wrote to Goethe, sending him the proofs of his Theory of Knowledge: “I regard you, and have always regarded you, as the representative... (of the purest spirituality of feeling) at the present level of humanity. It is to you that philosophy rightly turns: your feeling is the same touchstone.” And Goethe writes to Fichte when he has received the Theory of Knowledge: ”There is nothing in what you have sent that I do not understand or at least believe I understand, nothing that does not readily follow from my usual way of thinking.” And Goethe continues along the following lines: I believe that you will be able to present to human souls in a proper way that which nature has always been in agreement with, but with which human souls must come to terms. And if today someone who finds that science, which Fichte had printed at the time, dry and un-Goethean, were to claim that Goethe had no sense for this matter, then one would have to reply to him as I did when I published Fichte's letters to Goethe in the Goethe Yearbook in 1894 at the Goethe-Schiller-Archiv in Weimar. In the Goethe Schiller Archive, there are excerpts from Fichte's “Wissenschaftslehre” written by Goethe himself, where Goethe wrote down sentence by sentence the thoughts that came to him while reading Fichte's “Wissenschaftslehre”. And finally, one also understands how one of the most German of Germans, Goethe, at that time, out of the purest spirituality of feeling, out of which he sought a new world view, had to reach out to him who, out of reason-energy, as the most German of Germans at that time, sought a philosophical world view. Goethe once put it beautifully when he spoke of his relationship to Kant's philosophy. He said something like this, not literally, but completely in line with the meaning: Kant came along and said that by looking at the world, man could only have sensory knowledge. But sensory knowledge is merely an appearance, merely something that man himself brings into the world through his perception. Knowledge must be set aside; one can only come to freedom, to infinity, to an understanding of the divine-spiritual existence itself through a faith. And what one might undertake, not in order to arrive at a belief, but to arrive at an immediate beholding of the spiritual world, to a living and weaving of one's own creative activity in the creative activity of the divine world spirit, and which Kant believes one cannot undertake, of which Kant says it would be “the adventure of reason.” And Goethe says: Well, then one would have to dare to bravely endure this adventure of reason! And if one does not doubt the spiritual world, but believes in freedom and immortality, in God, why should one not bravely face this adventure of reason and, with the creator of the soul, be able to place oneself in the creative spirituality that pervades and interweaves the world, in the world itself? - Only in a different way from how Goethe wanted to face it, he still found it with Fichte.

And this urge towards spirituality, towards an understanding of the creative wisdom of the world, had to emerge one day, even if it was in a brusque manner, by the creative self experiencing itself as one with the creative world essence within it. And according to Fichte's view, this was to happen through his theory of knowledge. As we have been able to characterize it, it is a direct deed of the German people, for we see Fichte's soul growing up from the German people, and Fichte was aware that basically his philosophy was always a result of his lively interaction with the German national spirit. With that, the German national spirit has presented to the world what it itself had to say about the world and life and human goals. It presented itself in the way that it could only present itself, in that it happened at the first onset of such a rugged personality as Fichte was.

Fichte was not easy to deal with. For example, when the university was founded in Berlin and Fichte was to elaborate the plan, he formed an idea of the university and worked out the plan for this idea in great detail. But what did he want? He wanted to create something so fundamentally new at the University of Berlin, at that time at the beginning of the 19th century, that we may say, without any contradiction arising, that this new thing has not yet been realized anywhere in the world; that the world is still waiting for it to be realized. Of course, Fichte's plan has not been realized, although, as he put it, he wanted nothing more than to make the university an institute that meant “a school of the art of real use of the mind.” So it was not people who know this or that that were to come out of the university, who were philosophers or natural scientists or physicians or lawyers, but people who are so immersed in the overall structure of the world that they can fully master the art of using reason. Imagine what a blessing it would be if there were such a university somewhere in the world! If only an art school could be realized somewhere that would produce people who have brought their inner soul to life so that they can truly move freely in the essence of existence.

But this personality was not easy to handle; it was there to give history a powerful impetus. Fichte also became the second rector of the university. He took such an energetic approach to his job that he was only able to serve as rector for four months. Neither the students nor the authorities involved could stand what he wanted to implement for any longer. But all of this was forged out of German national character, just as it appeared in Fichte. For when he delivered his 'Speeches to the German Nation', about which I have already spoken here repeatedly, not only during the war but also before the war, as well as about the great phenomenon of Fichte in general, he knew that he wanted to tell the German people what he had, as it were, overheard through his meditative dialogue with the world spirit. He wanted nothing more than to stir in their souls that which can stir in the souls of men from the deepest source of Germanness. The way in which Fichte positioned himself in his time and in relation to those whom he wanted to move in the direction of a soul that was equal to the tasks of world existence was not, however, likely to make any impression on shallow, superficial people other than that of curiosity. But Fichte did not want to create that at all. Of course, it is always the easiest thing to do when something like Fichte's spirituality comes into the world, to make fun of it. Nothing is easier than to criticize, to make fun of it. People did that enough. That put Fichte in serious situations. For example, as soon as he came to the University of Jena, he was already in a rather serious situation because he could not really agree with those – well, they were also philosophers. For example, at the University of Jena there was the one who was the senior philosopher. His name was Schmid. He had spoken so disparagingly about what Fichte had achieved up to that point, even though Fichte was now to become his colleague, that it was actually shameful that Fichte was now to become his colleague. So Fichte said a few words in the journal in which Schmid had expressed himself. And so it went back and forth. Fichte actually took up his teaching post in Jena by having the Jena journal in which Schmid had written insert: “I declare that for me Mr. Schmid will no longer exist in the world.” — So he stood next to his colleague.

The situation was a serious one. A less serious, but no less significant one was this: a journal called “Der Freimütige” was published in Berlin at the time. Kotzebue, the “famous” German poet Kotzebue and yet another person were involved in publishing this journal, putting it together. It is actually impossible to find out - I really don't think even the most intimate clairvoyance could find out! what this Kotzebue actually wanted in Fichte's lectures back then. But only for a while could it not be found out. It later became clear because the most malicious attacks on Fichte's lectures appeared in the “Freimütigen”, which at the time was making itself quite important in Berlin. Fichte finally had enough. And lo and behold, he took a number of these “Freimütigen” and tore them apart in front of the audience, tearing them apart in such a way that he - which he could do - poured an invincible humor over what this “Freimütige” had to say. The face of one of the listeners, whose reason for attending was previously unknown, became longer and longer. And finally, Mr. Kotzebue stood up with a long face and declared that he no longer needed to listen to this! He then left and did not return. But Fichte was quite glad to be rid of him.

Yes, Fichte was already able to find a tone that directly grasped the situation, in the way he practically engaged with the life that he wanted to shape as the innermost life of human existence. Although he lived entirely in the spiritual world, he was not an unworldly idealist. He was a man who rested entirely on himself and who took with all seriousness what he found in himself as his essential nature. Therefore, at a certain time, when Napoleon had overcome Prussia and the French were in Berlin, he could not remain in Berlin. He did not want to be in the city that had been subjugated by the French. He went to Königsberg, and later to Copenhagen. He only returned when he wanted to appear as the German man who presented the innermost essence of his nationality, of being a nation, of his national character, to his fellow countrymen in the “Speeches to the German Nation”.

Fichte is rightly perceived as an immediate expression of German nationality, as the expression of that which, as spirit, always lives in our midst, insofar as we are able to grasp Germanness in its spirit, not only in thought, as a philosopher put it so beautifully, who as a philosopher was not at all in agreement agreement with Fichte, Robert Zimmermann, who said: “As long as a heart beats in Germany that can feel the shame of foreign domination, the memory of the brave will live on, who, in the moment of deepest humiliation, under the ruins of the collapsed monarchy of Frederick the Great, in the middle of French-occupied Berlin, occupied Berlin, in front of the eyes and ears of the enemies, among spies and informers, to raise the strength of the German people, broken from the outside by the sword, from the inside by the spirit, and to create it anew in the same moment that the political existence of the same seemed to be destroyed forever, through the inspiring idea of general education, undertook to recreate it in future generations.” Even today, I would like to reiterate that, with regard to the content of much of what is in the “Speeches to the German Nation” and indeed what is in Fichte's other writings, we may have to think quite differently. What is important is that we feel the German spirit flowing through its products, and the renewal of the German spirit with regard to its position in the universe, as it is given in the “Speeches to the German Nation”. That we feel this as the spirit that is in our midst and that we grasp it only in the one example of Fichte, through which he has placed himself in an admittedly initially remote way in the German development. This spirit wanted to place itself in the evolution of the world powerfully and energetically, but deeply inwardly. Therefore, even in the time when his twilight years were already approaching, Fichte found the opportunity, precisely in the most intimate way, to once again cast and renew his entire theory of knowledge, to meditate on it again, and to bring it to his Berlin audience in the fall of 1813, which he had grasped as his deepest thoughts. There he once again, in the manner described, seized the soul of his listeners, casting his gaze on how impossible it is for a person to come to understand existence and its reality without wanting to grasp this existence in the spirit, beyond all sensuality. But to those people who believe they see any true existence in the world of the senses and in what is formed only after the world of the senses, he called out in the lectures that belong to the last that Fichte spoke: “Their knowledge is lost in misunderstanding and empty words; and they praise themselves for it, and quite rightly find that it is so. Take seeing, for example: an image of an object is cast onto the retina. On the calm surface of the water, an image of the object is also reflected. So, in our opinion, does the surface of the water see? What is the added element that must come between this image and the actual seeing that is present with us, but not with the surface of the water? They do not even have a notion of this, because their sense does not go that far. A special sense, a new sense, Fichte says, must be realized within oneself if one wants to experience that being in the spirit that makes all other being comprehensible in the first place. “I am, and I am with all my goals only in a supersensible world!” This is one of the words that Fichte himself coined and which, like a leitmotif, runs through everything Fichte said throughout his life, which he reaffirmed in a different way that fall of 1813. And what was he talking about then? That people must become aware that one can never get behind true being in the way one sees things and the world in ordinary life and in ordinary science. One must become aware that a supersensible sense lives in every human being and that man can merge into a supersensible world, can live into this sense as a creator in his ego in the creative, weaving world spirit. It is, as Fichte says, as if a seeing person comes into a world of blind people and wants to make them understand the world of colors and forms, and the blind people refuse to believe him. Thus, the materialistically minded person, because he has no sense for it, denies the one who knows: I am, and I am in the supersensible world with all my goals and creations. And so Fichte impressed upon his listeners this being in the supersensible, this life in the spiritual, this handling of a supersensible-sensual that he said:

“The new sense is therefore the sense for the spirit; the one for which there is spirit, and nothing else at all, and to which the other, the given being, also takes on the form of the spirit, and is transformed into it, to which therefore being in its own form has indeed disappeared.”

It is a great thing that in this way the confession of the spirit has been made within the German development of thought, before those who wanted to seek what, in the highest sense, the German people have to say when they speak from the innermost part of their being. For it is through Fichte that the German people have spoken. And for Fichte more than for anyone else it is true that the German folk spirit at that stage, as it could speak, spoke to the German people.

Whether we look at him externally, this Fichte, or turn our soul's gaze to his soul, he always appears to us as the most direct expression of German nationality itself, of that which is not only present within Germanness at some time or other, but is always present; which, if only we know how to grasp it, is always among us. Precisely through what Fichte is, how he presents himself to us, presents himself so that we have his image vividly before our soul, we would like to see him, to listen to him in spirit when he creates an atmosphere that spreads between his soul and the soul of his listeners, that we want to be very close to him: that makes us feel we can feel him, I would like to say, like a legendary hero, like a spiritual hero, who, as a leader of his people, can always be seen in spirit if this people only understands him correctly. They can see him by vividly imagining him as one of their best spiritual heroes.

And today, in the age of action, when the German people must struggle for their existence in an incomparable way, the image of the one who , German character, from the highest point of view, but also in the most energetic, in a single way; to describe it in such a way that we can believe in him more than in any other: we have him directly among us when we understand him correctly. For everything in him is so very much of a piece, it presents itself so directly that he stands among us in all his liveliness as we contemplate him; whether the individual trait emerges from the totality of his being or whether we allow the most intimate sides of his soul to affect us, he stands before us as a whole. He cannot be grasped by us otherwise, otherwise he is grasped in a haphazard, superficial way.

Yes, he can be seen how he kindles in his people the soul's devotion to the life-giving powers of the world, working within the creator, how he rises with this soul to experience in the spirit, and how he integrates himself as life into the developmental progress of his people. One need only open the eye of the soul. He will not be understood if he is not understood in this vivid way. But if you open your soul's eye to the greatness of your people, then he is standing among us.

The way he sought to work differently from other teachers, by standing before his audience and not speaking but acting with his words, acting as if it mattered little to him what he said, because it was only meant to ignite the soul of the listener, because something should happen to the soul, something should be done, and because the souls should leave the hall differently than they entered it, — this has the very peculiar effect that he must become alive to us in the way he worked from the people into the people, and that we believe we hear him when he had heard in lonely meditation, by which he well prepared himself for every spoken lecture, what he had heard in his self-talk with the world spirit, now did not present to his listeners, but converted it into the word that is action, so that he released those to whom he had spoken as other people. They had become other people, but not through his power, but through the awakening and ignition of their own power. If we understand him correctly in this way, then we can believe that we hear him keenly, how he wants to grasp the spirit directly with his word, with the sharpness, with the sharp knife of his word, which he previously grasped in the soul, by placing, as has been said of him, not just good, but great people in the world through his care of the soul.

If you really bring to life what he was, you cannot help but hear his words, his words that seem to come from the spirit itself, which in this Fichte only made itself a tool to speak, to speak out of the spirit of the world itself, inspiring, awakening fire and warmth and light. His words were full of heartiness, and they drove courage forward. His words became spirited when they flowed through the ears into the souls and hearts of the listeners; they carried spiritedness out into the world when the fire that these words ignited in the souls of the listeners made these listeners, as we so often hear from those who were Fichte's contemporaries, go out into the world as the most capable men. If you open your spiritual ear, you can hear, if you understand Fichte at all, the one who speaks from the spirit of his people, directly as a contemporary. And whoever has an ear for such greatness of nation will hear it in the midst of us. And rarely will a spirit stand before us in such a way that we can follow everything that it is into every single act of life. Do we not see the duty, the moral world order, as he represented it at the height of his philosophy, when we see the boy, how he, at seven years old, because he has grasped the love for “Horned Siegfried” out of inclination, throws it into the water because he does not feel in harmony with his duties? Do we not see the pensive man preparing for his lectures, who knows how to focus his mind on the secrets of the world, in the boy standing outside in the pasture and letting his gaze wander for hours in one direction into the secrets of nature until the shepherd comes and leads him home? Do we not feel the whole fire that inspired Fichte, that inspired him on his lectern in Jena, and later, when he spoke to the representatives, as he said, of his entire people in the “Speeches to the German Nation”? Do we not feel it already there, where he, repeating the sermon of the country pastor, made an impression on Baron von Miltitz? Do we not feel this spirit very close to us in every single thing, even in the smallest acts of his life, if we are able to feel just a little spiritually? Do we not feel how soulfulness, heartiness, moral courage radiates from this spirit into all subsequent German development? Do we not feel the eternal life that lives there, even if we cannot agree with the individual in the “Speeches to the German Nation”? Although they were confiscated twice by the censor in 1824, they could not be killed. They live today and must live in souls.

How we can see him, this Fichte, in our midst! How we can hear him, if we understand him correctly! We can feel him, if we feel with our soul how he inspires his listeners, how he inspires the entire German nation in its more distant development, how that which he created, what he allowed to flow through the continuous developmental current of his people, must remain immortal! We cannot help it, if we understand him correctly, we must feel this spirit of Fichte among us.

[ 1 ] Sleep has often been called the younger brother of death. This simile illustrates the paths of the human spirit more exactly than a superficial observation might feel inclined to assume. For it gives us an idea of the way in which the most manifold incarnations passed through by this human spirit are interrelated. In the first chapter of this book, Reincarnation and Karma, Concepts Compelled by the Modern Scientific Point of View, it has been shown that the present natural-scientific mode of thought, if it but understands itself properly, leads to the ancient teaching of the evolution of the eternal human spirit through many lives. This knowledge is necessarily followed by the question: how are these manifold lives interrelated? In what sense is the life of a human being the effect of his former incarnations, and how does it become the cause of the later incarnations? The picture of sleep presents an image of the relation of cause and effect in this field.¹ I arise in the morning. My continuous activity was interrupted during the night. I cannot resume this activity arbitrarily if order and connection are to govern my life. What I have done yesterday constitutes the conditions for my actions of today. I must make a connection with the result of my activities of yesterday. It is true in the fullest sense of the word that my deeds of yesterday are my destiny of today. I myself have shaped the causes to which I must add the effects. And I encounter these causes after having withdrawn from them for a short time. They belong to me, although I was separated from them for some time.

[ 2 ] The effects of my experiences of yesterday belong to me in still another sense. I myself have been changed by them. Let us suppose that I have undertaken something in which I succeeded only partially. I have pondered on the reason for this partial failure. If I have again to carry out a similar task, I avoid the mistakes I have recognized. That is, I have acquired a new faculty. Thereby my experiences of yesterday have become the causes of my faculties of today. My past remains united with me; it lives on in my present; and it will follow me into my future. Through my past, I have created for myself the position in which I find myself at present. And the meaning of life demands that I remain united with this position. Would it not be senseless if, under normal conditions, I should not move into a house I had caused to be built for myself?

[ 3 ] If the effects of my deeds of yesterday were not to be my destiny of today, I should not have to wake up today, but I should have to be created anew, out of the nothing. And the human spirit would have to be newly created, out of the nothing, if the results of its former lives were not to remain linked to its later lives. Indeed, the human being cannot live in any other position but the one which has been created through his previous life. He can do this no more than can certain animals, which have lost their power of sight as a result of their migration to the caves of Kentucky, live anywhere else but in these caves. They have, through their deed, through migration, created for themselves the conditions for their later existence. A being which has once been active is henceforth no longer isolated in the world; it has inserted itself into its deeds. And its future development is connected with what arises from the deeds. This connection of a being with the results of its deeds is the law of karma which rules the whole world. Activity that has become destiny is karma.

[ 4 ] And sleep is a good picture of death for the reason that the human being, during sleep, is actually withdrawn from the field of action upon which destiny awaits him. While we sleep, the events on this field of action run their course. For a time, we have no influence upon this course. Nevertheless, we find again the effects of our actions, and we must link up with them. In reality, our personality every morning incarnates anew in our world of deeds. What was separated from us during the night, envelops us, as it were, during the day.

[ 5 ] It is the same with the deeds of our former incarnations. Their results are embodied in the world in which we were incarnated. Yet they belong to us just as the life in the caves belongs to the animals which, through this life, have lost the power of sight. Just as these animals can only live if they find again the surroundings to which they have adapted themselves, so the human spirit is only able to live in those surroundings which, through his deeds, he has created for himself and are suited to him.

[ 6 ] Every new morning the human body is ensouled anew, as it were. Natural science admits that this involves a process which it cannot grasp if it employs merely the laws it has gained in the physical world. Consider what the natural scientist Du Bois-Reymond says about this in his address, Die Grenze des Naturerkennens (The Limits of the Cognition of Nature): “If a brain, for some reason unconscious, as for instance in dreamless sleep, were to be viewed scientifically”—(Du Bois-Reymond says “astronomically”)—“it would hold no longer any secrets, and if we were to add to this the natural-scientific knowledge of the rest of the body, there would be a complete deciphering of the entire human machine with its breathing, its heartbeat, its metabolism, its warmth, and so forth, right up to the nature of matter and force. The dreamless sleeper is comprehensible to the same degree that the world is comprehensible before consciousness appeared. But just as the world became doubly incomprehensible with the first stirring of consciousness, so the sleeper becomes incomprehensible with the first dream picture that arises in him.” This cannot be otherwise. For, what the scientist describes here as the dreamless sleeper is that part of the human being which alone is subject to physical laws. The moment, however, it appears again permeated by the soul, it obeys the laws of the soul-life. During sleep, the human body obeys the physical laws: the moment the human being wakes up, the light of intelligent action flashes forth, like a spark, into purely physical existence. We speak entirely in the sense of the scientist Du Bois-Reymond when we state: the sleeping body may be investigated in all its aspects, yet we shall not be able to find the soul in it. But this soul continues the course of its rational deeds at the point where this was interrupted by sleep.—Thus the human being, also in this regard, belongs to two worlds. In one world he lives his bodily life which may be observed by means of physical laws;in the other he lives as a spiritual-rational being, and about this life we are able to learn nothing by means of physical laws. If we wish to study the bodily life, we have to hold to the physical laws of natural science; but if we wish to grasp the spiritual life, we have to acquaint ourselves with the laws of rational action, such, for instance, as logic, jurisprudence, economics, aesthetics, and so forth.

[ 7 ] The sleeping human body, subject only to physical laws, can never accomplish anything in the realm of the laws of reason. But the human spirit carries these laws of reason into the physical world. And just as much as he has carried into it will he find again when, after an interruption, he resumes the thread of his activity.

[ 8 ] Let us hold on to the picture of sleep. If life is not to be meaningless, the personality has to link up today with its deeds of yesterday. It could not do so did it not feel itself joined to these deeds. I should be unable to pick up today the result of my activity of yesterday, had there not remained within myself something of this activity. If I had today forgotten everything that I have experienced yesterday, I should be a new human being, unable to link up with anything. It is my memory which enables me to link up with my deeds of yesterday.—This memory binds me to the effects of my action. That which, in the real sense, belongs to my life of reason,—logic, for instance,—is today the same it was yesterday. This is applicable also to that which did not enter my field of vision yesterday, indeed, which never entered it. My memory connects my logical action of today with my logical action of yesterday. If matters depended merely upon logic, we certainly might start a new life every morning. But memory retains what binds us to our destiny.

[ 9 ] Thus I really find myself in the morning as a threefold being. I find my body again which during my sleep has obeyed its merely physical laws. I find again my own self, my human spirit, which is today the same it was yesterday, and which is today endowed with the gift of rational action with which it was endowed yesterday. And I find—preserved by memory—everything that my yesterday, that my entire past has made of me.—

[ 10 ] And this affords us at the same time a picture of the threefold being of man. In every new incarnation the human being finds himself in a physical organism which is subject to the laws of external nature. And in every incarnation he is the same human spirit. As such he is the Eternal within the manifold incarnations. Body and Spirit confront one another. Between these two there must lie something just as memory lies between my deeds of yesterday and those of today. And this something is the soul. It preserves the effects of my deeds from former lives and brings it about that the spirit, in a new incarnation, appears in the form which previous earth lives have given it. In this way, body, soul, and spirit are interrelated. The spirit is eternal; birth and death rule in the body according to the laws of the physical world; both are brought together again and again by the soul as it fashions our destiny out of our deeds. (Each of the above-mentioned principles: body, soul, and spirit, in turn consists of three members. Thus the human being appears to be formed of nine members. The body consists of: (1) the actual body, (2) the life-body, (3) the sentient-body. The soul consists of: (4) the sentient-soul, (5) the intellectual-soul, (6) the consciousness-soul. The spirit consists of: (7) spirit-self, (8) life-spirit, (9) spirit-man. In the incarnated human being, 3 and 4, and 6 and 7 unite, flowing into one another. Through this fact the nine members appear to have contracted into seven members.)

[ 11 ] In regard to the comparison of the soul with memory we are also in a position to refer to modern natural science. The scientist Ewald Hering published a treatise in 1870 which bears the title: Ueber das Gedaechtnis als eine allgemeine Funktion der organisierten Materie (Memory as a General Function of Organized Matter). Ernst Haeckel agrees with Hering's point of view. He states the following in his treatise: Ueber die Wellenzeugung der Lebensteilchen (The Wave Generation of Living Particles): “Profound reflection must bring the conviction that without the assumption of an unconscious memory of living matter the most important life functions are utterly inexplicable. The faculty of forming ideas and concepts, of thinking and consciousness, of practice and habit, of nutrition and reproduction rests upon the function of the unconscious memory, the activity of which is much more significant than that of conscious memory. Hering is right in stating that it is memory to which we owe nearly everything that we are and have.” And now Haeckel tries to trace back the processes of heredity within living creatures to this unconscious memory. The fact that the daughter-being resembles the mother-being, that the former inherits the qualities of the latter, is thus supposed to be due to the unconscious memory of the living, which in the course of reproduction retains the memory of the preceding forms.—It is not a question here of investigating how much of the presentations of Hering and Haeckel are scientifically tenable; for our purposes it suffices to draw attention to the fact that the natural scientist is compelled to assume an entity which he considers similar to memory; he is compelled to do so if he goes beyond birth and death, and presumes something that endures beyond death. He quite naturally seizes upon a supersensible force in the realm where the laws of physical nature do not suffice.

[ 2 ] We must, however, realize that we are dealing here merely with a comparison, with a picture, when we speak of memory. We must not believe that by soul we understand something that is equivalent to conscious memory. Even in ordinary life it is not always conscious memory that is active when we make use of the experiences of the past. We bear within us the fruits of these experiences even if we do not always consciously remember what we have experienced. Who can remember all the details of his learning to read and write? Moreover, who was ever conscious of all those details? Habit, for instance, is a kind of unconscious memory.—By means of this comparison with memory we merely wish to point to the soul which inserts itself between body and spirit and constitutes the mediator between the Eternal and that which, as the Physical, is inwoven into the course of birth and death.

[ 13 ] The spirit that reincarnates thus finds within the physical world the results of its deeds as its destiny; and the soul that is bound to it, mediates the spirit's linking up with this destiny. Now we may ask: how can the spirit find the results of its deeds, since, on reincarnating, it is certainly placed in a world completely different from the one in which it existed previously? This question is based upon a very externalized conception of the web of destiny. If I transfer my residence from Europe to America, I, too, find myself in completely new surroundings. Yet my life in America is completely dependent upon my previous life in Europe. If I have been a mechanic in Europe, my life in America will take on a form quite different from the one it would take on had I been a bank clerk. In the one case I shall probably be surrounded in America by machines, in the other by banking papers. In every case my previous life determines my surroundings, it attracts, as it were, out of the whole environment those things which are related to it. This is also the case with my spirit-soul. It surrounds itself quite necessarily with what it is related to out of its previous life. This cannot constitute a contradiction of the simile of sleep and death if we realize that we are dealing only with a simile, although a most striking one. That I find in the morning the situation which I myself have created on the previous day is brought about by the direct course of events. That I find on reincarnating an environment that corresponds to the result of my deeds of the previous life is brought about through the affinity of my reborn spirit-soul with the things of this environment.

[ 14 ] What leads me into this environment? Directly the qualities of my spirit-soul on reincarnating. But I possess these qualities merely through the fact that the deeds of my previous lives have implanted them into the spirit-soul. These deeds, therefore, are the real cause of my being born into certain circumstances. And what I do today will be one of the causes of my finding myself in a later life within certain definite circumstances.—Thus man indeed creates his destiny for himself. This remains incomprehensible only as long as one considers the separate life as such and does not regard it as a link in the chain of successive lives.

[ 15 ] Thus we may say that nothing can happen to the human being in life for which he has not himself created the conditions. Only through insight into the law of destiny—karma—does it become comprehensible why “the good man has often to suffer, while the evil one may experience happiness.” This seeming disharmony of the one life disappears when the view is extended upon many lives.—To be sure, the law of karma must not be conceived of as being so simple that we might compare it to an ordinary judge or to civil justice. This would be the same as if we were to imagine God as an old man with a white beard. Many people fall into this error. Especially the opponents of the idea of karma proceed from such erroneous premises. They fight against the conception which they impute to the believers in karma and not against the conception held by the true knowers.

