The Rudolf Steiner Archive

The soul, as it becomes clairvoyant, will progress further, beyond the elemental world we have been describing in these lectures, and it will penetrate the actual spiritual world. On ascending to this higher world, the soul must take into account even more forcefully what already has been indicated. In the elemental world there are many happenings and phenomena surrounding the clairvoyant soul that remind it of the characteristics, the forces, and of all sorts of other things in the sense world, but rising into the spiritual world, the soul finds the happenings and beings totally different. The capacities and points of view it could get on with in the sense world have to be given up to a far greater degree. It is terribly disturbing to confront a world that the soul is not at all accustomed to, leaving everything behind it has so far been able to experience and observe. Nevertheless, when you look into my books Theosophy or Occult Science or if you recall the recent performance of Scenes Five and Six of The Souls' Awakening, it will occur to you that the descriptions there of the real spiritual world, the scientific descriptions as well as the more pictorial-scenic ones, use pictures definitely taken—one can say—from impressions and observations of the physical sense world.

Recall for a moment how the journey is described through Devachan or the Spirit-land, as I called it. You will find that the pictures used have the characteristics of sense perception. This is, of course, necessary if one proposes to put on the stage the spirit region, which the human being passes through between death and a new birth. All the happenings must be represented by images taken from the physical sense world. You can easily imagine that stage hands nowadays would not know what to do with the sort of scenery one might bring immediately out of the spiritual world, having nothing at all in common with the sense world. One therefore faces the necessity of describing the region of spirit with pictures taken from sense observation. But there is more to it than this.

You might well believe that to represent this world whose characteristics are altogether different from the sense world, one has to help oneself out of the difficulty with sense-perceptible images. This is not the case. When the soul that has become clairvoyant enters the spiritual world, it will really see the landscape as the exact scenery of those two scenes of the “Spirit Region” in The Souls' Awakening. They are not just thought out in order to characterize something that is entirely different; the clairvoyant soul really is in such scenery and surrounded by it. Just as the soul surrounded in the physical sense world by a landscape of rocks, mountains, woods and fields must take these for granted as reality if it is healthy, the clairvoyant soul, too, outside the physical and etheric bodies can observe itself surrounded in exactly the same way by a landscape constructed of these pictures. Indeed, the pictures have not been chosen at random; as a matter of fact they are the actual environment of the soul in this world. Scenes Five and Six of The Souls' Awakening did not come about in just this way because something or other of an unknown world had to be expressed and therefore the question was considered, “How can that be done?” No, this world pictured here is the world surrounding the soul that it to some degree simply forms as an image.

However, it is necessary for the clairvoyant soul to enter into the right relationship to the genuine reality of the spirit world, the spirit-land that has nothing at all in common with the sense world. You will get some idea of the relationship to the spiritual world which the soul has to acquire from a description of how the soul can come to an understanding of that world. Suppose you open a book. At the top of the page you find a line slanting from the left above to the right below, then a line slanting from bottom left to top right, another line parallel to the first and still another parallel to the second; then come two vertical lines, the second shorter than the first and connected at the top to its center. Then comes something like a circle that is not quite closed with a horizontal line in its center; finally come two equal vertical lines joined together at the top. You don't go through all this when you open a book and look at the first thing that stands there, do you? You read the word “when.” You do not describe the w as lines and the e as an incomplete circle, and so on; you read. When you look at the forms of the letters in front of you, you enter into a relationship with something that is not printed on the page; it is, however, indicated to you by what is there on that page.

It is precisely the same with the relationship of the soul to the whole picture-world of the spirit region. What the soul has to do is not merely to describe what is there, for it is much more like reading. The pictures before one are indeed a cosmic writing, a script, and the soul will gain the right inner mood by recognizing that this whole world of pictures—woven like a veil before the spiritual world—is there to mediate, to manifest the true reality of that world. Hence in the real sense of the word we can speak of reading the cosmic script in the spirit region.

One should not imagine that learning to read this cosmic writing is anything like learning to read in the physical world. Reading today is based more or less on the relation of arbitrary signs to their meaning. Learning to read as we have to do for such arbitrary letters is unnecessary for reading the cosmic script which makes its appearance as a mighty tableau, expressing the spiritual world to the clairvoyant soul. One has only to take in with an open, unbiased inner being what is shown as picture-scenery, because what one is experiencing there is truly reading. The meaning itself can be said to flow out of the pictures. It can therefore happen that any sort of interpreting the images of the spiritual world as abstract ideas is more a hindrance than a help in leading the soul directly to what lies behind the occult writing. Above all, as described in Theosophy and in the scenes of The Souls' Awakening, it is important to let the things work freely on one. With one's deep inner powers coming sometimes in a shadowy way to consciousness, there will already have been surmises of a spiritual world. To receive such hints, it is not even necessary to strive for clairvoyance—bear this well in mind. It is necessary only to keep one's mind and soul receptive to such pictures, without setting oneself against them in an insensitive, materialistic way, saying, “This is all nonsense; there are no such things!” A person with a receptive attitude who follows the movement of these pictures will learn to read them. Through the devotion of the soul to the pictures, the necessary understanding for the world of the spirit will come about.

What I have described is actual fact—therefore the numerous objections to spiritual science coming from a present-day materialistic outlook. In general, these objections are first of all rather obvious; then, too, they can be very intelligent and apparently quite logical. Someone like Ferdinand Fox,¹¹ who is considered so supremely clever not only by the human beings but also, quite correctly, by Ahriman himself, can say, “Oh yes, you Steiner, you describe the clairvoyant consciousness and talk about the spiritual world, but it's merely a collection of bits and pieces of sense images. How can you claim—in the face of all that scenery raked together from well-known physical pictures—that we should experience something new from it, something we cannot imagine without approaching the spiritual world?”

That objection is one that will confuse many people; it is made from the standpoint of present-day consciousness apparently with a certain justification, indeed even with complete justification. Nevertheless when you go more deeply into such objections as these of Ferdinand Fox, you will discover the way to the truth: The objection we have just heard resembles very much what a person could say to someone opening a letter: “Well, yes, you've received a letter, but there's nothing in it but letters of the alphabet and words I already know. You won't hear anything new from all that!” Nevertheless, through what we have known for a long time we are perhaps able to learn something that we never could have dreamed of before. This is the case with the picture-scenery, which not only has to find its way to the stage for the Mystery Drama performance but also will reveal itself on every side to the clairvoyant consciousness. To some extent it is composed of memory pictures of the sense world, but in its appearance as cosmic script it represents something that the human being cannot experience either in the sense world or in the elemental world. It should be emphasized again and again that our relation to the spiritual world must be compared to reading and not to direct vision.

If a man on earth, who has become clairvoyant, is to understand the objects and happenings of the sense world and look at them with a healthy, sane attitude, he must observe and describe them in the most accurate way possible, but his relation to the spiritual world must be different. As soon as he steps across the threshold, he has to do something very much like reading. If we look at what has to be recognized in this spirit land for our human life, there is certainly something else that can demolish Ferdinand Fox's argument. His objections should not be taken lightly, for if we wish to understand spiritual science in the right way, we should size up such objections correctly. We must remember that many people today cannot help making objections, for their ideas and habits of thought give them the dreadful fear of standing on the verge of nothingness when they hear about the spiritual world; therefore they reject it.

This relationship of a modern human being to the spiritual world can be understood better by discovering what someone thinks about it who is quite well-intentioned. A book appeared recently that is worth reading even for those who have acquired a true understanding of the spiritual world. It was written by a man who means well and who would like very much to come by knowledge of the spiritual world, Maurice Maeterlinck;¹² it has been translated with the title Concerning Death. In his first chapters the author shows that he wants to understand these things. We know that he is to some extent a discerning and sensitive person who has allowed himself to be influenced by Novalis, among others, that he has specialized somewhat in Romantic mysticism and that he has accomplished much that is very interesting—theoretically and artistically—in regard to the relationship of human beings to the super-sensible world. Therefore as example he is particularly interesting.

Well, in the chapters of Concerning Death in which Maeterlinck speaks of the actual relationship of the human being to the spiritual world, his book becomes completely absurd. It is an interesting phenomenon that a well-meaning man, using the thinking habits of today, becomes foolish. I do not mean this as reproof or criticism but only to characterize objectively how foolish a well-intentioned person can become when he wishes to look at the connection of the human soul to the spirit world. Maurice Maeterlinck has not the slightest idea that there is a possibility to so strengthen and invigorate the human soul that it can shed everything attained through sense observation and the ordinary thinking, feeling and willing of the physical plane and indeed, even that of the elemental world. To such minds as Maeterlinck's, when the soul leaves behind it everything involved in sense observation and the thinking, feeling and willing related to it, there is simply nothing left. Therefore in his book Maeterlinck asks for proofs of the spiritual world and facts about it. It is of course reasonable to require proofs of the spiritual world and we have every right to do so—but not as Maeterlinck demands them. He would like to have proofs as palpable as those given by science for the physical plane. And because in the elemental world things are still reminiscent of the physical world, he would even agree to let himself be convinced of the existence of the spiritual world by means of experiments copied from the physical ones. That is what he demands. He shows with this that he has not the most rudimentary understanding of the true spiritual world, for he wants to prove, by methods borrowed from the physical one, things and processes which have nothing to do with the sense world. The real task is to show that such proofs as Maeterlinck demands for the spiritual world are impossible.

I have frequently compared this demand of Maurice Maeterlinck to something that has taken place in the realm of mathematics. At one time the university Math departments were continually receiving treatises on the so-called squaring of the circle. People were constantly trying to prove geometrically how the area of a circle could be transformed into a square. Until quite recently an infinite number of papers had been written on the subject. But today only a rank amateur would still come up with such a treatise, for it has been proved conclusively that the geometrical squaring of the circle is not possible.

What Maeterlinck demands as proof for the spiritual world is nothing but the squaring of the circle transferred to the spiritual sphere and is just as much out of place as the other is in the realm of mathematics. What actually is he demanding? If we know that as soon as we cross the threshold to the spiritual world, we are in a world that has nothing in common with the physical world or even with the elemental world, we cannot ask, “If you want to prove any of this to me, kindly go back into the physical world and with physical means prove to me the things of the spiritual world.” We might as well accept the fact that in everything concerned with spiritual science we will get from the most well-meaning people the kind of absurdities that—transferred to ordinary life—would at once show themselves to be absurd. It is just as if someone wants a man to stand on his head while continuing to walk with his feet. Let someone demand that and everyone will realize what nonsense it is. However, when someone demands the same sort of thing in regard to proofs of the spiritual world, it is clever; it is a scientific right. Its author will not notice its absurdity and neither will his followers, especially when the author is a celebrated person. The great mistake springs from the fact that those who make such claims have never clearly grasped man's relation to the spiritual world.

If we attain concepts that can be gained only in the spiritual world through clairvoyant consciousness, they will naturally meet with a great deal of opposition from people like Ferdinand Fox. All the concepts that we are to acquire, for instance, about reincarnation, that is, the truly genuine remembrances of earlier lives on earth, we have to gain through a certain necessary attitude of the soul towards the spiritual world, for only out of that world can we obtain such concepts. When there are impressions, ideas, mental images in the soul that point back to an earlier life on earth, they will be especially subject to the antagonism of our time. Of course, it can't be denied that just in these things the worst foolishness is engaged in; many people have this or that experience and at once relate it to this or that former incarnation. In such cases it is easy for our opponents to say, “Oh yes, whatever drifts into your psyche are really pictures of experiences you've had in this life between birth and death—only you don't recognize them.” That is certainly the case hundreds and hundreds of times, but it should be clear that a spiritual investigator has an eye for these things. It can really be so that something that happens to a person in childhood or youth returns to consciousness completely transformed in later life; then perhaps because the person does not recognize it, he takes it for a reminiscence from an earlier life on earth. That can well be the case. We know within our own anthroposophical circles how easily it can occur. You see, memories can be formed not only of what one has clearly experienced; one can also have an impression that whisks past so quickly that it does not come fully to consciousness and yet can return later as a distinct memory. A person—if he is not sufficiently critical—can then swear that this is something in his soul that was never experienced in his present life. It is thus understandable that such impressions cause all the foolishness in people who have busied themselves, but not seriously enough, with spiritual science. This happens chiefly in the case of reincarnation, in which so much vanity and ambition is involved. For many people it is an alluring idea to have been Julius Caesar or Marie Antoinette in a former life. I can count as many as twenty-five or twenty-six Mary Magdalenes I have met in my lifetime! The spiritual investigator himself has good reason to draw attention to the mischief that can be stirred up in all this. Something more, however, must be emphasized.

In true clairvoyance, impressions of an earlier life on earth will appear in a certain characteristic way, so that a truly healthy clairvoyant soul will recognize them quite definitely as what they are. It will know unmistakably that these impressions have nothing to do with what can arise out of the present life between birth and death. For the true reminiscences, the genuine memories of earlier lives on earth that come through scrupulous clairvoyance, are too astonishing for the soul to believe it could bring them out of its conscious or unconscious depths by any humanly possible method. Students of spiritual science must get to know what soul experiences come to it from outside. It is not only the wishes and desires, which do indeed play a great part when impressions are fished up out of the unknown waters of the soul in a changed form, so that we do not recognize them as experiences of the present life; there is an interplay of many other things. But the mostly overpowering perceptions of former earth lives are easy to distinguish from impressions out of the present life. To take one example: a person receiving a true impression of a former life will inwardly, for instance, experience the following, rising out of soul depths: “You were in your former life such and such a person.” And at the moment when this occurs, he will find that, externally, in the physical world, he can make no use at all of such knowledge. It can bring him further in his development but as a rule he has to say to himself, “Look at that: in your previous incarnation you had that special talent!” However, by the time he receives such an impression, he is already too old to do anything with it. The situation will always be like that, showing how the impressions could not possibly arise out of one's present life, for if you took your start from the ordinary dream or fantasy, you would provide yourself with quite different qualities in a former incarnation. What one was like in an earlier life is something we ordinarily cannot imagine, for it is usually just the opposite of what we might expect. The genuine reality of an impression arising through true clairvoyance may show in one way or another our relationship to another person on earth. However, we must remember that through incorrect clairvoyance many previous incarnations are described, relating us to our close friends and enemies; this is mostly nonsense. If the perception you receive is truly genuine, it will show you a relationship to a person whom it is impossible at the time to draw near to. These things cannot be applied directly to practical life.

Confronted with impressions such as these, we have to develop the frame of mind necessary for clairvoyant consciousness. Naturally, when one has the impression, “I am connected in a special way with this person,” the situation must be worked out in life; through the impression one should come again into some sort of relationship with him. But that may only come about in a second or third earthly life. One must have a frame of mind able to wait patiently, a feeling that can be described as a truly inward calmness of soul and peacefulness of spirit. This will contribute to our judging correctly our experience in the spiritual world.

When we want to learn something about another person in the physical world, we go at it in whatever way seems necessary. But this we cannot do with the impression that calls for spirit peacefulness, calmness of soul, and patience. The attitude of soul towards the genuine impressions of the spiritual world is correctly described by saying,

To strive for nothing—wait in peaceful stillness,
one's inner being filled with expectation.
(The Soul's Awakening, Scene 3)

In a certain respect this frame of mind must stream out over the entire soul life in order to approach in the right way its clairvoyant experiences in the spirit.

The Ferdinand Foxes, however, are not always easy to refute, even when inner perceptions arise of which one can say, “It is humanly not possible for the soul with its forces and habits acquired in the present earth life to create in the imagination what is rising out of its depths; on the contrary, if it were up to the soul it would have imagined something quite different.” Even when one is able to point out the sure sign of true, genuine, spiritual impressions, a super-clever Ferdinand Fox can come and raise objections. But one does not meet the objections of those who stand somewhat remote from the science of the spirit or of opponents who don't want to know anything about it with the words, “One's inner being filled with expectation.” This is the right mood for those who are approaching the spiritual world, but in the face of objections from opponents, one should not—as a spiritual scientist—merely wait in expectation but should oneself raise all those objections in order to know just what objections are possible.

One of these is easy to understand today, and it can be found in all the psychological, psychopathological and physiological literature and in the sometimes learned treatises that presume to be scientific, as follows: “Since the inner life is so complicated, there is a great deal in the subconscious that does not rise up into the ordinary consciousness.” One who is super-clever will not only say, “Our wishes and desires bring all sorts of things out of soul depths,” but will also say, “Any experience of the psyche brings about a secret resistance or opposition against the experience. Though he will always experience this reaction, a person knows nothing of it as a rule. But it can push its way up from the subconscious into the upper regions of soul life.” Psychological, psychopathological and physiological literature admit to the following, because the facts cannot be denied: When someone falls deeply in love with another person, there has to develop in unconscious soul depths, side by side with the conscious love, a terrible antipathy to the beloved. And the view of many psychopathologists is that if anyone is truly in love, there is also hatred in his soul. Hatred is present even if it is covered over by the passion of love.

When such things emerge from the depths of the soul, say the Ferdinand Foxes, they are perceptions that very easily provide the illusion of not coming from the soul of the individual involved and yet can well do so, because soul life is very complex. To this we can only reply: certainly it may be so; this is as well-known to the spiritual investigator as it is to the psychologist, psychiatrist or physiologist. When we work our way through all the above-mentioned literature dealing with the healthy and unhealthy conditions of soul life, we realize that Ferdinand Fox is a real person, an extremely important figure of the present day, to be found everywhere. He is no invention. Take all the abundant writing of our time and as you study it, you get the impression that the remarkable face of Ferdinand Fox is springing out at you from every page. He seems nowadays to have his fingers in every scientific pie. To counteract him, it must be emphasized again and again, and I repeat it in this case gladly: to prove that something is reality and not fantasy is only possible through life experience itself. I have continually said: The chapter of Schopenhauer's philosophy that views the world as a mere mental image and does not distinguish between idea and actual perception can be contradicted only by life itself. Kant's argument, too, in regard to the so-called proof of God' s existence, that a hundred imaginary dollars contain just as many pennies as a hundred real dollars, will be demolished by anyone who tries to pay his debts with imaginary and not real dollars.

Therefore the training and devotion of the soul to clairvoyance must be taken as reality. It is not a matter of theorizing; we bring about a life in the realm of spirit by means of which we can clearly distinguish the genuine impression of a former life on earth from one that is false, in the same way that we can distinguish the heat of an iron on our skin from an imaginary iron. If we reflect on this, we will understand that Ferdinand Fox's objections about the spiritual world are really of no importance at all, coming as they do from people who—I will not say, have not entered the realm of spirit clairvoyantly—but who have never tried to understand it.

We must always keep in mind that when we cross the threshold of the spiritual world, we enter a region of the universe that has nothing in common with what the senses can perceive or with what we experience in the physical world through willing, thinking, and feeling. We have to approach the spiritual world by realizing that all our ability to observe and understand the physical sense world has to be left behind. Referring to perception in the elemental world, I used an image that may sound grotesque, that of putting one's head into an ant hill—but so it is for our consciousness in the elemental world. There the thoughts that we have do not put up with everything quite passively; we plunge our consciousness into a world (into a thought-world, one might call it) that creeps and crawls with a life of its own. A person has to hold himself firmly upright in his soul to withstand thoughts that are full of their own motion. Even so, many things in this elemental world of creeping and crawling thoughts remind us of the physical world.

When we enter the actual spiritual world, nothing at all reminds us of the physical world; there we enter a world which I will describe with an expression used in my book The Threshold of the Spiritual World: “a world of living thought-beings.” Our thinking in the physical world resembles shadow-pictures, shadows of thoughts, whose real substance we find in the spiritual world; this thought-substance forms the beings there whom we can approach and enter into. Just as human beings in the physical world consist of flesh and blood, these beings of the spiritual world consist of thought-substance. They are themselves thoughts, actual thoughts, nothing but thoughts, yet they are alive with an inner essential being; they are living thought-beings. Although we can enter into their inner being, they cannot perform actions as if with physical hands. When they are active, they create relationships among themselves, and this can be compared to the embodiment in the sense world of thoughts in speech, a pale reflection of the spiritual reality. We can accustom ourselves to experience the living thought-entities in the spiritual world. What they do, what they are, and the way they affect one another, forms a spirit language. One spirit being speaks to another; thought language is spoken in the realm of the spirit! However, this thought language in its totality is not only speech but represents the deeds of the spiritual world as well. It is in speaking that these beings work, move, and take action.

When we cross the threshold, we enter a world where thoughts are entities, entities are thoughts; however, these beings of the spiritual world are much more real than people of flesh and blood in the sense world. We enter a world where the action consists of spiritual conversation, where words move, here, there, and everywhere, where something happens because it is spoken out. We have to say of this spiritual world and of the occurrences there what is said in Scene Three of The Guardian of the Threshold:

At this place words are deeds
and further deeds must follow them.

All occult perception attained for mankind by the initiates of every age could behold the significance in a certain realm of this spirit conversation that is at the same time spirit action. It was given the characteristic name, “The Cosmic Word.”

Now observe that our study has brought us to the very center of the spiritual realm, where we can behold these beings and their activities. Their many voices, many tones, many activities, sounding together, form the Cosmic Word in which our own soul being—itself Cosmic Word—begins to find itself at home, so that, sounding forth, we ourselves perform deeds in the spiritual world. The term “Cosmic Word” used throughout past ages by all peoples expresses an absolutely true fact of the spirit land. To understand its meaning at the present time, however, we have to approach the uniqueness of the spiritual world in the way we have tried to describe in this study.

In the various past ages and peoples, occult knowledge has spoken with more or less understanding of the Cosmic Word; now, too, it is necessary, if mankind is not to be devastated by materialism, to reach an understanding for such words about the spiritual world, from the Mystery Drama:

At this place words are deeds
and further deeds must follow them.

It is imperative in our time that when such words are spoken out of the knowledge of the spiritual world, our souls should feel their reality, should feel that they represent reality. We must be aware that this is just as much an exact characteristic of the spiritual world as when in characterizing the physical sense world we apply ordinary sense images.

Just how far our present age can bring understanding to bear on such words as “Here in this place words are deeds and further deeds must follow them” will depend on how far it takes up spiritual science and how well people today will be prepared to prevent the dominating force of materialism that otherwise will plunge human civilization into impoverishment, devastation and decay.

• 11. Ferdinand Fox Reinecke. See Guardian of the Threshold, Scenes 1 and 8; The Souls' Awakening, Scene 12, where there is the remark: “Ahriman goes off and returns with the Soul of Ferdinand Fox, whose figure is a sort of copy of his own.”
• 12. Maurice Maeterlinck (1862 – 1949), Belgian poet who wrote his metaphysical, “Symbolistic” drama, poetry and prose in French. Dramas include “Melisande” and “The Blue Bird.” He won the Nobel Prize in literature in 1911.

In the course of the years we have spoken about the deeper meanings of the Gospels of St. Matthew, St. Luke and St. John, and here in Hanover, too, about the mysteries of Christianity. You will have realised that each of the Gospels provides a special means of penetrating to the core of the Christian message. It is almost truer to say of the Gospel of St. Mark than of the others that if it is to help us to gain some understanding of Christianity, we must make a certain basic assumption.

In studying this Gospel it is essential to be aware of how language was used as a means of expression in past ages of evolution. The ancient Hebrew language opens up a wide horizon in this respect. Those of you who were present at the lecture-course in Munich on Genesis, must have realised how necessary it was to give an adequate translation of particular words before the six or seven days’ work of creation could be understood, and how essential it is to re-create these ancient records in order to bring to light the inner, spiritual truths they indicate. In the Hebrew language the vowels and consonants were used very differently from anything that is customary to-day. What a man saw round about him was indicated in that ancient language by the consonants; the vowels expressed inner experiences of the soul and were indicated by dots only. In those early times, and even in the Greek language, a word in itself was an indication of a supersensible reality. Everyone knew that a spoken word containing certain sounds or syllables would arouse in the soul a whole series of mental pictures. A very great deal could be conveyed in a few words because all these factors were operating. We must always bear this in mind when we are studying the Gospel of St. Mark. We must not restrict ourselves to the actual words, because the words by themselves cannot lead us into the secrets and mysteries of that Gospel.

Let me give you one or two illustrations. In earlier times, language was a means for the expression of realities of soul and spirit. In our day it is a means for the expression of abstract thinking and this is very far removed from the living, pictorial thinking which alone can point the way into spiritual worlds. If we want to recover that kind of living thinking we must alter the forms of expression in our language accordingly. Language has become pedantic, useful only as an expression of abstract thinking; it has entirely lost the living quality which is able to lead into higher regions through the words of language and to unite the soul with the mysteries of the Universe. In the Rosicrucian Mystery Play, The Portal of Initiation, beginnings have been made to infuse real life into language. It is often a matter of subtle nuances. Our language is crude, lacks suppleness, and it is only with a struggle that it can be made to express the delicate aspects of spiritual life. That is why I tried to manipulate language in such a way as to point to secrets of existence. In the Mystery Play I made an attempt to use other means to express a great deal that words cannot express. In the Play a man is striving to take the first steps towards Initiation, to hear spiritual tones resounding in his soul. The Play describes the many deep experiences undergone by Johannes in the course of his development. His progress is such that through the bitterest but at the same time the most powerful inner experiences, he reaches the realm of Devachan in the spiritual world where he is to be introduced to the life and activity of the elemental beings there. Any attempt to express this in ordinary words could only result in abstractions. And so I tried to present living people, expressing in their own nature the mysteries of how light and darkness interweave. In this way I tried to make audible in actual sounds things which, expressed in the words of modern language, would have seemed unreal. One must listen intently to the sound of the words and feel how the right sound occurs at the right place, sensing where a sound is appropriate and where it is not. This is a kind of spiritual alchemy. And by such means it is possible to indicate the interweaving life and activity of the spiritual forces in the Universe.

In the Mystery Play, Johannes is welcomed in Devachan by Maria and her companions, Philia, Astrid and Luna. Philia is the poetic representation of the sentient soul, hence the sound I (ee) occurs twice and A once in her name. Luna is the expression of the consciousness-soul, hence U and A occur once in her name. Astrid, the expression of the intellectual or mind-soul has in her name first the sound A then I (ee). In this way a great deal can be expressed more truly than in words. If a feeling for such things could be aroused there is a great deal which I might be able to omit. You must learn to feel the significance of the U with its dull, deep ring, the lightness of the I (ee) and the delicate significance of the AI or EI, with the sense of wonder it awakens in the soul. This brings a kind of understanding different from anything to be gained through ordinary words. The sounds of language make it a most wonderful instrument, infinitely wiser than human beings, and it would be well for us to pay heed to its wisdom. Far from that, however, men are doing what they can to destroy it. If we want to have any understanding at all of earlier times with their peculiar forms of expression, we must penetrate into what was then living in the souls of men.

When we read the lines at the very beginning of St. Mark's Gospel we can feel how necessary it is to think in this way about language and its secrets. In Luther's translation, which in most respects is still the best—Weizsäcker's is far inferior—the passage from Isaiah reads: ‘Behold I send my Angel before thee who shall prepare thy way before thee. It is the voice of the preacher in the wilderness: ”Prepare the way of the Lord, make straight his path”.’

You would think that anyone who is honest with himself would have to admit that he can make nothing of this passage. To understand what it really means Spiritual Science must enable us to recognise what, according to Isaiah who was initiated in these mysteries, was to come to pass through the events of Palestine and the Mystery of Golgotha. In our day nobody is willing to admit that there are men who really can tell us something important about the most significant impulses in world-evolution. Consequently we have grotesque explanations of the Apocalypse and assertions that the writer had himself already experienced the happenings described. People talk about objective research but always start with the assumption that what they do not know cannot be known. In the words just quoted, Isaiah is giving voice to something he knew through Initiation, namely that an impulse of supreme importance is to be given to the evolution of humanity. Why did he, and all other Initiates, regard this event to which he was pointing as being of such significance? His picture of the evolution of humanity was true and he knew that in earlier times men possessed a natural clairvoyance, moreover that through the astral body they were able to see into the spiritual worlds. The astral body gradually lost the power of vision and became inwardly dark but man's progress lay in this very loss of astral clairvoyance. It was now to be made possible for the ‘I’ to function. Out of his Initiation-knowledge Isaiah might also have said: In those days men will speak only of their Ego and as long as that Ego is not filled with Christ it will be restricted to perception of the physical plane furnished by the senses and intellect. Men will be forsaken by the world of the spirit. But then Christ will come, bringing consolation, and human souls will be permeated more and more with the Christ Impulse so that they can again look upwards into the spiritual world. Before this is possible, however, they will experience the darkening of the astral body.

The very first beginnings of man's physical body came into being on Old Saturn, of his etheric body on Old Sun, of his astral body on Old Moon; and the Ego evolves on the Earth. Until the astral body lost its clairvoyant powers and became dark, the Ego had at first to work in the darkness. Before Earth-evolution began in the real sense a kind of recapitulation of the Moon-evolution took place. During that period man's astral body had developed to a stage where the activity of the whole Universe was mirrored within it. When the recapitulation of the Moon-evolution was completed the Ego began to enter into the process of evolution and Isaiah could say that Egohood would become more and more dominant on the Earth.

There were Beings who had reached the human stage on the Old Moon, others on Old Sun and Old Saturn. Man reached the human stage on the Earth. On the Old Moon the Angels reached the human stage and man has reached the human stage on the Earth. Consequently it devolved upon the Beings who were man's forerunners to make preparation for what man was to become on the Earth. The Angel-nature must penetrate into the astral body before the Ego can become active. Man's mission on Earth was prepared for by his forerunners—the Angels. Hence it is possible at certain times for an Angel to enter into a human personality. When this happens the Earth-man himself may well be maya, for a Being of higher rank is making use of his soul. The man is in truth the figure we see before us, yet he may be the sheath of some other Being. Thus it came about that the same Individuality who had once lived as Elijah and was reincarnated as John the Baptist became the vehicle of an Angel who spoke through him. In The Portal of Initiation a similar process takes place and another Being works in and through Maria:

Within our circle there is formed a knot
Of threads that Karma spins, world-fashioning.
Thy sufferings, my friend, are links in chains
Forged by the hand of destiny, whereby
The deeds of Gods unite with human lives.

(The Portal of Initiation. Scene 3)

A deed of the Gods mingles with human life and creates human destiny.

Thus in John the Baptist a deed of the Heavens was united with human destiny. A divine Being, an Angel, worked in and through him. What John achieved was possible only because, while the man John was maya, another Being lived within him, having the mission to proclaim in advance what man's destiny on Earth was to be. Consequently, if we are to translate the passage in a way that helps us to understand what is actually expressed, the rendering would have to be something like this.—‘Take heed: the ‘I’ which is to appear in man's being sends in advance the Angel who prepares its way.’ The Angel is the Being who lived in the personality of John the Baptist, and the lesson to be learnt from Spiritual Science is that Moon Initiates must make preparation for Initiations that belong essentially to the Earth.