[ 16 ] What is the relation of the human being to his physical surroundings when he enters a new incarnation? This relation is composed of two factors: first, in the time between two consecutive incarnations he has had no part in the physical world; second, he passed through a certain development during that period. It is self-evident that no influence from the physical world can affect this development, for the spirit-soul then exists outside this physical world. Everything that takes place in the spirit-soul, it can, therefore, only draw out of itself, that is to say, out of the super-physical world. During its incarnation it was interwoven with the physical world of facts; after its discarnation through death, it is deprived of the direct influence of this factual world. It has merely retained from the latter that which we have compared to memory.—This “memory remnant” consists of two parts. These parts become evident if we consider what has contributed to its formation.—The spirit has lived in the body and through the body, therefore, it entered into relation with the bodily surroundings. This relation has found its expression through the fact that, by means of the body, impulses, desires, and passions have developed and that, through them, outer actions have been performed. Because he has a corporeal existence, the human being acts under the influence of impulses, desires, and passions. And these have a significance in two directions. On the one hand, they impress themselves upon the outer actions which the human being performs. And on the other, they form his personal character. The action I perform is the result of my desire; and I myself, as a personality, am what is expressed by this desire. The action passes over into the outer world;the desire remains within my soul just as the thought remains within my memory. And just as the thought image in my memory is strengthened through every new impression of like nature, so is the desire strengthened through every new action which I perform under its influence. Thus within my soul, because of corporeal existence, there lives a certain sum of impulses, desires, and passions. The sum total of these is designated by the expression “body of desire.”—This body of desire is intimately connected with physical existence, for it comes into being under the influence of the physical corporeality. The moment the spirit is no longer incarnated it cannot continue the formation of this body of desire. The spirit must free itself from this desire-body in so far as it was connected, through it, with the single physical life. The physical life is followed by another in which this liberation occurs. We may ask: Does not death signify the destruction also of this body of desire? The answer is: No; for to the degree in which, at every moment of physical life, desire surpasses satisfaction, desire persists even when the possibility of satisfaction has ceased. Only a human being who does not desire anything of the physical world has no surplus of desire over satisfaction. Only a man of no desires dies without retaining in his spirit a certain amount of desire. And this amount must gradually diminish and fade away after death. The state of this fading away is called “the sojourn in the region of desire.” It can easily be seen that the more the human being has felt bound to the sense life, the longer must this state persist.

[ 17 ] The second part of the “memory remnant” is formed in a different way. Just as desire draws the spirit toward the past life, so this second part directs it toward the future. The spirit, through its activity in the body, has become acquainted with the world to which this body belongs. Each new exertion, each new experience enhances this acquaintance. As a rule the human being does a thing better the second time than he does it the first. Experience impresses itself upon the spirit, enhancing its capacities. Thus our experience acts upon our future, and if we have no longer the opportunity to have experiences, then the result of these experiences remains as memory remnant.—But no experience could affect us if we did not have the capacity to make use of it. The way in which we are able to absorb the experience, the use we are able to make of it, determines its significance for our future. For Goethe, an experience had a significance quite different from the significance it had for his valet; and it produced results for Goethe quite different from those it produced for his valet. What faculties we acquire through an experience depends, therefore, upon the spiritual work we perform in connection with the experience.—I always have within me, at any given moment of my life, a sum total of the results of my experience. And this sum total forms the potential of capacities which may appear in due course.—Such a sum total of experiences the human spirit possesses when it discarnates. This the human spirit takes with it into supersensible life. Now, when it is no longer bound to physical existence by bodily ties and when it has divested itself also of the desires which chain it to this physical existence, then the fruit of its experience has remained with the spirit. And this fruit is completely freed from the direct influence of the past life. The spirit can now devote itself entirely to what it is capable of fashioning out of this fruit for the future. Thus the spirit, after having left the region of desire, is in a state in which its experiences of former lives transform themselves into potentials—that is to say, talents, capacities—for the future. The life of the spirit in this state is designated as the sojourn in the “region of bliss.” (“Bliss” may, indeed, designate a state in which all worry about the past is relegated to oblivion and which permits the heart to beat solely for the concerns of the future.) It is self-evident that the greater the potentiality exists at death for the acquirement of new capacities, the longer will this state in general last.

Naturally, it cannot be a question here of developing the complete scope of knowledge relating to the human spirit. We merely intend to show how the law of karma operates in physical life. For this purpose it is sufficient to know what the spirit takes out of this physical life into supersensible states and what it brings back again for a new incarnation. It brings with it the results of the experiences undergone in previous lives, transformed into the capacities of its being.—In order to realize the far-reaching character of this fact we need only elucidate the process by a single example. The philosopher, Kant, says: “Two things fill the soul with ever increasing wonder: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.” Every thinking human being must admit that the starry heavens have not sprung out of nothingness but have come gradually into existence. And it is Kant himself who in 1755, in a basic treatise, tried to explain the gradual formation of a cosmos. Likewise, however, we must not accept the fact of moral law without an explanation. This moral law, too, has not sprung from nothingness. In the first incarnations through which man passed the moral law did not speak in him in the way it spoke in Kant. Primitive man acts in accordance with his desires. And he carries the experiences which he has undergone through such action into the supersensible states. Here they become higher faculties. And in a subsequent incarnation, mere desire no longer acts in him, but it is now guided by the effect of the previous experiences. And many incarnations are needed before the human being, originally completely given over to desires, confronts the surrounding world with the purified moral law which Kant designates as something demanding the same admiration as is demanded by the starry heavens.

[ 18 ] The surrounding world into which the human being is born through a new incarnation confronts him with the results of his deeds, as his destiny. He himself enters this surrounding world with the capacities which he has fashioned for himself in the supersensible state out of his former experiences. Therefore his experiences in the physical world will, in general, be at a higher level the more often he has incarnated, or the greater his efforts were during his previous incarnations. Thus his pilgrimage through the incarnations will be an upward development. The treasure which his experiences accumulate in his spirit will become richer and richer. And he thereby confronts his surrounding world, his destiny, with greater and greater maturity. This makes him increasingly the master of his destiny. For what he gains through his experiences is the fact that he learns to grasp the laws of the world in which these experiences occur. At first the spirit does not find its way about in the surrounding world. It gropes in the dark. But with every new incarnation the world grows brighter. The spirit acquires a knowledge of the laws of its surrounding world; in other words, it accomplishes ever more consciously what it previously did in dullness of mind. The compulsion of the surrounding world decreases; the spirit becomes increasingly self-determinative. The spirit, however, which is self-determinative, is the free spirit. Action in the full clear light of consciousness is free action. (I have tried to present the nature of the free human spirit in my book, Philosophie der Freiheit, (Philosophy of Freedom—Spiritual Activity.) The full freedom of the human spirit is the ideal of its development. We cannot ask the question: is man free or unfree? The philosophers who put the question of freedom in this fashion can never acquire a clear thought about it. For the human being in his present state is neither free nor unfree; but he is on the way to freedom. He is partially free, partially unfree. He is free to the degree he has acquired knowledge and consciousness of world relations.—The fact that our destiny, our karma, meets us in the form of absolute necessity is no obstacle to our freedom. For when we act we approach this destiny with the measure of independence we have achieved. It is not destiny that acts, but it is we who act in accordance with the laws of this destiny.

[ 19 ] If I light a match, fire arises according to necessary laws; but it was I who put these necessary laws into effect. Likewise, I can perform an action only in the sense of the necessary laws of my karma, but it is I who puts these necessary laws into effect. And new karma is created through the deed proceeding from me, just as the fire, according to necessary laws of nature, continues to be effective after I have kindled it.

[ 20 ] This also throws light upon another doubt which may assail a person in regard to the effectiveness of the law of karma. Somebody might say: “If karma is an unalterable law, then it is wrong to help a person. For what befalls him is the consequence of his karma, and it is absolutely necessary that it should befall him.” Certainly, I cannot eliminate the effects of the destiny which a human spirit has created for himself in former incarnations. But the matter of importance here is how he finds his way into this destiny, and what new destiny he may create for himself under the influence of the old one. If I help him, I may bring about the possibility of his giving his destiny a favorable turn through his deeds; if I refrain from helping him, the opposite may perhaps occur. Naturally, everything will depend upon whether my help is a wise or unwise one. [The fact that I am present to help may be a part of both his Karma and mine, or my presence and deed may be a free act. (Editor.)]

[ 21 ] His advance through ever new incarnations signifies a higher development of the human spirit. This higher development comes to expression in the fact that the world in which the incarnations of the spirit take place is comprehended in increasing measure by this spirit. This world, however, comprises the incarnations themselves. In regard to the latter, too, the spirit gradually passes from a state of unconsciousness to one of consciousness. On the path of evolution there lies the point from which the human being is able to look back upon his successive incarnations with full consciousness.—This is a thought at which it is easy to mock; and it is easy to criticise it negatively. But whoever does this has no idea of the nature of such truths. And derision as well as criticism place themselves like a dragon in front of the portal of the sanctuary within which we may attain knowledge of these truths. For it is self-evident that truths, the realization of which lies for the human being in the future, cannot be found as facts in the present. There is only one way of convincing oneself of their reality: namely, to make every effort possible to attain this reality.

• 1. I can imagine that there are many people who consider themselves standing at the pinnacle of knowledge and who consider the present exposition “completely unscientific.” I can understand these people, for I know that this objection forces itself upon anyone who has no experience in the domain of the supersensible and who, at the same time, lacks the necessary restraint and modesty to admit that he still might learn something. Such people, however, should at least refrain from stating that the processes described here “contradict the intellect” and “cannot be proved by the intellect.” The intellect cannot do anything but combine and systematize facts. Facts can be experienced, but not be “proved by the intellect.” With the intellect, you cannot prove a whale. Either you must have seen it yourself, or you must let somebody describe it who has seen one. It is the same with the supersensible facts. If we have not yet attained to the point where we can see them ourselves, then we must permit them to be described to us. I can assure everyone that the supersensible facts which I describe in the subsequent pages are just as “factual” for the one whose higher senses are opened, as is the whale.

This is the 7th of 8 lectures given by Rudolf Steiner at Stuttgart, in 1921. It is also known as: The Gulf Between a Causal Explanation of Nature and the Moral World Order. The title of this series of lectures is: Anthroposophy, Root and Fruit. The lectures were published in German as: Anthroposophie, ihre Erkenntniswurzeln und Lebensfruchte. Mit einer Einleitung ueber den Agnostizismus als Verderber echten Menschentums. This lecture appears in the book: Fruits of Anthroposophy.

The most significant question in the spiritual life of our time, which casts its shadow over the whole of our culture, is of such a nature that it already affects every man's feeling life to some extent. Yet its answer can only be found on the path leading from ordinary objective knowledge to super-sensible cognition by means of Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition. Each soul must ask himself this significant question, when, in genuine concern for the being of man, he contrasts, with a complete lack of bias, the conception of the moral, ethical life that is possible today, with the interpretation of life that stems with good reason from a natural scientific world conception. What is more, in our day the question of morality is of the greatest urgency because we live in that period of time when what is ethical is at the same time social, and today every man experience the urgency of the social question.

Let us consider what the soul learns about existence in conformity with today's thinking as it is shaped by natural science. In the attempt to reach a true natural science, man is led to consider the objects of the world in their necessity, in their causal connections. This results in a world outlook which must necessarily extend these causal connections to comprise everything that is within the world order, including man. Today, in so far as we wish to understand man by means of natural science, we take it as a foregone conclusion that we apply that same cognition that we are accustomed to use when considering natural appearances outside man, and we then attempt to extend in more or less audacious hypotheses, what natural science has learnt from what is lying nearest to us, that we are able to observe, to cover world facts and world beings. We construct hypotheses about the beginning and the end of the world, out of our natural scientific theories of knowledge. Then we come with this natural scientific knowledge to the point where if we are consistent we must say, ‘We may not come to a halt before human freedom.’ I have already indicated this problem.

A man who seeks a strictly uniform explanation of the world, simply out of a desire for consistency, and has to decide between assuming a freedom which is really given empirically in immediate human experience, and that all-powerful natural necessity which must be deduced from what mankind has learned through established ways of thinking and knowing, will opt for natural necessity. He will declare the experience of freedom to be an illusion, and will extend the area of natural necessity to include the most intimate experiences of the human being, so that mankind will be fully enmeshed in the web of natural necessity. And in the same way he will assess in the light of this hypothetical world conception the nature of the beginning and the end of the earth. He takes those laws and interconnections produced by physics and chemistry etc., and builds out of them such hypotheses as the nebular hypothesis, that is, the Kant-Laplace theory of the beginning of the earth. Then, out of the second principle, the teaching about mechanical heat, he constructs hypotheses about the heat death in which the earth will perish.

In this way one can extend into the most intimate details of the human being, as well as to the boundaries of the world-all, the contemporary explanation of natural appearances, as they surround us in the world in which we wander between birth and death, without disputing its fruitfulness. But then, if we reach a certain degree of self-perception, we ask ourselves, “In that case, wherein lies the dignity of man, wherein exists true human worth?” Here we come to the point where we turn our gaze to the moral world, to that which seems to be an ethical, moral impulse. We feel that it is only in carrying out a moral ideal, permeated with religious fervour, that we can achieve an existence fully worthy of mankind. We could not call ourselves fully human if we did not think that motive was active in us which we describe as ‘moral’, which streams into the social life, and seems to be inwardly vibrating in us with what we call the Divine in the world order. But for a modern man who in all honesty adopts the viewpoint from which he surveys mechanical causality, the necessary order of nature, there is no bridge leading from the natural order, which according to a certain way of knowledge must include man himself, to that other order, which is moral, and which is bound up with what man must consider to be his entire dignity, his entire worth.

In most recent times, to be sure, a certain expedient has been devised in order to bridge this chasm which has opened up between the two components of our human make-up. It has been said that we can only regard as truly scientific that which will explain the whole world in terms of natural necessity, including man, and including the beginning and the end of the world. And from this standpoint scientific validity is given to nothing that cannot be absorbed without contradiction into a thinking spun out of this natural order. But yet, a realm has been established with an entirely different kind of certainty, with the certainty of belief. Man looks within on that which shines in us as a moral light, and says to himself. “No scientific knowledge can guarantee in any way the significance of this moral sphere, but man must find within himself a certainty of belief. He must recognise out of the Subjective that in a certain way his Being is connected with that realm which is permeated with moral necessity.”

At first, many people may well find reassurance if they discriminate clearly between what man can know and what he can believe, and can persuade themselves that this separation gives a certain comfort, a feeling of security in life. But if we probe deeply enough, not with a partial thinking, but with all that thought can experience if it unites itself with the full power of the human soul and spirit, then we must come to the following conclusion: if the realm of natural necessity is as man has grown accustomed to consider it in the course of the last hundred years, then in the face of this there is no possibility of preserving the realm of morality. This must be said, because the moral realm simply shows nowhere the power to be a match for the realm of natural order. We need only consider how the thought must arise with a certain inner justification out of the contemplation of heat entropy—I say expressly, must arise—that once all the remaining earth forces have changed into heat, this heat cannot change itself back into any other force, and that then the earth as such will succumb to what is called ‘the heat death.’ Thus there is no possibility for an honest thinker who must hold fast to the current way of thinking about natural causality, other than to say to himself: of this earth which has succumbed to heat death there remains a huge field of corpses, not only including all men but with them all moral ideals. They must disappear into the lifeless, if, in recognising the sole validity of natural necessity we accept that the earth is to succumb to ‘the heat death.’

For a man who faces the world without prejudice, this reflection produces an experience that even takes from him the certainty of a moral world order, and above all leaves him in a situation where he must see the world as split asunder, so that he can only say to himself: “Moral ideas rise up out of natural necessity like foam bubbles, and like foam bubbles, they vanish.” For, according to natural necessity, what is connected in the innermost being of man with human worth and dignity cannot be acknowledged as having real existence. How shall I say? Granted that one accepts a formal division between knowledge and belief, yet, even if one has already found a certainty of belief, against the necessary exactions of science, certainty of belief can give no inner guarantee for the reality of what is moral.

This not only affects man's theoretical ideas. If a man intends to live honestly, he must work with it into his deepest world experiences, and there take hold of it through events which lie deep in the subconscious, disturbing that which gives inner security, which makes it possible for a man to have a stable connection with the world, not only by means of thinking but also through experience. And a man who has a feeling for such connections could say to himself: What is called up in such an uncanny way out of the depths of human life in this twentieth century, like a devastating wave, proceeds when all is said and done out of the harmony—or one could say the disharmony—of all that the individual has experienced about himself. For our frightful catastrophic time is born finally out of the innermost condition of the human heart and soul. Such an inner division as I have described to you does not appear only on the surface of the soul-life, as a theoretic world-conception. It sinks down to the depths out of which comes the instinctive life, the life of conscience. And so this dichotomy throws up into the world-order discrepant feelings, disorder, producing a framework for what is unsocial rather than fostering what is more truly social.

Certainly, many men do not yet give full weight to what I have described today. But the consequences can already be foreseen, if we follow with only a little lack of prejudice the trend of human spiritual development in the last centuries, and especially in very recent times, and see to what moral exhaustion, to what kind of social form this division in the human soul must lead in the very near future. An answer will never be found to the burning question, ‘Why do we live in such distressing times?’ if one does not try to seek the foundation man has need of in the depths of human life itself.

Confronting what I have here described is that knowledge of the world which may be striven for through anthroposophical spiritual science, by means of Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition. We shall see how anthroposophical spiritual science enables man to come to terms with what I have shown today to be the most urgent problem of the present and the near future, and what precisely in this way it seems to him that he will be able to know. I have shown you the path which spiritual science takes by means of Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition. I cannot give each exercise here in detail, but you can find this in my books which I have often mentioned here. I have drawn attention to the way in which each exercise on the path to imaginative knowledge gives the soul a conscious content in the same way as our everyday consciousness is impregnated with a content when it lives in memory. Behind what rises up in the form of memories, consciously or unconsciously invoked, lies our physical and etheric organisation. What takes place there, rises up into consciousness. What our physical organisation produces in our ordinary memory is brought about in a purely soul-spiritual way through carrying out the exercises given in my books. Through them one reaches ideas, which in a purely formal way are like memory ideas, but which refer to an outer objective content, not to an entirely personal experience. By this means we prepare ourselves through Imagination for the knowledge of a truly objective spiritual world.

Then, in order to reach to Inspiration, we must not only practise in a soul-spiritual way the production of ideas which are like remembered thoughts, but we must work in such a way that the spirit-soul also practises forgetting, to some extent, as it were throwing out these imaginations from the consciousness which has been now attained. We must practise no longer having, yes, the unreal imaginations. We must deliberately distance them from our consciousness, so that, if I may so express it, this consciousness has a certain emptiness. If we reach this stage, then by means of all these practices we are able to strengthen the Ego to the point where we find ourselves within the manifestations of an objective, super-sensible world. In place of the former subjective imaginations, objective imaginations light up in our consciousness, and this lighting up of such objective Imaginations which in fact do not come from ourselves, but from spiritual objectivity, this is in reality Inspiration. We reach right to the boundary of the super-sensible, that reveals itself to us in its outer appearance through these Imaginations. Exactly in the same way as in our sense-perceptible world, if we only let the whole man be active in sense perception, we convince ourselves through the reality of this sense world, of the underlying objective outer world, so now the Imaginations we have attained give us plenary conviction of the super-sensible world whose expression they are.

Now it is a question of pursuing this way of knowledge to the next stage. This we reach in that we not only push the forgetting so far that we throw out the Imaginations, but we go yet a stage further. When a man reaches the Imaginative world, he sees first his own life in its progression. He lives consciously not only in the moment, but in the whole of his life as far back as to his birth. If he is then able to go still further back, through Inspiration, then he extends his survey to the life before birth, as far as to the perception of a super-sensible world out of which he came into the sense world through birth or conception. The spiritual field of vision extends over that world which we have lived through before birth and conception and shall live through when we have gone through the Portal of death. This prospect of the super-sensible world to which we belong is reached by means of Inspired cognition.

If we now strive even further, not only to expunge those Imaginations whose details remain within the horizon of the Imaginative world but also to wipe out the imagination of our whole life as man, that means, if we have acquired the forces to thrust out what is united with our Ego through the experiences we have had since our birth, and what is also added to it through the fact that the horizon has widened to include a spiritual world, then we have reached the stage not of weakening our Ego, but, just through forgetting ourselves, of first really and truly strengthening it. And through this we come gradually into the reality of the spiritual, the super-sensible world. We ourselves live together with the reality of the super-sensible world. We reach the point of recognising the appearance of previous earth lives as something which our Ego shows us at different stages. Then, if we have developed the capacity to forget this Ego in its present stage, that means, to thrust out its imaginative content, we reach the stage of perceiving the eternal Ego.

The matters discussed by anthroposophical spiritual science are not drawn out of some blue haze of mysticism, rather the way to reach this particular knowledge can be indicated step by step. It is in no sense an outer way. It is inward in its entire journey, but it is such that it leads to the perception of a truly objective yet super-sensible reality. And in that we raise ourselves in this way to real intuitive knowledge, we first obtain a true insight into what is in fact our own thinking, our ideation, that we employ in ordinary life, with which we mix our sense-perceptions. One reaches to full, complete reality when to a certain extent one can create an idea for oneself, an empirical idea, in the way I have attempted to describe in my book The Philosophy of Freedom. There I have tried to make known that pure thinking, that very thinking that can live in us before we have fully united the thinking with some outer perception. I have shown that this pure thinking itself can be perceived as an inner soul content. But what is in accordance with its being first lets itself be known when true intuition enters the soul through the higher way of knowledge. Then a man can certainly penetrate into his own thinking. Then he lives for the first time within his own thoughts, by means of intuition, for this intuition arises through the fact that a man lives within the super-sensible with his own being, that he plunges into the super-sensible.

And so one learns to recognise something, the experience of which is a kind of destiny of knowledge. One experiences something that is full of potency, if one lives intuitively in the Nature of knowing. One understands then how man is organised materially as man; one learns to know to what extent this material organisation is in control; but one perceives also through intuition that this control only extends so far as to serve as a support, at most a ground out of which thinking can unfold itself, but that the material process itself must be broken down where true thinking appears. To the same degree in which the material events can be reduced can that gain ground in us which now occupies the place where matter is destroyed, that is, thinking, ideation.

I know all the objections that can be brought against the proposition that I put forward here, but intuitive knowledge leads one to realise that in the place where thinking unfolds itself a nothingness of material can be seen. It leads one so far as to say, ‘In that I think, I am not, if I allow the material being, that as a rule man regards as authoritative, to be considered the only being to have validity.’ First matter must withdraw itself from the organism and make room for the thoughts, the ideas, then these thoughts and ideas can develop within man. Thus, in that place where we perceive thinking in its reality, we see the destruction of material existence. Therein we perceive how matter goes over into nothingness.

Here is where we stand on the boundary of the laws of the conservation of matter and energy. One must recognise how far these laws of matter and energy extend, so that one can summon up the courage to contradict them when this is necessary. One can never penetrate the nature of thinking in an unprejudiced way to the place where matter destroys itself, if one acknowledges the law of conservation to be absolute, if one does not know that what prevails in the sphere which we survey outwardly in the physical and chemical fields etc., is yet not valid where our thinking takes place on the platform of our human organisation. If it were not necessary out of a certain basis to place this knowledge before the world today, one would not expose oneself to all the mockery and objections that must come quite understandably from those who, according to well-known hypotheses, regard the laws of the conservation of matter and energy as absolute, valid without exception.

But just as through Intuition one learns to know the relationship between thinking and the matter which surrounds us in the physical world, so through intuition one learns to recognise the connection of Inspiration, that Inspiration which is so powerful in Spirit, with the human feeling and rhythmic system. In the nerve-sense being physical substance is annihilated. By this means the nerve-sense system can be the basis for thinking, for ideation. The second system in man is the rhythmic system. With this the feeling life is psychically connected, as is the thinking life with the nerve-sense system. The connection of the objective world outside man which we approach through Inspiration shows us that through Inspiration we become aware of a World Being which plays into us as the sense world plays into us through thinking. This inspired world plays into us through the breathing process, which carries its rhythm right into the brain processes and into the rest of the organism.

Now one learns to recognise what lives within the human being as rhythm. This will not destroy matter, as in the case of the thinking process, but it will retard life so that it must for ever stimulate itself anew. The usual purely mechanical breathing rhythm provides an inner rhythmic basis for this retardation and renewal, which is certainly a two-fold process of breathing and feeling. When the soul-feeling events unite with the physical breathing rhythm we perceive this union as an Inspiration, as a Being which lives objectively in Inspiration and can be perceived through Intuition. In short we learn in this way to recognise the whole connection between the feeling and the rhythmic system in man. We recognise that here a complete annulment of matter does not take place as in the nerve system, but there is a damping down of matter. Thus we learn step by step to ‘see through’ the human being. And in this way we look into the feeling life of man and see what can only be there through the fact that in the rhythmic events life can always be held back and will stimulate itself anew.

Thus we see a second power working in the human being, in that we perceive the harmony of the slowing down and the renewal of life. We see the significance of man's entire rhythmic life, and how it is bound up with his whole being, body and soul. And as we survey this second element in man, it will certainly become clear to us that man bears in himself a real force, which is in rhythmic interchange with an outer force active in the super-sensible. And we could also survey in a similar way the metabolic limb system. In that we raise ourselves to Inspiration, Intuition and Imagination we see, soul-spiritually, what is active in man as a real though unconscious force. Our customary objective knowledge gives us only the forms. Through it we are as it were only observers of the world. That, however, which we reach through Imagination, Intuition and Inspiration we have first as a free inner soul product, obtained from super-sensible knowledge, from something which is objective in man, through which we can see clearly how the human will works in moral deeds. If we have first recognised that pure thinking involves a breaking down of matter, and is connected above all with a death-bringing process, through and through a process working in matter in a backward direction, then one comes to the point of being able to recognise that everything which appears as soul-willing is connected with the up-building processes, the processes of growth. These growths, these up-building processes, the activities of the organs and the reproductive process in us, damp down our ordinary consciousness of the depths of the human organism, and the will arises out of those depths of the human being to which the ordinary consciousness does not reach. Thus, as thinking lives in the death process, willing lives in what is growing, thriving, fructifying.

We then perceive further, through Intuition, how out of the digestive system, through the will when it has its motive in pure thinking, substance in the human organism is pushed into the place where the breaking down process takes place. Thinking as such breaks down, but willing builds up. Indeed this building up activity is such that from the beginning of life right up to death this process is latent in the human organism. An up-building process is certainly there. In that we bring our moral motives, in the sense of my The Philosophy of Freedom to true, free moral intuition, we live such a human life that, out of its organism, through the will process substance is placed where substance has been destroyed. Man becomes inwardly creative, inwardly up-building. In other words, we see within the cosmos, in the human organism, nothingness filled with new creating in a fully material sense. This means nothing else than that in so far as a man consistently follows the way of anthroposophical knowledge he reaches the stage where within man the pure moral ideals are world-building forces reaching right into materiality.