We must now consider how man's nature had developed up to the time of the Mystery of Golgotha. Think of what men must have felt when they looked back to those past ages when the astral body could see clairvoyantly into the spiritual world, and then, as incarnation followed incarnation, realised that this astral body was growing steadily darker. In earlier times, when they wanted to observe something in the spiritual world their astral bodies became luminous and radiant. But this gradually ceased and darkness in the astral body intensified until there was within man a state of isolation, a wilderness, ἔρημος. Even in Greek the expression is to be found. Then a voice awakens in the human soul, like a cry of longing for the ‘Lord’, for the ‘I’, to enter into the soul. This was the feeling accompanying the word χὐριοç, translated so baldly as ‘lord’. The soul was felt to consist of three forces: thinking, feeling and willing. Then a time came when the ‘I’, the kyrios, was to be received into the soul. This is what John the Baptist meant by the words: Prepare ye the way of the Lord, make his paths straight!

Thus the quotation from Isaiah at the beginning of St. Mark's Gospel points to the wisdom-filled guidance of human evolution up to the time of the Mystery of Golgotha. This utterance of Isaiah also indicated what we now know about John the Baptist. I have described under what con­ditions he was able to become the vehicle of an Angel. A certain Initiation was necessary for this—the Initiation which enabled the man receiving it to reveal to other men that the time had now come for the ‘I’ to penetrate into the human soul.

This could be proclaimed only by one who had received the Initiation known since ancient times as the Aquarius Initiation in the terminology used in the Mysteries. The language of the heavens was used to express the great secrets of the spiritual world made known to men through Initia­tion. The language of the heavens alone is able to express what happens to the human soul when it is initiated into the great Mysteries. Such things cannot be described by human words. Men looked up to the stars, observed their relations to one another and said to themselves: if we can frame adequate expressions for what the stars reveal, that is the most fitting way to indicate the nature of the mysterious processes operating in a man during a particular Initiation.

No matter what name was used in the various civilisations, it was always the great Ahura Mazdao to whom men looked up: they looked up to that Divine Being and to his hierarchy in the Sun. Christ is the supreme Spirit of the Sun Beings. There are twelve different ways in which Initiation into the sacred Mysteries of the Sun can take place and to explain this in human words is hardly possible. But if we think of the Sun standing in one of the constellations and sending its rays through that constellation to the Earth, and if we consider how it is related to other stars, we have a kind of script which expresses the fact that a particular man is initiated into the Sun-Mysteries in a way that makes him an Aquarius Initiate.

Take, for instance, the seven holy Rishis. The symbol of their Initiation into the Sun-Mysteries is the picture of the Sun in Taurus. When the Sun stands in the sign of Taurus the spectacle presented in the firmament reveals the mystery of the particular Initiation of the Rishis. This Initiation took effect through the seven personalities who were the seven holy Rishis. This is also expressed in the fact that the Pleiades, a cluster of seven stars, shine from the same region of the heavens. That is moreover the region where the whole solar system entered into the Universe to which we belong. So in order to specify the various forms of Initiation into the Sun-Mysteries we can use expressions indicating the Sun's position in a particular constellation.

John the Baptist had necessarily to receive an Aquarius Initiation, the expression indicating that the Sun was standing in the constellation of Aquarius. Try to understand it in this way: On the day or light side of the Zodiac lie Aries, Taurus, Gemini, Cancer, Leo, Virgo, then Libra. The constellations on the night or dark side of the Zodiac are Scorpio, Sagittarius, Capricorn, Aquarius and Pisces. Since the last two lie on the night side, the Sun's rays coming from them must not only traverse physical space but they must send the spiritual light of the Sun, which passes through the Earth, through spiritual space. Aquarius Initiates received this name because they were able to confer the water-baptism, that is to say, to enable men, while immersed in water, to be sustained by the power of the spiritual Sun.

It is the facts of the spiritual life here on Earth from which the names of the zodiacal constellations are derived, by transference to the heavens. Our so-called learned men, however, explain such things by saying that the names of the constellations in the heavens were given to certain personalities on Earth. The truth is just the opposite! Nowadays it is said that John the Baptist was called the ‘Water-man’ because that name had been derived from the constellation and applied to him. But that is really putting the cart before the horse. You will have heard of a certain savant's ironical attempt to establish that Napoleon was not an historical figure. The argument was that the name ‘Napoleon’ is easily derived from ‘Apollo’, the prefix N indicating comparative rank—therefore a kind of super-Apollo. Napoleon had six brothers and sisters and the star Apollo is included among the seven Pleiades. Napoleon's twelve Marshals are said to be the twelve signs of the Zodiac and Apollo's mother, Leto, becomes Napoleon's mother, Letitia ... and so on, in the same strain!

If we trace the course of the Sun in the heavens we find that as the physical Sun sets the spiritual Sun begins to rise. In its day or summer course the Sun progresses from Taurus to Aries, and so on; in its night or winter course it will reveal to us the secrets of the Initiation of Aquarius or Pisces. Physically, the Sun's course is from Virgo to Leo, Cancer, Gemini, Taurus, Aries; spiritually its course is from Virgo to Libra, Scorpio, Sagittarius, Capricorn and Aquarius to Pisces. The spiritual counterpart of the course of the physical Sun is its passage from Aquarius to Pisces.

Consequently John could say: He must increase but I must decrease. My mission is one of which you will have a picture when the Sun passes from the sign of Aquarius to that of Pisces. I am an Aquarius Initiate and I am not worthy to give you the secrets of the Sun in Pisces. I am not worthy to unloose the shoe-latchet of the One I am to proclaim to you.

In these words John speaks of himself unambiguously as an Aquarius Initiate. Pictures in old calendars indicate the meaning of his words when he says: ‘The latchet of whose shoe I am not worthy to unloose’. In old pictures of the zodiacal constellations the Waterman is shown kneeling. His whole posture indicates the reverence he must feel for the Sun as it passes him by and rising in Pisces reveals what is to come. This is the picture of John the Baptist: the Sun passes on and he cannot detain it; he can only proclaim in advance what is to be.

The prophet Isaiah knew that when the Sun progressed to Pisces a new dispensation was to come. This progression signifies the advent of men or beings connected with the Pisces Initiation. That is why the sign for Christ Jesus in the earliest Christian times was the fish or two fishes still to be seen in the catacombs of Rome. Why did Jesus say to His disciples: ‘I will make you fishers of men’? John the Baptist prepared for the Pisces Initiation which the Nazarene had to undergo if the Christ was to descend into him. The events in Palestine, the most important in the whole process of world-evolution, are inscribed in wonderful signs in the Zodiac. What came to pass step by step in Palestine is explained in its depths not through any human script but through a heavenly script which must be consulted for any real understanding of a process so exalted that it is directly related to the Macrocosm. What the physical eye saw moving about Palestine in the flesh and blood of Jesus of Nazareth—was that all? If you remember the indications I have given, it was maya, illusion. Actually the whole spiritual power, the central spiritual power, of the Sun was present in the figure of Jesus of Nazareth moving about Palestine; the figure that appeared physically as Jesus of Nazareth was maya.

Everything Christ Jesus did was connected with macrocosmic events. Think of how often in St. Mark's Gospel it is said that Christ performed His acts of healing after the Sun had set or before it had risen. Thus we are told: In the evening, when the Sun had set, they brought to Him all manner of sick and possessed. (i, 32). Why were the sick and possessed brought to Him at just that time? Because the Sun had set and its forces were no longer working physically in Jesus, but spiritually; what He was to do was not connected with the physical forces of the Sun. The physical Sun had set, but the spiritual Sun-forces worked through His heart and body. And when He wanted to unfold His greatest and most powerful forces He had necessarily to exert them at a time when the physical Sun was not visible in the heavens. So also when we read: ‘Before the Sun had risen’—the words have a definite meaning. Every word in St. Mark's Gospel indicates great cosmic connections between processes in the universe and every step taken and every deed performed by Christ in the body of Jesus of Nazareth here on Earth. If you were to draw a map of the paths He trod and the deeds He performed and were then to study the corresponding processes in the heavens, the picture would be the same: processes in the heavens would seem to have been projected down to the Earth.

Whence did a man like Kepler derive the principles of his astronomy? In his life as Kepler he did not find the powers which enabled him to epitomise the fundamentals of astronomy in his three great laws. These three laws describe in words the movement of the planets around their fixed star. Kepler was able to discover them only because his enthusiasm caused certain memories to arise in him. In a previous incarnation he had been a pupil of the old Egyptian Mysteries. In him, and in many others too, those experiences rose up again as dim intuitions. Such men had in their life of soul much that was an expression of the harmony of the spheres. Kepler studied the wonderful constellations to be seen in the heavens during his life. He observed the conjunction of Saturn, Jupiter and Moon and through it sought to explain the star by which the Three Wise Men from the East were guided. Abstractions as appalling as the Kant-Laplace theory had not been devised in Kepler's day.

The Gospel of St. Mark gives expression to the wonderful harmony between the great Cosmos and what was to come to pass once on our Earth through the deeds of Christ Jesus and the Mystery of Golgotha. We cannot understand this Gospel unless we can decipher the writing of the stars and that requires insight into the secrets of the language of the heavens. When the Gospel says that the Sun had set, this does not indicate merely that the Sun was no longer shining but also that the spiritual Beings of the Sun-Hierarchy had moved into a world of stronger spiritual powers because they must now work through the Earth, through the physical substance of the Earth. All this was felt by men when they were told of what came to pass through Christ Jesus after the Sun had set. A whole world of meaning lay in the words.

I hope that these few indications will help us to penetrate more deeply into the secrets of the Gospels. Particularly through the study of St. Mark's Gospel the human soul can rise to an understanding of wonderful mysteries of cosmic happenings. Every word in that Gospel is of great significance.

Answers to Questions

What is the meaning of the temptation of Jesus by Satan? Are Satan and Lucifer identical? How can the highest of all Beings be tempted by one of a lower order?

Satan is Ahriman. In the Gospels of St. Luke and St. Matthew, Lucifer is meant; in the Gospel of St. Mark, Ahriman. An impressive description is given in that Gospel of how hideous animal forms make their appearance when a man enters the spiritual world in the usual way. There are people who believe that entrance to the spiritual world can be achieved by adopting some special diet and other material practices of a similar kind. But everything they then see, particularly when it takes the form of sublime figures of light, is only a reflection of their own self, an Ahrimanic deception. Both Lucifer and Ahriman are tempters; and Christ in human form showed how man must resist them when he begins to find his way into the spiritual world.

Shall we see in higher worlds those who belong to us?

Spiritual seeing is very different from physical seeing. In the spiritual sense we shall certainly see again those who belong to us. The fact that Mary Magdalene did not immediately recognise Jesus is an indication that the Risen Christ cannot be recognised by everyone; certain powers must first have been developed. These powers began to function in Mary Magdalene only when Christ spoke her name. Much of what Spiritual Science teaches is regarded as heretical, although the Gospels confirm it. The Risen Christ could be recognised only by clairvoyant sight.

Are not the contents of the Babylonian Tables and the Ten Commandments practically identical?

People who speak about similarities in such a case are not aware of the essentials. This is very evident in the case of the Sermon on the Mount. The Bible does not say: ‘yours is the kingdom of heaven’, but: ‘you will find the kingdom of heaven within yourselves’. The Ten Commandments too are fundamentally different from anything previously in existence. Hebraism and Christianity added the impulse of the ‘I AM’ to what was already contained in earlier religions. When such things are studied in depth they are extraordinarily enlightening.

How is the doctrine of reincarnation to be reconciled with the Bible?

It is not yet possible to understand the Bible fully. Each epoch has translated it in the way that suited itself. The Bible has nothing to fear from the doctrine of reincarnation. It used to be thought that every discovery of a new scientific truth constituted a danger to the Bible.

What is the relation between Christ and Lucifer?

It is not easy to explain this briefly. We have often spoken of how man has passed from incarnation to incarnation and how the Luciferic power took root in very early times in the astral body and Ahriman later on in the etheric body. With the coming of Christ all this acquired a new meaning. We are only at the beginning of Christian evolution. If the Gospels are understood they make it clear that Christ was obliged to deal with Lucifer and Ahriman. But there are very few who realise to-day that the stories of the Temptation differ in the Gospels of St. Matthew, St. Mark and St. Luke. Occultists know that there is not only a Luciferic temptation by way of man's desires, but also an Ahrimanic temptation—when a man carries his own passions out into the Macrocosm and sees all manner of animal figures and forms. The Gospel of St. Matthew describes a Luciferic temptation: in the Gospel of St. Mark, Jesus is ‘with the wild beasts’ of human nature. In all occult writings Lucifer is pictured as a serpent, Ahriman as a hound.

These stories of the Temptation point to deep mysteries. Just as the advent of the Luciferic and Ahrimanic powers was a necessity in order that man might become a free, independent being, so he must tear himself away from them again through the power of Christ in his soul. The spheres of Lucifer and Ahriman will gradually be reversed. Men will take the Christ Impulse into themselves, confronting Ahriman in the outside world. Up to now, and at present, the opposite has been the case. Such things can be studied in The Portal of Initiation. You should pay attention to the vowel sounds. These things are in accordance with an inner necessity. The verses in the first part change in the second into their opposite. This is intentional.

Question not recorded.

It is true that Jesus did not write anything. There is actually a theologian who discusses whether He could write at all!—In four hundred years people will call what is said nowadays about Copernicus and Galileo a modern form of mythology. Theosophists of all people should not talk about ‘Ptolemaic childishness’.

A question about the authenticity of the writings of Dionysius.

It is usual nowadays to regard the actual writer as more important than the spiritual originator and inspirer. (Rudolf Steiner here referred to his own experience in connection with Goethe's prose-hymn, Nature, the authorship of which had been disputed by some philologists.) Dionysius, the disciple of the Apostle Paul, actually wrote nothing down because in those days to have done so would have seemed unimportant. But his successors, who, as was customary in those times, were also called Dionysius, presented a faithful account of his teachings as handed down by tradition. These were the writings of the so-called pseudo-Dionysius.

To ‘believe in good faith’ is not enough; everyone should convince himself of the truth. People to-day have no conception of what is possible and what is impossible. Things become tragic in this respect when, for instance, the Bible is ruthlessly analysed by scholars. Erudition and nonsense often go hand in hand!

Can Christ Jesus appear to men on Earth?

In the way in which He appeared to St. Paul, this is possible. When this happens it is a kind of Initiation which can sometimes take place without previous training. From the middle of the twentieth century onwards many people will have this experience.

As previously announced, I do not intend to give you a Theosophical lecture this evening, but rather a more or less purely philosophical lecture. And if any of our esteemed Theosophical listeners find that the matter is too philosophical and, shall we say, too difficult, I would ask you to bear in mind that I did not promise anything easy, but rather something philosophical for this afternoon.

The reason why I like to insert such an extraordinary lecture as this one is the following: It is not unfair to realize that in fact within our Theosophical consciousness, within our entire Theosophical worldview and the current zeitgeist, as it is practiced in the world – not as it is in its essence – there is far too little thoroughness, far too little conscientiousness, with regard to what can be called the thinking, the philosophical principle in the human soul.

Now anyone who wants to look more deeply into what Theosophy really is can see – and they will see it with every step they take into Theosophy, where it presents itself in its true form – that in the field of Theosophy nothing, absolutely nothing, is said that does not comply with philosophy, with scientific conscientiousness and intellectual thoroughness. Theosophy can be justified philosophically, scientifically, and logically in every respect. But Theosophy is not always cultivated and advocated with the necessary seriousness. Therefore, this lecture is intended as an admonition to have a sense of responsibility when speaking of the highest things that Theosophy has to say, as an admonition to have a sense of responsibility towards the intellectual, towards that which is called the scientific mind, the scientific spirit.