Here we have certainly a place where the moral world itself becomes creative, where something arises out of human morality which guarantees its own reality since it bears itself within itself, since it creates itself. And then we learn through Intuition really to know the outer world. We see how the mineral kingdom is caught up in a death-bringing process, a wasting-away that we have well learned to recognise as a corresponding process in our own thinking. And in the same way we learn to recognise how this wasting-away process draws into itself plant and animal life. Then we do not look to a heat death (an idea which has validity within certain limits, but is somewhat one-sided), but we look to the wasting-away of the entire world, which is permeated with minerality, and which is all around us. We see this, which we recognise as the world of causal necessity, in its transitoriness, and we recognise the world which we build up out of pure moral ideas as that which arises from the ground of the other, dying world.¹ In other words, we now recognise how the moral world is connected with the world order of physical causality. We have in the pure moral will of the human being something which conquers causality in man, and therefore for the whole world.

Whoever thinks honestly about the causal explanation of nature finds in its domain no place in the world where it does not prevail. And because it prevails, a power must arise which destroys its validity. This is the moral world, recognised within the general nature Of man, which contains within itself the power to break through natural causality, not, to be sure, through working miracles, but through a course of development. For that which finds a place within the human being where causality can be destroyed, sets itself there within him as a means of destroying causality. It is of prime significance for the world of the future. Nevertheless, we now see here the reality of human willing which enters into an alliance with pure thinking. For through it we obtain—and this is the most beautiful life fruit of anthroposophical scientific knowledge—an insight into the value of man in the cosmos, through which we also can feel the dignity, the high office of man within the cosmos.

Things in the world are not so interrelated as with our abstract ideas we often think they are. No, they cohere as realities, and one powerful reality is the following. It is true that not everyone today is able as yet to attain to Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition. But as spiritual investigators we take with us through all these stages of knowledge that thinking which develops one thought out of another with inner necessity. This thinking each man can experience now if he will give himself freely to it. And it stems from this, that the results of spiritual knowledge, when once they are found, can always be proved afterwards, by means of pure thinking, since the spiritual investigator takes this pure thinking into the whole of his life of ideation.

Knowledge of human worth, feeling for human dignity, willing in love for humanity: These are the most beautiful life fruits nurtured in man when he assimilates what is bestowed on him by spiritual science.

For this spiritual science works through the will, so that it can reach up to what I have described in my Philosophy of Freedom as moral intuition. And its power streams into human life as the moral ideal. The moral intuitions are gradually permeated with what indeed is love, so that we can become men who act freely out of love springing from our individuality. Thereby Spiritual Science approaches an ideal stemming from Goethe's time. It spoke most clearly through his friend Schiller. When Schiller familiarised himself with Kantian philosophy, he learnt much from Kant about theoretic philosophy, but he could not always accept Kant's moral philosophy. In this Kantian moral philosophy Schiller found a numbing conception of duty, presented by Kant in such a way that duty seemed to stand there in its own right as a natural power, working compulsively on man. Schiller experienced the worth and dignity of man, and would not accept the idea that to be virtuous a man must submit to spiritual compulsion. Schiller gave utterance to this beautiful saying: ‘Gladly do I serve my friend, yet, alas, I act from inclination, so it often vexes me that I am not dutiful.’ For in the Kantian sense, Schiller meant, one must even try first to suppress all liking for one's friend, and then do what one does for him out of a rigid conception of duty.

That the connection of man with morality must be other than this, Schiller revealed as far as it was possible to do so in his time, in his Letters concerning the Aesthetic Education of Mankind, where he wished to show how duty must sink down so that it becomes inclination, how inclination must rise up so that the content of duty becomes congenial. Duty must sink down, natural instinct must rise up in free men, who do out of their inclination what benefits the whole of humanity. And in that man looks for where moral intuition is rooted in the human being, in that he looks for what is the real driving, ethical motive in moral intuition, he finds it at its highest in love purified by spirit. There, where this love has become spiritual, there it draws into itself moral intuitions; and a man is moral because he loves duty, because it is something that comes out of the Individuality itself as a directly active power.

It was this that brought me, in The Philosophy of Freedom, to place against the Kantian moral philosophy a direct antithesis drawn from Anthroposophy. The Kantian thesis says: ‘Duty! Thou sublime and mighty name, that dost embrace nothing charming or ingratiating, but requirest submission,’ thou that ‘settest up a law ... before which all inclinations are dumb, even though they secretly work against it.’

Through such a conception of duty man can never be so spiritualized in his inmost being that he becomes a free creator of his moral activity. Out of this attempt to penetrate the human being by means of anthroposophical knowledge of man, I placed in my Philosophy of Freedom against this stiff Kantian idea what you find there: ‘Freedom, thou friendly, human name, beloved of all who are virtuous, in thee is contained what my humanity values most, which makes me servant to none, thou who settest up no law, but awaitest what my virtuous love itself will recognise as a law because it feels itself unfree against every law that is forced upon it.’

So I believed I must speak in The Philosophy of Freedom of how moral human worth shines out in fullest splendour when it is one with human freedom, and is rooted in true human love. For one can show by means of anthroposophy how this love of duty can become in the widest sense love for mankind and therefore, as we will further consider, can become a true ferment in the social life. What arises today as the most urgent, the most hotly discussed social question can only be resolved if man bestirs himself to recognise the connection between freedom, love, the human being, spiritual and natural necessity.

• 1. See Man as Symphony of the Creative Word, Lecture VI, penultimate paragraph. Ed.

In the lecture yesterday I drew your attention to the fact that very diverse Powers intervene in the course of human evolution. For this reason, and also because one mighty stream of influence intersects another, certain periods of ascent and equally of decline occur in definite spheres of civilisation. While older civilisations are still waning, while they are so to say passing over into external forms, the creative impulses which are to inaugurate later civilisations, to inspire them and bring them to birth, are being slowly and gradually prepared. So that in a general way the course of man's cultural life may be described briefly as follows.—We find cultural life rising from unfathomed depths and ascending to certain heights; then it ebbs, and indeed more slowly than it ascended. The fruits of a particular civilisation-epoch live an for a long time, penetrate into later streams and into folk-cultures of the most diverse character and lose themselves like a river which instead of flowing into the sea trickles away over lowlands. But while it is trickling away the new civilisations—which were still imperceptible during the decline of the old—are in preparation, in order eventually to begin their development and ascent, and to contribute in the same or a similar way to the progress of humanity. If we want to think of an eminently characteristic example of progress in culture we can surmise that it must be one in which the principle of the universal-human, the weaving of the ego in the ego, appeared in the most striking form. This, as we have shown, was the case in the culture of the ancient Greeks. We have there a clear illustration of a civilisation running its own characteristic course; for the achievements of the three preceding civilisation-epochs and of the epoch following that of Greece are modified in a quite different way by forces outside man. Hence what lies in the human being himself, whereby he makes his mark upon the world, everything which, proceeding from super-sensible powers, is able to express itself in him in the most characteristically human way—this is exemplified in the middle, the Fourth civilisation-epoch.

But in regard to this Greek civilisation, the following must also be said. It was preceded by the Third epoch, which then ebbed away, and during this period of decline Greek culture was being prepared. During the decline of the Babylonian culture, which streamed from the East towards the West, there was enshrined in the little peninsula of Southern Europe we know as Greece the seed of what was to sink into humanity as the impulse of a new life. True though it is that this Greek life brought pre-eminently to expression the essentially human element, that which man can find entirely within himself, it must not be thought that such things need no preparation. What we call the essentially human element—that, too, had first to be taught to men in the Mysteries by super-sensible Powers, just as now the still higher freedom which must be prepared for the Sixth civilisation-epoch is sustained and taught in super-sensible worlds by the Beings who lead and guide human evolution.

We must therefore realise that when Greek culture appears to outer observation. as if everything sprang from the essentially human element, it already has behind it a period when it was, so to speak, under the influence of the teachings of higher spiritual Beings. It was through these higher spiritual Beings that Greek culture was able to rise to the heights it achieved in bringing the essentially human element to expression. For this reason Greek culture too, when we trace it backwards, is lost sight of in the darkness of those prehistoric ages when, as its basis, there was cultivated in the Mystery-sanctuaries the wisdom which then, like a heritage, was clothed in majestic poetic form by Homer, by Aeschylus. And so, in face of the grandeur of there unparalleled figures, we must conceive that these men did indeed elaborate something that was entirely the product of their own souls, of the weaving of the ego in the ego, but that it had first been laid by higher Beings into these souls in the temple-sanctuaries. That is why the poetry of Homer and of Aeschylus seems so infinitely profound, so infinitely great. The poems of Aeschylus should not on any account, however, be judged from the translation by Wilamowitz, for it must be realised that the full greatness of what lived in Aeschylus cannot be conveyed in modern language, and that there could really be no worse approach to an understanding of his works than that tendered by one of the most recent translators.

If, therefore, we study Greek culture against the deep background of the Mysteries, we can begin to divine its real nature. And because the secrets of the life in super-sensible worlds were conveyed in a certain human form to the artists of Greece, they were able in their sculptures to embody in marble or in bronze, what had originally been hidden in the secrecy of the Mysteries. Even what confronts us in Greek philosophy clearly shows that its highest achievements were in truth ancient Mystery-wisdom translated into terms of intellect and reason. There is a symbolic indication of this when we are told that Heraclitus offered up his work, On Nature, as a sacrificial act in the temple of Diana at Ephesus. This means that he regarded what the weaving of the ego in the ego enabled him to say as an offering to the spiritual Powers of the preceding epoch with whom he knew himself to be connected. This is an attitude which also sheds light an the profound utterance of Plato, who was able to impart a philosophy of such depth to the Greeks and yet found himself compelled to affirm that all the philosophy of his time was as nothing compared with the ancient wisdom received by the forefathers from the spiritual worlds themselves.³⁶ In Aristotle everything appears as though in forms of logic—indeed, here one must say that the ancient wisdom has become abstraction, living worlds have been reduced to concepts. But in spite of this—because Aristotle stands at the terminal point of the ancient stream—something of the old wisdom still breathes through his works.³⁷ In his concepts, in his ideas, however abstract, an echo can still be heard of the harmonies which resounded from the temple-sanctuaries and were in truth the inspiration not only of Greek wisdom but also of Greek art, of the whole folk-character. For when such a culture first arises, it takes hold not only of knowledge, not only of art, but of the whole man, with the result that the whole man is an impress of the wisdom and spirituality living within him. If we picture Greek civilisation rising up from unknown depths even during the decline of Babylonian culture, then, in the age of the Persian Wars we can clearly perceive the effects of what the Greek character had received from the old temple-wisdom. For in these Persian Wars we see how the heroes of Greece, aflame with enthusiasm for the heritage received from their forefathers, fling themselves against the stream which, as an ebbing stream from the East, is surging towards them. The significance of their violent resistance, when the treasures of the temple-wisdom, when the teachers of the ancient Greek Mysteries themselves were fighting in the souls of the Greek heroes in the battles against the Persians, against the waning culture of the East—the significance of all this can be grasped by the human soul if the question is asked: What must have become of Southern Europe, indeed of the whole of later Europe, if the onset of the massive hordes from the East had not been beaten back at that time by the little Greek people? What the Greeks then achieved contained the seed of all later developments in European civilisation up to our own times.

And even the outcome in the East of what Alexander subsequently carried back to it from the West—albeit in a way that from a certain point of view is not justifiable—even that could develop only after what was destined to decline in respect also of its physical power had first been thrust back by the burning enthusiasm in the souls of the Greeks for the temple-treasures. If we grasp this we shall see how not only the teaching concerning Fire given by Heraclitus, not only the all-embracing ideas of Anaxagoras and of Thales, work on, but also the actual teachings of the guardians of the temple-wisdom in prehistoric Greek civilisation. We shall feel all this as a legacy of spiritual Powers who imbued Greek culture with what it was destined to receive. We shall perceive it in the souls of the Greek heroes who defied the Persians in the various battles. This is how we must learn to feel history, for what is offered us in the ordinary way is, at its best, only an empty abstract of ideas. What works over from earlier into later times can be observed only when we go back to what was imparted to the souls of men through a period lasting for thousands of years, taking definite forms in a certain epoch.

Why was it that in this upsurge of the old temple-treasures something so great could be imparted to the Greeks The secret lay in the universality, the comprehensiveness, of these temple treasures, and in their aloofness from anything of lesser account. It was something that was given as a primal source, something that could engross the whole man, bringing with it, so to say, a direct forte of guidance.

And here we come to the essential characteristic of a culture which is rising towards its peak. During this period, everything that is an active stimulus in man—beauty, virtue, usefulness, purposiveness, what he wishes to achieve and realise in life—all this is seen as proceeding directly from wisdom, from the spiritual. Wisdom embraces virtue, beauty and everything else as well. When man is permeated by, inspired by, the temple-wisdom, the rest follows of itself. That is the feeling which prevails during these times of ascent. But the moment the questions, the perceptions, fall asunder—the moment when, for example, the question of the good or the beautiful becomes independent of the question of its divine origin—the period of decline begins. Therefore we may be sure that we are living in a period of decline when it is emphasised that, independently of a spiritual origin, this or that must be especially cultivated, this or that must be the main consideration. When man lacks the confidence that the spiritual can bring forth of itself everything that human life requires, then the streams of culture, which an the arc of ascent form a unity, fall apart into separate streams. We sec this where interests outside wisdom, outside the spiritual impetus, begin to infiltrate Greek life; we see it in the political life, we see it, too, in that part of Greek life which especially interests us, in the spiritual life immediately preceding Aristotle. Here, side by side with the question: What is the true?—which embraces the question: What is good and practically effective?—the latter question begins to be an independent one. Men ask: How should knowledge be constituted in order that one can attain a practical goal in life? And so in the period of decline we see the stream of Stoicism arising. With Plato and Aristotle the good was directly contained in the wise; impulses of the good could proceed only from the wise. The Stoics ask: What must man do in order to become wiser in the practice of living, in order to live to some purpose? Goals of practical life insert themselves into what was formerly the all prevailing impetus of truth.

With Epicureanism comes an element that may be described as follows.—Men ask: How must I prepare myself intellectually in order that this life shall run its course with the greatest possible happiness and inner peace? To this question, Thales, Plato and even Aristotle would have answered: Search after the truth and truth will give you the supreme happiness, the germinating seed of love.—But now men separate the one question from the question of truth, and a stream of decline Sets in. Stoicism and Epicureanism are a stream of decline, the invariable consequence being that men begin to question truth itself and truth loses its power. Hence, simultaneously with Stoicism and Epicureanism in the period of decline, Scepticism arises—doubt in regard to truth. And when Scepticism and doubt, Stoicism and Epicureanism, have exercised their influence for a time, then man, still striving after truth, feels cast out of the World-Soul and thrown back upon his own soul. Then he looks around him, saying: This is not an age when Impulses flow into humanity from the on working stream of the spiritual Powers themselves. He is thrown back upon his own inner life, his own subjective being. In the further course of Greek life, this comes to expression in Neo-Platonism, a philosophy which is no longer concerned with external life, but looks within and strives upwards to truth through the mystical ascent of the individual. One stream of the cultural life is mounting, another declining, stage by stage. And what has developed during the ascent peters slowly and gradually away, until with the approach of the year 1250 there begins for humanity an inspiration not easy to observe but no less great for all that, which I characterised yesterday in a certain way. This again has been petering away since the 16th century. For since then all the specialised questions have again arisen by the side of those concerning truth itself; again an attitude is taken which wants to separate the question of the good and of the outwardly useful from the one supreme question of truth. And whereas those leading personalities in whom the impulses of the year 1250 were working contemplated all human currents in their relation to truth, we now see coming into prominence the fundamental separation of the questions of practical life from those that are intrinsically concerned with truth. At the portal leading to the new period of decline, the period which so clearly signifies the downward surge in spiritual life—at this portal stands Kant. In his preface to the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason, he says expressly that he had to set limits to the striving after truth in order to make room for what practical religion requires.³⁸ Hence the strict separation of Practical Reason from Theoretical Reason: in Practical Reason, the postulate of God, Freedom and Immortality is based entirely on the element of the good; in Theoretical Reason, any possibility of knowledge penetrating into any spiritual world is demolished. That is how things are, when viewed in the setting of world-history. And we may be sure that the striving for wisdom in our age will follow in the wake of Kant. When our own spiritual Movement points to the ways in which the capacity for knowledge can be so extended and enhanced as to enable it to penetrate into the super-sensible, we shall for a long, long time continue to hear from all sides: “Yes, but Kant says! ...” The historical evolution of mankind takes its course in antitheses of this kind. In what arises instinctively, like a dim inkling, we can see that underneath what is pure maya but accepted as the truth, underneath the stream of maya, human instincts do hit upon things which to a great extent are right. For it is extraordinarily interesting that in certain inklings arising out of folk-instincts for practical life, we can perceive the descending course of human evolution until the Greco-Latin epoch and the re-ascent now demanded of us.

What picture, then, must have come before the minds of men who had a feeling for such things When they looked back to the great figures of history in pre-Christian times—or, we had better say, pre-Grecian times—how must they have thought of all those whom we described as the instruments of Beings of the higher Hierarchies They must have said to themselves—and even the Greeks still did so: This has come to us through men who were played into by superhuman, divine forces.—And in all the ages of antiquity we find that the leading personalities, down to the figures of the Hermes, and even Plato, were regarded as “sons of the gods”; that is to say, when men looked back to olden times, heightening their vision more and more, they saw the divine behind there personalities who appeared in history; and they regarded the beings who appeared as Plato and in the Hermes as having come down, as having been born from, the gods. That is how they rightly saw it—the sons of the gods having united with the daughters of men, in order to bring down the spiritual to the physical plane. In those ancient times men beheld sons of the gods—divine men, that is to say, beings whose nature was united with the divine. On the other hand, when the Greeks came to feel: Now we can speak of the weaving of the ego in the ego, of what lies within the human personality itself—then they spoke of their supreme leaders as the Seven Sages, thus indicating that the nature of those who once were sons of the gods had now become purely and essentially human.

What was bound to come about in the instincts of the peoples in post-Grecian times? It was now a matter of indicating what man elaborates on the physical plane, and how he carries the full fruit of this into the spiritual world. Thus, while the feeling in much earlier times was that the spiritual must be recognised as taking precedence of the physical man and the physical man regarded as a shadow-image, and while during the Greek epoch there were the sages in whom the ego works in the ego, in the epoch after Greece attention was turned to personalities who live on the physical plane and rise to the spiritual through what is achieved in the physical world. This concept developed out of a certain true instinct of knowledge. Just as the pre-Grecian age had sons of the gods and the Greeks had sages, the peoples of the post-Grecian age have saints—human beings who lift themselves into the spiritual life through what they carry into effect on the physical plane. Something is alive there in the folk-instinct, enabling us to glimpse how behind maya itself there is a factor which impels humanity forward.

When we recognise this, the impulses at work in the epochs of time throw light upon the individual human soul, and we understand how the group-karma is inevitably modified by the fact that men are at the same time instruments of the process of historical evolution. We are then able to grasp what the Akasha Chronicle reveals—for example, that in Novalis we have to see something that goes back to Elijah of old. This is an extraordinarily interesting sequence of incarnations.³⁹ In Elijah the element of prophecy comes strongly to the fore, for it was the mission of the Hebrews to prepare that which was to come in later time. And they prepared it during the period of transition from the Patriarchs to the Prophets, via the figure of Moses. Whereas in Abraham we see how the Hebrew still feels the working of the God within him, in his very blood,⁴¹ in Elijah we see the transition to the ascent into the spiritual worlds. Everything is prepared by degrees. In Elijah there lives an individuality already inspired by what is to come in the future. And then we see how this individuality was to be an instrument for preparing understanding of the Christ Impulse. The individuality of Elijah is reborn in John the Baptist.⁴⁰ John the Baptist is the instrument of a higher Being. In John the Baptist there lives an individuality who uses him as an instrument, but in order to enable him to serve as such an instrument, the lofty individuality of Elijah was necessary.

Then, later on, we see how this individuality is well fitted to pour impulses working towards the future into forms that were made possible only by the influence of the Fourth Post-Atlantean culture-epoch. However strange it may seem to us, this individuality appears again in Raphael, who unites in his paintings what is to work in all ages of time as the Christian impulse, with the wonderful forms of Greek culture. And here we can realise how the individual karma of this entelechy is related to the outer incarnation. It is required of the outer incarnation that the power of an age shall be able to come to expression in Raphael; for this power the Elijah-John individuality is the suitable bearer. But the epoch is only able to produce a physical body bound to be shattered under such a power; hence Raphael's early death.

This individuality had then to give effect to the other side of his being in an age when the single streams were dividing once more; he appears again as Novalis. We see how there actually lives in Novalis, in a particular form, all that is now being given us through Spiritual Science. For outside Spiritual Science nobody has spoken so aptly about the relation of the astral body to the etheric and physical bodies, about the waking state and sleep, as Novalis, the reincarnated Raphael.⁴² These are things which show us how individualities are the instruments of the onflowing stream of man's evolution. And when we observe the course of human development, when we perceive this enigmatic alternation in the happenings of history, we can dimly glimpse the working of deep spiritual Powers. The earlier passes over into the later in strange and remarkable ways.

To some of you I have already said⁴³ that a momentous vista of history is revealed by the transition from Michelangelo to Galileo. (Mark well, I am not speaking of a reincarnation here; it is a matter of historical development.) A very intelligent man once drew attention to the striking fact that the human spirit has woven into the wonderful architecture of the Church of St. Peter in Rome what he calls the science of mechanics. The majestic forms of this building embody the principles of mechanics that were within the grasp of the human intellect, transposed into beauty and grandeur. They are the thoughts of Michelangelo! The impression made by the sight of the Church of St. Peter upon men expresses itself in many different ways, and perhaps everyone has felt something of what Natter, the Viennese sculptor,⁴⁴ experienced, or what was experienced in his company. He was driving with a friend towards St. Peter's. It was not yet in sight, but then, suddenly, the friend heard Natter exclaim, springing from his seat and as though beside himself: “I am frightened!”At that moment he had caught sight of St. Peter's ... afterwards he wanted to obliterate the incident from his memory. Everyone may experience something of the kind at the sight of such majesty And now, in a professorial oration, a very clever man, Professor Müllner, has made the point that Galileo, the great mechanistic thinker, taught humanity in terms of the intellect what Michelangelo had built into spatial forms in the Church of St. Peter. So that what stands there in the Church of St. Peter like crystallised mechanics, principles of mechanics grasped by the human mind, confronts us once again, but now transposed into intellectuality, in the thoughts of Galileo. But it is strange that in this oration the speaker should have called attention to the fast that Galileo was born on the day Michelangelo died (18th February, 1564). Hence there is an indication that the intellectual element, the thoughts coined by Galileo in the intellectual forms of mechanics, arise in a personality whose birth occurs on the same day as the death of the one who had given them expression in space. The question therefore inevitably arises in our minds: Who, in reality, built into the Church of St. Peter, through Michelangelo, the principles of mechanics only subsequently acquired by humanity through Galileo?

My dear friends, if the aphoristic and isolated thoughts that have been presented in connection with the historical development of humanity unite in your hearts to produce a feeling of how the spiritual Powers themselves work in history through their instruments, you will have assimilated there lectures in the right way. And then it could be said that the feeling which arises in our hearts from the study of occult history is the right feeling for the way in which development and progress occur in the stream of time. To-day, at this minor turning-point of time, it may be fitting to direct our meditation to this feeling of the progress of men and of gods in the flow of history. If in the heart of each one of you this feeling for the science of occult progress in time were to become clear perception of the weaving, creative activity in the becoming of our own epoch, if this feeling could come alive within you, it might perhaps also live as a New Year's wish in your souls. And at the close of this course of lectures, this is the New Year's wish that I would fair lay in your hearts: Regard what has been said as the starting-point of a true feeling for time. In a certain way it may be symbolical that we should have been able to use this minor transition from one period of time to another as an opportunity for allowing ideal which embrace such transitions in their sweep, to take effect in our souls.

• 36. Timaeus, 22, 23. “In the Egyptian Delta, at the head of which the River Nile divides, there is a certain district which is called the district of Sais, and the great city of the district is also called Sais. ... To this city came Solon, and was received there with great honour; he asked the priests who were most skilful in such matters, about antiquity, and made the discovery that neither he nor any other Hellene knew anything worth mentioning about the times of old. On one occasion, wishing to draw them an to speak of antiquity, he began to tell about the most ancient things in our part of the world. ... Thereupon one of the priests, who was of a very great age, said: O Solon, Solon, you Hellenes are never anything but children and there is not an old man among you. Solon in return asked him what he meant. I mean to say, he replied, that in mind you are all young; there is no old opinion handed down among you by ancient tradition, nor any science which is hoary with age. ... just when you and other nations are beginning to be provided with letters and the other requisites of civilised life, after the usual interval, the stream from heaven, like a pestilence, comes pouring down, and leaves only those of you who are destitute of letters and education, and so you have to begin all over again like children, and know nothing of what happened in ancient times, either among us or among yourselves. ...”
• 37. World-History in the light of Anthroposophy, p. 102.
• 38. Immanuel Kant (1724–1804). “I must, therefore, abolish knowledge, to make room for belief”Preface to the 2nd ed. of the Critique of Pure Reason. (Tr. J. M. D. Meiklejohn, p. xxxv. London, 1860.)
• 39. See Rudolf Steiner, Earthly and Cosmic Man, Lecture IV.
• 41. See Rudolf Steiner, Deeper Secrets of Human History in the light of the Gospel of St. Matthew. Lectures II and III.
• 40. See Rudolf Steiner, Earthly and Cosmic Man, Lecture IV.
• 42. See inter alia, Hymns to the Night, the most recent translation of which is by Mabel Cotterell, with an introduction by August Closs, published by the Phoenix Press, London, 1948. Translations were made at the end of the 19th century of Heinrich von Ofterdingen, The Disciples at Sais, of many “Fragments,” and other “Songs.” Carlyle's Essay on Novalis is well known. Apart from there publications, however, the English reader will have some difficulty in finding works in his own language that will enable him to acquire any real insight into the writings of Novalis. A great deal, of course, has been and is continuing to be written in Germany of the one of whom Tieck wrote in 1846: “Few authors have ever produced so great an impression on the world of German thought as Novalis.” The biography by Friedrich Hiebel, Novalis, der Dichter der blauen Blume, is of great value. Students of Spiritual Science will be particularly interested in Novalis in anthroposophischer Betrachtung by Monica V. Miltitz, published in 1956. But Rudolf Steiner alone was able to unveil the mystery enshrouding the personality of Novalis. Among many passages occurring in his lectures, the following is of outstanding importance: “... A deeply shattering event in life made him (Novalis) aware, as by a magic strike, of the relation between life and death and, as well as the great vista of past ages of the earth and cosmos, the Christ Being Himself appeared before his eyes of Spirit. ... In the rase of Novalis we cannot really speak of a self-contained lifc, for his was actually like a remembrance of an earlier incarnation. The initiation he had received as it were by Grace, brought to life within him experiences of an earlier incarnation; there was a certain mysterious consolidation of the fruits of insight acquired in an earlier life. And because he looked back through the ages with his own awakened eyes of spirit, he was able to say that to him nothing in life was comparable with the momentous event when in his inmost self he had discovered what Christ truly is. This experience was like a repetition of the happening at Damascus, when Paul, who had hitherto persecuted the followers of Christ and rejected their message, received in higher vision the direct proof that Christ lives, that He is present! ...” This quotation is from Rudolf Steiner's lecture entitled, The Christinas Mystery. Novalis the Seer. Not yet printed in English. Berlin, 22.XII.08.
• 43. The lecture, not yet printed in English, was entitled: The Human Spirit and the Animal Spirit, Berlin, 17.XI.10.
• 44. Heinrich Natter 1846–92).