This is not to say that this scientific sense should be demanded of every follower of Theosophy; that would be going too far. Theosophy wants to be something that can penetrate into the hearts of the broadest masses of humanity, and with an unbiased sense of truth, it can always be received. But he who represents Theosophy under full responsibility must always be aware of the sense of scientific and intellectual conscientiousness envisaged here, in addition to all the other factors that come into play in the field of Theosophy.

From the wide range of material available to a theosophist, I would now like to give you a summarized overview of the inner principle of the development of modern philosophy, from Fichte to Schelling to Hegel. In doing so, we put ourselves in a position similar to that explained yesterday from a theosophical point of view, namely that with the philosophers Fichte, Schelling and Hegel, something significant for human spiritual development has been given, but which is not yet understood in our present time.

Those who are able to consider what was at stake in the grandiose intellectual struggle of this triumvirate of thinkers, Fichte, Schelling and Hegel, are not in the least surprised. For the intellectual weapons that our present age produces and that are sufficient for the great, admirable achievements of natural science, these intellectual weapons are not sufficient to achieve what was at work in the minds of Fichte, Schelling and Hegel at the turn of the eighteenth to the nineteenth century. And why should we be surprised at this? It can be fully justified and understood in terms of the history of philosophy.

If we want to understand Fichte, Schelling and Hegel in their position within the spiritual development of humanity, we must consider this development from its starting point with Socrates, Plato and Aristotle. For anyone who sees into things, everything in between is of little importance for the spiritual development of humanity. If we look at the matter historically, we see how, in the Middle Ages, Catholicism assimilated philosophy in the spirit of the medieval world view. Aristotle, that great thinker of the pre-Christian era, had to be forgotten first, then remembered again and applied according to the method of medieval philosophy, the medieval world view. The compromise had to be reached: justification of spiritual revelation with the help of Aristotelianism. These two things were brought together in the Middle Ages by trying to do justice to both, by combining them in scholasticism; most decisively in Thomas Aquinas, who was called the Doctor Angelicus because he undertook the task of justifying the revelation of Christianity with the help of Aristotelianism.

The extent to which today's thinking is inadequate to the tasks of that time is best illustrated by the fact that one of the newer thinkers has completely misunderstood the matter. An understanding of Aristotelian thought is the prerequisite for understanding the philosophy of Fichte, Schelling and Hegel. The theosophist need not be surprised. He can say to himself: It was necessary that in Christianity the decisive philosophy should speak differently than it did in the eighteenth century.

In particular, it is difficult to understand that Aristotle, in his psychology, gives a shadowy, because merely philosophical, reflection of what we encounter again in Theosophy. We are speaking, first of all, of the physical body. Aristotle begins only with the etheric body. He speaks of these things as one had to speak three to four centuries before the Christian era. What he calls “treptikon” is nothing other than what we call the etheric body, and what he calls “aestheticon” is nothing other than what we call the sentient body or astral body. Basically, it is quite the same. It is just that for Theosophy it is something grasped from the living intuition, while for Aristotle, it is something held in the realm of the shadowy, out of the logical philosophical tradition. Then he also has the “Erektikon”, what we call the sentient soul. Then the “Kinetikon”, the mind or soul of mind.

But there is one thing that is not found in Aristotelianism: there is no adequate expression for the consciousness soul. But how can you be surprised that you do not find it? In those days, thinking had not yet progressed and developed to such an extent that one could also speak of a consciousness soul. But it is only in the consciousness soul that the I comes to an inner, thinking perception of itself. At that time, one could not yet speak of the I as in more recent philosophy. Therefore, one had to speak of something else, of that which pours into the sentient soul and the mind soul from the outside, from the spiritual outside. What rules in it, what we today call the consciousness soul, can be found in the way that Aristotle looks up to the divine, which works into the human being from the outside and spiritualizes the two soul members, the sentient soul and the mind or feeling soul. Aristotle calls this the “nous”. What Aristotle calls the Nous is what was felt at that time as an external spirit. The Nous is experienced in two ways: in the sentient soul and in the mind or feeling soul, as a stimulator of the sentient soul (Nous poietikos), and as a stimulator of the mind or feeling soul (Nous pathetikos). Here we have something from the ancient traditions of the Greek mysteries that is coming to us again today from spiritual research.

Aristotle's psychology was then used in the Middle Ages to delve into Catholic truths of revelation. However, an actual teaching of the I, as it arises from the perception of the I in the consciousness soul, is not included in Aristotle's psychology. But it would be good for our present time if it were to take up a slightly different concept of Aristotle and incorporate it into its conceptual world. Our entire conceptual world lacks a concept that Aristotle had and which, if it were understood, would be enough to simply sweep away what modern Darwinism asserts with its natural philosophy.

Philosophy has lost this concept. Aristotle is aware that, in the case of humans, we are initially dealing with what we call the animal nature of man, and Aristotle certainly speaks of this animal nature of man and its similarity to the animal nature in the animal kingdom. However, Aristotle speaks differently of the animal nature of man than of the animal nature of animals. Aristotle certainly speaks of the soul in animals, but he is clear about the fact that although this soul of animals is still present in the entire human organization, it undergoes something there that it must undergo through the penetration of the animal soul with the Nous. And this penetration of the animal soul with the Nous is what Aristotle refers to with a term that has been little understood. This is evident from the way in which it has been translated in the usual philosophical histories and translations of Aristotle. . This is a concept that is extremely difficult to convey today because it has not been further developed. If we want to describe it, we can say something like the following would convey the concept: something of the soul is horrified by something higher, so that what happens to the animal soul through the nous of Aristotle is what one could call a horror, a conquest of the violence of the animal soul by the nous. But only through this is the human soul brought forth from the animal soul in a metamorphosis. And once this concept is grasped again, then one will indeed understand the relationship between the human and the animal in a corresponding way in terms of natural philosophy.

I have presented some of the ideas that were passed down philosophically throughout the Middle Ages and preserved into modern times and used to justify the Catholic Church's revelation. I have tried to characterize this with a few terms. These are only a few selected things. I wanted to pick this out because I wanted to give you an idea of the fact that it is not so easy to grasp the meaning of the Aristotelian concepts precisely and succinctly, since today's concepts no longer coincide with Aristotle's concepts. Even in the Middle Ages, the philosophers who understood him had the greatest difficulty in saving him from misunderstandings. While the Greek word nous was correctly translated as intellectus agens, the pantheistic philosophers of Arabism made the wildest leaps with concepts that can only be correctly interpreted if one sees their full significance for human nature and which are terribly distorted if one reads into them a nebulous pantheism.

If we now turn to the second epoch of philosophical development, as indicated, it can of course only be adequately characterized if we show the whole course of philosophical development from the first wrestling of Aristotle, then show how in German philosophy, in Leibniz and Wolff, a remarkable elaboration of this struggle came about, and how, in Kantianism, a skepticism arose out of opposition to Wolffianism. It would be necessary to show this if one wants to characterize the struggle of thought of Western humanity, if one wants to understand the triumvirate of Fichte, Schelling and Hegel from the perspective of German philosophy, if one wants to have an idea of what Fichte, Schelling and Hegel attempted philosophically at the turn of the eighteenth to the nineteenth century. Fichte attempted to provide his philosophy of the ego out of Kantianism. However, anyone who studies the emergence of Fichteanism out of Kantianism sees that Kantianism was not the actual cause, but that the actual cause lay in Fichte's nature. Thus, I would like to characterize Fichteanism as a separate entity. In line with the now self-aware humanity, Fichte sets out to grasp the self. It is not easy to descend into this abyss. Therefore, do not think that it would ever occur to me to be harsh to those who do not understand Fichte and distort him. I understand every misunderstanding, I understand every objection, however many there may be, I understand Schopenhauer, who called Fichte a windbag and a charlatan. This can be somewhat understandable, because what one needs to understand Fichte is so infinitely deep and abysmal that one can always find it forgivable when misunderstandings arise.

Human thinking does not always behave logically towards the self, and in this regard one can sometimes encounter grandiose illogic in literature, especially in scientific literature. Even today we can see the most fantastic leaps being made where it is a matter of finding the transition from an assertion that the ego makes to the application of this assertion to the ego itself. That is the logical foundation that matters. The transition from an assertion that the ego makes to the application to the ego must be grasped. Take the old school example: a Cretan says: all Cretans are liars. — If all Cretans are liars, then it cannot be true. Therefore, what the speaker asserts can only be taken into consideration if he himself is excepted, if he is left out. The moment you apply an assertion that an ego makes to the ego itself, you can no longer even get by with formal logic. Only, all these things that are repeatedly mentioned are not understood. Where the transition is from an assertion of the ego to the ego itself, people do not realize that this is a leap.

There is a philosopher and psychologist who traces everything a person does out of desire and passion back to ordinary sensual urges, more or less. He has also written about suicides among students. He tries to show that it was not the reasons imagined by the student that drove him to suicide, but that the real reasons lie in sensual and sexual life. This philosopher and psychologist now differentiates between the motive for an action and the pretext for it in countless areas, and he says that the pretext can be something quite different from the motive, that the motive lies in the sensual life. If only this world view could realize how it appears when applied to itself, if one were to say to this psychologist: Your reasons, everything you use to prove your point, are mere pretexts. But if we look at your sensual life, at your sinful desires, we see the real motives for what you write. You have grossly characterized the transition that is not brought to consciousness.

I wanted to give you a rough example to show how people today actually have so little logic in their bodies that they do not understand the Cretan. That was an example of the lack of understanding of this sentence. I wanted to show that one enters into very special areas when one penetrates from the entire remaining sum of our world view to what is the content of our I.

But now Fichte said to himself: Within the consciousness that man has at first, nothing can actually live, there can be nothing of which man is aware without his ego being involved. Whatever objects enter this consciousness must first take hold of this ego, they must touch the ego in some way. Without the things, beings or whatever entering into a relationship with this ego, the ego cannot know anything at all of what appears in the field of vision of our consciousness. Fichte therefore said to himself: the ego must be everywhere present, therefore there is nothing that we can find within our consciousness, within our thinking organism, that can lie outside the ego. Thus, for Fichte, a thing like Kant's “thing in itself” is an un-concept. And it is easy to see that this thing in itself is an un-concept. One would have to try to imagine this thing in itself. So one should imagine that which lies outside of imagination. Can you imagine that which lies outside of your imagination? It is impossible to imagine that.

What I have said in a few words was what Fichte felt as a powerful impulse in his soul. Everything must be grasped by the tentacles of the ego, the ego is the great agent—and there can be nothing else within our experience—that must grasp everything. But then the question arises, and Fichte is aware of it: How is it that the ego constantly has things around it that it is clear it did not create itself? Nothing should enter the field of consciousness in which the ego is not involved. And yet the ego finds that there are a lot of things that it has not made. These are the fundamental points where Fichte has drawn attention to something that only modern theosophy can fully understand. He draws attention to this by saying: There is an activity of the ego that we usually overlook. In somnambulism, we have an activity that originates from the I but is not encompassed by conscious thinking. In somnambulism, we see an activity of the I that is more comprehensive, more all-encompassing than what one can initially grasp with the ordinary waking consciousness of the I. Fichte descends to an activity that is an activity of the ego but does not fall into the realm of thinking, and which can be imagined, while an 'ego in itself' cannot be imagined as it is an absurdity. But that which corresponds to the ego and is of the same nature as the ego activity is that which can also be grasped inwardly by the ego because it is of a nature more akin to the ego. Thus Fichte points to an external world of which the ego is aware that it did not make it, but in which it can still recognize itself as a comprehensive ego, as an absolute ego - in contrast to the relative ego - that it is part of this external world. In this way, Fichte points beyond the ego to the I. This is the great advance in the field of philosophy, and with this advance something has happened that goes beyond Cartesius, beyond the “cogito ergo sum”. The “cogito ergo sum” is something that proves the existence of the ego in thinking, whereas in Fichte's characterization, the existence of the ego arises from the will, and that is the essential thing. Everything that Fichte could muster of cognitive powers is compressed into the point of the ego. And that is why he was the one who could understand that everything in the world can be grasped starting from the ego.

What I have outlined here is what Fichte presented in Jena in 1793/94. If you want to understand his philosophical struggle in statu nascendi, the best way to do so is to take a look at the first version of his “Wissenschaftslehre” (Science of Knowledge), the 1794 edition, which still shows his entire philosophical struggle. Thus the philosophical horizon was established, so to speak, and the mind was raised to a certain height. The starting-point was there, the vanishing-point of the perspective was established.

The next person to stand at this point and attempt to sketch out a picture of the world was Schelling. Schelling did something that is quite understandable for anyone who can see into the essence of this matter, but which cannot be understood for our present time with the usual concepts. Schelling said to himself: Well, our great teacher Fichte — Schelling was his most brilliant student — has led us up to this point, but now the soul must be given content. Schelling had to go beyond the one-sided psychological understanding of the “I am”; he had to expand the “I am” into a world, as it were. He could only do this by showing that in the way one perceives the “I am”, one can perceive even more. He referred to the so-called “intellectual intuition”. What is this intellectual intuition? This so much misunderstood intellectual intuition is nothing more than the awareness that one can stand at the location of the “I am”, but does not have to remain there, but that one can see something that is perceived in the same way as the “I am”, and the content of this perception is present in intellectual intuition. This intellectual intuition has been very much denied.

Thus, in Schelling we have a knowledge of nature and spirit worked out in the manner of the knowledge of the ego. One must indeed have an organ for it if one wants to go into such things as those expounded by Schelling. This applies in particular to his thoughts about light. It is easy to refute everything that can be found in Schelling; it is much easier to refute him than to understand and justify him. It is the same with Hegel. It is easy to refute Hegel, but for those who want to understand Schelling and Hegel, the point is not to refute them, but to understand what they wanted. Hegel was a student of Fichte and a contemporary of Schelling. He tried, in his turn, to continue what emerged on the horizon to which Fichte had raised people, only in a different way than Schelling. Hegel did not allow for an intellectual view. He wanted to present what every person can find without an intellectual view, just by honestly and sincerely taking this point of view. It became clear to Hegel that everything that underlies a thing, a being, is given to us in the way of “I am”. Let us understand correctly what was going through Hegel's mind. He wondered why concepts and ideas should have any significance for the nature of things, correspond to any truth, if what we experience in our minds, what our minds go through in developing concepts, is not what things are originally based on, if that is not the objective way of things? So Hegel's point of view becomes one that must be characterized in such a way that one says: Man can initially approach things in such a way that he forms all kinds of opinions and thoughts about them, and then go from the opinions that he forms about external sensuality to the pure subject.

Hegel set down these thoughts in his monumental work “Phenomenology of Spirit”, published in 1807. This work was completed in 1806, at the moment when the cannon thunder of the Battle of Jena was heard around Jena. There Hegel was in Jena and wrote the last sentence. There Hegel knew how to find the way to such a point of view where everything subjective is no longer considered, where subject and object are no longer considered, but the spirit manifests itself everywhere in the objective course of things. In the ideas and concepts, the spirit has made itself identical with the inner course of things.

Those who cannot bring themselves to understand that these things must be understood in this way will not be able to understand Hegel's philosophy, Hegel's logic. For Hegel, it is a matter of excluding all “subjective reasoning”. You should not add anything to how one concept is linked to another, but rather let the concepts fit together, as they naturally grow out of one another and are linked to one another. It is a surrender to the structure of the conceptual world that Hegel's logic wants to be. How one concept develops from another is the essence of Hegelian dialectics.