The great advances in natural science in recent centuries, but especially in recent decades, are rightly admired, as I have repeatedly mentioned in the lectures on spiritual science given here. And it is only right that the modern man, in order to get to know the present point of human development, likes to put himself in the mindset and the way of thinking from which these results, this progress of natural science, have been achieved. But by putting himself in this way of thinking, the modern man's thinking, his whole mind, takes on certain forms. And without detracting from our admiration for the progress of natural science, it must be said that in recent times this very immersion in the scientific way of thinking has, in many people, produced a kind of inability to be attentive to what knowledge of the nature of the human soul, of the human spirit itself, gives, what knowledge it gives about the most important, most incisive riddles of human existence.

If one follows the course of spiritual history from the points of view just mentioned, one not only gets a general idea of the inability just described. If we look in detail at what has been attempted in recent times with regard to the study of the soul, we immediately get the impression that minds that have been trained by the scientific way of thinking often pass by the points where the knowledge of the soul, the knowledge of the most important questions of existence, should open up. As an example today, I will mention the ideas of a thinker of recent times, whom I have often referred to here and who can indeed be considered one of those who have endeavored to go beyond the merely external, sensual existence and point to something that lives in the spiritual behind the sensual. I would like to start with certain thoughts that Eduard von Hartmann, the philosopher of the unconscious, wrote down at the beginning of his psychology, his theory of the soul. He expresses how it is actually impossible to observe the phenomena of the soul, and how the difficulty of a psychology lies precisely in the fact that it is almost impossible to observe the phenomena of the soul. Let us allow Hartmann's thoughts to arise in this direction before our soul. He says:

“Psychology seeks to establish what is given; to do so, it must above all observe it. But observing one's own psychic phenomena is a peculiar matter, since it inevitably disturbs and changes what it focuses on to a lesser or greater degree. Anyone who wants to observe their own delicate feelings will, by focusing their attention on them, alter these feelings quite considerably.”

Hartmann therefore believes that you cannot observe the soul, because if you want to observe feelings, you have to observe the soul; but when you want to direct your attention to a tender feeling, it disappears into the soul; the soul withdraws, as it were, from the observation of the human being.

“Yes, even,” he says, “they can slip away from him underhand. A slight physical pain is intensified by observation.”

So he means: pain is a mental experience; but how can we observe it? How can we find out what is there when pain lives in the soul in such a way that when we start observing it, it becomes stronger. So it changes. By observing, we change what we want to observe. Or:

“Reciting the most familiar memorized material can falter or become confused in its sequence if the observation is trying to determine the course of this sequence.”

He means: It is a mental phenomenon when we recite something that we have memorized. But if we want to start observing what is actually happening while we are reciting, it does not work. So we cannot observe this mental phenomenon of reciting. Or he says:

"Strong feelings or even emotions, such as fear and anger, make it impossible to observe one's own psychological phenomena. Often, observation falsifies the result by introducing into what is given only that which it expects to find. It seems almost impossible to objectify one's psychic experiences of the present moment in such a way that one makes them the object of simultaneous observation; either the experience does not allow the simultaneous observation to arise, or the observation falsifies and displaces the experience.

We see here a personality that, as it were, recoils from the observation of the soul under the influence of thinking. If I want to grasp the soul, then I change the soul precisely through this soul activity of grasping. And that is why observation is actually not possible at all – so Hartmann thinks.

Now this is indeed an extraordinarily interesting example of the wrong track that this research in particular can take due to a certain inability. After all, what would we actually gain if we could truly observe, say, a tender feeling? A tender feeling would remain in the soul exactly what it is. By observing this tender feeling, we would experience nothing other than what this tender feeling is. Nothing about the soul; nothing at all about the soul. And it is the same with the other examples Hartmann cites. For it depends on the fact that what we should actually call soul never shows itself in what the moment offers. Rather, the soul can only truly appear to us when we are experiencing the changes of the individual soul experiences. If we wanted to observe what is present in the soul in a moment, we would be like the person who goes out into the fields at a certain time of year and sees the brown soil of the fields, spread out widely, and says to himself: this brown soil of the fields is what is actually spread out there. After a certain time, he goes out again. Now there are green shoots everywhere. If he is observing rationally, will he not say: Yes, then the brown soil that I saw recently did not show me everything that is actually there. Only by observing the changes that have taken place at different points in time can I understand what it actually is: that it is not just soil that has been spread, but that this soil has contained so many seeds that have sprouted and are sprouting.

Thus, the soul presents itself only when we become attentive: a delicate feeling is extinguished when I direct a strong thought of observation towards it. This interaction of the delicate feeling and the strong thought that observes it is the first manifestation of the workings and essence of the soul. So Eduard von Hartmann regrets not being able to observe that which changes, while he should be observing change. If he were to start from a point of view that allows him to look deeper into the life of the soul and into the connection between the life of the soul and the physical life than he is able to, then he would say the following about memorization, for example. He would recognize that memorizing is based on the fact that something of the soul has become engrained in the bodily process as a result of me having activated it many times, so that when I recite what I have memorized, the body automatically carries out what has to happen so that what I have memorized comes out again, so to speak without the soul having to be present. The person who is able to observe soul experiences knows that through memorization the soul element moves deeper into the bodily organization, so that there is more activity in the bodily realm than when we form present thoughts through direct contemplation that we have not memorized. When we form thoughts directly, I would say that we are working at a higher level in the soul than when we recite what we have memorized, where we bring forth more or less automatically what the soul has engraved in the body. But then, when we automatically run what we have buried from the soul into the body, we disturb this automatism when we intervene with a directly present thought that arises at a higher level, namely in the soul. It is when we enter with our thoughts from the soul into the automatism of the body, which takes place when reciting a piece of memorized material, just as if we were to insert a stick into a machine and disturb its operation.

When we grasp such things, which Hartmann regrets, we will immediately see how the various modes of activity of the soul and also of the body interact in man.

And Eduard von Hartmann says: “Observation often distorts the soul.” Well, in the course of the last few decades, popular science has basically more or less abandoned actual observation of the soul, at least methodical observation of the soul. But certain flashes of light have emerged. And such flashes of light have been had precisely by those who are not really recognized by regular school philosophers. Nietzsche, for example, had many such flashes of insight. In a certain, increasingly morbid and ingenious grasp of the soul's life, Nietzsche recognized how what takes place on the surface of it differs greatly from what takes place in the depths of human life. One need only read something like Nietzsche's arguments about the ascetic ideal to which some people devote themselves, and one will see what is actually meant here. How is the ascetic ideal often described? Well, you describe it in such a way that you have in mind what the person who devotes himself to asceticism in the usual sense imagines: how the person trains himself more and more to want nothing himself, to switch off his will and, precisely as a result, to become more and more spineless and selfless. From pursuing this train of thought, what is called the ascetic ideal is then formed. Nietzsche asks: What is actually behind this ascetic ideal in the soul? And he finds: The one who lives according to an ascetic ideal wants power, an increase of power. If he were to develop his ordinary soul life as it is, he would have less power – as he perceives it – than he wants. Therefore, he trains his will, seemingly to reduce it. But in the depths of the soul, it is precisely by diminishing the will that he wants to achieve great power, great effects. The will to power is behind the ideal of lack of will, of selflessness. So says Nietzsche. And there is indeed a flash of insight here, which should certainly be taken into account when judging, especially when it comes to self-knowledge of the human being.

Let us take a more obvious example than the one Nietzsche discussed in Asceticism. A person once wrote to me and often said: “I devote myself to a certain scientific direction; actually, I don't have the slightest sympathy for this scientific direction, but I consider it a mission, a duty, to work in this direction because humanity needs it in the present. I would actually rather do anything than what I am doing. I was not embarrassed to keep telling the man in question that, according to how he appeared to me, this was a superficial view of his soul about himself. Deep in the subconscious, in those layers of the soul's life of which he knows nothing, there lives in him a greed to carry out precisely that which he said he actually dislikes, that he only accepts as a mission. And in truth, I said, the whole thing seems to me that he regards this as a mission for the reason that he wants to develop these things out of the most selfish motives. So one can see, without going deeper into the soul life, that the superficial soul life almost falsifies the subconscious. But in this falsification lies a remarkable activity of the soul.

It was precisely from such trains of thought, as I have cited them, and from a failure to pursue such trains of thought further, as I have followed them up, that Eduard von Hartmann reached his hypothesis of the unconscious. He says: From what takes place in the soul as thinking, feeling and willing, from what one has there as consciousness, one can actually gain no view of the real soul. But because one has only this, one must altogether renounce any view of the real soul-life and can only put forward a hypothesis. — Therefore Hartmann puts forward the hypothesis: Behind thinking, feeling and willing lies the unconscious, which can never be reached. And from this unconscious arise thoughts, feelings and impulses of the will. But what is down there in the unconscious can only be the subject of thoughts that have a greater or lesser degree of probability, but which are only hypotheses. It must be said that anyone who thinks in this way simply blocks their own access to the life of the soul, to that which is beyond the ordinary life of the soul. For Hartmann correctly recognized that everything that enters into ordinary consciousness is nothing more than a mere image. And it is precisely one of Hartmann's merits that he emphasized time and again in the most eminent sense: What falls into ordinary consciousness arises from the fact that the soul, as it were, receives its own content mirrored from the body, so that we only have mirror images in what we experience in thinking, feeling and willing. And to talk about the fact that these mirror images of consciousness contain a reality is quite similar to the assertion that the images we perceive from a mirror are reality. Hartmann emphasized this again and again. We will come back to this point today. But Hartmann, and with him countless thinkers, countless people in general in the last decades and the immediate present, they blocked their own possibility of penetrating into the soul because, I would say, they had an indescribable fear of the path that can penetrate into the soul. This fear remains in the subconscious; in ordinary consciousness it protrudes in such a way that one conjures up numerous reasons that tell one: one cannot go beyond certain limits of knowledge.

For anyone who really wants to penetrate into the life of the soul needs not to stop at ordinary consciousness, but to move on to what I have called “visionary consciousness” in the lectures I have given here, a consciousness that is, to a certain extent, higher than ordinary consciousness. I have chosen the following comparison: During sleep, man lives in images. The images of the dream that arises from sleep become conscious to a certain degree. I said in previous lectures: the essential thing is that in these images that he experiences in his dreams, man is not able to relate his will to the things around him. At the moment of waking up, when a person enters from dream consciousness into waking consciousness, what remains of the images and perceptions is basically the same as it is in the dream; only now the person enters into a relationship with their surroundings through their will, and they integrate what otherwise only exists as images in their dream into their sensory environment. Just as a person wakes up from dream consciousness into ordinary waking consciousness, so too can he bring himself, through certain soul activities, to wake up from ordinary waking consciousness to a “visionary consciousness,” whereby he does not integrate himself into the ordinary world of the senses, but with his soul powers into the spiritual world. This intuitive consciousness is the only way by which man can penetrate into the beyond of soul phenomena.

I might say that the most enlightened minds of the present believe that one would be committing a sin against knowledge if one were to speak of a human being's ascent to such an intuitive consciousness. And for many of the philosophical minds of the present day in particular, this intuitive consciousness is simply condemned by the fact that such a person says: Yes, it is just like clairvoyance! — Now the thing is that — in order to tie in with something — it is perhaps best characterized by characterizing the tremendous progress that has taken place in man's attitude to reality from Kant to Goethe. In doing so, one does indeed commit a sin against the spirit of many a philosopher. But this sin must be committed at some time. Kantianism is, after all, what began to erect barriers to human knowledge within the development of the continental spirit. The “thing in itself” is to be presented as something absolutely otherworldly, which human knowledge cannot approach. That is what Kantianism wants, and that is what many people in the 19th century wanted with Kantianism, right up to the present day and including the 20th century. In a few short sentences, Goethe has put forward something tremendously significant against this principle of Kantianism. And if one really wants to evaluate German intellectual life, one could consider Goethe's short essay “On the Power of Judging by Intuition”, which is usually printed in the natural scientific writings of Goethe, as one of the greatest achievements of modern philosophy, for the simple reason that what is alive in this short essay is the starting point for a tremendous development of human intellectual life. In this essay, “On the Power of Judgement,” Goethe says something like this: Yes, Kant excludes the human being from the thing in itself and only allows the categorical imperative to enter into the soul, commanding him what he should do. But if, in the moral sphere, one should rise to thoughts about freedom and immortality, why should it be closed to man to raise himself directly in knowledge to that world in which immortality and freedom themselves are rooted? — Goethe calls such a power of judgment, which transports itself into such a world, the contemplative power of judgment. Now, in his contemplation of natural phenomena, Goethe continually exercised this power of judgment. And in the way he observed plant and animal forms, he set a magnificent example of the use of this power of judgment. Kant saw this power of judgment as something demonic, which one should leave alone, which one should pass by. He called the use of this power of contemplative judgment “the adventure of reason.” Goethe countered: “Why should one, after making the effort I have, to recognize how the spirit lives and moves in natural phenomena, why should one not bravely face this adventure of reason?”

This is, of course, only the beginning, but it is the beginning of a development that proceeds as I have characterized it in these lectures. Today, too, I would like to point out that in my writings, in “How to Know Higher Worlds?”, in “The Occult Science in Outline”, in my last book, “The Riddle of Man”, you will find information and hints about what the soul has to undertake in order to find within itself, as it were, the strength to awaken from ordinary waking consciousness to observing consciousness in the same way that one awakens from dream consciousness to ordinary waking consciousness. Just as the soul must exert itself by virtue of the natural forces given to it in order to awaken from the dream-life, in which man is passively surrendered to the succession of images, into the waking consciousness, so can it, by taking itself in hand and applying to itself all that I have described in the book “How to Know Higher Worlds.” She can strengthen herself to awaken within a world that is now just as different in comparison to the ordinary waking consciousness as the ordinary sense world of the waking consciousness is different from what one experiences in the mere world of images in a dream. Out of the ordinary waking consciousness and into a world of intuitive consciousness: this is the path that the most outstanding thinkers of modern times have avoided so much. And we have the peculiar phenomenon that precisely the most enlightened minds have remained with Kant and have not found the way from Kant to Goethe, in order to advance vividly into the realm of the seeing consciousness, which is only the development at a different level of what Goethe meant by contemplative judgment.

But then, when the human being rises to such an awakening in the seeing consciousness, then he first reaches what I have already characterized in my lectures as imaginative knowledge, which is not called “imaginative” because it represents only something imagined, but because one lives in images; but in images that are not taken from the sensual outer world, but from a more powerful, more intense reality than the outer sensual reality. When a person develops the strength within themselves to reach this imaginative knowledge, it means that they truly live in what I have called in earlier lectures the ethereal in the sense of spiritual science. Through ordinary waking consciousness, we become aware of the external sense world. In imaginative consciousness, we enter into a completely different world, in which, so to speak, other things live and move than in the ordinary sense world.

Now it is certainly difficult for those who have no idea of this seeing consciousness to form an idea of it. And it will probably be the same for some of my honored listeners who have told me in recent times that these lectures are difficult to understand. They are not difficult with regard to what is communicated, but they are difficult for the reason that they speak of something that is not there for ordinary consciousness.

They speak of the results of perception that are based on the research of the seeing consciousness. But one can also gain an approximate idea in the ordinary consciousness of that which is actually the very first of the seeing consciousness. Imagine yourself — and basically anyone can do this — in a very vivid morning dream from which you wake up, and try to remember such a dream in which you have tried, I would even say, to really live in the dream, more or less subconsciously trying to really live in it. Then you will have experienced that what you feel as thoughts, as if they were banished to your body, and of which you have to say to yourself, “I feel my thoughts as though they were thought by me,” you will have to think about that, so to speak, spread out over the images of the dream as they flood in. You cannot distinguish yourself from what is flooding in the images of the dream, as you can distinguish yourself in sensual consciousness, so that you can say, “I stand here and I think about the things that are out there.” You do not perceive something outside and think about it, but you have the direct experience: in what is flooding up and down, the forces live that otherwise live in my thinking. It is as if you yourself were immersed in the surging life, so that the surging, the form of the surging, everything that is there is formed like weaving, living thought forces: objective life and weaving of thought forces. This, what can only be imagined in the dream life, I would like to say, can be perceived very distinctly in the seeing consciousness as a first impression. There really the possibility ceases to think: There outside are the objects and there inside in my head I think about the objects. No, there one feels embedded in something, what one would like to call a surging substantial sea, in which one is a wave. And that, what thought power is, is not only in one, that is outside, that drives this surging and surging, that goes outward, inward. That is to say, one sometimes feels connected to it, sometimes in such a way that the power of thought flows outside without one.

What one achieves – whereby, in a sense, a substantial element is connected with what otherwise only lives in us as thought – that is what should really be called ether. For the ether is nothing other than a finer substantiality, but one that is so permeated everywhere that thought is at work in it, that in reality thoughts outside fill the ether itself. Only in this way, through the development of consciousness, does one arrive at what should really be called ether. But then one also arrives at a more intimate relationship between one's own soul and the environment. In sensory observation, one can never enter into such an intimate relationship with one's surroundings as in this experience of the observing consciousness, which now really has no boundaries between inside and outside, but flows in and out - into and out of one's own soul life - that which is ether filled with thoughts and thoughts of the soul.

But only when one has entered into this intuitive consciousness can there be a higher self-knowledge. And here I now touch on something that again belongs to the significant results of spiritual research; but it will also be transferred to scientific research, insofar as it will find confirmation of this, as it will find confirmation of those results of spiritual research that I have presented in previous lectures. Man is a complex being, even if we look at him only externally and physically. If Goethe's approach had already been fruitful earlier, if it had not been overgrown by the 19th-century materialism hostile to spirit and soul, Goethe's theory of metamorphosis would also have been applied to man himself. Goethe made a very beautiful distinction between the green leaf and the colored petal of a flower, which are the same thing, only at different levels of existence, one being only a transformation product, a metamorphosis of the other. If we start not from a merely theoretical reception, but from the intuition that lived in Goethe, in that he applied the idea of metamorphosis in the simplest way, to the plant, and now applies this metamorphic applies this view of metamorphosis to man in all the complexity of his being, one comes to recognize that man, by having a head and a remaining organism, is a very remarkable creature.

When we observe the human being as he develops from an early age, from early childhood onwards, we encounter many things that are full of meaning and that are still not sufficiently appreciated by science today. Let us just emphasize the fact that in early childhood the part of the human being that develops most physically is the head. The head grows throughout life in such a way that it increases fourfold, while the rest of the organism grows twentyfold from its childhood state. Consider, then, how different the pace of growth is for the head and for the rest of the organism. This is due to the fact that the head and the rest of the organism are two different metamorphoses of one and the same, but in a very peculiar way. The head appears in man, as he begins his physical life, immediately in a certain perfection; the rest of the organism, on the other hand, appears with the greatest conceivable imperfection, and must first develop slowly to the degree of perfection that it is to achieve in physical life. Thus the head and the rest of the organism undergo quite different periods of development. I have already mentioned how spiritual science shows the origin of this. The human head points back to a long preceding spiritual development. When we enter our physical existence through conception and birth, we come from a spiritual world as soul-spiritual beings. What we go through during our spiritual development in the spiritual world contains a sum of forces that initially express themselves primarily in the head; therefore, what appears in the head as something so perfect and needing little further perfection points to a development that the person has already undergone.

The rest of the organism is, as it were, the same at an initial stage. It is in the process of developing the powers which, if they could reach full development, would tend to make the whole of the rest of the organism what the head is physically. However paradoxical it may sound, that is how it is. The head shows that it is a transformed remaining organism; the remaining organism shows that it is a head that has not yet become. In a sense, just as the green leaf is a petal that has not yet become a flower, and the colored petal is a transformed leaf. And that which the human being develops through his remaining organism, that is incorporated into the soul. And when a person passes through the gate of death, it enters into a spiritual world, undergoes a development between death and a new birth, and in a later life becomes one of the powers that then develop in the head, just as the head of the present has developed out of the organism of an earlier life on earth.

Now you may ask: How can such a thing be known? Something like this can be known as soon as a person enters into intuitive consciousness. For then something really occurs that compels one to see the human being as this duality: the head human being and the human being of the rest of the organism. And the head is, so to speak, a tool of the etheric world, as I have just described it, and the rest of the organism is also a tool of this etheric world.

The human being not only has his physical organism as a kind of section of the whole physical world, but he also has, held together by the physical organism, an etheric organism within him that can only be perceived if one ascends to imaginative knowledge, as I have described. But then, when what is ethereal really becomes vivid, then one encounters the great difference between what underlies the etheric body of the human being and the head and what underlies the etheric body of the rest of the organism. And just as the head and the rest of the organism have very different growth rates, so that which lives and is active in the etheric body of the head and that which lives in the etheric body of the rest of the organism has very different inner developments of strength, which evoke different inner imaginations. And when one enters the imaginative world at all, then the imagination of the etheric body of the head interacts with the imagination of the etheric body of the rest of the organism. And this living interaction in the human etheric organism is the content of a higher self-knowledge. The fact that the human being comes to truly recognize himself in this way also enables him to evaluate certain soul experiences in the right way. If what I have stated were not as I have described it, the human being would never be able to have what is called a memory. The human being would be able to form ideas from sensory impressions, but these would always pass by. The fact that a person can remember something that he has once experienced is based on the fact that the etheric body of the head, in interaction with the etheric body of the rest of the organism, causes that which takes effect in the etheric body of the head to bring about changes in the etheric body of the rest of the organism that are permanent and that work their way up into the physical organism. Every time something takes hold in the soul and bodily life of a person that belongs to memory, a change first occurs in the etheric organism that can be imagined through imaginative knowledge; but this change continues into the physical organism. And through this alone we have the possibility of again bringing up certain thoughts, that what is sent from the ether organism of the head into the other ether organism is imprinted in the physical body. Only by the fact that something has made impressions in our physical body are we able to retain it in our memory. But what happens in the physical organism in the manner described, can only be observed by the seeing consciousness. This can only be observed if the observing consciousness continues the exercises that are characterized in the books mentioned, if the observing consciousness rises from mere imaginative knowledge to what I have called “inspired knowledge”. Through imaginative knowledge we enter into a world of surging ether, which is animated by thoughts that permeate it. If we continue the exercises, we will gain more strength in our soul life than is necessary for this imaginative knowledge, and then we will not only perceive a surging thought life in the ether, but we will also perceive beings within this surging thought life, real spirit beings, which do not reveal themselves in any physical body, but which only reveal themselves in the spiritual. But by coming to the real perception of a spiritual world, we also come to the possibility of achieving what can be called: to look at the actual human being as well as at things from the outside, to really face oneself, not just to feel what I have now called one's own thought life in the surging ether, in one's own ether organism, but to perceive oneself among other spirit beings as a spirit being in the spiritual world. When this happens, something occurs that is difficult to even characterize, but that can be understood with some good will.

When you imagine something and hold the image in your mind, and later you recall this image, you say you are remembering. But as I have just explained, this is based on something that is happening in the physical organism. It is just that we cannot follow it with our ordinary consciousness. But if we ascend into the consciousness of vision, then we come, as it were, to see what happens behind the memory, what happens in man in the time that elapses from the moment when he conceived a thought that has now disappeared as it were, and lives only down in the physical organism until it is brought up again. All that lives beyond the thought that is remembered is not perceived if one cannot lift oneself out of oneself through the seeing consciousness and, as it were, look at oneself from the other side. So that one not only sees a thought going down and sensing it coming back up, but perceiving everything that happens in between while the thought is going down and coming back up. This is only possible for the inspired consciousness; it is possible for the beholder who has made it possible for himself not only to look outward while living in the physical body, but to look even within the body of man himself while living in the spirit. Thus man reaches, on the one hand, a beyond of the soul, which assures him that he lives in the spirit. But man also reaches the beyond of the soul, which works in what lives unconsciously from the disappearance of a thought until the reappearance of the same, what lives down there as what Eduard von Hartmann calls the “unconscious”, and which he believes can never be reached by consciousness. It cannot be reached by ordinary consciousness because the thought is reflected in the organism beforehand; but if one gets behind this reflection, if one goes beyond oneself and lives in the observing consciousness, then one experiences what really happens in a person between the moment of conceiving the thought and the moment of remembering it. And this we will now hold fast, what man can perceive, as it were, beyond that stream through the seeing consciousness, which is usually limited to him by memory. For we see well: there we enter through the seeing consciousness into a beyond of the soul.

Let us keep this thought in mind and look at many other endeavors that have emerged in the scientific age from the same point of view.

Not only does the scientific world view, I might say, take such erroneous paths to the soul life as I have characterized it, but in a certain respect it also takes erroneous paths when it wants to explore what lies beyond the senses. In this respect, scientific research is indeed in a strange position at present when it forms a world view. It has actually come to the conclusion that everything that lives in consciousness is only an image of reality. It starts from an incorrect idea; but this incorrect idea, despite its incorrectness, gives a certain insight that is correct, namely that everything that lives in consciousness is an image. Scientific research starts from the idea that out there is a reality of vibrating, thoughtless ether atoms, completely without spirit or soul. We have found the ether to be a surging, thought-filled life; the scientific world view starts from the thoughtless, soulless ether. These vibrations impress our senses, effects arise in us, conjuring up the colorful, resounding world for us, while outside everything is dark and silent. Now, however, thinking, on which this world view is based, wants to get behind these images. What does it do? What it does there can be compared to someone -— well, let's say a child - looking into a mirror. Mirror images come towards him, his own and the images of his surroundings. And now the child wants to know what actually underlies these mirror images. What does it do? Yes, what is actually underlying them is behind the mirror, it says; so it will either want to look behind the mirror. But there it sees something quite different from what it was actually looking for. Or it may well smash the mirror to see what is behind the glass. The same is true of the scientific view of the world. It has the whole carpet of sense phenomena before it, and it wants to know what actually lives behind the sense phenomena. It goes so far as to approach the substance, the matter. Now it wants to know what is out there, apart from the senses. But that is merely as if it wanted to smash the carpet, which is like a mirror. She would not find what she was looking for behind it. And if someone were to say: “I have red through the eye, and behind it are certain vibrations in the ether,” he is talking just like someone who believes that the origin of what shines in the mirror is behind the mirror. Just as when you stand before a mirror you see the image of yourself in the mirror, and you are together with what is in the surroundings, and with what also reflects itself of yourself, so you are together in the soul with what is behind the sense phenomena. If I want to know why other things are reflected with me, I cannot look behind the mirror, but I have to look at those who are to my left and right, who are of the same nature as I am, who are also reflected. If I want to explore what is out there behind the sensory phenomena, I must explore that in which I myself am involved; not by breaking the mirror, but by exploring that in which I myself am involved.

Indeed, ingenious and wonderful trains of thought have been developed over the airwaves in relation to natural science. But all these trains of thought have led to nothing, to the realization that the path of physical research leads only to the same thing that is seen in the sense perception, only that because some things are too fine or too fast to be perceived by the senses. One comes to no ether. This is clear today after the beautiful research with the pumped tubes, the vacuum tubes, where one thought one had the ether in one's hands; for today one knows that nothing else comes about through these experiments than radiant matter, not what can be called ether. I would even say that ether research in particular is undergoing the greatest revolution today. For one will never arrive at anything other than that which reflects, by way of physical research. If one wants to get further, then one must consider that which reflects with a community — but one can only do that with the seeing consciousness. And that is what lives in the ether that is truly inspired by thought. Therefore, when one asks about the beyond of the senses, one finds only one answer through the seeing consciousness. For when one recognizes the surging thought-inspired ether within oneself through imaginative knowledge, then one also comes to seek it behind the red, behind the sound, behind all external sensory perception; no longer the dead ether of today's physical conception, which is just fading away, but the living, thought-inspired ether. Behind what the senses perceive, lives the same thing that is found in us when we penetrate down into that which lives in us between the grasping of a thought and the remembering of a thought. We do not reach the beyond of the senses by the methods of modern physics, but by finding what is beyond the senses in our own being, by learning to recognize: the same process works in our own being between the grasping of a thought and the reminiscence of a thought, which lives outside and which penetrates my eye when I perceive red. Behind this red is the same thing that is in me between the grasping of a thought and the remembering of a thought. The beyond of the senses and the beyond of the soul leads into the spiritual.

I had to lead you through a deducted train of thought today because I wanted to say something in the context of these lectures about the perspective that must arise from spiritual science. I wanted to show how true self-knowledge leads to the beyond of the soul, but also how, when one steps into the beyond of the soul, one also stands in the beyond of the senses, and how one thereby finds the way into the spiritual world through the observing consciousness. And once we enter this spiritual world, the intuitive consciousness discovers that which also plays a role in our soul life and which I have described in the previous lectures as that which, as our destiny, rises and falls in our experiences. In this way, the life of fate is linked to the moral life, to what happens in destiny. When we first know that behind the experience of the senses there is not a spiritless reality, but a reality inspired by the spirit, then our moral life will have just as much place in this spiritual world, which lies beyond the soul and beyond the senses, as the material world, which we perceive all around us, has in this outer world.

Spiritual science today, when it develops these things, is still seen as something paradoxical; the things I have described are, so to speak, considered foolishness; and yet they can be considered just as much as facts, simply by looking at them as if one wanted to describe an external event. But this approach of spiritual science is only digging in one epistemic tunnel from one side; from the other side, natural science digs into the mountain. If the two strive in the right direction, they will meet in the middle. And I would like to say: in a kind of negative way, those who cultivate natural science do come to meet those who cultivate the humanities; for remarkable things have come about among natural scientists in recent times. Those who think they are firmly grounded in natural science research because they know what has been discovered up to twenty years ago do not yet know much about what natural scientists actually do. But if you look more closely, you will make some very strange discoveries in the course of scientific thinking. For this very reason, I have today cited Eduard von Hartmann as a thinker who at least points to a beyond the senses and a beyond the soul. He just does not admit that it is possible for the observing consciousness to penetrate beyond the senses and the beyond of the soul. Therefore he says, dipping it into a general sauce of knowledge - knowledge sauce, one says nowadays! -: What lies beyond the senses and beyond the soul is the unconscious. He now puts forward quite questionable hypotheses about it. But these are only truths of thought. Thought does not reach into these worlds. Only the seeing consciousness reaches into them, as I have described. But at least Hartmann does advance to at least a presentiment of the fact that in the beyond of the senses and in the beyond of the soul there is something spiritual, even if he did not bring it to consciousness. When he published his Philosophy of the Unconscious in 1868, he offered a critique of the already then rampant materialistic interpretation of Darwinism. “Materialistic Darwinism” — not what Darwin found in the way of individual facts, that is not under discussion here — believes that it can explain how the more perfect arise from imperfect, simplest living creatures by leaving out everything of a spiritual nature, as they say, through mere selection, through mere struggle for existence. Due to the fact that the perfect ones develop by chance and overcome those that remain imperfect by chance, the perfect ones gradually prevail; this is how something like a developmental series from the imperfect to the perfect arises. As early as 1868, Hartmann explained that such a play of purely external natural necessities, which can also be called chance, is not sufficient to explain the development of organisms, but that certain forces must be at work, even if unconsciously, when a living being develops from imperfection to perfection. In short, he sought a spiritual element in evolution, that spiritual element that can really be found beyond the senses and beyond the soul, he hypothetically assumed. He assumed it only hypothetically, because at that time one had not yet penetrated to the stage of direct intuitive consciousness.

When the “Philosophy of the Unconscious” was published, which criticized Darwin's theory of chance in a sharp-witted way, a large number of scientifically minded people came forward to oppose this “dilettante thinker” Eduard von Hartmann. A dilettante philosopher who doesn't understand anything of what Darwinism has brought, and who speaks so glibly from his own intellectual standpoint! And among those who criticized Hartmann at the time was Oscar Schmid, a professor in Jena. Haeckel himself was also among them. Haeckel himself and numerous of his students were now highly astonished that among the many writings that, in their opinion, brilliantly refuted Eduard von Hartmann, who talked such amateurish nonsense, there was also a writing by an anonymous author – by a man who did not name himself. And Haeckel said: He should come forward! And others also said: He should come forward and we would accept him as one of our own! It is so wonderful that a scientific paper has now been published in this way against the nonsense of the “philosophy of the unconscious”! — And a second edition of this paper “The Unconscious in the Light of Darwinism” was published. And the author called himself – it was Eduard von Hartmann! You see, there were reasons why people no longer declaimed: He calls himself us and we consider him one of us. They now kept quiet about him. That was a fundamental lesson that had to be taught to those who believe that the one who talks about the spirit does so because he does not understand their science. It became quite quiet now. But something else was noticed: in 1916 a very interesting work was published that can be said to stand at the pinnacle of the field it discusses. This work is called: 'The Development of Organisms. A Refutation of Darwin's Theory of Chance'. And this work - well, who wrote it? Well, it is by the often mentioned most brilliant Haeckel student, by Oscar Hertwig, the Berlin professor of biology. We are witnessing the strange spectacle that the next generation of Haeckel's students, the generation of students of which he himself was most proud, is already writing books to refute the Darwinian theory of chance, which at the time when they turned against Hartmann was precisely the one prevailing in the Haeckel circle. And what does Hertwig do, whom I myself knew as one of the most loyal Haeckel students with his brother Richard? He adopts what can be called a “materialistic interpretation of the Darwinian theory” and refutes it piece by piece, quoting Eduard von Hartmann at several points. Hartmann now reappears in Oscar Hertwig's writing “The Becoming of Organisms. A Refutation of Darwin's Theory of Chance” and is honored again. In the past, when he was not known, people said: He calls himself unconscious, and we consider him one of us. And now we are beginning to come back to what Hartmann still put into the unconscious. Now we are beginning to recognize the spiritual in what is there sensually.

However, this book “The Development of Organisms. A Refutation of Darwin's Theory of Chance by Oscar Hertwig” is indeed strange. For while all earlier materialistic interpretations of Darwinism boiled down to saying: We have perfect organisms, we have imperfect organisms; the perfect ones have developed from the imperfect ones through their external natural forces, Hertwig comes back to to the fact that in the perfect organism, if one goes back microscopically to the first germ, one can prove that Nägeli's view is correct, that in the first germ the perfect organism is already distinguished from the imperfect organism. For there is already something quite different in the perfect organism than in the imperfect one, which one believes the perfect one has developed from. Microscopic research has gone to a limit, but it has achieved nothing more than to come across a mirror, and has not progressed further than the limit of the sensory world. The consequence will be that many people who stand on the standpoint of the natural-scientific world view will not merely state, as Hertwig does: the materialistic interpretation of Darwinism is impossible. Rather, they will acknowledge: If we want to arrive at anything that explains the sense world and lies behind it, then we cannot stop at ordinary consciousness; we cannot get out of the sense world, not even with as many telescopes as we want. We can only get out of the sense world if we arm ourselves with the seeing consciousness.

But in general, even philosophers have not yet gone very far in arming themselves with the soul to the point where they would recognize that the seeing consciousness can sprout forth from this ordinary consciousness, just as the waking consciousness sprouts forth from the dream. Today philosophers are even less qualified to penetrate to these things. I have often said that I only act in opposition to those whom I basically respect very much. Therefore, I may say: It is only because of this inability to think in a way that is in accordance with the spirit and reality, that one would strive for this seeing consciousness, that people are considered great philosophers today who, basically, their whole thinking and meditating only swim around in what surges up and down in this ordinary consciousness, without even feeling the need to get beyond mere talk of surging ideas. And so it has also come about that someone who revels in the surface of the surging and swaying ideas, as Eucken did, for example, can be regarded as a great philosopher today. It is just one of the things that one has to characterize by saying that this clinging to ordinary consciousness has also taken away from man the sharpness of thought that allows him to see that there are not such limits to knowledge as Kant states, but such limits that one must reckon with in order to transcend them through the seeing consciousness. That is why those who declaim about all kinds of spiritual worlds, but who, within the ordinary consciousness, come to nothing but what Eduard von Hartmann long ago recognized as mere ordinary consciousness operating in images, are regarded as great philosophers today.

And so much could be shown in the present day that would draw attention to the fact that, I would say, the admirable scientific way of looking at things has led us away from the paths that lead to the soul. For some, however, it has been quite the opposite. There are people in the present who sense what I have said today. For example, there is a personality in the present who senses that what lives in the soul between birth and death in the form of thinking, feeling and willing is only something that is conditioned by the body, while the eternal comes from the comes out of the spiritual world, enters into existence through birth, transforms itself in the body so that it works in the body, and then leaves again through death, and that what works in the body is not the true soul. The personality that I mean recognizes this. But it says that in what lives in ordinary consciousness, we only have images. This personality calls it “events”. Behind these lie the primal factors that are experienced in the seeing consciousness as beyond the soul and beyond the senses. But the personality that I mean does not want to go into this seeing consciousness. And so it stands before the occurrences, again, I would like to say, smashing a thick mirror over and over again, and saying: Behind it the primal factors must be. But it rages. And by raging against the mirror surface and not wanting to come to the seeing consciousness, it believes that all philosophy has only raged. With Fichte one can see (I have spoken about this in my book “Vom Menschenrätsel” (The Riddle of Man)) that he did not rave, but that he pointed to the seeing consciousness in an important point. The personality I am referring to now, which does recognize the image-nature of ordinary consciousness, says: “He who cannot laugh (at Fichte) cannot philosophize either.” And as this personality lets all philosophers from Plato and Heraclitus to the present day pass before it in their interrelations, it calls these philosophies “The Tragicomedy of Wisdom”. And there is an interesting sentence on page 132: “We have no more philosophy than an animal, and only the frantic attempt to arrive at a philosophy and the final surrender to not-knowing distinguish us from the animal.”

That is the judgment of one personality about all philosophy, about all attempts to penetrate into the beyond of the soul and the beyond of the senses! This is truly a raging man who, in his rage, believes that others are raging. Therefore, because he speaks so beautifully about philosophy, he is currently a university professor of philosophy! Philosophy is currently being taught in such a way as to express itself in such a phenomenon.

I know very well that for some people what I am saying seems bitter. I can fully understand that. I can understand all the bitterness and also all the paradoxes. But it must be pointed out once and for all that in the present time there is the necessity to emerge from what is enclosed in the mere sense world and to submerge into what leads beyond the soul, beyond the senses. For it is not the world that sets up limits to our knowledge. What sets up the limits of knowledge is man himself.

Sometimes one can make very interesting discoveries, such as what the human being is like when he does not even want to look at what, as a seeing consciousness, leads to the very essence of the soul. I have just given a sample of a philosophical view of a university professor Richard Wahle, who wrote the “Tragicomedy of Wisdom”. I could mention another: the famous Jodl. The man would certainly - he is no longer alive - regard everything that has been said here today, and that is said here at all, as the most complete madness. But he does speak about the soul in the following way: “The soul does not have states or capacities, such as thinking, imagining, joy, hatred, and so on, but these states in their totality are the soul.” Very ingenious! And the whole of Jodl's philosophy is permeated by this ingenuity. Only this definition of the soul is no more valuable than if someone were to say: It is not the table that has corners and edges and a surface, but corners and edges and a surface are the table.

And that is the quality of most of the thoughts that now live in that tangle of mere thought-webs, which are, however, only a product of the body because they do not want to penetrate to the observing consciousness, where one first discovers the soul. Today, however, one will still find that such a view takes many revenge. I have called the world-view represented in these lectures Anthroposophy. This is in reference to the “Anthroposophy” of Robert Zimmermann, who was also a university professor, but who was equally opposed to Anthroposophy. For what would Robert Zimmermann have said about the Anthroposophy that is presented here? Well, he would say what he has already said about Schelling: the philosopher must remain within that which can be attained through thought. He must not appeal to something that requires a special training of the soul! One can speak in this way, then one is just practicing an anthroposophy like Robert Zimmermann did. You will find a thicket of thoughts in it; it will not interest you, because not a word is said about all the questions of the soul and the spirit. Of what I have discussed in these lectures, what is connected with the beyond of the soul and the beyond of the senses, what is connected with the question of the immortality of the human soul, with the question of fate — none of this is contained in that anthroposophy. For the whole of the thinking of this last century has, on the one hand, admittedly produced the great advances of natural science, which cannot be sufficiently admired, but on the other hand, it has also produced the attitude of mind towards knowledge that the youthful Renan, when he left college, expressed as his conviction when he had been led astray in his religious ideas by the insights of the modern scientific way of thinking. At that time he said: “The man of the present day is aware that he will never know anything about his highest causes or his destiny.” That is ultimately the confession of many today, except that because the confession has been around for so long, very many have become numb to it and do not feel how such a confession eats away at the soul when it is new. This confession has blocked the paths to the beyond of the soul and to the beyond of the senses that are characteristic of today. Ernest Renan, after all, was someone who felt how it is possible to live with such a blockage. And so, as an old man, he made a strange statement:

The non-recognition of the observing consciousness does not lead to the knowledge of the origin and essence of man, just as the breaking of a mirror does not lead to the knowledge of those beings who are reflected in it. Renan felt this. He felt that where earlier times sought the spiritual origin of man, his world view posits a nothing. His mind protested against this by him declaring in old age that he would rather know that there is a hell than believe that nothingness is real. As long as only the mind protests in this way, as long as humanity will not get beyond the limitations of the world view that has so far blocked the paths to the beyond of the senses and the beyond of the soul. Only when humanity declares its willingness to develop such strong thinking and imagining that the soul can strengthen itself for what is, in the seeing consciousness, a living continuation of what Goethe suggested in his concept of the contemplating power of judgment, and which Kant regards as an adventure of reason, only when humanity decides to to advance to this realization of thoughts, to the whole soul world, in order to penetrate into spiritual reality with the seeing consciousness, then not only a mere protest of the mind, but a protest of knowledge will arise against the powers of compulsion of that so-called monism, which wants to split man off from a knowledge of his actual being. And I think that today we can already feel the inner nerve that lives in the spiritual-scientific debates in such a way that we are living at the starting point of those upheavals in human soul life that lead out of the realization of the already admired natural scientific world view into the beyond of the senses and the beyond of the soul, into the actual place of origin of the human being, into the spirit.

And thus man will again be able to link that which lives in his destiny, in his moral existence, to the origin of the world, just as he can link that which lives in the outer necessity of nature. And in this way man will ascend to a truly unified and also truly satisfying view of nature and soul, because as spirit he speaks to spirit.

[ 1 ] In publishing a work of this kind at the present time one must be resigned from the outset to every kind of criticism. A reader, for example, versed in the accepted theories, can be heard commenting on the way scientific themes have here been treated: ‘It is amazing that such absurdities can be put forward in our time. The author betrays utter ignorance of the most elementary notions. He writes of ‘heat’ and ‘warmth’ as though untouched by the whole trend of modern Physics. Such vagaries do not even deserve to be called amateurish.’ Ore in this vein can be imagined: ‘One need only read a few pages to discard the book—according to one's temperament, with a smile or with indignation—shelving it with other literary curiosities such as turn up from time to time.’

What then will the author say to these damning criticisms? Will he not, from his own standpoint, have to regard his critics as without discernment or even lacking the good will for an intelligent judgment? The answer is, No—not necessarily. He is well aware that those who condemn his work will often be men of high intelligence, competent scientists and anxious to judge fairly. Knowing well the reasons for these adverse judgments, he can put himself in the critic's place. He must here be permitted a few personal observations which would be out of place save in so far as they relate to his resolve to write the book at all. For it would have no raison de'etre if merely personal and subjective. The contents of this book must be accessible to every human mind; also the manner of presentation should as far as possible be free of personal coloring. The following remarks on the author's life and work are therefore only meant to show how he could come to write this book while understanding only too well the apparent grounds of adverse judgment. Even these remarks would be superfluous if it were possible to show in detail that the contents are after all in harmony with the known facts of science. But this would need several volumes, far more than can be done under present circumstances.

The author would certainly never have ventured to publish what is here said about ‘heat’ or ‘warmth,’ for example, if he were not conversant with the commonly accepted view. In this student days, some thirty years ago, he made a thorough study of Physics. Concerning the phenomena of heat, the so-called ‘Mechanical Theory of Heat’ was in the forefront at that time, and this engaged his keen attention he studied the historical development of all such explanations and lines of thought associated with such names as J. R. Mayer, Helmholtz, Clausius and Joule. This has enabled him also to keep abreast of subsequent developments. If he were not in this position, he would not have felt justified in writing about warmth or heat as in this book. For he has made it his principle only to speak or write of any subject from the aspect of spiritual science where he would also be qualified to give an adequate account of the accepted scientific knowledge. He does not mean that every writer should be subject to the same restriction. A man may naturally feel impelled to communicate what he arrives at by his own judgment and feeling for the truth, even if ignorant of what contemporary science has to say. But for his own part the author is resolved to adhere to the principle above-mentioned. Thus he would never have written the few sentences this book contains about the human glandular and nervous systems were he not also in a position to describe them in contemporary scientific terms.

Therefore however plausible the verdict that to speak of heat or warmth as in this book argues an utter ignorance of Physics, the fact is that the author feels justified in writing as he has done precisely because he has kept abreast of present-day research and would refrain from writing if he had not. No doubt this too may be mistaken for lack of scientific modesty. Yet it must be avowed, if only to forestall even worse misunderstandings.

[ 2 ] Equally devastating criticisms might easily be voiced from a philosophic standpoint. One can imagine such a reader's question: ‘Has the author been asleep to all the work that has been and is still being done in fundamental theory of knowledge? Has he never even heard of Kant, who proved how inadmissible it is to make such statements as are here contained? … To a trained mind this uncritical and amateurish stuff is quite intolerable—a sheer waste of time.’

Here once again and at the risk of fresh misunderstanding, the author has to introduce a more personal note. He began studying Kant at the age of sixteen, and believes himself to be up-to-date also in this respect—qualified to judge from a Kantian standpoint what is put forward in this volume. Here too, he would have had good reason to leave the book unwritten were he not fully aware that the Kantian boundaries of knowledge are here overstepped. One can be equally well aware that Herbart would have found in it a ‘naïve realism’ of which the concepts had not been properly worked-over; or that the pragmatic school of William James, Schiller and others would judge it to be trespassing beyond the bounds of those genuine conceptions which man is really able to assimilate, to make effective and to verify in action.¹

In spite of all this—nay even because of it—one could feel justified in writing the book. The author himself has written critically and historically of these and other trends of thought in his philosophic work: The Theory of Knowledge implicit in Goethe's World-Conception, Truth and Science, The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity, Goethe's Conception of the World, Nineteenth-Century Philosophic Views of Life and of the World, Riddles of Philosophy.

[ 3 ] Other criticisms are imaginable. A reader of the author's earlier writings—for example his work on nineteenth century philosophies or his short essay on Haeckel and his Opponents—might well be saying: ‘How can one and the same man be the author of these works and of the book Theosophy (published in 1904) or of the present volume? How can he take up the cudgels for Haeckel and then offend so grossly against the straightforward monism, the philosophic outcome of Haeckel's researches? One could well understand the writer of this Occult Science attacking all that Haeckel stood for; that he defended him and even dedicated to him one of his main works² appears preposterously inconsistent. Haeckel would have declined the dedication in no uncertain terms, had he known that the same author would one day produce the unwieldy dualism of the present work.’

Yet in the author's view one can appreciate Haeckel without having to stigmatize as nonsense whatever is not the direct outcome of his range of thought and his assumptions. We do justice to Haeckel by entering into the spirit of his scientific work, not by attacking him—as has been done—with every weapon that comes to hand. Least of all does the author hold any brief for those of Haeckel's adversaries against whom he defended the great naturalist in his essay on Haeckel and his Opponents. If then he goes beyond Haeckel's assumptions and placed the spiritual view side by side with Haeckel's purely naturalistic view of the Universe, this surely does not rank him with Haeckel's opponents. Anyone who takes sufficient trouble will perceive that there is no insuperable contradiction between the author's present work and his former writings.

[ 4 ] The author can also put himself in the place of the kind of critic who without more ado will discard the whole book as an outpouring of wild fancy. This attitude is answered in the book itself, where it is pointed out that reasoned thinking can and must be the touchstone of all that is here presented. Only those who will apply to the contents of this book the test of reason—even as they would to a description of natural-scientific facts—will be in a position to decide.

[ 5 ] A word may also be addressed to those already predisposed to give the book a sympathetic hearing. (They will find most of what is relevant in the introductory chapter.) Although the book concerns researches beyond the reach of the sense-bound intellect, nothing is here presented which cannot be grasped with open-minded thought and with the healthy feeling for the truth possessed by everyone who will apply these gifts of human nature. The author frankly confesses: he would like readers who will not accept what is here presented on blind faith, but rather put it to the test of their own insight and experience of life.³ He desires careful readers—readers who will allow only what is sound and reasonable. This book would not be valid if relaying on blind faith; it is of value only inasmuch as it can pass the test of open-minded thinking. Credulity too easily mistakes folly and superstition for the truth. People who are content with vague belief in the supersensible may criticize this book for its excessive appeal to the lift of thought. But in these matters the scrupulous and conscientious form of presentation is no less essential than the substance. In the field of Occult Science irresponsible charlatanism and the highest truths, genuine knowledge and mere superstition are often separated by a thin dividing line, and it is all too easy to mistake the one for the other.

[ 6 ] Readers already conversant with supersensible realities will no doubt recognize the author's care to keep within the bounds of what can and should be communicated at the present time. They will be well aware that there are aspects of supersensible knowledge for which a different form of communication is required, if not a later period of time should be awaited.

Rudolf Steiner
December, 1909

• 1. Even in the more recent schools—Bergson, the ‘As If’ philosophy, and the ‘Critique of Language’—have been studied and appraised in this connection.
• 2. Nineteenth-century Philosophic Views of Life and of the World (published in 1900)
• 3. This does not only refer to the spiritual test of supersensible research, but to the test—unquestionably valid—of open-minded thought, the test of healthy human intelligence and reflection.

I have often emphasised here that the theosophical movement cannot disabuse us of the immediate reality, of the duties and tasks that the day imposes on us in this time. Now it must become apparent whether this theosophical movement finds the right words if it concerns to give us an understanding of the great spiritual heroes who are, in the end, the creators of our culture and education. During these days, everybody who counts himself among the German education directs his thoughts upon one of our greatest spiritual heroes, on our Friedrich Schiller (1759–1805).

Hundred years separate us from his earthly decease. The last big celebration of Schiller, which was committed not only within Germany, but also in England, in America, in Austria, in Russia, was in 1859, on his hundredth birthday. It was interlinked with jamborees, with devoted words to the highest idealism of Schiller. These were words that were spoken over whole regions of the earth. There will be again jamborees which are celebrated during these days to honour of our great spiritual hero. However, as intimate and sincere and honest as the sounds were, which were spoken in those days in 1859, so intimate and devoted and completely spoken from the heart the words will not be that are spoken about Schiller today. Education and the national view about Schiller has substantially changed during the last fifty years. In the first half of the 19th century, Schiller's great ideals, the great portrayals of his dramas settled down, slowly and gradually It was an echo of that which Schiller himself had planted, an echo of that which he had sunk in the hearts and souls which flowed in enthusiastic words from the lips of the best of the German nation in those days. The most excellent men of this time have exerted their best to say what they had to say. There the brothers Ernst and Georg Curtius, the aesthete Vischer, the linguist Jacob Grimm, Karl Gutzkow and many others united. They joined in the big choir of Schiller celebrations and everywhere it sounded in such a way, as if one heard anything from Schiller himself, anything of that which Schiller himself had planted.

We have to acknowledge to ourselves that this changed in the last decades. The immediate interest in Schiller has decreased because Schiller's great ideals do no longer speak so familiarly and intimately to our contemporaries. Hence, it may be a substitute that we bear in mind clearly and vividly what Schiller can still be for our present and future. It behoves the theosophist above all to take the big theosophical basic questions up and to ask himself whether Schiller has to do anything with these theosophical basic questions. I hope that the course of this evening shows that it is not pure invention if we bring together Schiller and the theosophical movement, if we theosophists feel called in certain way to care for the remembrance of Schiller.

What is our basic question, what do we long for, what do we want to investigate and fathom? It is the big question to find the way to that which surrounds us as sense-perceptible objects and to that which is beyond the sensuous, as the spiritual, the super-sensible that lives in us and above us. This was also an early question which moved our Schiller. I cannot get involved in details. But I would like to show one thing, nevertheless, that Schiller's life and work was penetrated by this basic question: how is the physical with the psycho-spiritual, the super-sensible connected? Schiller wanted to solve this problem from the beginning of his life up to the heights of his work, even through his whole work, which is the artistic and philosophical expression of this question. At that time, he wrote a treatise after he had completed his study of medicine. This treatise, a kind of thesis, which he wrote with the departure from the Karlsschule (elite military academy) addresses the question: which is the interrelation between the sensuous nature of the human being and his spiritual nature?

Schiller treats in this work emphatically and nicely how the spirit is connected with the physical nature of the human being. Our time has already outdistanced what Schiller answers to this question; but that does not matter with such a great genius like Schiller. It matters how he engrossed his mind and how he put up with such things. Schiller understood this in such a way that there no conflict may be permitted between the sensuous and the spiritual. Thus he tried to subtly show how the spirit, how the soul of the human being works on the physical, that the physical is only an expression of the spirit living in the human beings.

Any gesture, any form and any verbal utterance is an expression of it. He investigates at first how the soul enjoys life in the body; then he investigates how the physical condition works on the mind. Briefly, the harmony between body and soul is the sense of this treatise. The end of the treatise is brilliant. There Schiller speaks of death in such a way, as if this is no completion of life, but only an event like other events of life. Death is no completion. He says already there: life causes death once; but life is not finished with it; the soul goes, after it has experienced the event of death, into other spheres to look at life from the other side. However, has the human being already sucked out all experience from life really at this moment? Schiller thinks that it might very well be possible that the life of the soul within the body appears as if we read in a book which we peruse, put aside and take in hand again after some time to understand it better. Then we put it aside again, after some time we take it in hand et etcetera to understand it better and better. He says to us with it: the soul lives not only once in the body, but like the human being takes a book in hand again and again, the soul returns repeatedly to a body to make new experiences in this world. It is the great idea of reincarnation, which Lessing had touched shortly before in his Education of the Human Race like in his literary will, and which Schiller also expresses now where he writes about the interrelation of the sensuous nature with the spiritual nature of the human being. At the very beginning, Schiller starts considering life from the highest point of view.