To enter into Hegel's logic is to take on one of the most difficult endeavors of human thought. And that is why the usual result occurs when people tackle Hegel's logic: it is too difficult for them. And I can assure you: in the days before the critical edition of Hegel's works was published, when only the old Hegel edition was available, you could tell from the library that this edition had been read very little. The fruit of it could then be found in the lectures; the lecturers knew nothing. It is difficult to study Hegel's logic, but I would like to say a few words about what you get out of it if you study it. I can't give an overview of Hegel's philosophy today, but I can hint at what you get if you engage with it. If you have engaged with it, you have been educated to be rigorous in the application of concepts.

When you follow the steps from the abstract concept of being through the nothing, the becoming, the existence, through unity, number and measure in Hegel's logic, when you let all these concepts, which are strictly and organically structured in Hegel's logic, take effect on you, then you get into your soul that you say to yourself: Oh, how powerless much of what is said within humanity about spiritual things is. One learns to use the concept in the sense in which it really belongs in logic. That is what one gets used to through becoming acquainted with this logic. Consider how all kinds of concepts are used, picked up from our literary and scientific work. In the field of theology, something should be felt of this rigor in thinking. Here, the arbitrariness of “subjective reasoning” prevails the most, the arbitrariness of concepts that have been picked up here or there.

Hegel then moves on from the “Science of Logic” to what he calls natural philosophy. This has been much ridiculed, but little understood. If you look at things spiritually, you come from logic to natural philosophy. You should let the phenomena speak for themselves, no longer speculate, but let the phenomena express themselves as they are mirrored in the concept. Therefore, one cannot help but let nature itself speak. One must unfold the inner activity, just as one has unfolded it for logical dialectics. But this is a book with seven seals, and I can fully understand that Helmholtz – whom I admire as a natural scientist – when he read Hegel's natural philosophy, said: This is pure nonsense.

It is part of the process that one first acquires the conscientious logical-intellectual responsibility towards the spiritual facts, as one can develop it through Hegel's logic. Hegel has achieved many things that modern philosophy has no understanding for. The mechanical concepts into which one brings ordinary earthly events are to be used only for earthly processes in the sense of Hegel's natural philosophy; the finite mechanical concepts lose their meaning when we ascend to the regions of heaven. There Hegel moves from finite to absolute mechanics and shows in a thorough, astute manner how this is something completely different from what must be called Newtonian mechanics.

A great deal could be gained by wanting to understand Hegel. Of course, from the point of view of the time, his views are sometimes highly contestable, but even then one can be clear about how each individual point is meant. However, it must be clear that most of it was published from notes taken by students. I would therefore like to emphasize that from the outset one should bear in mind the principle that much of what is in it has been said differently by Hegel. Regarding what goes out into the world from notes, I can say that I myself have experienced what can come out of transcribed lectures! Nevertheless, anyone who is able to do so will recognize a great achievement in Hegel's natural philosophy.

From this outpouring of the spirit into the individual things of nature, Hegel then moves on to the spirit's return to itself. He distinguishes three areas: the “spirit in itself,” the beginning; the “spirit for itself,” the spirit that is spread out in nature and must be perceived for itself; and the “spirit in and for itself.” This is the actual philosophy of mind, the “philosophy of mind”.

From the field of political philosophy, Hegel particularly developed the philosophy of law. If you consider what has been achieved later, you can say that there is still much to be gained from this Hegelian philosophy of law. Hegel was a personality who had an intense Aristotelian sense and therefore wanted to understand everything in Aristotelian reasonability first. That is why he placed at the forefront of his philosophy of law the proposition that there is a rational starting point for all problems. It is easy to refute Hegel, even by action; someone need only do something stupid, and he has the refutation. But then you can see that Hegel is not interested in clever refutations. Hegel developed philosophy in the strictest, most disciplined thinking, and this discipline of thought can be acquired through Hegelism. It is also understandable that the height of this point of view cannot be grasped so easily. Therefore, it is understandable that the great, in many respects extraordinary poet Grillparzer, when he received Hegel's philosophy, was terribly horrified. He said:

“You may teach us the divine thinking prophetically,
but, my friend, you are surely destroying the human thinking.”

You can see that the spiritual things here are so elevated that great minds who do not understand Hegel can be excused. They need not be thought of as idiots. But it must be retorted that the greatest discipline can be found in Hegel's philosophy. The lack of this intellectual discipline can be found in all subsequent philosophers. It is painful for anyone who has a concept of this difficult thought activity to see the arbitrariness of scientific and especially philosophical literature. It is terrible what impossibilities are experienced by those who have been educated in Hegel. It is terrible what those who have studied the highest thought structures that Hegel has created must go through.

We can be sure that humanity will one day grasp what was presented yesterday in the theosophical lecture. Hegel will be forgotten, as Aristotle was. Hegel is forgotten today. What is presented today as a renewal of Hegelianism is a chapter we prefer not to talk about. Even if the intellectual struggles of the triumvirate of Fichte, Schelling and Hegel are forgotten today, the mind will have to be worked through with this intellectual struggle, just as in the Middle Ages Catholic Revelation was worked through with Aristotle. Hegel's philosophy is something that must be grasped from the starting point of our present into the near future. Those who have realized this can withstand all the devastating things that can come from the present, they can see that these devastating things are only the reverse side of what is emerging today as the future and how the seed of what must come is revealed in this reverse side.

It is truly distressing to see how quickly the level of thinking has fallen. It behoves the theosophist to cast his gaze on the fields of pure thinking. I would love to give lectures of this kind everywhere to establish a firm, secure basis for Theosophy, if only there were time and I could justify it to the necessity of Theosophy progressing more quickly.

When we approach the great theosophical truths that speak to the most fundamental human feelings, as given in spiritual science, we should be aware that we must not shirk rigorous thinking. We should be aware that there must be nothing theosophical that cannot stand up to the strictest scrutiny of a philosophical consciousness. We should make it our ideal not to say anything that cannot withstand the strictest necessity of reason.

A lecture given during the first general meeting of the Anthroposophical Society in Berlin

My dear theosophical friends! When in the year 1902, we were founding the German Section of the Theosophical Society, there were present, as most of our theosophical friends now assembled know, Annie Besant and other members of the Theosophical Society at that date – members who had been so for some time. Whilst the work of organization and the lectures were going on, I was obliged to be absent for a short time for a particular lecture of a course which I was at that time – more than ten years ago – delivering to an audience in no way belonging to the theosophical movement, and the members of which have, for the most part, not joined it. Side by side, so to say with the founding of the theosophical movement in Germany, I had during these days to deliver a particular lecture to a circle outside it; and because the course was a kind of beginning, I had used, in order to describe what I wished to say in it, a word which seemed to express this still better than the word ‘Theosophy’ – to be more in keeping with the whole circumstances and culture of our time. Thus, whilst we were founding the German Section, I said in my private lecture that what I had to impart could best be designated by the word ‘Anthroposophy’. This comes into my memory at the present moment, when all of us here assembled are going apart, and alongside of that which – justly of course – calls itself Theosophy are obliged to choose another name for our work, in the first place as an outer designation, but which at the same time may significantly express our aims, for we choose the name ‘Anthroposophy’.

If through spiritual contemplation we have gained a little insight into the inner spiritual connection of things – a connection in which necessity is often present, even if to outer observation it appears to be a matter of mere ‘chance’ – feeling may perhaps be allowed to wander back to the transition I was then obliged to make from the business of founding the German Section to my anthroposophical lecture. This may be specially permissible today when we have before us the Anthroposophical Society as a movement going apart from the Theosophical Society. In spite of the new name no change will take place with regard to what has constituted the spirit of our work, ever since that time. Our work will go on in the same spirit, for we have not to do with a change of cause, but only with a change of name, which has become a necessity for us. But perhaps the name is for all that rather suitable to our cause, and the mention of feeling with regard to the fact of ten years ago, may remind us that the new name may really suit us very well. The spirit of our work – will remain the same. It is really that which at bottom we must call the essence of our cause. This spirit of our work is also that which claims our best powers as human beings, so far as we feel ourselves urged to belong to this spiritual movement of ours. I say, “ours best power as human beings” because people at the present time are not yet very easily inclined to accept that which – be it as Theosophy or Anthroposophy – has to be introduced into the spiritual and mental life of progressive humanity.

We may say “has to be introduced” for the reason that one who knows the conditions of the progressive spiritual life of humanity, gains from the perception of them, the knowledge that this theosophical or anthroposophical spirit is necessary to healthy spiritual and mental life. But it is difficult to bring into men’s minds, in let us say a plain dry way, what the important point is. It is difficult and we can understand why. For people who come straight from the life of the present time, in which all their habits of thought are deeply connected with a more materialistic view of things, will at first naturally find it very difficult to feel themselves at home with the way in which the problems of the universe are grappled with by what may be called the theosophical or anthroposophical spirit. But it has always been the case that the majority of people have in a certain sense followed individuals who make themselves, in a very special way, vehicles of spiritual life. It is true the most various gradations are to be found within the conception of the world that now prevails; but one fact certainly stands out as the result of observing these ideas – that a large proportion of contemporary humanity follows – even when it does so unconsciously – on the one hand certain ideas engendered by the development of natural science in the last few centuries, or on the other hand a residuum of certain philosophical ideas. And on both sides – it may be called pride or may appear as something else – people think that there is something ‘certain’, something that seems to be built on good solid foundations, contained in what natural science has offered, or, if another kind of belief has been chosen, in what this or that philosophical school has imparted.

In what flows from the anthroposophical or theosophical spirit, people are apt to find something more or less uncertain, wavering – something which cannot be proved. In this connection the most various experiences may be made. For instance, it is quite a common experience that a theosophical or anthroposophical lecture may be held somewhere on a given subject. Let us suppose the very propitious case (which is comparatively rare) of a scientific or philosophical professor listening to the lecture. It might very easily happen that after listening to it he formed an opinion. In by far the greatest number of cases he would certainly believe that it was a well founded, solid opinion, indeed to a certain degree an opinion which was a matter of course. Now in other fields of mental life it is certainly not possible, after hearing a lecture of one hour on a subject, to be able to form an opinion about that subject. But in relation to what theosophy or anthroposophy has to offer, people are very apt to arrive at such a swift judgment, which deviates from all the ordinary usages of life. That is to say, they will feel they are entitled to such an opinion after a monologue addressed to themselves, perhaps unconsciously, of this kind, “You are really a very able fellow. All your life you have been striving to assimilate philosophical – or scientific – conceptions; therefore you are qualified to form an opinion about questions in general, and you have now heard what the man who was standing there, knows.” And then this listener (it is a psychological fact, and one who can observe life knows it to be so) makes a comparison and arrives at the conclusion, “It is really fine, the amount you know, and the little he knows.”

He actually forms an opinion, after a lecture of an hour’s length, not about what the lecturer knows, but very frequently about what the listener thinks he does not know, because it was not mentioned in the hour’s lecture. Innumerable objections would come to nothing, if this unconscious opinion were not formed. In the abstract, theoretically, it might seem quite absurd to say anything as foolish as I have just said – foolish not as an opinion, but as a fact. Yet although people do not know it, the fact is a very widely spread one with regard to what proceeds from theosophy or anthroposophy. In our time there is as yet little desire really to find out that what comes before the public as theosophy or anthroposophy, at least as far as it is described here, has nothing to fear from accurate, conscientious examination by all the learning of the age; but has everything to fear from science which is really only one-third science – I will not even say one-third – one-eighth, one-tenth, one-twelfth, and perhaps not even that. But it will take time before mankind is induced to judge that which is as wide as the world itself, by the knowledge which has been gained outwardly on the physical plane. In the course of time, it will be seen that the more it is tested with all the scientific means possible and by every individual science, the more fully will true theosophy, true anthroposophy be corroborated. And the fact will also be corroborated that anthroposophy comes into the world, not in any arbitrary way, but from the necessity of the historical consciousness.

One who really wishes to serve the progressive evolution of humanity, must draw what he has to give from the sources from which the progressive life of mankind itself flows. He may not follow an ideal arbitrarily set up, and steer for it just because he likes it; but in any given period, he must follow the ideal of which he can say, “It belongs especially to this time.” The essence of Anthroposophy is intimately bound up with the nature of our time; of course not with that of our immediate little present, but with the whole age in which we live. The next four lectures,¹ and all the lectures which I have to deliver in the next few days, will really deal with the ‘essence of Anthroposophy’. Everything which I shall have to say about the nature of the Eastern and Western Mysteries, will be an amplification of ‘essence of Anthroposophy’. At the present time I will point out the character of this ‘essence’, by speaking of the necessity through which Anthroposophy has to be established in our time. But once again I do not wish to start from definitions or abstractions, but from facts, and first of all from a very particular fact. I wish to start from the fact of a poem, once – at first I will only say ‘once’ – written by a poet. I will read this poem to you, at first only a few passages, so that I may lay stress on the point I wish to make.

The god of love speaks softly to my inmost heart
In deep words of yearning,
He speaks of marvellous things,
Which throw my thoughts into a whirl;
So flattering is everything he says.
And as I hearken and delude myself,
I strive to repeat what I hear;
It is but lost labour.
It is beyond my power.

After the poet has enlarged further on the difficulty of expressing what the god of love says to him, he describes the being he loves in the following words:

At the sight of her,
Breezes from Paradise seem gently to fan me.
Love itself gives her that smile,
And what her eyes say is no lie.

It appears to be quite obvious that the poet was writing a love-poem. And it is quite certain that if this poem were to be published somewhere anonymously now—it might easily be a modern poem by one of the better poets—people would say. “What a pearl he must have found, to describe his beloved in such wonderful verses”. For the beloved one might well congratulate herself on being addressed in the words:

At the sight of her,
Breezes from Paradise seem gently to fan me.
Love itself gives her that smile,
And what her eyes say is no lie.

The poem was not written in our time. If it had been and a critic came upon it, he would say: “How deeply felt is this direct, concrete living relation. How can a man, who writes poems as only the most modern poets can when they sing from the depths of their souls, how can such a man be able to say something in which no mere abstraction, but a direct, concrete presentment of the beloved being speaks to us, till she becomes almost a palpable reality.”

A modern critic would perhaps say this. But the poem did not originate in our time, it was written by Dante.²

Now a modern critic who takes it up will perhaps say: “The poem must have been written by Dante when he was passionately in love with Beatrice (or someone else), and here we have another example of the way in which a great personality enters into the life of actuality urged by direct feeling, far removed from all intellectual conceptions and ideas.”

Perhaps there might even be a modern critic who would say: “People should learn from Dante how it is possible to rise to the highest celestial spheres, as in the Divine Comedy, and nevertheless be able to feel such a direct living connection between one human being and another.” It seems a pity that Dante has himself given the explanation of this poem, and expressly says who the woman is of whom he writes the beautiful words:

At the sight of her,
Breezes from Paradise seem gently to fan me.
Love itself gives her that smile,
And what her eyes say is no lie.

Dante has told us – and I think no modern critic will deny that he knew what he wanted to say – that the ‘beloved one’, with whom he was in such direct personal relations, was none other than Philosophy.

And Dante himself says that when he speaks of her eyes, that what they say is no untruth, he means by them the evidence for truth; and by the ‘smile’, he means the art of expressing what truth communicates to the soul; and by ‘love’ or ‘amor’, he means scientific study, the love of truth. And he expressly says that when the beloved personality, Beatrice, was taken away from him and he was obliged to forego a personal relation, the woman Philosophy drew near his soul, full of compassion, and more human than anything else that is human. And of this woman Philosophy he could use these words:

At the sight of her,
Breezes from Paradise seem gently to fan me.
Love itself gives her that smile,
And what her eyes say is no lie.