Schiller's first dramas have an intense effect on somebody who has a feeling heart for what is great in them. If we ask ourselves why Schiller's great thoughts flow into our hearts, then we get the answer that Schiller touches matters in his dramas which belong to the highest of humanity. The human being does not always need to understand and realise in the abstract what takes place in the poet's soul if he lonely forms the figures of imagination. But what lives there in the breast of the poet when he forms his figures, which move there on the stage, we see this already as young people in the theatre, or if we read the dramas. There flows in us what lives in the poet's soul. What lived in Schiller's soul at that time when he out-poured his young soul in his Robbers, in Fiesco, in Intrigue and Love. We must take him from the spiritual currents of the 18th century if we want to completely understand him.

Two spiritual currents existed which influenced the spiritual horizon of Europe at that time. A term of the French materialism calls one current. If we want to understand it, we have to see deeper into the development of the nations. What seethed in Schiller's soul has taken its origin in the striving and thinking of centuries. Approximately around the turn of the 15-th to the 16-th century the time begins when the human beings looked up at the stars in a new way. Copernicus, Kepler, Galilei, they are those who bring up a new age, an age in which one looks at the world differently than before. Something new crept into the human souls relying on the external senses.

Who wants to compare the difference of the old world view of the12th, 13th centuries with that which arose around the turn of the 16th century with Copernicus and later with Kepler must compare what plays in Dante's Divine Comedy with the world view of the 17th, 18th centuries. One may argue against the medieval world view as much as one likes. It can no longer be ours. But it had what the 18th century did no longer have: it arranged the world as a big harmony, and the human being was arranged in this divine world order as its centre, he himself belonged to this big harmony. All things were the outflow of the divine, of the creativity which was revered in faith, in particular that of Christianity. The superior was an object of faith. It had to hold and bear. And this had an effect down to the plants and minerals. The whole world was enclosed in a big harmony, and the human being felt existing in this harmony. He felt that he can be released growing together and being interwoven with this divine harmony. He rested in that which he felt as the world permeated by God, and he felt contented.

This changed and had to change in the time when the new world view got entrance in the minds when the world was permeated with the modern spirit of research. There one had gained an overview about the material. By means of philosophical and physiological research one had received an insight into the sensory world. One could not harmonise what one thought of the sensuous world with faith this way. Other concepts and other views took place. However, the human beings could not harmonise their new achievements with that which they thought and felt about the spirit.

One could not harmonise it with that which one had to believe about the sources of life according to the ancient traditions. Thus something came up in the French Revolution that one can express with the sentence:”the human being is a machine.” One had understood the substances, but one had lost the connection with the spirit. One felt the spiritual in oneself. However, one did not feel how the world is connected with it; one did no longer have this. The materialists created a new world view in which actually nothing but substances existed. Goethe was repelled by such views like Holbach's Systeme de la nature, he found it empty and dull. But this world view of Holbach (1723–1789) was got out of the scientific view. It mirrors the external truth. How should the human being face up to it now who has lost the spirit? He has lost the connection, he has lost the harmony which the medieval human being felt, the harmony between the soul and the material. Thus the best spirits of that time had to strive to find the connection again or were forced to choose between the spiritual and the sensuous.

This was, as we have seen, Schiller's basic question in his youth, this interrelation between ideal and reality, nature and spirit. But the trend had torn up a deep abyss between the spiritual and the sensuous, it pressed like a nightmare on his soul. How can one reconcile ideal and reality, nature and spirit? This was the question.

This abyss had been still torn open by another trend, which issued from Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778). Rousseau had rejected the culture modern at that time up to a certain degree. He had found that the human being alienated himself by this culture, that he has torn out himself from nature. He had alienated himself from nature not only by the world view; he also could no longer find the connection with the spring of life. Therefore, he had to long for the return to nature, and thus Rousseau establishes the principle that basically the culture diverts the human beings from the true harmonies of life, that it is a product of decline.

At that time, the question of the spiritual, of the ideal had faced up the greatest of the contemporaries in new form: why should it not be there if they looked at life? In the time in which one felt the ideal of life so much, one had to feel the conflict twice if one looked at the real life as it had developed, and then at that which there was in the human society. Schiller's teens were in this time. All that towered up; and Schiller had to feel that as disharmony. His youth dramas originated from this mood. Back to the ideal! Which is the right social existence which is decreed to us in a divine world order? These are the feelings which lived in Schiller's youth, which he expressed then in his dramas, in the Robbers, in particular, however, also in the court dramas; we feel them if we take in the great drama Don Carlos. We have seen how the young doctor Schiller put the basic question of the interrelation between the sensuous and the spirit, and that he put it as a poet before his contemporaries.

After the hard trials which he was exposed to on account of his youth dramas he was invited by the father of the freedom poet Körner (Christian Gottfried K., 1756–1831) who did everything to support the cultural life. Körner's fine philosophical education brought Schiller to philosophy, and now the question arose philosophically before Schiller's mind anew: how can the interrelation of the sensuous with the spirit be found again? What was spoken in those days in Dresden between Schiller and Körner (1785–1787) and which great ideas were exchanged is reflected in Schiller's philosophical letters. Indeed, these may be somewhat immature compared with Schiller's later works. What is immature, however, for Schiller, is still very ripe for many other people and is important for us because it can show us how Schiller has struggled up to the highest heights of thinking and imagination.

These philosophical letters, The Theosophy of Julius, represent the correspondence between Julius and Raphael; Schiller as Julius, Körner as Raphael. The world of the 18-th century faces us there. Nice sentences are in this philosophy, sentences like those which Paracelsus expressed as his world view. In the sense of Paracelsus that of the whole outside world is shown to us which the divine creativity accomplished in the most different realms of nature: minerals, plants, animals with capacities of the most varied kind are spread out over nature. The human being is like a big summary, like a world like an encyclopaedia repeats everything once again in itself that is otherwise scattered. A microcosm, a little world in a macrocosm, a big world! Like hieroglyphics, Schiller says, is that which is contained in the different realms of nature. The human being stands there as the summit of the whole nature, so that he combines in himself and expresses on a higher level what is poured out in the whole nature. Paracelsus expressed the same thought largely and nicely: all beings of nature are like the letters of a word, and, if we read them, nature represents her being, a word results which presents itself in the human being. Schiller expresses this lively and emotionally in his philosophical letters. It is so lively to him that the hieroglyphics speak vividly for themselves in nature. I see, Schiller says, the chrysalises outside in nature which change to the butterflies. The chrysalis does not perish, it shows a metamorphosis; this is a guarantee to me that also the human soul changes in similar way. Thus the butterfly is a guarantee of human immortality to me.

In the most marvellous way the thoughts of the mind associate themselves in nature with the thought which Schiller studies as that which lives in the human soul. Then he struggles up to the view that the force of love lives not only in the human being, but finds expression in certain stages all over the world, in the mineral, in the plant, in the animal, and in the human being. Love expresses itself in the forces of nature and most purely in the human being. Schiller phrases that in a way which reminds of the great mystics of the Middle Ages. He calls what he pronounced that way the Theosophy of Julius. At it he developed up to his later approaches to life. His whole lifestyle, his whole striving is nothing else than a big self-education, and in this sense Schiller is a practical theosophist. Theosophy is basically nothing else than self-education of the soul, perpetual work on the soul and its further development to the higher levels of existence. The theosophist is convinced that he can behold higher and higher things the higher he develops. Who accustoms himself only to sensuality can see the sensuous only; who is trained for the psycho-spiritual sees soul and spirit around himself. We have to become spirit and divine first, then we can recognise something divine. The Pythagoreans already said this in their secret schools that way, and Goethe also said it in accordance with an old mystic:

Unless the eyes were like the sun,
How could we see the light?
Unless God's own force lived in us,
How could delight us the divine?

But we must develop the forces and capacities which are in us. Thus Schiller tries to educate himself throughout his whole life.

A new stage of his self-development is his aesthetic letters, About the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters. They are a jewel in our German cultural life. Only somebody can feel what mysteriously pours out between and from the words also from Schiller's later dramas who knows these aesthetic letters; they are like a heart- balm. Who has concerned himself a little with the lofty spiritual, educational ideal, which lives in his aesthetic letters, has to say: we have to call these aesthetic letters a book for the people. Only when in our schools not only Plato, not only Cicero, but Schiller's aesthetic letters are equally studied by the young people, one will recognise that something distinct and ingenious lives in them. What lives in the aesthetic letters becomes productive first if the teachers of our secondary schools are permeated with this spiritual life, if they let pour in something of that which Schiller wanted to bring up giving us this marvellous work. In the modern philosophical works you do not find any reference to these aesthetic letters. However, they are more significant than a lot that has been performed by the pundits of philosophy, because they appeal to the core of the human being and want to raise this core a stage higher.

Again, it is the big question which faces Schiller in the beginning of the nineties of the 18th century. He puts the question now in such a way: the human being is subjected, on one side, to the sensuous hardships, the sensuous desires and passions. He is subjected to their necessities, he follows them, he is a slave of the impulses, desires and passions. The logical necessity stands on the other side: you have to think in a certain way. The moral necessity stands on the other side, too: you must submit to certain duties. The intellectual education is logically necessary. The moral necessity demands something else that exceeds the modern view. Logic gives us no freedom, we must submit to it; also the duty gives us no freedom, we must submit to it. The human being is put between logical necessity and the needs of nature. If he follows the one or the other, he is not free, a slave. But he should become free.

The question of freedom faces Schiller's soul, as deeply as it was never possibly put and treated in the whole German cultural life. Kant had also brought up this question shortly before. Schiller has never been a Kantian, at least he overcame Kantianism soon. During the wording of these letters he was no longer on Kant's point of view. Kant speaks of the duty so that the duty becomes a moral imperative. “Duty, you lofty and great name. You have nothing popular or mellifluous in yourself but you request submission, … you establish a law... in front of it all propensities fall silent if they counteract secretly against it...” Kant demands submission to the categorical imperative. However, Schiller renounced this Kantian view of duty. He says: “with pleasure I serve the friends, however, I do it, unfortunately, with propensity” and not with that which kills propensity which even kills love. Kant demands that we act from duty, from the categorical imperative.

Schiller wants harmony between both, a harmony between propensity and passion on the one hand and duty and logic on the other side. He finds it at first in the view of beauty. The working of beauty becomes a big universal music and he expressed this: ”Only through beauty's morning gate you enter the land of knowing.” If we have a piece of art, the spiritual shines through it. The piece of art does not appear to us as an iron necessity, but as a semblance that expresses the ideal, the spiritual to us. Spirit and sensuality are balanced in beauty. As to Schiller, spirit and sensuality must also be balanced in the human being. Where the human being is between these two conditions, where he depends neither on the natural necessity nor on the logic one, but where he lives in the condition which Schiller calls the aesthetic one, passion is overcome.

He got down the spirit to himself, he purified sensuality with beauty; and thus the human being has the impulse and the desire to do voluntarily what the categorical imperative has demanded. Then morality is something in the human being that has become flesh and blood in him, so that the impulses and desires themselves show the spiritual. Spirit and sensuality have penetrated the aesthetic human being that way, spirit and sensuality have interpenetrated in the human being because he likes what he has to do. What slumbers in the human being has to be awakened. This is Schiller's ideal. Also concerning the society, the human beings are forced by the natural needs or by the rational state to live together according to external laws. The aesthetic society is in between where love accomplishes what every human being longs for and what is imposed on him by his innermost propensity. In the aesthetic society, the human beings freely co-operate, there they do not need the external laws. They themselves are the expression of the laws according to which the human beings have to live together. Schiller describes this society where the human beings live together in love and in mutual propensity and do voluntarily what they should and have to do.

I could only outline the thoughts of Schiller's aesthetic letters in a few words. But they have an effect only if they are not read and studied, but if they accompany the human being like a meditation book through the whole life, so that he wants to become as Schiller wanted to become. At that time, the time had not yet come. It has come today where one can notice the large extent of a society which founds the interrelation of human beings on love as its first principle. At that time, Schiller tried to penetrate such a knowledge and such a living together. Schiller wanted to educate the human beings with his art at least, so that they become ripe once because his time was not ripe to create the free human beings in a free society. It is sad how little just these most intimate thoughts and feelings of Schiller have found entrance in the educational life which would have to be filled completely with them, which should be a summary of them.

In my talks on Schiller, which I have held in the “Free College,” I have explained how we have to understand Schiller concerning the present. I tried there to show the thoughts in coherent and comprehensive way. You can read up there in detail what I can only indicate today. In any Schiller's biography you can find basically only little of these intimacies of Schiller. But once a pedagogue, a sensitive, dear pedagogue concerned himself with the content of Schiller's aesthetic letters in nice letters. Deinhardt (Heinrich D., 1805-1867) was his name. I do not believe that you can still buy the book. All teachers, in particular of our secondary schools, had to purchase it. However, I believe, it was pulped. The man, who wrote it, could hardly achieve a poor tutor's place. He had the mishap to pick up a leg fracture; the consulted doctors said that the leg fracture could be cured, however, the man were too badly nourished. Thus he died as a result of this accident.

After Schiller had advanced to this point of his life that way, something very important occurred to him: an event took place that intervened deeply in his life and also in the life of our whole nation. It is an event which is very important generally for the whole modern spiritual life. This is the friendship between Schiller and Goethe. It was founded peculiarly. It was at a meeting of the “Society of Naturalists” in Jena. Schiller and Goethe visited a talk of a significant scientist, Batsch (Johann Karl B., 1761-1802, botanist). It happened that both went together out of the hall. Schiller said to Goethe: this is such a fragmented way to look at the natural beings; the spirit that lives in the whole nature is absent everywhere. Thus Schiller put his basic question again to Goethe. Goethe answered: there may probably be another way to look at nature.

Goethe had also pointed in his Faust to that where he says that somebody who searches in such a way expels the spirit, then he has the parts in his hands “however, unfortunately, the spirit band is absent.” Goethe had seen something in all plants that he calls the archetypal plant (Urpflanze), in the animals what he calls the archetypal animal. He saw what we call the etheric body and he drew this etheric body with a few characteristic lines before Schiller. He realised that something really living expresses itself in every plant. Schiller argued: “yes, however, this is no experience, this is an idea!” Goethe responded: “this can be very dear to me that I have ideas without knowing it, and even see them with my eyes.” Goethe was clear in his mind that it was nothing else than the being of the plant itself.

Schiller had now the task to attain the great and comprehensive view of Goethe. It is a fine letter, which I have mentioned already once; it contains the deepest psychology which generally exists and with which Schiller makes friends with Goethe. “For a long time and with always renewed admiration I have already observed the course of your mind although from considerable distance and the way, which you have marked for yourself. You search for the necessary of nature, but you search for it in the most difficult way, for any weaker strength will probably take good care not do that. You summarise the whole nature to get light about the single; you try to explain the individual in all its appearances. From the simple organisation you ascend step by step to the more intricate one to build, finally, the most intricate one of all, the human being, genetically from the materials of the whole nature. Because you recreate him in nature as it were, you try to penetrate his concealed techniques. A great and really heroic idea which shows well enough how much your mind holds together the whole wealth of its ideas in an admirable unity. You can never have hoped that your life will suffice to such a goal, but even to take such a way is more worth than to finish any other and you have chosen like Achilles in the Iliad between Phthia and immortality.

If you had been born as a Greek, or just as an Italian, and a choice nature and an idealising art had surrounded you already from the cradle, your way would be endlessly shortened, would maybe rendered quite superfluous. Then already in the first observation of the things you would have comprehended the form of the necessary, and with your first experiences the great style would have developed in you. Now, because you are born as a German, because your Greek mind was thrown into this northern creation, no other choice remained to you to become either a northern artist, or to give your imagination what reality refused to it to substitute with the help of mental capacity and to bear a Greece as it were from within on a rational way.” This is something that continued having an effect on Schiller as we will see immediately.

Schiller now returns again to poetry. What had a lasting effect faces us in his dramas. Greatly and comprehensively life faces us in Wallenstein. You do not need to believe that you find the thoughts which I develop now, if you read Schiller's dramas. But deeply inside they lie in his dramas, as well as the blood in our veins pulsates, without us seeing this blood in the veins. They pulsate in Schiller's dramas as blood of life. Something impersonal is mixed in the personal. Schiller said to himself: there must be something more comprehensive that goes beyond birth and death. He tried to understand which role the great transpersonal destiny plays in the personal. We have often mentioned this principle as the karma principle. In Wallenstein he describes the big destiny which crushes or raises the human being. Wallenstein tries to fathom it in the stars. Then, however, he realises again that he is drawn by the threads of destiny, that in our own breasts the stars of our destinies are shining. Schiller tries to poetically master the personal, the sensuous nature in connection with the divine in Wallenstein. It would be inartistic if we wanted to enjoy the drama with these thoughts. But the big impulse flows unconsciously into us which originates from this connection. We are raised and carried to that which pulsates through this drama. In each of the next dramas, Schiller tries to reach a higher level to educate himself and to raise the others with him.

In The Maid of Orleans transpersonal forces play a role in the personal. In The Bride of Messina he tries to embody something similar going back to the old Greek drama. He attempts to bring in a choir and a lyrical element there. Not in the usual colloquial language, but in sublime language he wanted to show destinies, which rise above the only personal. Why Schiller tied in with the Greek drama? We must visualise the origin of the Greek drama itself. If we look back to the Greek drama behind Sophocles and Aeschylus, we come to the Greek mystery drama, to the original drama whose later development stages are those of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides. In his book The Birth of the Tragedy from the Spirit of Music (1872) Nietzsche (1844–1900) tries to explore the origin of the drama. In the Homeric time, something was annually brought forward to the Greeks in great dramatic paintings that was at the same time religion, art and science truth, devoutness and beauty. What did this original drama thereby become? This original drama was not a drama which shows human destinies. It should show the godhead himself as the representative of humanity Dionysus. The god, who has descended from higher spheres, who embodies himself in the material substances, who ascends through the realms of nature to the human being to celebrate his redemption and resurrection in the human being. This path of the divine in the world was shaped most beautifully in the descent, in the resurrection and the ascension of the divine.

This original drama took place in manifold figures before the eyes of the Greek spectators. The Greek saw what he wanted to know about the world, what he should know as truth about the world, the triumph of the spiritual over the natural. Science was to him what was shown in these dramas, and it was shown to him in such a way that this presentation was associated with devoutness and could be a model of the human lifestyle. Art, religion and wisdom was that which happened before the spectators. The single actors spoke not in usual language, but in sublime language about the descent, the suffering and overcoming, about the resurrection and ascension of the spiritual. The choir reflected what happened there. It rendered what took place as a divine drama in the simple music of the past. From this homogeneous spring flows out what we know as art, as science, which became physical, and as religion, which emerged from these mysteries. Thus we look back at something that links art with truth and religious devoutness.

The great re-thinker of the Greek original drama, the French author Edouard Schuré (1841–1929), attempted in our time to rebuild this drama. You can read up this really ingenious rebuilding in The Holy Drama of Eleusis (Le drame sacré d'Eleusis). Engrossing his mind in this drama he got to the idea that it is a task of our time to renew the theatre of the soul and the self. In The Children of Lucifer (Les Enfants de Lucifer) he tries to create a modern work that connects self-observation and beauty, dramatic strength and truth content with each other. If you want to know anything about the drama of the future, you can get an idea of it in these pictures of The Children of Lucifer. The whole Wagner circle strives for nothing else than to show something transpersonal in the dramas. In Richard Wagner's dramas, we have the course from the personal to the transpersonal, to the mythical. Hence, Nietzsche also found the way to Wagner when he sought the birth of the tragedy in the original drama. Schiller had already tried in his Bride of Messina what the 19th century aimed at. In this drama, the spiritual is represented in sublime language, and the choir echoes the divine actions before us. He says in his exceptionally witty preface of the writing About the Use of the Choir in the Tragedy from which depths he wanted to bear a Greece in those days. This writing is again a pearl of German literature and aesthetics.

Schiller attempted the same that the 19th century wanted to enter the land of knowing through beauty's morning gate and to be a missionary of truth. With the drama Demetrius which he could not finish because death tore him away, with this drama he tried to understand the problems of the human self, with a clearness and so greatly and intensely that none of those who tried it could finish Demetrius because the great wealth of Schiller's ideas is not to be found with them.

How deeply he understands the self that lives in the human being! Demetrius thinks of himself because of certain signs that he is the real Russian successor to the throne. He does everything to attain what is due to him. At the moment when he is near to arrive at his goal everything collapses that had filled his self. He has now to be what he has made of himself merely by the strength of his inside. This self which was given to him does no longer exist; a self which should be his own action should arise. Demetrius should act out of it. The problem of the human personality is grasped grandiloquently like by no other dramatist of the world. Schiller had such a great thing in mind when death tore him away. In this drama, something lies that with those who could not put it in clear words will now find more response. What was built in the human hearts and in the depths of human souls gushed out again in 1859.

1859 caused a change in the whole modern education. Four works appeared by chance round this time. They influenced the basic attitude of our education. One of them is Darwin's On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life that brought a materialistic movement with it. The second work was also typical, in particular concerning Schiller if we remember his words which he called out to the astronomers: “do not chat to me so much about nebulas and suns! Is nature only great, because she gives you something to count? Admittedly, your object is the loftiest in space; but, friends, the elated does not live in space.” But it became possible to understand just this elated in space by a work about the spectral analysis which Kirchhoff (Robert K., 1824–1887, physicist) and Bunsen (Robert Wilhelm B., 1811–1899, physicist) published. The third work was again in a certain opposition to Schiller. Gustav Theodor Fechner (1801–1887) wrote in idealistic spirit: The Preliminaries of Aesthetics (1876). An aesthetics should be created “from below.” Schiller had started it stupendously “from above.” Fechner took the simple sensation as his starting point. The fourth work carried materialism into the social life. What Schiller wanted to found as society was moved under the point of view of the crassest materialism in the work by Karl Marx (1818–1883) A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859). All that crept in. These are things which were far from the immediate-intimate which Schiller poured in the hearts, honestly and sincerely. And now those who are exposed to the modern literature can no longer look at Schiller in such an idealistic way. Recently, in the last decade of the 19-th century, a man wrote a biography on Schiller who had grown together thoroughly with the aesthetic culture. The first word in it was: “I hated Schiller in my youth!” And only by his scholarly activity he was able to acknowledge Schiller's greatness.

Who can listen only a little to what floods in our time sees that there a certain internal coercion prevails. Time has changed. Nevertheless, perhaps some great, enthusiastic words and some nice festivity will be also connected with Schiller. But somebody who has a good ear will not hear anything that still moved through the minds and souls before half a century when we revered Schiller. We must understand it; we do not reproach those who have no connection with Schiller today. But with the immense dimension of Schiller's oeuvre we have to concede to us: he has to become a component of our cultural education again. The immediate present has to follow Schiller again. Why should a society striving for spiritual deepening like the Theosophical Society not take Schiller up? He is still the first pre-school of self-education if we want to reach the heights of spirit. We get to knowledge differently, if we experience him. We come to the spiritual, if we experience his Aesthetic Letters. We understand the Theosophical Society as an association of human beings, without taking into consideration nation, gender, origin and the like, as an association merely on the basis of pure human love.

In the course of his life, Schiller strove for the heights of spiritual being, and his dramas are basically nothing else than what wants to penetrate artistically into the highest fields of this spiritual being. What he sought was nothing else than to develop something everlasting and imperishable in the human soul. If we remember Goethe quite briefly again: with the word “entelechy“ he termed what lives in the soul as the imperishable what the human being develops in himself, acquires experiencing reality, and what he sends up as his eternal. Schiller calls this the forming figure. As to Schiller, this is the everlasting that lives in the soul that the soul develops constantly in itself, increases in itself and leads to the imperishable realms.

It is a victory which the figure gains over the transient corporeality in which the figure only acts. Schiller calls it the everlasting in the soul-life, and we are allowed, like Goethe, after Schiller had deceased, to stamp the words: “he was ours.” If we understand Schiller with living mind, we are allowed to imbue ourselves with that which lived in him with which he lives in the other world, which took up his best friendly and affectionately. We are also allowed as theosophists to celebrate that mysterious connection with him which we can celebrate as a Schiller festival. As well as the mystic unites with the spiritual of the world the human being unites with the great spiritual heroes of humanity. Everybody who strives for a spiritual world view should celebrate such a festival, a “unio mystica,” for himself, still beside the big Schiller jamborees. Nothing should be argued against these big festivals. However, only somebody who celebrates this intimate festival in his heart connecting him with Schiller intimately finds Schiller's work. Aspiring to spirit we find the way best if we make it like Schiller who educated himself all his life. He expressed it, and it sounds like a motto of the theosophical world view:

Only the body belongs to those powers
Which braid the dark fate;
But freely from any force of time,
As playmate of blessed beings,
Strolls above in the light's acres,
Divinely among gods the figure.

We will concern ourselves today with something that will show us how significant it is, based on research that can be done in the higher worlds, to experience what the future holds in store for humanity. The mission of the spiritual scientific movement is connected with the important events of the transition period in which we live. From this we can be certain that much still lies before us in the future, and we therefore seek in spiritual science for guidance in taking the appropriate measures in the present. We must know, therefore, what is of special significance in thinking, feeling, and willing in our time.

There is a great distinction between the spiritual stream that came from Buddha and the one that arose from the Christ impulse. This is not meant to place these streams in opposition to one another; it is rather necessary to understand in what regard each of these streams can be fruitful. Both streams must unite in the future, and Christianity must be fructified by spiritual science. For a time, Christianity had to set aside the teaching of reincarnation. It was included in the esoteric teaching but could not be received in exoteric Christianity for certain universal pedagogical reasons. In contrast, reincarnation was a fundamental principle of Buddhism. There it was bound up with the teaching of suffering, which is exactly what Christianity is intended to overcome. Once we have recognized the purposes and missions of both streams, we will also be able to distinguish clearly between them. The main distinction can be seen most strongly when one examines the two individualities, Buddha and Paul.

Gautama Buddha came to knowledge through his enlightenment under the Bodhi tree; he then taught that this world is maya. It cannot be considered real, because therein lies maya, the great illusion, that one believes it to be real. Man must strive to be released from the realm of the elements; then he comes into a realm, Nirvana, where neither names nor things exist. Only then is man freed from illusion. The realm of maya is suffering. Birth, death, sickness, and age are suffering. It is the thirst for existence that brings man into this realm. Once he has freed himself from this thirst, he no longer needs to incarnate. One can ask oneself why the great Buddha preached this doctrine. The answer can follow only from a consideration of the evolutionary course of humanity.

Man was not always the way he is today. In earlier times, man not only had his physical body at his disposal for achieving knowledge, but there was also a kind of clairvoyant knowledge diffused among human beings. Man knew that there were spiritual hierarchies in the same way that we know that there are plants. He had no power of judgment but could see the creative beings themselves. This wisdom gradually disappeared, but a memory of it remained. In ancient India, Persia, even in Egypt, there was still a memory of previous earthly lives. The human soul at that time was such that one knew: I was descended from divine beings, but my incarnations have gradually penetrated the physical so strongly that my spiritual gaze has been darkened.