—feeling in the depths of his soul that the eyes represent the evidence for truth, the smile is that which imparts truth to the soul, and love is scientific study.

One thing is obviously impossible in the present day. It is not possible that a modern poet should quite honestly and truly address philosophy in such directly human language. For if he did so, a critic would soon seize him by the collar and say. “You are giving us pedantic allegories.” Even Goethe had to endure having his allegories in the second part of Faust taken in very bad part in many quarters. People who do not know how times change, and that our souls grow into them with ever fresh vitality have no idea that Dante was just one of those who were able to feel as concrete, passionate, personal a relation, directly of a soul-nature, towards the lady Philosophy as a modern man can only feel towards a lady of flesh and blood. In this respect, Dante’s times are over, for the woman Philosophy no longer approaches the modern soul as a being of like nature with itself, as a being of flesh and blood, as Dante approached the lady Philosophy. Or would the whole honest truth be expressed (exceptions are of course out of the reckoning), if it were said today, deliberately that philosophy was something going about like a being of flesh and blood, to which such a relation was possible that its expression could really not be distinguished from ardent words of love addressed to a being of flesh and blood? One who enters into the whole relation in which Dante stood to philosophy, will know that that relation was a concrete one, such an one is only imagined nowadays as existing between man and woman.

Philosophy in the age of Dante appears as a being whom Dante says he loves. If we look round a little, we certainly find the word ‘philosophy’ coming to the surface of the mental and spiritual life of the Greeks, but we do not find there what we now call definitions or representations of philosophy. When the Greeks represent something, it is Sophia not Philosophia. And they represent her in such a way, that we feel her to be literally a living being. We feel the Sophia to be as literally a living being as Dante feels philosophy to be. But we feel her everywhere in such a way – and I ask you to go through the descriptions which are still existing – that we, so to say, feel her as an elemental force, as a being who acts, a being who interposes in existence through action. Then from about the fifth century after the foundation of Christianity onwards, we find that Philosophia begins to be represented, at first described by poets in the most various guises, as a nurse, as a benefactress, as a guide, and so on. Then somewhat later painters etc. begin to represent her, and then we may go on to the time called, the age of scholasticism in which many a philosopher of the Middle Ages, really felt it to be a directly human relation when he was aware of the fair and lofty lady Philosophia actually approaching him from the clouds; and many a philosopher of the Middle Ages would have been able to send just the same kind of deep and ardent feelings to the lady Philosophia floating towards him on clouds, as the feelings of which we have just heard from Dante. And one who is able to feel such things even finds a direct connection between the Sistine Madonna, floating on the clouds, and the exalted lady, Philosophia.

I have often described how in very ancient periods of human development, the spiritual conditions of the universe were still perceptible to the normal human faculty of cognition. I have tried to describe how there was a primeval clairvoyance, how in primeval times all normally developed people were able, owing to natural conditions, to look into the spiritual world. Slowly and gradually that primitive clairvoyance became lost to human evolution, and our present conditions of knowledge took their place. This happened by slow degrees, and the conditions in which we are now living – which as it were represent a temporary very deep entanglement in the material kind of perception – also come by slow degrees. For such a spirit as Dante, as we gather from the description he gives in the Divine Comedy, it was still possible to experience the last remnants of a direct relation of spiritual worlds – to experience them as it were in a natural way. To a man of the present day it is mere foolish nonsense to except him to believe that he might first, like Dante, be in love with a Beatrice, and might afterwards be involved in a second love-affair with Philosophy, and that these two were beings of quite similar nature, the Beatrice of flesh and blood, and Philosophy.

It is true I have heard that it was said that Kant was once in love, and someone became jealous because he loved Metaphysics, and asked “Meta what?” – but it is certainly difficult to introduce into the modern life of the spirit enough understanding to enable people to feel Dante’s Beatrice and Philosophy as equally real and actual. Why is this? Just because the direct connection of the human soul with the spiritual world has gradually passed over into our present condition. Those who have often heard me speak, know how highly I estimate the philosophy of the nineteenth century; but I will not even mention it as possible, that anyone could pour forth his feelings about Hegel’s Logic in the words:

At the sight of her,
Breezes from Paradise seem gently to fan me.
Love itself gives her that smile,
And what her eyes say is no lie.

I think it would be difficult to say this about Hegel’s Logic. It would even be difficult, although more possible, with regard to the intellectual manner in which Schopenhauer contemplates the world. It would certainly be easier in this case, but even then it would still be difficult to gain any concrete idea or feeling that philosophy approaches man as a concrete being in the way in which Dante here speaks of it. Times have changed. For Dante, life within the philosophic element, within the spiritual world, was a direct personal relation – as personal as any other which has to do with what is today the actual or material. And strange though it seems, because Dante’s time is not very far removed from our own, it is nevertheless true, that for one who is able to observe the spiritual life of humanity, it follows quite as a matter of course for him to say: “People are trying nowadays to know the world; but when they assume that all that man is, has remained the same throughout the ages, their outlook does not really extend much further than the end of their noses.” For even as late as Dante’s time, life in general, the whole relation of the human soul to spiritual world, was different. And if any philosopher is of opinion that the relation which he may have with the spiritual world through Hegel’s or Schopenhauer’s philosophy, is the only possible one, it means nothing more than that a man may still be really very ignorant.

Now let us consider what we have been describing – namely, that on the transition from the Graeco-Roman civilisation to our fifth period, that part of the collective being of man which we call the intellectual soul, or soul of the higher feelings, which was specially developed during the Graeco-Roman period, was evolved on into the self-conscious soul, during the development which has been going on up to the present. How then in this concrete case of philosophy does the transition from the Graeco-Roman to our modern period come before us – i.e., the transition from the period of the intellectual soul to that of the self-conscious soul? It appears in such a form that we clearly understand that during the development of the intellectual soul, or soul of the higher feelings, man obviously still stands in such a relation to the spiritual worlds connected with his origin, that a certain line of separation is still drawn between him and those spiritual worlds. Thus the Greek confronted his Sophia, i.e. pure wisdom, as if she were a being so to say standing in a particular place and he facing her. Two beings, Sophia and the Greek, facing each other, just as if she were quite an objective entity which he can look at, with all the objectivity of the Greek way of seeing things. But because he was still living in the intellectual soul, or soul of the higher feelings, he has to bring into expression the directly personal relation of his consciousness to that objective entity. This has to take place in order to prepare the way gradually for a new epoch, that of the self-conscious soul.

How will the self-conscious soul confront Sophia? In such a way that it brings the ego into a direct relation with Sophia, and expresses, not so much the objective being of Sophia, as the position of the ego in relation to the self-conscious soul, to this Sophia. “I love Sophia” was the natural feeling of an age which still had to confront the concrete being designated as Philosophy; but yet was the age which was preparing the way for the self-conscious soul, and which, out of the relation of the ego to the self-conscious soul, on which the greatest value had to be placed, was working towards representing Sophia as simply as everything else was represented. It was so natural that the age which represented the intellectual soul, or soul of the higher feelings, and which was preparing the self-conscious soul, should bring into expression the relation to philosophy. And because things are expressed only by slow degrees, they were prepared during the Graeco-Roman period. But we also see this relation of man to Philosophia developed externally up to a certain point, when we have before us pictorial representations of philosophy floating down on clouds, and later, in Philosophia’s expression (even if she bears another name), a look showing kindly feeling, once again expressing the relation to the self-conscious soul.

It is the plain truth that it was from a quite human personal relation, like that of a man to a woman, that the relation of man to philosophy started in the age when philosophy directly laid hold of the whole spiritual life of progressive human evolution. The relation has cooled: I must ask you not to take the words superficially, but to seek for the meaning behind what I am going to say. The relation has indeed cooled – sometimes it has grown icy cold. For if we take up many a book on philosophy at the present day, we can really say that the relation which was so ardent [passionate] in the days when people looked upon philosophy as a personal being, has grown quite cool, even in the case of those who are able to struggle through to the finest possible relation to philosophy. Philosophy is no longer the woman, as she was to Dante and other who lived in his times. Philosophy nowadays comes before us in a shape that we may say: “The very form in which it confronts us in the nineteenth century in its highest development, as a philosophy of ideas, conceptions, objects, shows us that part in the spiritual development of humanity has been played out.”

In reality it is deeply symbolic when we take up Hegel’s philosophy, especially the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences, and find as the last thing in this nineteenth-century book, a statement of the way in which philosophy interprets itself. It has understood everything else; finally, it grasps itself. What is there left for it to understand now? It is the symptomatic expression of the fact that philosophy has come to an end, even if there are still many questions to be answered since Hegel’s days. A thorough-going thinker, Richard Wahle,³ has brought this forward in his book, The Sum-Total of Philosophy and Its Ends, and has very ably worked out the thesis that everything achieved by philosophy may be divided up amongst the various separate departments of physiology, biology, aesthetics, etc., and that when this is done, there is nothing left of philosophy. It is true that such books overshoot the mark but they contain a deep truth, i.e., that certain spiritual movements, have their day and period, and that, just as a day has its morning and evening, they have their morning and evening in the history of human evolution.

We know that we are living in an age when the Spirit-Self is being prepared, that although we are still deeply involved in the development of the self-conscious soul, the evolution of the Spirit-Self is preparing. We are living in the period of the self-conscious soul, and looking towards the preparation of the age of the Spirit-Self, in much the same way as the Greek lived in the epoch of the intellectual soul, or soul of the higher feelings, and looked towards the dawning of the self-conscious soul. And just as the Greek founded philosophy, which in spite of Paul Deussen⁴ and others first existed in Greeks, just as the Greek founded it during the unfolding of the intellectual soul, or soul of the higher feelings, when man was still directly experiencing the lingering influence of the objective Sophia, just as philosophy then arose and developed in such a way that Dante could look upon it as a real concrete, actual being, who brought him consolation after Beatrice had been torn from him by death, so we are living now in the midst of the age of the self-conscious soul, are looking for the dawn of the age of the Spirit-Self, and know that something is once more becoming objective to man, which however is carrying forward through the coming times that which man has won while passing through the epoch of the self-conscious soul.

What is it that has to be evolved? What has to come to development is the presence of a new Sophia. But man has learnt to relate this Sophia to his self-conscious soul, and to experience her as directly related to man’s being. This is taking place during the age of the self-conscious soul. Thereby this Sophia has become the being who directly enlightens human beings. After she has entered into man, she must go outside him taking with her his being, and representing it to him objectively once more. In this way did Sophia once enter the human soul and arrive at the point of being so intimately bound up with it that a beautiful love-poem, like that of Dante’s could be made about her; Sophia will again become objective, but she will take with her that which man is, and represent herself objectively in this form – now not merely as Sophia, but as Anthroposophia – as the Sophia who, after passing through the human soul, through the being of man, henceforth bears that being within her, and thus stands before enlightened man as once the objective being Sophia stood before the Greeks. This is the progress of the history of human evolution in relation to the spiritual facts under consideration.

And now I leave it to all those, who wish to examine the matter very minutely, to see how it may also be shown in detail from the destiny of Sophia, Philosophia and Anthroposophia, how humanity evolves progressively through the soul principles which we designate the intellectual soul (the soul of the higher feelings), the self-conscious soul and the Spirit-Self. People will learn how deeply established in the collective being of man is that which we have in view through our Anthroposophy. What we receive through anthroposophy is the essence of ourselves, which first floated towards man in the form of a celestial goddess with whom he was able to come into relation which lived on as Sophia and Philosophia, and which man will again bring forth out of himself, putting it before him as the fruit of true self-knowledge in Anthroposophy. We can wait patiently till the world is willing to prove how deeply founded down to the smallest details is what we have to say.

For it is the essence of Theosophy or Anthroposophy that its own being consists of what is man’s being, and the nature of its efficacy is that man receives and discovers from Theosophy or Anthroposophy what he himself is, and has to put it before himself because he must exercise self-knowledge.

• 1. The Mysteries of the East and of Christianity, Berlin, 3rd, 4th, 5th, 7th February 1913 [PC]
• 2. Poem number 61 in Dante’s Rime {note from the book Isis Mary Sophia}
• 3. Richard Wahle (1857-1935) was professor of philosophy at the Universities of Czernowitz (in Western Ukraine) and Vienna.
• 4. Paul Jakob Deussen (1845-1919) was a German professor of philosophy at University of Kiel and academic researcher of the history and cultures, languages, and literature of the Indian subcontinent.

Dear Attendees!

When any worldview asserts itself – be it a more materialistic-intellectual or an idealistic-spiritual worldview – it can be said that such a worldview has an opponent on the corresponding opposite side, or even just on a side that is more or less turned away from it, and that it is fought from that side. But of the spiritual scientific world view, as I have been developing it from this place for years now, it can be said that it is fought more or less by all of these world views, whether they lean more towards the idealistic-spiritual direction or the materialistic-realistic direction. The fact that it still has opponents from all sides today is largely due to the fact that the most essential basic characteristics of this spiritual scientific worldview are misunderstood and then judged or condemned before one has actually got to know them.

This spiritual-scientific worldview is misunderstood not only because of what it asserts, but above all from many sides because of certain fabrications that are made about it, because of certain false ideas that are formed about it. I have often emphasized this here, and I will have to ask you again today to allow me to say things that have already been said in some small details, but which are necessary to tie in so that new points of view can be developed.

For example, it is widely believed that spiritual science does not want to stand on the standpoint of firmly established scientific knowledge, which has rushed from triumph to triumph in recent centuries. But this is quite a mistake! For spiritual science, when it is represented from its true foundations, is entirely based on the point of view that says: everything that scientific knowledge has brought us must today be regarded as a first starting point for any, including the spiritual scientific, world view.

I have often said here that I would not say a word from the spiritual-scientific point of view if I were not aware that none of the scientifically justified truths would be contradicted by spiritual science.

First of all, there are two things to be emphasized if one wants to speak of the opposition of those who say: We stand on the firm ground of natural science, and we must fight against this amateurish intervention from an authoritative, spiritual-scientific point of view. In this connection two things must be considered. Firstly, that such people can either stand on the ground from which they say: everything that can be the subject of scientific observation and that may be taken into account when a scientific world picture is being built up, is the experience of natural science, that is, what natural science has brought.

Another direction, which arises from its point of view and is opposed to this humanistic direction, is that which says: Of course, one can admit that behind the facts that natural science establishes for the sensory world, there are still other spiritual facts or spiritual beings to be sought; but the human capacity for knowledge is not at all predisposed to recognize anything of this world of existence hidden behind the sensory world.

And from these two points of view, spiritual science is then fought against, as if from its side it itself somehow appeared antagonistic, appeared opposed to these two views, insofar as these two views are positive. But it does not do that at all! That it does not do that at all will be clear from some of the reflections of this evening.

On the other hand, however, spiritual science, as it is meant here, also has an opponent, an opponent who often does not present himself as its opponent, but who in many respects is perhaps even an honest opponent, as honest as the one just mentioned. And this other opponent of spiritual science, as it is meant here, is that which is brought into the world in terms of ideas and fantasies in a large number of unclear minds under all kinds of mystical names, and sometimes also under all kinds of mystical fraud. On this side, dear attendees, there are, above all, people who can count on such listeners and confidants who, in blind faith, accept everything that is somehow chattered about the spiritual world, and who accept it all the more willingly when such chatter occurs, usually in an amateurish way, of course, with a judgmental attitude towards strict science, which often appears all the more snobbish the less the person in question has taken in the denier of this strict science into his soul.