Man experienced the progress in this time as a degeneration, as a step backward. This was felt especially by all those who could still, even in much later times, leave their physical bodies at particular moments. The everyday world appeared to them in these moments as a world of illusion, as maya, the great deception. Buddha only spoke out of what lived in the human soul. The physical, sensible world was experienced as that which had pulled man down; he wished to leave this world and ascend again. The world of the senses bore the guilt for the descent of humanity.

Let us compare this conception with the Christ impulse and the teachings of Paul. Paul did not call the sensible world an illusion, although he knew as well as Buddha that man had descended from the spiritual worlds and that it was his urge for existence that had brought him into this world. One speaks in a Christian sense, however, when one asks if this urge for existence is always something bad. Is the physical, sensible world only deception? According to Paul's conception, it is not the urge for existence in itself that is evil; this urge was originally good but became harmful through the fall of man, under the influence of Luciferic beings. This urge was not always harmful, but it has become so and has brought sickness, lies, suffering, and so on. What was a cosmic event in Buddha's conception became a human event for Paul.

Had the Luciferic influence not interfered, man would have seen the truth in the physical world rather than illusion. It is not the world of the senses that is wrong but human knowledge that has been dulled through the Luciferic influence. The differences in these conceptions bring different conclusions with them. Buddha sought redemption in a world in which nothing of this world of the senses remained. Paul said that man should purify his forces, his thirst for existence, because he himself had corrupted them. Man should tear away the veil that covers the truth and, through purifying himself, see again the truth he himself had covered. In place of the veil that conceals the plant world, for example, he will see the divine-spiritual forces that work on and behind the plants. Rend the veil, and the world of the senses becomes transparent; we finally see the realm of the spirit. We believed we saw the animal, the plant, and the mineral kingdoms; that was our error. In reality, we saw the hierarchies streaming toward us.

That is why Paul said, “Kill not the pleasure of existence; rather purify it, because it was originally good.” This can occur when man takes the power of Christ into himself. When this power has permeated the soul, it drives away the soul's darkness. The gods did not place man on the earth for no purpose. It is man's duty to overcome what hinders him from seeing this world spiritually. Buddha's conclusion that one must shun incarnation points to an archetypal wisdom for humanity. Paul, in contrast, said, “Go through incarnation, but imbue yourselves with Christ, and in a distant future all that man has cast up as illusion will vanish.”

This teaching, which put the blame not on the physical, sensible world but on man himself, had of necessity to become a historic doctrine. Exactly for this reason, however, it could not be given in its entirety at the beginning. Only the initial impulse could be given, which must be penetrated. This impulse would then gradually enter all spheres of life. Although almost two thousand years have passed since the Mystery of Golgotha, the Christ impulse is only beginning today to be received. Whole spheres of life, such as philosophy and science, have yet to be imbued with it. Buddha was more able to give his teaching all at once, because he referred to an ancient wisdom that was still experienced in his time. The Christ impulse, however, must prevail gradually. A theory of knowledge based on these facts contrasts sharply with that of Kant, who did not know that it is our knowledge itself that must be purified.

Paul had to instruct human beings that the work in each individual incarnation is actually of great importance. In contrast to the relatively recent doctrine of the Buddha that the individual incarnation is worthless, he almost had to overstate this teaching. One must learn to declare, “Not I, but Christ in me!” This is the purified I. Through Paul, the spiritual life became dependent upon this one incarnation for all the future. Now that such an education of the soul has, been completed and a sufficient number of human beings have gone through it in the past two thousand years, the time has come again to teach reincarnation and karma. We must seek to restore our I to the condition in which it was before incarnations began.

It is always said that Christ is constantly in our midst. “I am with you every day until the end of the earth.” Now, however, man must learn to behold Christ and to believe that what he sees is real. This will happen in the near future, already in this century, and in the following two thousand years more and more people will experience it. How will this actually occur? We might ask, for example, how we now see our planet. The earth is described mechanically, chemically, and physically by science, according to the Kant-Laplace theory and the like. Yet we are now approaching a reversal in these fields. A conception will arise that will see the earth not in terms of purely mineral forces but in terms of plant, or what could be called etheric, forces. The plant directs its root toward the earth's center, and its upper part stands in relation to the sun. These are the forces that make the earth what it is; gravity is only secondary. The plants preceded minerals just as coal was once plant life; this will soon be discovered. Plants give the planet its form, and they then give off the substance from which its mineral foundation originates. The beginnings of this idea were given through Goethe in his plant morphology, but he was not understood. One will gradually begin to see the etheric, because it is that which is characteristic of the plant realm. When man is able to receive the growth forces of the plant kingdom, he will be released from the forces that now hinder him from beholding the Christ. Spiritual science should be an aid to this, but this will be impossible as long as man believes that the ascent of the physical into the etheric has nothing to do with his inner being. It is of no matter in the laboratory whether a man has a strong or weak moral character. This is not the case, however, when one is concerned with etheric forces. Then one's moral constitution affects one's results. For this reason, it is impossible for modern man to develop this ability if he remains as he is. The laboratory table must first become an altar, just as it was for Goethe who, as a child, kindled his small altar to nature with the rays of the rising sun.

This will happen before long. Those who are able to say, “Not I, but Christ in me,” will be able to work with the plant forces in the same way that mineral forces are now understood. Man's inner being and his outer surroundings work into one another reciprocally; what is outside transforms itself for us, depending on whether our vision is clear or clouded. Even in this century, and increasingly throughout the next 2,500 years, human beings will become able to behold Christ in His etheric form. They will behold the etheric earth from which the plant world springs up. They will also be able to see, however, that inner goodness works differently on the environment from evil. He who possesses this science in the highest degree is the Maitreya Buddha, who will come in approximately 3,000 years. “Maitreya Buddha” means the “Buddha of right-mindedness.” He is the one who will make clear for human beings the significance of right-mindedness. This will all lead human beings to know in which direction they must go. You must undertake to transform abstract ideals into concrete ideals in order to contribute to an evolution that moves forward. If we do not succeed in this, the earth will sink into materialism, and humanity will have to begin again, either on the earth, after a great catastrophe, or on the next planet. The earth needs anthroposophy! Whoever realizes this is an anthroposophist.

In our last lecture we tried to consider a planetary system in its dependence on the various spiritual beings of the three hierarchies, ranged, as it were, one above the other; and which we tried to describe in the previous lectures. We gained an idea of all that participates in forming a planet, and we have seen how a planet receives its form, its enclosed form, as a result of the activity of the Spirits of Form. We saw further that the inner life, the inner mobility of the planet, is the result of the activity of the Spirits of Motion. What we may call the lowest consciousness of the planet, which can be compared with the consciousness present in man in his astral body, we have to allot to the Spirits of Wisdom. That impulse through which the planet, instead of remaining stationary changes its place in space, we have to allot to the Spirits of Will, or Thrones. The organizing of the planet in such a way that it does not follow an isolated course in space but so moves that its impulses of motion are in harmony with the whole planetary system to which it belongs, the regulating of the individual movements of the planet in harmony with the whole system, that is an activity of the Cherubim. Finally we ascribe to the Seraphim what we may call the inner soul-life of the planet, whereby the planet comes as it were, into connection with the other heavenly bodies, as a man by means of his speech enters into relation with other men. So that we must observe a sort of coherence in the planet; and in this, what comes from the Spirits of Form is but a sort of kernel. On the other hand every planet has something like a spiritual atmosphere, we might even say something like an aura, in which work the spirits belonging to those two higher hierarchies which are higher than the Spirits of Form. Now if we want to understand all this aright, we must make ourselves acquainted with yet other concepts than those I have just recalled to you—concepts to which we shall most easily attain if we begin with the beings of that hierarchy which stands, so to speak, nearest to humanity in the spiritual world, namely the beings of the Third Hierarchy.

We have said that characteristic of the beings of the Third Hierarchy is the fact that what is perception in man is in them manifestation, and that what in man is inner life, in them is being filled with spirit. Even in those beings who start immediately above man in the cosmic order, the Angels or Angeloi, we already find this peculiarity, that they are actually conscious of that which they manifest from out of themselves. When they return to their inner being, they have nothing independent, nothing self-enclosed, like the inner life of man; but they then feel shining and springing forth in their inner being, the forces and beings of the higher hierarchies above them. In short they feel themselves filled and inspired by the spirit and its beings, immediately above them. Thus what we men call our independent inner life, really does not exist in them. If they wish to develop their own being, if they wish to feel, think and will somewhat as a man does, all that is immediately manifested externally; not as in man, who can shut up within himself his thoughts and feelings, and allow the impulses of his will to remain unfulfilled. What lives as thought in these beings, in so far as they themselves bring forth these thoughts, is at the same time also externally revealed. If they do not wish to manifest externally they have no other means of returning into their inner being, but by once again filling themselves with the world above them. Thus, in the inner life of these beings dwells the world above them, and when they live a life of their own, they project themselves externally, objectively.

Thus, as we have seen, these beings could hide nothing within them as the product of their own thought and feeling, for whatever they bring about in their inner being must show itself externally. As we mentioned in one of the former lectures, they cannot lie, they cannot be untrue to their nature so that their thoughts and feelings did not harmonize with the external world; they cannot have an idea within them which does not agree with the external world; for any ideas which they have in their inner being, are perceived by them in their manifestation. But now let us just suppose that these beings had a desire to be untrue to their own nature, what would be the result? Well, in the beings we have designated as Angels, Archangels, and Spirits of the Age or Archai, we find throughout that everything which reveals itself to them, everything which they can perceive is, so to speak, their own being. If they were to wish to be untrue, they would be obliged to develop something in their inner being which would not be consistent with their own nature. Every untruth would be a denial of their nature. That would mean nothing less than a deadening, a damping-down of their own being. Now suppose that nevertheless these beings had the desire to experience something in their inner nature which they did not manifest externally; to do so they would have to take on another nature.

What I have just described as the denial of their own nature by beings of the Third Hierarchy, the taking on of another nature, did actually take place; it did occur in the course of the ages. We shall see, as these lectures go on, why this had to happen; but to begin with we will confine our attention to the fact that it did happen; that, as a matter of fact, among the beings of the Third Hierarchy there were some possessed with this desire to have experiences in their inner nature which they need not manifest externally. That is, they had the wish to deny their own nature. What did this bring about in these beings? Something entered, which the other beings, those of the Third Hierarchy which retained their own nature, cannot have. The beings of the Third Hierarchy can have no inner independence such as man has. If they wish to live in their inner being, they must immediately be filled with the spirit-world above them. A certain number of the beings of the Third Hierarchy had the desire to develop something within their inner being which they would not immediately encounter in the external world as perception, or revelation of their own being. Hence the necessity arose of denying their own nature and taking on another nature. To develop an inner life of their own, to attain inner independence, a number of beings of the Third Hierarchy had to give up their own nature, to deny it. They had, so to speak, to bring about in themselves the power not to manifest certain inner experiences externally. Now let us ask:—What then were the reasons which moved these beings of the Third Hierarchy to develop such a desire within them? If we fix our attention upon the nature of the beings of the Third Hierarchy, with their manifestation and enfilling with spirit, we see that these beings are in reality wholly at the service of the beings of the higher hierarchies. Angels have no life of their own; their own life is manifestation, which is for the whole world; as soon as they do not manifest themselves there radiates into their inner being the life of the higher hierarchies. That which induced a number of them to deny their nature was a feeling of power, of independence and freedom. At a certain time a number of beings of the Third Hierarchy had an impulse, an urge, not merely to be dependent upon the beings of the higher hierarchies, but to develop within themselves an inner life of their own. The result of this was very far-reaching for the whole evolution of the planetary system to which we belong; for these beings whom we may call the rebels of the Third Hierarchy, brought about nothing less than the actual independence of man—making it possible for him to develop an independent life of his own, which does not immediately manifest externally, but can be independent of external manifestation.

I am intentionally using many words to describe this circumstance, because it is extremely important to grasp accurately what is here in question, namely, that an impulse arose in a number of the Third Hierarchy to develop an inner life of their own. Everything else was simply the result, the consequence of this impulse. What then was this result? It was in fact a terrible one, namely, the betrayal of their own nature; untruth, falsehood. You see, it is important that you should understand that the spirits of the Third Hierarchy which had this impulse, did not do what they did for the sake of lying, but in order to develop an independent life of their own; but in so doing they had to take the consequence, they had to become Spirits of Untruth—spirits which betrayed their own being—in other words, Spirits of Lies. It is as though someone were to take a journey on foot—and he meets with a wet day; he must of necessity make the best of it and put up with getting wet, which he did not at all intend:—in the same way the spirits of which we are speaking, had no intention of doing something in order to sink into untruth. Their action arose from their wish to develop an inner life, an inner activity; but the result, the consequence was, that they at the same time became Spirits of Untruth. Now all the spiritual beings which in this way, through betraying their own nature, arose as a second category beside the spirits of the Third Hierarchy, are called in occultism, Luciferic Spirits.

The concept of the Luciferic Spirits consists essentially in the fact that these beings wish to develop an inner life. Now the question is—What have these spirits to do, to attain their goal? We have already seen what they had to develop as a result; and we shall now inquire further what they had to do in order to attain this goal of an inner independent life. What did these spirits wish to surmount? They wished to prevent themselves from being filled wholly with the substance of the higher hierarchies; they wished to be filled, not only with the beings of the higher hierarchies, but with their own being. They could only accomplish this in the following way: Instead of filling themselves with the spirit of the higher hierarchies, and, as it were, leaving themselves open to the free outlook towards the higher hierarchies, they cut themselves off, detached themselves from them, in order in this way to create substance of their own from the substance of the higher hierarchies. We can gain a correct idea of what is here in question if we think of the beings of the Third Hierarchy in the following way. We think of them represented symbolically, graphically, in such a way that they manifest their own being outwardly, as it were, as though it were their skin; so that each time they developed inner thought or feeling, a manifestation arises, like a shining-forth of their own being. The moment they do not manifest themselves, they take up the light of the higher hierarchies which flows into them; they fill themselves with the spirit of the higher hierarchies and, as it were, open their whole being to them.

Those spiritual beings of the Third Hierarchy of which we have just spoken did not wish to be filled with the spirit nor to be connected with the spiritual substance of the hierarchies. They wanted an independent spiritual life, they therefore cut themselves off, they detached themselves, so that the being of the higher hierarchies was above them; they cut the connection and detached themselves as independent beings, retaining the actual light in their inner being. Thus they, as it were, stole what should only have filled them, and then returned to the higher hierarchies. They stole it for themselves, filled their own inner being with it, and by that means developed an independent side to their nature. This concept can provide an explanation of events in the cosmos, without which we should be quite unable to grasp a stellar system, the constitution of the stars in general as we know them with our human physical consciousness. Without these concepts one cannot possibly grasp the life of the stars, the life of the heavenly bodies.

I have now tried to indicate to you how certain beings of the Third Hierarchy have become quite different beings—Luciferic Spirits. That which took place in these beings of the Third Hierarchy cannot, of course, take place in the same way in the beings of the other hierarchies but something similar takes place even with these. If we apply that which takes place in the beings of the other hierarchies to a consideration of the Spirits of Form, it will give us an idea of how a planetary system is actually formed. At the conclusion of the last lecture it was said that what our vision first perceives in the planets, proceeds from the Spirits of Form; but it is not quite accurate to represent it thus. If you consider the planets—Mars, Saturn or Jupiter for instance—which are outside in cosmic space; as you see them with your physical eyes, or with the telescope, you have in the form revealed to you, not merely the Spirits of Form. Let us take, for example, the planet which for a long period of time, has been reckoned as the outermost one in our system; Uranus and Neptune were added later, as we shall see; but to begin with we will consider Saturn as the outermost. If we look at Saturn with physical vision we find him outside in cosmic space, a sort of luminous globe (leaving his rings out of the question). To the occultist who follows the spiritual events in the cosmos, this globe which is seen out there is not what the occultist calls Saturn; to him Saturn is that which fills the whole space bounded by the apparently elliptical orbit of Saturn.

You know that astronomy describes an orbit of Saturn which it interprets as the path of Saturn round the Sun. We will not at present discuss the accuracy of that statement, but if you take this accepted concept and here in the center imagine the Sun (S), and the outer circle as the orbit of Saturn, as astronomy conceives it, then everything which is within this orbit of Saturn, within the ellipse of Saturn, is to the occultist Saturn. For to him not only is that which the external eye sees as the most external physical matter, Saturn; not only that which gleams in the heavens, for the occultist knows, occult vision teaches him that, as a matter of fact, a sort of accumulation exists which extends from the Sun to the orbit of Saturn (a,a,a, in the diagram). So that if with occult vision we regard this orbit of Saturn, we have a sort of etheric filling in of the whole space: (the wide crosslines). That which lies within this orbit we must think of as filled with matter, not however in the form of a globe, for we have to do with a very flattened ball, a lens. Looked at from the side, we should if we had the Sun at (S¹) have to draw the Saturn of the occultist thus:—as a much flattened ball, and at (a¹), would be that which is designated the physical Saturn. We shall understand still better what is in question if we add an idea which we can gain in a similar manner from occult science with regard to Jupiter. External physical astronomy knows as Jupiter that shining body which revolves round the Sun as the second planet (the inner circle). That to the occultist, is not Jupiter: to him, Jupiter is all that lies within the orbit of Jupiter (narrow sloping lines). Looked at from the side, we should have to draw Jupiter so that if we put wide sloping lines for Saturn, we can put narrow sloping lines for Jupiter. That which astronomy describes is only a body (bl) which is, so to speak, on the outermost limits of the true occult Jupiter.

What I am here saying is not a mere theoretical idea or fancy, the fact actually is, that matter, not coarse physical matter but fine etheric matter, fills the space within the orbit of Saturn in its lenticular, flattened, ball-like form, as drawn here. It is just as much a fact that the second smaller space for Jupiter is filled with a different etheric substance which permeates the first; so that there is simple etheric substance only between the two orbits; within, the two etheric substances permeate one another, mutually permeate one another.

Now let us ask: What is the task of the Spirits of Form in this whole disposition? That Spirit of Form which forms the basis of Saturn, sets a boundary, gives form to this etheric substance which in an occult sense we call Saturn. Thus the outermost line in the formation of Saturn has been shaped by the Spirit of Saturn, which is also a Spirit of Form. In the same way the line of Jupiter was formed by the Spirit of Form allotted to Jupiter; the line of Mars by the Spirit of Mars, which is a Spirit of Form. Now we may ask: Where then actually dwells the Spirit of Form which corresponds to Saturn, or Jupiter, or Mars? If we can speak of a place in which these beings are, where is this place? In the ordinary sense of the word we cannot so do; we can only say:—The spiritual beings which we call the Spirits of Form work as forces within the etheric substance I have just mentioned; but they all have a common center, and this is none other than the Sun. Thus if we seek for the actual place whence the Spirits of Form work, the Spirits of Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, etc., as also the Spirit of Form belonging to our Earth—if we seek for the center, the starting point from which the Spirits of Form work—we find it in the Sun. That means that the Spirits of Form corresponding to our planets, comprise, as it were, a synod or council of Spirits, having its seat in the Sun, and from there sets boundaries to certain etheric substances, certain masses of ether, so that what we call occult Saturn, occult Jupiter, comes into being. Now let us ask: How would it be if the Spirits of Form alone were to work?

From the whole significance of these studies you will gather that those physical planets would not be in existence if only the Spirits of Form were to work. They would indeed have, as it were, their abode in the Sun, where they form a sort of college; and we should have around us the planetary spheres as far as the orbit of Saturn, for there would be, so to speak, concentric globes, flattened balls in existence as occult planets; the most external of these flattened globes being of the finest etheric matter, the next somewhat denser and the innermost of the densest etheric matter. Thus the physical planets would not be in existence if these Spirits of Form alone were to work, but there would be globe-shaped, accumulated masses bounded by what the physical astronomy of to-day calls the orbits of the planets. But within the cosmos there are certain spiritual beings corresponding to the Spirits of Form, but who, as it were, are rebels against those of their own class. Just as we find Luciferic Spirits among the beings of the Third Hierarchy, which in order to set up their own independent life, cut themselves off from the spiritual substance of the higher hierarchies, so do we also find within the category of the Spirits of Form that some separated and would not go through the usual development of a Spirit of Form, but went through an evolution of their own. These oppose the normal Spirits of Form, are in opposition to them. What then happens is as follows.

Let us suppose that we had at point S the centre-point of the spiritual Council of the Spirits of Form; the Spirit of Form working upon Saturn would call forth this etheric globe, so that by the agency of this Spirit of Form a flattened globe would arise, as in the diagram. At an outermost point of this etheric globe, in opposition to the Spirit of Form working from the centre of the Sun works the rebel, the Luciferic Spirit of Form. He works from without inwards; opposingly. Thus we have the normal Spirit of Form working outwards from the Sun, centrifugally; he brings about the occult Saturn, which is then to be seen as a mighty etheric globe with its centre-point in the Sun. At the periphery, working inwards from cosmic space, is an abnormal Spirit of Form who has cut himself off from the normal evolution of the others; and at point (a) through the combined working of the forces working inwards from cosmic space, and those others working outwards from the sun, there occurs an “inturning,” which finally becomes detached, and that is the physical planet Saturn. Thus we have to imagine that where our physical eyes ace the planet Saturn, there are two forces working together; the one, the, normal force of the Spirit of Form working outward from the Sun; and at a definite point in opposition works the detached Spirit of Form. This produces an “in-turned” structure; the ether is notched, and this notch appears to the physical eye as the physical planet Saturn. Just the same occurs with the physical Jupiter, and with the physical Mars. Hence, by this example you see how in individual cases there actually arises what we call “maya,” the great illusion. Where physical astronomy places a planet, there is in truth a combined working of two forces; and only because, in truth, a great and mighty etheric heavenly body is there, which, through the contact of these opposing forces, is dented in and has a notch formed in one place, does the appearance of the physical planet arise.

For in truth here we have actually to do with a turning in, and to be really accurate the matter must in the first place be described as:

The Spirits of form working from the Sun extended the etheric substance to a certain distance; there worked the abnormal Spirits of Form in opposition, and caved the substance in, so that in reality a hollow was made in the etheric substance. As regards the original etheric substance of the planet, where the physical eye believes it sees the planet—there is really nothing; the actual planet is where the physical eye sees nothing. That is the peculiarity of “maya.” Where the physical planet is seen, there is a hollow. It may perhaps be said: “It is a very strange idea that where the physical planet is to be seen, there is a hollow,” for you will ask about our Earth. In the sense of what has been expounded, our Earth must also be a sort of flattened ball having its central point in the Sun, and it must also be such a notch, such a sort of hollow on the outermost rim. “A fine thing that!” you can say, “We know quite well that we are walking on firm, solid earth. In like manner we might take for granted that where Saturn, Jupiter or Mars are, there would naturally have to be solid filling, not hollow. And nevertheless where you walk about on our Earth—where, in the sense of Maya-perception you believe yourselves to be walking on solid, firm ground—even then, in reality, you are walking about on a hollow. Our Earth itself, in so far as it is an accumulation of matter, is a hollow in cosmic space, something bored into cosmic space. All physical matter comes into being through the meeting together of forces coming from the Spirits of Form. In this case we have the meeting of the forces of the normal Spirits of Form and those of the abnormal Spirits of Form. They collide with one another and in reality an indentation is produced and consequently at this point a simultaneous breaking up of the form, but only of the form. The form breaks up and this hollow space is bored. Now broken spiritual form, crushed form, is in reality matter. In a physical sense matter only exists when spiritual forms are broken up. Thus the planets out there are also broken-up forms.

In our planetary system the Spirits of Form have helpers, as has been made evident by our previous considerations. They themselves determine the boundaries, as we have described:—but above the Spirits of Form stand the Spirits of Motion, above these the Spirits of Wisdom, above these the Spirits of Will, above them the Cherubim, the Seraphim. In all ranks of these spiritual beings there are those who can be likened to what we have described as Luciferic Spirits. So that wherever a planet is formed, on its outermost border not merely do the Spirits of Form cooperate, but that which goes out from the Sun, from the activities of the normal hierarchies, working from within outwards, is always being opposed by the forces coming from the abnormal, the rebellious hierarchies.

The Cherubim and Seraphim are those hierarchies which just as much take part in the whole working of the forces, as do the Spirits of Form. They have the task of bearing the power of light outwards from the center-point of the planetary system, from the center of the Sun. Inasmuch as the beings of the higher hierarchies, the Seraphim and Cherubim, become the bearers of light, they have now the same relation to the light as the forces of the Spirits of Form to the etheric substance. Just as the forces of the normal Spirits of Form pass outwards and encounter the forces of the abnormal spirits working in opposition, and by that means a notch is hollowed out, so also do the forces work which carry the light, filling the whole etheric space; but in opposition to them work the abnormal forces (See Figure 6, point a), so that the planet arrests the light. Just as it arrests the forces of the Spirits of Form, so does it arrest the light, and throw it back; hence it appears as a reflector, as a thrower-back of the light which the spirits we call the Cherubim and Seraphim carry to it from the Sun.

Hence the planets have no light of their own, because they claim for themselves the force of the light which would be their due as beings if they were to open themselves to the normal Cherubim and Seraphim—because they veil themselves, cut themselves from the whole. Thus every planet has a cut-off separated light. It is not correct to say that the planets only have light borrowed from the Sun; every planet has its own light; but it has cut it off, keeps it hidden within itself, and develops it for its own independent inner life of light. We shall see that each planet only shares this light with its own beings, belonging to the kingdoms of nature on the planet in question. But that light to which they ought to open themselves, which they ought to take up from outside, is brought to them from the Sun by the Cherubim and Seraphim, but to that they close themselves, and throw it back. Hence, seen in cosmic space, they are stars which have no light of their own. Thus, as it were, with the light which flows in from the Sun a notch is formed and the planet throws itself against that light flowing in from the Sun; arrests it and throws it back.

Thus to occult vision what we observe in the stellar world, is absolutely different from what it appears to physical astronomy. What exists for the latter is nothing but a description of a Maya, and only behind this Maya does the truth lie; for the truth behind the material world is the spiritual world. In reality the material world does not exist at all. What is called the material world is the interplay of the forces of the spiritual world.

We have tried to describe to-day how such a planetary system really arises. Very little is really known in the external world, in the world of physical science, of the origin of such a system; for though physical science imagines that a planetary system arises from a sort of massing of etheric substance, the first fundamental principle is omitted which should hold good in all natural science. How often are children told at school—at least I do not know whether it is done here, but in Central Europe they are always told—that according to the Kant-Laplace system of the origin of the world a mass of original matter was in rotation from which then the separate planets split off. (There may be some little improvement in that to-day, but the principle is the same.) And in order that this may be quite clear and comprehensible, the children are shown by means of a little experiment how easily a planetary system can be formed. A large drop of some oily substance which floats on water is taken, and a circle ingeniously made in the line of the equator which is pierced through with a card; then a needle is passed through from pole to pole, then one begins to turn, and behold, out of the drop of oil arises a pretty little planetary system. Quite in the sense of the Kant-Laplace theory of the origin of the world, little drops separate off and rotate, while in the center remains the big drop, the Sun. What is more natural than to represent this to young people as a visible proof that this was also once enacted in the great cosmic spaces. But in so doing an important error is made, one which ought never to be made in natural science. There are certain conditions that ought never to be forgotten in making experiments. A scientist who forgets conditions without which no experiment can come about does not describe it accurately even according to natural science. If you omit any essential condition you are not describing it correctly according to natural science. The essential condition in the origin of this planetary system is however that the teacher should stand there and make it revolve, otherwise the whole system could not originate! The Kant-Laplace theory would thus only be possible if those who believe in it could at the same time supply a gigantic teacher in cosmic space, who would revolve the whole etheric mass. People notice even small errors in logic—perhaps not always, but often;—but capital errors, such errors as those which in their effects extend to the whole cosmic-conception, are not remarked.