Then there are those who make all kinds of assertions that are supposed to come from the spiritual world, and who pursue quite different purposes with them, in that they first want to befuddle people with all kinds of assertions from the spiritual world so that they can then use them as tools for whatever purposes they have in mind.

Perhaps it will be possible, if time permits, to talk about this kind of opposition to spiritual science at the end of the lecture. This opposition is not harmless because people who are often quite honestly striving for science either lack the opportunity or the ability to engage with spiritual science and therefore lump together true spiritual science with nebulous mystical ravings, superstitious ideas, and the delusions of such ambiguous minds.

The question may still be raised as to why spiritual science is being fought by the more or less materialistically colored world view, which also believes that it stands on the firm ground of natural science.

This, esteemed attendees, is something that must indeed be seriously considered, considered for a very specific reason. From this side, from the more or less materialistically colored world view, which believes that it is standing on the firm ground of natural science, it will be emphasized again and again that spiritual science claims all sorts of things that cannot be understood, while the materialistically colored world view only says what can be observed everywhere, so to speak, what everyone can understand.

Spiritual science, however, does not want to deny the latter; and that is why it is so difficult for it to penetrate precisely against this objection. A materialistically colored worldview, such as the one I mentioned yesterday as that of de La Mettrie in his “Man a Machine”, such materialistic worldviews can be understood extremely easily. Everything about them is extremely plausible, obvious, clear. That is why they find such willing adherents in our time. And then such worldviews often spread the opinion that their clear views are denied by spiritual science.

Just as de La Mettrie can be described as the father of the newer, more materialistically-oriented positivism, how can spiritual science appreciate something like what de La Mettrie says in his book 'The Human Machine' to prove how everything of a spiritual nature is dependent on material things, how everything of a spiritual nature is conditioned by material things? De La Mettrie says:

“What power does a meal have over us? Joy awakens in a sad heart; it passes to the souls of the fellow diners and is expressed in those charming songs in which the French excel.”

No one with a humanistic worldview would dream of doubting such a palpable truth as is expressed here. And whether such a palpable truth is expressed in a coarse, boorish manner, as here, or whether it is expressed in a somewhat more refined way, is ultimately irrelevant!

This same de La Mettrie says, for example: Man's mental qualities, everything he reveals of his soul to the outside world, are so dependent on the mechanism of his body that one can say: If only some little thing in the brain of Erasmus or of Fontenelle – a little thing that cannot even be proved anatomically – had been different, then Erasmus and Fontenelle might have become blockheads instead of geniuses!

These things are always mentioned, with the intention of making it appear as if spiritual science could somehow be refuted by them! Spiritual science will readily admit this; it will only have to consider such a crude truth and the somewhat finer truth lying on the same board, as when one says, for example: It could have been much worse; let us assume that Erasmus, the one who should have become Erasmus, had been killed as a five-year-old boy by a bandit, then of course his soul would have been able to develop even less than if only a cog in his brain had been wrong! Or even before he was born, his mother would have been killed by a bandit!

All the things that are put forward from that side cannot be refuted at all; they even stand out because they are taken for granted, but it can still remain a small thing to keep mentioning them and to awaken the belief as if the spiritual scientist were so foolish that he could not admit such “tangible” things.

But the humanities scholar, he knows, dear attendees, that – [just as] such assertions are true, [just as] well-founded they are – that they are, on the other hand, just as well contestable, of course! – Because that which one can say with regard to the external world, can combine with the mind, can be totally wrong on the other hand! I have often repeated here what the unforgettable Vincenz Knauer said against materialism. He said: Just do the test and lock up a wolf, lock him up. After you can be sure that everything [he had in terms of matter was pure wolf matter], feed him only lamb meat. One will convince oneself that, even though he will have rebuilt his body out of lamb, one will convince oneself that, even though he will have rebuilt his body out of lamb, the wolf will not have become a lamb!

It is a matter of the fact that what de La Mettrie says about the influence of a meal on the soul is certainly very true; it is absolutely true. But assertions that are supposed to have the strength to support a worldview are likely to gradually merge into others, or even into their opposite; and that, when viewed from the other side, their opposite can be asserted just as well.

I had to presuppose this, especially today, when it will be a matter of entering, from a certain point of view, the path that spiritual scientific research takes. This path is initially characterized by the fact that, in its further pursuit, it leads the spiritual scientist to confirm certain scientific findings even more than the natural scientist himself can confirm them today.

Now I have often explained here that the path that spiritual research has to take is an entirely inward one; that although this spiritual science wants to be as scientific, as strictly scientific as any natural science, the path it has to take because it does not deal with the sensory world but with the spiritual, that this path must be a purely inward one. I shall not go into the exact nature of this inner path today; I have done so here often enough, and the same thing cannot be repeated over and over again. I must refer you to what is written in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds”, where it is described in detail what the soul has to do with itself if it wants to go the way that awakens certain dormant powers in it, which can be called spiritual eyes and spiritual ears, to use these Goethean expressions. It describes the development the soul must undergo to acquire such spiritual eyes and ears, in order to be able to see into a spiritual world just as the senses can see into the world of the senses.

But when everything that is needed for the soul to find the way that has just been indicated will come, then it will be found that the essential part of it is that thinking, and then imagining, is treated in a different way than this thinking, this imagining, is treated in ordinary life. In ordinary life, man forms ideas about the external world, and he is intent on this – and must be intent on this, for only in this way can he stand firmly in the external world and in practical life – he is intent on this and must be intent on this, in his ideas to have images of what is outside as reality, inwardly awakened images.

But something else is also necessary. Not only do the images have to be formed within us, but these images, which the human being forms as representations of reality in his environment, must - if I may use an expression that, although it does not accurately indicate the fact, allows us to communicate - these images must remain in the inner life of the human being: memory and recollection must be present. If the images did not stick, if what we imagine passes by without leaving a trace [in the form of memories], we would not have our continuous ego image, which must accompany us from the time we can remember back to our death and which must remain undisturbed. We only have this idea of self, we can only carry it with us, if the ideas we form are not just momentary, present experiences, but if they remain in our inner life, if they can be brought out of this inner life.

Now the essential thing about the first inner undertaking, the first inner activity that the spiritual researcher has to undertake with his own soul, is that this imagining, which is quite right for ordinary outer life, is changed, so that it occurs in the soul in a completely different way than it occurs in ordinary life. So in order to really recognize the spiritual, something must happen to the soul that arranges the life of ideas quite differently than it is in ordinary life.

Now, I have often emphasized that the point is for the spiritual researcher, in order to find his way into the spiritual world, to make a plan for himself, that it is a matter of making certain thoughts - the external reality of which is not important at first, they can be pictorial thoughts, symbolic thoughts - present in his soul. This is called 'meditation'; the soul's entire activity is concentrated on a thought-content that is placed arbitrarily in the soul, which one can survey, in which therefore no subconscious feeling, unconscious feeling driving forces can play a part, but a content that one can survey, that one places transparently clearly before the soul, is placed at the center of consciousness, moved to the center of thinking.

And then thinking must – this is a long path of practice that must be traversed, which can often take years – thinking must repeatedly return to placing this content at the center of consciousness. In this way, the entire life of the soul is concentrated – certainly, it may only last a short time, minutes during the day, for example – in this content. And in this way, little by little, I am describing what spiritual research really involves, the soul life gradually comes to separate two things that are always linked in ordinary thinking: namely, to separate the inner activity of thinking, of imagining, from the content. One must separate that, dear attendees, which one does when thinking, when visualizing – this inner activity of thinking must be completely separated from the content. So that when you place such a content at the center of your mental life, you gradually become aware: It does not depend on this content; I have only introduced this content so that I can exercise the inner activity of thinking with it.

And then I experience inwardly, now not a particular thought, now not a particular content, but the inner activity of thinking. This is less that which one otherwise calls thinking, but rather that which otherwise always remains unconscious in thinking; it is a certain activity of the will that is practiced in other thinking and imagining, a fine activity of the will. In ordinary life, in ordinary thinking, when one is thinking, one does not pay any attention to this at all. One does not pay any attention to the fact that one actually always uses one's will when one thinks, when one imagines; one does not pay attention to this. But now one experiences the fact that one exercises a fine inner will activity there. The soul becomes aware of certain powers within itself, which it otherwise exercises all the time in ordinary life, but to which it does not direct its consciousness and which remain unconscious. So that all the content of meditation can emerge from the imagination, and only this inner movement in thinking, in imagining, is inwardly grasped, so to speak. And that is what matters. Because when you continue to practise in this direction, you will have very definite experiences as you continue your search for the spiritual world. Certain experiences attach themselves to it when you have come to really separate the content and to be able to experience the mere inner activity, the activity in thinking, in imagining. Then you initially have an inner feeling as if you were now in some very vague experience. It is important - I would even say essential - to focus on these fine details if you want to know something about true spiritual scientific research.

What otherwise is the resting of thinking in the imagination can initially cease under the influence of such exercises if the goal is to be achieved, and must actually cease for certain experiences if the goal is to be achieved. One enters into an inner experience, into an inner movement. One does not feel external now - only the comparison is linked to the external - one feels as if one is groping spiritually in the darkness all around; one feels completely absorbed in the inner activity of thinking and imagining, which one has grasped. Through inner experience, one now has a certain experience; and that consists in saying to oneself: So, you have now reached the point where you live only in the activity of thinking, in the activity of imagining. First of all, one experiences that with regard to these inner experiences in the activity of thinking, in the activity of imagining, that which is otherwise the power of recollection, that which is otherwise memory, is no longer there. That is no longer there. One notices that one has entered into a completely different inner stream, that one does not experience what one now experiences as thinking activity in the same way as when one remembers something or when one otherwise thinks with reference to external objects or facts; but one notices that one is now developing thinking activity, just as one develops will activity out of habit – not a thinking, but an inner activity out of a certain fine habit, that is what one experiences inwardly now. And this inner experience has only one value, one meaning at that moment – this experience of inner activity has one meaning at the moment when one experiences it. It is also a rough comparison, but I can still use the comparison: what one experiences by separating one's inner thinking activity from one's thoughts now belongs to the momentary experience, just like eating and drinking. It is a rough comparison, but it is a comparison that illustrates everything I want to say. We cannot, when we have eaten yesterday, use yesterday's food or yesterday's drink to nourish the body today, but we have to eat and drink again today. Eating and drinking only have this momentary, present meaning. We cannot say: We eat today; and tomorrow, when we perform this activity, which [...] reminds us of our eating and drinking today, thereby also nourishing us. It is an activity – eating and drinking – that must always be repeated.

And so this inner activity of imagination is something, this inner activity of imagination is now something that has no value for a later time, but must always be evoked anew from the experience. You have to acquire the inner ability, not to remember what you have once experienced in this way, so that you can recall it, but so that you can experience it again and again from a now inner, finer habit. So that you realize that what you have now developed as an idea actually flows like dreams. Just as dreams flit by, so does this real sensing, spiritual-soul sensing, which is in an unchangeable mobility, as I have indicated.

So what do you actually notice at this moment, dear ones who are present? You notice that which can now have a shattering effect on the soul, as do many things that I have already mentioned on the occasion of the spiritual path of knowledge: you notice what it actually has to do with what we call memory, with what we call the power of remembrance. At first, we cannot use this power of recollection for spiritual knowledge. We have to let go of this power of recollection if we want to gain spiritual knowledge. And now we clearly recognize that the thinking that can be recollected – and that is all everyday thinking and must be all everyday thinking; if it is no longer everyday thinking, then one is no longer spiritually healthy – we recognize that the thinking that can be passed on to memory is directly connected to the physical body. One recognizes that the physical body really does function like a machine, albeit a more delicate one, in contributing to the thoughts we have in our daily lives in such a way that they can evoke memory.

You see, esteemed attendees, the spiritual researcher comes through an experience precisely to an affirmation of the trivial truth, which materialism claims as its own, that the thinking that is developed in everyday life is definitely conditioned by the body. Only what we have now peeled away, the inner activity, is not conditioned by the body. [It is not thinking, the activity of thinking, that is conditioned by the body, but the content of the thought is entirely dependent on the body.] The content of the thought is entirely dependent on the body.

And when some amateur spiritual scientists, or philosophically nuanced experts, come along and say: Yes, but a thought has an inner quality from which one recognizes that it cannot be absorbed into the body, that it is something other than the body, then one will say, with science that may not yet exist today – but with the ideal of science, which will one day be fulfilled, spiritual science –: there are certain materials that, when exposed to light, absorb it to a certain extent and then continue to radiate it for a while. Will these radiations now be regarded as something that is not based in matter? In the same way, when the external world, the physical, sensory external world, makes an impression on a person, and these thoughts are only retained during our lifetime, when they fluoresce, as it were, out of the physical body, these too should not be regarded as something that is spiritually alone, as something that could have significance for the eternal forces of the human soul. They are phenomena that occur in the physical matter of the human being. Just as electricity occurs in matter. Not in the denial of this justified scientific view, but in the right understanding lies what spiritual science has to do with it.

So that all philosophical talk, which is based on the observation of thoughts as they are, will never be able to say anything about the eternal powers of the human soul. Just as the fluorescence of matter, when it is removed as matter, naturally causes the fluorescence to cease, so anyone who is grounded in natural science cannot help but state the truth: when the body decays, its basis for the appearance of thoughts from the body also decays.

Only the direct evidence that arises from the fact that the otherwise unconscious thought activity, imagination, has separated itself from the thoughts themselves, has grasped itself inwardly, that initially gives the higher consciousness that one now lives in something that is really outside of the body. With the thoughts of everyday life, one does not live outside of the body. By seizing hold of the activity that one has isolated in the manner described from the content of one's thoughts, one knows that one is living with something in a sphere that is now outside of the body.

Thus, dear ones, one can never explore the eternal powers of the human soul from what a person consciously practices in relation to the physical environment and in relation to his outer life; but it is necessary that, from what a person experiences within himself in ordinary physical life, first that which can be inwardly grasped in the manner described is separated. But it is not enough for a person to go through the path just described; for by doing so, he would never come to anything other than to feel, in a sense of eternal departure, as if in a darkness of soul. So that is not enough.

What has a person actually achieved in this way? Basically, they have shed the content of thought, the thoughts themselves, and have recognized that these ideas, these thoughts, are bound to the physical, and that only the activity of imagining, the activity of thinking, is not bound to this physical.

Therefore, they must now go hand in hand – the exercises, the inner exercises that I have mentioned, in order to train the soul in the right way, must not be followed merely on their own – but they must be accompanied by other exercises. The exercises I have just characterized are actually intended to develop the life of thought, the life of imagination. One separates the activity of the will in imagining from the content of the life of imagination. These exercises must be accompanied by others that relate less to the life of thought and more to the life of the will. And just by practising the meditations – and that is usually enough; you can read more about it in my book 'How to Know Higher Worlds' – just by practising the meditations, by carrying out this daily concentration of thought, which is an inner activity of the will – a fine will activity – one practises the will in a way that is not otherwise used in ordinary life. In ordinary life, one does not do this, that one makes an original decision of the will out of oneself. So there you are already practicing a volitional activity that, so to speak, does not develop as darkly as the impulses that otherwise arise from our desires, from our wishes, or for that matter from all kinds of ideals; but you are practicing a volitional activity for which you must first equip yourself directly, which must arise from the most direct, inner resolve.