Now there is no great teacher outside, making the axis of the world revolve, but there are the individual beings of the various hierarchies, who through the interplay of their forces, bring about the distribution and regulation of the movements of the different heavenly bodies. This should be the answer to those who would believe that the ordinary materialistic theory as expressed in Kant-Laplace, or in later hypotheses, is sufficient to explain the cosmic system, and that it is not necessary to consider anything else, as do the occultists. To those people who from a materialistic standpoint object to this living interplay of the hierarchies, we must again reply: with the capital error in logic which must be made by all cosmic materialistic hypotheses we cannot reach our goal; for there is no possibility of explaining a planetary system without calling to one's aid what occult vision can actually see. It is certainly abundantly proved to occult vision that what must he described with the physical senses is indeed, considered in its reality, something quite different. Thus what the eye sees is really nothing but the reflected light, which is thrown back, because, when the Seraphim and Cherubim carry the light of the Sun into cosmic space, the Luciferic Cherubim and Seraphim throw themselves against them, so to speak, and insert darkness into the substance of the sunlight; cutting off the light within, and claiming for each of the planets a light of its own.

These thoughts, now given out on the basis of occult observation and occult investigation, were first expounded in the post-Atlantean period in a sublime way by the great Zarathustra to his pupils. Everything which is rayed down from the Sun into cosmic space in the way just described, by the beings of the higher hierarchies centered in the Sun, was ascribed by Zarathustra to the Spirit whom he named Ahura Mazdao, or Ormuzd. That spirit who carried the forces of his being from the center-point of the Sun into the periphery, was everywhere opposed by the abnormal spirits of the different hierarchies, which in their totality, form the kingdom of Ahriman. We shall, however, see that we must separate the kingdom of Ahriman from that of Lucifer with regard to the planetary system. We shall have more to say about this; but at the conclusion of this lecture, attention must be drawn to the fact that Zarathustra in his own way symbolically pointed out to his pupils this connection of the Light of Ahura Mazdao, or Ormuzd, streaming out from the Sun, and of the kingdom of Ahriman embedded within it. Zarathustra said: What proceeds from the Sun we represent symbolically through that which the Seraphim and Cherubim carry, i.e. through the light. That which is hurled against the light in opposition by all the abnormal spirits of the higher hierarchies, the notch thus hollowed out, we represent by what is accepted as darkness. (That is, an individual light imprisoned within, manifesting externally as darkness.) That, Zarathustra represented as a kingdom of Angramanyu, or Ahriman. Thus we see how this teaching which, having originated in Asia Minor, is in a sense, once more given to us today, was met first in the Zarathustra civilisation. What always fills us with such significant feelings with regard to the evolution of humanity, is that we ourselves come upon certain things which even if they were not traditional and not to be observed in the Akasha Chronicle, are furnished by the results of present-day occult investigations; and which we can re-discover in the great teachings of antiquity. And only when we permeate ourselves with the truth which at the present time can be found in occult investigation, and when this same truth shines towards us from the old teachers and leaders of humanity, do we acquire a right relation to these leaders of humanity. Then only do they become living to us, then only do we understand them aright. Then, too, does the evolution of humanity reveal itself to us as a mighty discourse held by the spirits, now not only resounding forth to one another in space, but interpreting one another in the successive periods of time, completing one another, and leading the stream of civilisation on into the future.

My dear Friends,

I will now bring these few improvised hours of scientific study to a provisional conclusion. I want to give you a few guiding lines which may help you in developing such thoughts about Nature for yourselves, taking your start from characteristic facts which you can always make visible by experiment. In Science today—and this applies above all to the teacher—it is most important to develop a right way of thinking upon the facts and phenomena presented to us by Nature. You will remember what I was trying to shew yesterday in this connection. I shewed how since the 1890's physical science has so developed that materialism is being lifted right out of its bearings, so to speak, even by Physics itself. This is the point to remember above all in this connection.

The period when Science thought that it had golden proofs of the universality of waves and undulations was followed, as we say, by a new time. It was no longer possible to hold fast to the old wave-theories. The last three decades have in fact been revolutionary. One can imagine nothing more revolutionary in any realm than this most recent period has been in Physics. Impelled by the very facts that have not emerged, Physics has suffered no less a loss than the concept of matter itself in its old form. Out of the old ways of thinking, as we have seen, the phenomena of light had been brought into a very near relation to those of electricity and magnetism. Now the phenomena produced by the passage of electricity through tubes in which the air or gas was highly rarefied, led scientists to see in the raying light itself something like radiating electricity. I do not say that they were right, but this idea arose. It came about in this way:—The electric current until then had always been hidden as it were in wires, and one had little more to go on than Ohm's Law. Now one was able, so to speak, to get a glimpse of the electricity itself, for here it leaves the wire, jumps to the distant pole, and is no longer able as it were to conceal its content in the matter through which it passes.

The phenomena proved complicated. As we say yesterday, manifold types of radiation emerged. The first to be discovered were the so-called cathode rays, issuing from the negative pole of the Hittorf tube and making their way through the partial vacuum. In that they can be deflected by magnetic forces, they prove akin to what we should ordinarily feel to be material. Yet they are also evidently akin to what we see where radiations are at work. This kinship comes out most vividly when we catch the rays (or whatsoever it is that is issuing from the negative electric pole) upon a screen or other object, as we should do with light. Light throws a shadow. So do these radiations. Yet in this very experiment we are again establishing the near relation of these rays to the ordinary element of matter. For you can imagine that a bombardment is taking place from here (as we say yesterday, this is how Crookes thinks of the cathode rays). The “bombs” do not get through the screen which you put in the way; the space behind the screen is protected. This can be shewn by Crookes's experiment, interposing a screen in the way of the cathode rays.

We will here generate the electric current; we pass it through this tube in which the air is rarefied. It has its cathode or negative pole here, its anode or positive pole here. Sending the electricity through the tube, we are now getting the so-called cathode rays. We catch them on a screen shaped like a St. Andrew's cross. We let the cathode rays impinge on it, and on the other side you will see something like a shadow of the St. Andrew's cross, from which you may gather that the cross stops the rays. Observe it clearly, please. Inside the tube is the St. Andrew's cross. The cathode rays go along here; here they are stopped by the cross; the shadow of the cross becomes visible upon the wall of the vessel behind it. I will now bring the shadow which is thus made visible into the field of a magnet. I beg you to observe it now. You will find the shadow influenced by the magnetic field. You see then, just as I might attract a simple bit of iron with a magnet, so too, what here emerges like a kind of shadow behaves like external matter. It behaves materially.

Here then we have a type of rays which Crookes regards as “radiant matter”—as a form of matter neither solid, liquid or gaseous but even more attenuated,—revealing also that electricity itself, the current of electricity, behaves like simple matter. We have, as it were, been trying to look at the current of flowing electricity as such, and what we see seems very like the kind of effects we are accustomed to see in matter.

I will now shew you, what was not possible yesterday, the rays that issue from the other pole and that are called “canal rays”. You can distinguish the rays from the cathode, going in this direction, shimmering in a violet shade of colour, and the canal rays coming to meet them, giving a greenish light. The velocity of the canal rays is much smaller.

Finally I will shew you the kind of rays produced by this apparatus: they are revealed in that the glass becomes fluorescent when we send the current through. This is the kind of rays usually made visible by letting them fall upon a screen of barium platinocyanide. They have the property of making the glass intensely fluorescent. Please observe the glass. You see it shining with a very strong, greenish-yellow, fluorescent light. The rays that shew themselves in this way are the Roentgen rays or X-rays, mentioned yesterday. We observe this kind too, therefore.

Now I was telling you how in the further study of these things it appeared that certain entities, regarded as material substances, emit sheaves of rays—rays of three kinds, to begin with. We distinguished them as \(\alpha\)-, \(\beta\)-, and \(\gamma\)-rays (cf. the Figure IXc). They shew distinct properties. Moreover, yet another thing emerges from these materials, known as radium etc. It is the chemical element itself which as it were gives itself up completely. In sending out its radiation, it is transmuted. It changes into helium, for example; so it becomes something quite different from what it was before. We have to do no longer with stable and enduring matter but with a complete metamorphosis of phenomena.

Taking my start from these facts, I now want to unfold a point of view which may become for you an essential way, not only into these phenomena but into those of Nature generally. The Physics of the 19th century chiefly suffered from the fact that the inner activity, with which man sought to follow up the phenomena of Nature, was not sufficiently mobile in the human being himself. Above all, it was not able really to enter the facts of the outer world. In the realm of light, colours could be seen arising, but man had not enough inner activity to receive the world of colour into his forming of ideas, into his very thinking. Unable any longer to think the colours, scientists replaced the colours, which they could not think, by what they could,—namely by what was purely geometrical and kinematical—calculable waves in an unknown ether. This “ether” however, as you must see, proved a tricky fellow. Whenever you are on the point of catching it, it evades you. It will not answer the roll-call. In these experiments for instance, revealing all these different kinds of rays, the flowing electricity has become manifest to some extent, as a form of phenomenon in the outer world,—but the “ether” refuses to turn up. In fact it was not given to the 19th-century thinking to penetrate into the phenomena. But this is just what Physics will require from now on. We have to enter the phenomena themselves with human thinking. Now to this end certain ways will have to be opened up—most of all for the realm of Physics.

You see, the objective powers of the World, if I may put it so,—those that come to the human being rather than from him—have been obliging human thought to become rather more mobile (albeit, in a certain sense, from the wrong angle). What men regarded as most certain and secure, that they could most rely on, was that they could explain the phenomena so beautifully by means of arithmetic and geometry—by the arrangement of lines, surfaces and bodily forms in space. But the phenomena in these Hittorf tubes are compelling us to go more into the facts. Mere calculations begin to fail us here, if we still try to apply them in the same abstract way as in the old wave-theory.

Let me say something of the direction from which it first began, that we were somehow compelled to bring more movement into our geometrical and arithmetical thinking. Geometry, you know, was a very ancient science. The regularities and laws in line and triangle and quadrilateral etc.,—the way of thinking all these forms in pure Geometry—was a thing handed down from ancient time. This way of thinking was now applied to the external phenomena presented by Nature. Meanwhile however, for the thinkers of the 19th century, the Geometry itself began to grow uncertain. It happened in this way. Put yourselves back into your school days: you will remember how you were taught (and our good friends, the Waldorf teachers, will teach it too, needless to say; they cannot but do so),—you were undoubtedly taught that the three angles of a triangle (Figure Xa) together make a straight angle—an angle of 180°. Of course you know this. Now then we have to give our pupils some kind of proof, some demonstration of the fact. We do it by drawing a parallel to the base of the triangle through the vertex. We then say: the angle \(\alpha\), which we have here, shews itself here again as \(\alpha'\). \(\alpha\) and \(\alpha'\) are alternate angles and therefore equal. I can transfer this angle over here, then. Likewise this angle \(\beta\), over here; again it remains the same.

The angle \(\gamma\) stays where it is. If then I have \(\gamma = \gamma'\), \(\alpha = \alpha'\) and \(\beta=\beta'\), while \(\alpha'+\beta;' + \gamma'\) taken together give an angle of 180° as they obviously do, \(\alpha + \beta + \gamma\) will do the same. Thus I can prove it so that you actually see it. A clearer or more graphic proof can scarcely be imagined.

However, what we are taking for granted is that this upper line A'B' is truly parallel to the lower line \(AB\),—for this alone enables me to carry out the proof. Now in the whole of Euclid's Geometry there is no way of proving that two lines are really parallel, i.e. that they only meet at an infinite distance, or do not meet at all. They only look parallel so long as I hold fast to a space that is merely conceived in thought. I have no guarantee that it is so in any real space. I need only assume that the two lines meet, in reality, short of an infinite distance; then my whole proof, that the three angles together make 180°, breaks down. For I should then discover: whilst in the space which I myself construct in thought—the space of ordinary Geometry—the three angles of a triangle add up to 180° exactly, it is no longer so when I envisage another and perhaps more real space. The sum of the angles will no longer be 180°, but may be larger. That is to say, besides the ordinary geometry handed down to us from Euclid other geometries are possible, for which the sum of the three angles of a triangle is by no means 180°.

Nineteenth century thinking went a long way in this direction, especially since Lobachevsky, and from this starting-point the question could not but arise: Are then the processes of the real world—the world we see and examine with our senses—ever to be taken hold of in a fully valid way with geometrical ideas derived from a space of our own conceiving? We must admit: the space which we conceive in thought is only thought. Nice as it is to cherish the idea that what takes place outside us partly accords with what we figure-out about it, there is no guarantee that it really is so. There is no guarantee that what is going on in the outer world does really work in such a way that we can fully grasp it with the Euclidean Geometry which we ourselves think out. Might it not be—the facts alone can tell—might it not be that the processes outside are governed by quite another geometry, and it is only we who by our own way of thinking first translate this into Euclidean geometry and all the formulae thereof?

In a word, if we only go by the resources of Natural Science as it is today, we have at first no means whatever of deciding, how our own geometrical or kinematical ideas are related to what appears to us in outer Nature. We calculate Nature's phenomena in the realm of Physics—we calculate and draw them in geometrical figures. Yet, are we only drawing on the surface after all, or are we penetrating to what is real in Nature when we do so? What is there to tell? If people once begin to reflect deeply enough in modern Science—above all in Physics—they will then see that they are getting no further. They will only emerge from the blind alley if they first take the trouble to find out what is the origin of all our phoronomical—arithmetical, geometrical and kinematical—ideas. What is the origin of these, up to and including our ideas of movement purely as movement, but not including the forces? Whence do we get these ideas? We may commonly believe that we get them on the same basis as the ideas we gain when we go into the outer facts of Nature and work upon them with our reason. We see with our eyes and hear with our ears. All that our senses thus perceive,—we work upon it with our intellect in a more primitive way to begin with, without calculating, or drawing it geometrically, or analyzing the forms of movement. We have quite other categories of thought to go on when our intellect is thus at work on the phenomena seen by the senses. But if we now go further and begin applying to what goes on in the outer world the ideas of “scientific” arithmetic and algebra, geometry and kinematics, then we are doing far more—and something radically different. For we have certainly not gained these ideas from the outer world. We are applying ideas which we have spun out of our own inner life. Where then do these ideas come from? That is the cardinal question. Where do they come from? The truth is, these ideas come not from our intelligence—not from the intelligence which we apply when working up the ideas derived from sense-perception. They come in fact from the intelligent part of our Will. We make them with our Will-system—with the volitional part of our soul.

The difference is indeed immense between all the other ideas in which we live as intelligent beings and on the other hand the geometrical, arithmetical and kinematical ideas. The former we derive from our experience with the outer world; these on the other hand—the geometrical, the arithmetical ideas—rise up from the unconscious part of us, from the Will-part which has its outer organ in the metabolism. Our geometrical ideas above all spring from this realm; they come from the unconscious in the human being. And if you now apply these geometrical ideas (I will say “geometrical” henceforth to represent the arithmetical and algebraic too) to the phenomena of light or sound, then in your process of knowledge you are connecting, what arises from within you, with what you are perceiving from without. In doing so you remain utterly unconscious of the origin of the geometry you use. You unite it with the external phenomena, but you are quite unconscious of its source. So doing, you develop theories such as the wave-theory of light, or Newton's corpuscular theory,—it matters not which one it is. You develop theories by uniting what springs from the unconscious part of your being with what presents itself to you in conscious day-waking life. Yet the two things do not directly belong to one-another. They belong as little, my dear Friends, as the idea-forming faculty which you unfold when half-asleep belongs directly to the outer things which in your dreaming, half-asleep condition you perceive. In anthroposophical lectures I have often given instances of how the dream is wont to symbolize. An undergraduate dreams that at the door of the lecture-theatre he gets involved in a quarrel. The quarrel grows in violence; at last they challenge one-another to a duel. He goes on dreaming: the duel is arranged, they go out into the forest, he sees himself firing the shot,—and at the moment he wakes up. A chair has fallen over. This was the impact which projected itself forward into the dream. The idea-forming faculty has indeed somehow linked up with the outer phenomenon, but in a merely symbolizing way,—in no way consistent with the real object. So too, what in your geometrical and phoronomical thinking you fetch up from the subconscious part of your being, when you connect it with the phenomena of light. What you then do has no other value for reality than what finds expression in the dream when symbolizing an objective fact such as the fall and impact of the chair. All this elaboration of the outer world—optical, acoustic and even thermal to some extent (the phenomena of warmth)—by means of geometrical, arithmetical and kinematical thought-forms, is in point of fact a dreaming about Nature. Cool and sober as it may seem, it is a dream—a dreaming while awake. Moreover, until we recognize it for what it is, we shall not know where we are in our Natural Science, so that our Science gives us reality. What people fondly believe to be the most exact of Sciences, is modern mankind's dream of Nature.

But it is different when we go down from the phenomena of light and sound, via the phenomena of warmth, into the realm we are coming into with these rays and radiations, belonging as they do to the science of electricity. For we then come into connection with what in outer Nature is truly equivalent to the Will in Man. The realm of Will in Man is equivalent to this whole realm of action of the cathode rays, canal rays, Roentgen rays. \(\alpha\)-, \(\beta\)- and \(\gamma\)-rays and so on. It is from this very realm—which, once again, is in the human being the realm of Will,—it is from this that there arises what we possess in our mathematics, in our geometry, in our ideas of movement. These therefore are the realms, in Nature and in Man, which we may truly think of as akin to one-another. However, human thinking has in our time not yet gone far enough, really to think its way into these realms. Man of today can dream quite nicely, thinking out wave-theories and the like, but he is not yet able to enter with real mathematical perception into that realm of phenomena which is akin to the realm of human Will, in which geometry and arithmetic originate. For this, our arithmetical, algebraical and geometrical thinking must in themselves become more saturated with reality. It is along these lines that physical science should now seek to go.

Nowadays, if you converse with physicists who were brought up in the golden age of the old wave-theory, you will find many of them feeling a little uncanny about these new phenomena, in regard to which ordinary methods of calculation seem to break down in so many places. In recent times the physicists have had recourse to a new device. Plain-sailing arithmetical and geometrical methods proving inadequate, they now introduce a kind of statistical method. Taking their start more from the outer empirical data, they have developed numerical relations also empirical in kind. They then use the calculus of probabilities. Along these lines it is permissible to say: By all means let us calculate some law of Nature; it will hold good throughout a certain series, but then there comes a point where it no longer works.

There are indeed many things like this in modern Physics,—very significant moments where they lose hold of the thought, yet in the very act of losing it get more into reality. Conceivably for instance, starting from certain rigid ideas about the nature of a gas or air under the influence of warmth and in relation to its surroundings, a scientist of the past might have proved with mathematical certainty that air could not be liquefied. Yet air was liquefied, for at a certain point it emerged that the ideas which did indeed embrace the prevailing laws of a whole series of facts, ceased to hold good at the end of this series. Many examples might be cited. Reality today—especially in Physics—often compels the human being to admit this to himself: “You with your thinking, with your forming of ideas, no longer fully penetrate into reality; you must begin again from another angle.”

We must indeed; and to do this, my dear Friends, we must become aware of the kinship between all that comes from the human Will—whence come geometry and kinematics—and on the other hand what meets us outwardly in this domain that is somehow separated from us and only makes its presence known to us in the phenomena of the other pole. For in effect, all that goes on in these vacuum tubes makes itself known to us in phenomena of light, etc. Whatever is the electricity itself, flowing through there, is imperceptible in the last resort. Hence people say: If only we had a sixth sense—a sense for electricity—we should perceive it too, directly. That is of course wide of the mark. For it is only when you rise to Intuition, which has its ground in the Will, it is only then that you come into that region—even of the outer world—where electricity lives and moves. Moreover when you do so you perceive that in these latter phenomena you are in a way confronted by the very opposite than in the phenomena of sound or tone for instance. In sound or in musical tone, the very way man is placed into this world of sound and tone—as I explained in a former lecture—means that he enters into the sound or tone with his soul and only with his soul. What he then enters into with his body, is no more than what sucks-in the real essence of the sound or tone. I explained this some days ago; you will recall the analogy of the bell-jar from which the air has been pumped out. In sound or tone I am within what is most spiritual, while what the physicist observes (who of course cannot observe the spiritual nor the soul) is but the outer, so-called material concomitant, the movement of the wave. Not so in the phenomena of the realm we are now considering, my dear Friends. For as I enter into these, I have outside me not only the objective, so-called material element, but also what in the case of sound and tone is living in me—in the soul and spirit. The essence of the sound or tone is of course there in the outer world as well, but so am I. With these phenomena on the other hand, what in the case of sound could only be perceived in soul, is there in the same sphere in which—for sound—I should have no more than the material waves. I must now perceive physically, what in the case of sound or tone I can only perceive in the soul.

Thus in respect of the relation of man to the external world the perceptions of sound, and the perceptions of electrical phenomena for instance, are at the very opposite poles. When you perceive a sound you are dividing yourself as it were into a human duality. You swim in the elements of wave and undulation, the real existence of which can of course be demonstrated by quite external methods. Yet as you do so you become aware; herein is something far more than the mere material element. You are obliged to kindle your own inner life—your life of soul—to apprehend the tone itself. With your ordinary body—I draw it diagrammatically (the oval in Figure Xb)—you become aware of the undulations. You draw your ether—and astral body together, so that they occupy only a portion of your space. You then enjoy, what you are to experience of the sound or tone as such, in the thus inwarded and concentrated etheric-astral part of your being. It is quite different when you as human being meet the phenomena of this other domain, my dear Friends. In the first place there is no wave or undulation or anything like that for you to dive into; but you now feel impelled to expand what in the other case you concentrated (Figure Xc). In all directions, you drive your ether—and astral body out beyond your normal surface; you make them bigger, and in so doing you perceive these electrical phenomena.

Without including the soul and spirit of the human being, it will be quite impossible to gain a true or realistic conception of the phenomena of Physics. Ever-increasingly we shall be obliged to think in this way. The phenomena of sound and tone and light are akin to the conscious element of Thought and Ideation in ourselves, while those of electricity and magnetism are akin to the sub-conscious element of Will. Warmth is between the two. Even as Feeling is intermediate between Thought and Will, so is the outer warmth in Nature intermediate between light and sound on the one hand, electricity and magnetism on the other. Increasingly therefore, this must become the inner structure of our understanding of the phenomena of Nature. It can indeed become so if we follow up all that is latent in Goethe's Theory of Colour. We shall be studying the element of light and tone on the one hand, and of the very opposite of these—electricity and magnetism—on the other. As in the spiritual realm we differentiate between the Luciferic, that is akin to the quality of light, and the Ahrimanic, akin to electricity and magnetism, so also must we understand the structure of the phenomena of Nature. Between the two lies what we meet with in the phenomena of Warmth.

I have thus indicated a kind of pathway for this scientific realm,—a guiding line with which I wished provisionally to sum up the little that could be given in these few improvised hours. It had to be arranged so quickly that we have scarcely got beyond the good intentions we set before us. All I could give were a few hints and indications; I hope we shall soon be able to pursue them further. Yet, little as it is, I think what has been given may be of help to you—and notably to the Waldorf School teachers among you when imparting scientific notions to the children. You will of course not go about it in a fanatical way, for in such matters it is most essential to give the realities a chance to unfold. We must not get our children into difficulties. But this at least we can do: we can refrain from bringing into our teaching too many untenable ideas—ideas derived from the belief that the dream-picture which has been made of Nature represents actual reality. If you yourselves are imbued with the kind of scientific spirit with which these lectures—if we may take them as a fair example—have been pervaded, it will assuredly be of service to you in the whole way you speak with the children about natural phenomena.

Methodically too, you may derive some benefit. I am sorry it was necessary to go through the phenomena at such breakneck speed. Yet even so, you will have seen that there is a way of uniting what we see outwardly in our experiments with a true method of evoking thoughts and ideas, so that the human being does not merely stare at the phenomena but really thinks about them. If you arrange your lessons so as to get the children to think in connection with the experiments—discussing the experiments with them intelligently—you will develop a method, notably in the Science lessons, whereby these lessons will be very fruitful for the children who are entrusted to you.

Thus by the practical example of this course, I think I may have contributed to what was said in the educational lectures at the inception of the Waldorf School. I believe therefore that in arranging these scientific courses we shall also have done something for the good progress of our Waldorf School, which ought really to prosper after the good and very praiseworthy start which it has made. The School was meant as a beginning in a real work for the evolution of our humanity—a work that has its fount in new resources of the Spirit. This is the feeling we must have. So much is crumbling, of all that has developed hitherto in human evolution. Other and new developments must come in place of what is breaking down. This realization in our hearts and minds will give the consciousness we need for the Waldorf School. In Physics especially it becomes evident, how many of the prevailing ideas are in decay. More than one thinks, this is connected with the whole misery of our time. When people think sociologically, you quickly see where their thinking goes astray. Admittedly, here too most people fail to see it, but you can at least take notice of it; you know that sociological ways of thought will find their way into the social order of mankind. On the other hand, people fail to realize how deeply the ideas of Physics penetrate into the life of mankind. They do not know what havoc has in fact been wrought by the conceptions of modern Physics, terrible as these conceptions often are. In public lectures I have often quoted Hermann Grimm. Admittedly, he saw the scientific ideas of his time rather as one who looked upon them from outside. Yet he spoke not untruly when he said, future generations would find it difficult to understand that there was once a world so crazy as to explain the evolution of the Earth and Solar System by the theory of Kant and Laplace. To understand such scientific madness would not be easy for a future age, thought Hermann Grimm. Yet in our modern conceptions of inorganic Nature there are many features like the theory of Kant and Laplace. And you must realize how much is yet to do for the human beings of our time to get free of the ways of Kant and Konigsberg and all their kindred. How much will be to do in this respect, before they can advance to healthy, penetrating ways of thought!

Strange things one witnesses indeed from time to time, shewing how what is wrong on one side joins up with what is wrong on another. What of a thing like this? Some days ago—as one would say, by chance—I was presented with a reprint of a lecture by a German University professor. (He prides himself in this very lecture that there is in him something of Kant and Konigsberg!) It was a lecture in a Baltic University, on the relation of Physics and Technics, held on the 1st of May 1918,—please mark the date! This learned physicist of our time in peroration voices his ideal, saying in effect: The War has clearly shewn that we have not yet made the bond between Militarism and the scientific laboratory work of our Universities nearly close enough. For human progress to go on in the proper way, a far closer link must in future be forged between the military authorities and what is being done at our Universities. Questions of mobilization in future must include all that Science can contribute, to make the mobilization still more effective. At the beginning of the War we suffered greatly because the link was not yet close enough—the link which we must have in future, leading directly from the scientific places of research into the General Staffs of our armies.

Mankind, my dear Friends, must learn anew, and that in many fields. Once human beings make up their minds to learn anew in such a realm as Physics, they will be better prepared to learn anew in other fields as well. Those physicists who go on thinking in the old way, will never be so very far removed from the delightful coalition between the scientific laboratories and the General Staffs. How many things will have to alter! So may the Waldorf School be and remain a place where the new things which mankind needs can spring to life. In the expression of this hope, I will conclude our studies for the moment.