But that is not the important thing; rather, the important thing is that this activity of the will is now actually practiced with a completely different goal than the activities of the will in ordinary life. The activities of the will in ordinary life are practiced in such a way that one brings about this or that external action, that this or that happens. Isn't it true that when you will something, you want this or that to happen. But outwardly nothing should happen at all if you just want to direct your thinking in a certain direction, in a certain concentration. But inwardly something does happen; inwardly something very essential happens. What happens inwardly is that through such a volitional decision, the human being's I itself, its innermost soul essence, advances, that what is otherwise always, so to speak, the center of all volition, from which all volition emanates, the I, is now itself made the object of volition. Otherwise the I wills this or that; now one wants to transform the I with the will, to make the I into something else: The ego becomes the object, the goal of the will. And that is what matters.

These exercises can be intensified and made more effective if one starts out from the point just characterized, saying to oneself: the volition of ordinary life proceeds in such a way that one satisfies one's desires, and perhaps also pursues certain very justified ideals in the outer life. But now I will also take on something besides all that. Of course, the spiritual researcher must not step out of all the justified claims and demands of life step out of the justifiable claims and demands of life, otherwise he would become a crank and no spiritual researcher; but I will also, so to speak, take on things that do not have an external effect, that do not aim at the realization of these or those desires or ideals, but which are aimed at taking my own inner being in hand, at developing my own inner being in a way that would not otherwise develop if I did not take it in hand. For example, after I have poured, I realize that under certain circumstances I would wish for this or that: I want to consider not pursuing these desires, but rather to tame my ego and to steer it in a different direction of desire, and so on, and so on. In short, [the aim is] to develop an inner will that does not start from the ego, but that is directed precisely towards the ego, towards the development, the unfolding of the ego, towards the progress of the ego.

A will is developed that runs in the opposite direction to the ordinary will, a will that runs towards the I; while the ordinary will runs from the I. If you continue the practice in this way, after a reasonable period of time – which may be longer for some, shorter for others, and may take weeks for some and years for others, depending on their disposition – you will then you will notice that just as you have discovered the activity of the will in thinking through the treatment of the life of thinking, you will now, strangely enough, discover in the will a hidden consciousness, a real, true hidden consciousness. This is not just a figure of speech, but a statement that corresponds to reality: you discover a hidden consciousness, a constant observer of what actually develops as will activity. One really discovers now that in the self lives a higher self, a real higher self; not just as one often speaks in a figurative way of a higher self, but a real being lives there in the will. You discover this by colliding with the ego through the opposite direction of will, and now the ego becomes so objective to you, so external, so external to you, as it is otherwise always within you.

So the second, which must go hand in hand with the development of the life of thinking, and which must likewise discover consciousness, the more comprehensive thinking in the will - as one has discovered the will in thinking through the foregoing -, that is precisely an inner exercise of the will.

Both exercises must go hand in hand. And when one speaks of this, what arises in the soul, it appears to the uninitiated, who absolutely wants to remain with the obviously plausible world view with its more materialistic coloration, as a great folly. But it is there, and it can be described as an inner spectator. And what one calls an inner spectator, which speaks from the will when it is treated in the appropriate way – which you can read about in more detail in the book mentioned – is now able to brighten, really brighten, the darkness of which I spoke earlier, this darkness of the soul. And so two inner experiences are drawn together, as it were. The first is this groping experience in the realm of the movable; and the other is the survey, with the higher consciousness that one has now developed within oneself, of that which was at first dark. One illuminates for oneself that which was at first in the dark.

And now one recognizes that the refutation of materialism lies in a completely different area than where one usually looks for it! What de La Mettrie says, that some small cog, which anatomy cannot even explore, could perhaps have been just a little bit different in Erasmus, and Erasmus would have become a fool instead of a genius - that is quite right, so right that it is quite self-evident. But that is not the point; rather, the point is that the inner, finer structure of his organism, which made Erasmus Erasmus and a genius out of him, had already been created, had been made under the influence of the soul-spiritual!

So that, in our body, we initially carry something like a machine, but this machine has been made by the soul-spiritual, has been made under the influence of this soul-spiritual, which also emerges from the spiritual world and connects with what is inherited from the father and mother, as well as with what is present that has been inherited from the father and mother. Those 'cogs' in Erasmus that truly enabled him to make of his corporeality precisely that which his ingenious thoughts and ingenious creations were, the structure that was in him , these little cogs, were first made by his soul-spiritual individuality, which had descended from the spiritual world to his physical birth, and were first structured there!

If you look for the soul, the deeper soul of the human being, alongside the physical, during our physical life, you are quite wrong! You go so far astray that the spiritual researcher himself objects: Yes, what develops during your physical life, for example, as your world of thought, that is entirely dependent on your corporeality. And then, as a spiritual researcher, you are very aware of materialism insofar as it is justified. But that which is our material body is created out of spiritual power!

And it is with that, dear ones present, that which has gone before our physical existence and that which will be there after our physical existence has disintegrated, it is with that that one connects through the spiritual research path. And just as it is true that at the moment when the heat that I put into the steam engine is converted into propulsive power, the heat that is converted into propulsive power is no longer present as heat, but rather as propulsive , it is equally true that the power we have as soul and spirit before we have accepted physical existence, that this is precisely what is transformed by organizing the body, by becoming physical. And as long as we are physical, it is absorbed in the physical and can only be regained by spiritual research showing that the soul-spiritual is separated from the physical in the way described and knows itself as such soul-spiritual, living alongside the physical. One can be convinced that there was a spiritual-soul in us before it transformed into the physical – that it will be there spiritually-mentally when we have passed through the gate of death.

But it is crude spiritualism, one-sided spiritualism, to believe that on the one hand you have the matter of the body and on the other hand the spiritual, and that the two go side by side like two good comrades between birth and death.

The real process is very different. The real process is that this miracle of the human organism is actually created out of the spirit, is structured out of the spirit. And when it is structured, then it can unfold as a body. For just as it develops during ordinary external physical life through a higher fluorescence, so the eternal powers of the human soul are really only discovered through spiritual research. One cannot approach the human being philosophically and say: We point to the thoughts that have grown in the human being, and so on, and show that these thoughts are imperishable. Every sleep shows that they can be extinguished. And why should they not be extinguished as in sleep for all when the human being passes through the gate of death? In this way, one can never develop a proof of the eternal powers of the human soul. But if you want to develop a proof, win, then you have to win it on the way of spiritual research, by separating the will from the thoughts, and connecting this will, separated from the thoughts, with the thoughts that jump out like a higher consciousness from the development of the will. There you have that which goes through births and deaths.

Now I know, dearest attendees, that there are countless objections to what I have just said, as there are countless objections to spiritual research in general. And these objections are so self-evident internally, and so seemingly logical, that they must be convincing. And so, for example, someone could also raise the objection and have the opinion: The spiritual researcher is talking nonsense again; he says that the soul must be involved when a person comes into existence physically. As if it were not known through external science how a person comes into existence physically! That happens all by itself; no spiritual activity from spiritual worlds is necessary for that, that happens all by itself; natural science proves that very precisely in the doctrine of generations, in embryology and so on!

I will now use a comparison, one that can, of course, be refuted by obvious objections. But anyone who wants to think about this comparison will find it so powerful that it will overcome the purely materialistic objection alluded to here.

Let us assume that there are beings who cannot understand anything, perhaps cannot even see anything – of course it is a hypothesis, but it is a hypothesis that can be put forward after all – who cannot see how clocks are made. Let us assume that there are such beings walking around here in Stuttgart who cannot perceive how clocks are made. All the activity of making clocks and watches passes them by; they do not see it. But they see the clocks and watches; they are seen by them. They go into a watchmaker's shop, do not see how the clocks and watches are made, but they see the finished clocks and watches, the clocks and watches that have been created. Since they cannot see the clocks and watches coming into being, they will come to the conclusion that the clocks and watches come into being by themselves! That they will come together from the outside through an inner attraction of their individual parts and so on. These beings would speak in a way that is similar to the way people speak when they say: That which arises in the human being in the continuous succession of generations arises all by itself! Because what is not seen is that the spiritual forces that come from the spiritual world are involved in the deception that takes place here in the physical world. And in these spiritual forces lies that which we discover in ourselves through the paths of spiritual research just discussed.

In this way we arrive at a spiritual view of the eternal core of the human being, consisting of soul and spirit, which stands before our soul and of which we know that It inclines down from a spiritual existence and unites as a third with that which the person materially inherits from father and mother. And then one also knows what it is that passes through the gate of death in order to live again in a spiritual world.

And now possibilities arise for the spiritual researcher to speak of a structure of the human being, just as he does. You see, dear audience, when the spiritual researcher comes first and says: This person is not just made up of the physical body that the eyes can see and that ordinary science describes and explains – all that ordinary science has to say is readily admitted by spiritual research – when the spiritual researcher says: This person also has an etheric body - the spiritual researcher says: This person also has an ethereal body on them. The term is not important, it could also be called something else, there is no need to be put off by the term “ethereal body”; “ethereal” is meant quite differently from the usual ether in physics. When this is simply stated as an example - when it is said: There is a finer body living inside the coarser body and this gives rise to the idea: Now, the coarser body is just coarse, and a somewhat finer body lives in it, so a finer etheric body is woven into it, and this finer, woven-in body is just the etheric body – so one could indeed say that this is nonsense. But the spiritual researcher does not take this point of view; the spiritual researcher takes the point of view that just imagining, thinking, can be transformed in different ways, that thinking becomes such that the thinking person says: That is nonsense. But the spiritual researcher does not take this point of view; the spiritual researcher takes the point of view that precisely the imagination, the thinking, can be transformed in various ways, that thinking becomes such that the power of memory is woven out of thinking; that thinking is developed such that the imagination becomes such that it is not only experienced instantaneously, as is otherwise the case with coarse eating and drinking. And by living and moving in this thinking, which does not now lead directly to memory, but which must always be newly created, one lives in something other than the physical body; one lives in the etheric body. There the etheric body is pointed to as an experience. There it is pointed out what it is. And spiritual scientific truths are not found by simply showing physical facts in a more refined form, as spiritualism wants to do – this corruption of a true spiritual science – but by showing what the spiritual world is in inner experiences, which, however, also want to be inwardly experienced.

And then, when the spiritual researcher also talks about the existence of a so-called “astral body” in addition to this etheric body, well, then the objections come flying in from all sides, spurred on by all the scorn. One can say, as all the fine phrases are already called, one can say: spiritual research aims at man to “astralize” himself – and so on and so on.

The people who talk like this do not even notice how the spiritual researcher quite agrees with the most foolish way in which the astral body is often spoken of: But I have to explicitly point out that by developing one's will in the way I have explained, that one then discovers in oneself a more comprehensive , a consciousness that can illuminate what is first experienced in the etheric body, and which soul darkness provides us with; and this consciousness, which is shown to be a reality, is now what is figuratively called the “astral body”, these are the inner realities, but realities that are gained in inner experience!

The world is indeed comfortable and would like to have the spiritual world in front of it as one has the material world in front of one; this is called “spirit-matter” so that one can see it with physical eyes. One can then indeed spare oneself the trouble of using one's spiritual eyes! But these ghosts are usually something quite different from real ghosts, even when, as in the majority of cases, there is more than mere fraud. It is precisely this that spiritual science needs to shake off, because it is based on strict inner experience. And in this strict inner experience, the first thing that is achieved is that the human being has the experience of being able to distinguish between another consciousness and another experience in a world of facts, to distinguish this soul from its ordinary corporeality and to live in what its eternal powers are.

When he then lives in what his eternal powers are, then he will become aware of what actually builds up his body – or let us say 'helps to build it up' so that it cannot be misunderstood. that this whole life breaks down into lives that are spent in the body between birth – or let us say conception – and death here on earth, and such lives that are spent between death and a new birth [in a spiritual world].

In what the person experiences when he feels the indicated consciousness emerging from his will, he experiences something very special. If I am to characterize what he experiences, then I must show it as a consciousness. And that is what essentially matters – not that one points out that there is something nebulous, monadic – or whatever one wants to call it – contained in man, but that it is a certain consciousness. I have also described it as consciousness; consequently, I can characterize it.

When we survey external material processes, there is the possibility, as you all know, that from certain constellations of the sun and moon today, we can predict that after a certain time a lunar eclipse or a solar eclipse will occur. This means that the realization of a future event is already present in the present event. Here we are dealing with an external realization that lives in concepts, in concepts that correspond to the laws of nature. Here we see a future event in the present event.

As the soul develops that consciousness out of the will, of which I have spoken, she actually experiences in the present physical body that which must necessarily lead to a next life on earth. What must lead to the next life on earth is experienced as truly as the future can be foreseen in the present constellation of the sun and moon. [How the future can be foreseen], so is experienced in advance that which must lead to the next earthly life. And so it is experienced that what goes through the gate of death, then lives in the spiritual world for a time, and then must come again to a new earthly life. This is experienced.

And this must be said as a general characteristic: the insights of spiritual science are not merely hinted at, but are inwardly experienced insights. Mere conceptual inner activity is transformed into direct experience. And things are experienced.

There is something important about this, very revered attendees, when we emphasize that what is, so to speak, detached from memory, that this only has a meaning for the moment, that it must be experienced again and again if it is to be there properly.

This is how it is in general with regard to the spiritual world. The spiritual world must always be experienced anew. And if someone wants to speak from the spiritual world, to characterize the facts of the spiritual world, then basically he cannot always remember and then recite them, but basically, if what he has to say is to come directly from the spiritual world, he must give it in the moment as his own experience again and again, he must bring it out of his innermost being in that moment.

Therefore, what is to be spoken of the spiritual world will have to have a somewhat different character than what is spoken in external science from mere memory. What is spoken from the spiritual world will be directly related to the present insight into the spiritual world, so that it can be described from the spiritual world. But as a result of this, dear attendees, one is also protected from falling into a kind of aberration of spiritual scientific research, namely, that one merely adheres to what has been said.

Those who stand on materialistic ground, on self-evident materialistic ground – I must emphasize this again and again – will say: Well, what the spiritual researcher claims to have developed within himself through his special development of thinking, what is it other than what we all know in psychology as hallucinations, visions and so on and so forth? What is it other than that? It is a riding-oneself-into-an-unhealthy-mental-life that is indicated as a spiritual research path!

There is another objection, which is just as foolish as it is self-evident and plausible; plausible for anyone who stands on the ground of a materialistic interpretation of psychiatric phenomena, self-evident. It is only through constantly experiencing anew that one actually knows that one is in touch with the spiritual world; because there is nothing to prove. It is not possible to prove that anything is a reality. Those people who believe that one can prove that something is a reality – I have often pointed this out here – do not understand anything about the concept of reality. You cannot prove that a whale is a reality if you cannot show its existence in the external world. Reality can only be experienced, not proven. But in the direct experience of reality, what we need to show something as reality arises vividly. And so, in the direct experience of the spiritual world, what the spiritual world is must always be experienced anew; otherwise, of course, one can indulge in all sorts of fantasies.

This relationship between logic and reality even played a trick on Kant, causing a dispute. Kant sought to eliminate the so-called proof of the existence of God by agreeing that conceptually one hundred ordinary dollars, one hundred merely imagined dollars contain exactly the same amount as one hundred real dollars – not a penny less. Of course, in concept, a hundred imagined dollars contain just as much as a hundred real dollars. But in reality, which one reaches not in concepts but in experience, a hundred real dollars mean precisely a hundred dollars more than a hundred merely imagined ones! Everyone can convince themselves of this through life!

Now, it is very easy to fall into error by saying: Yes, but does this ordinary consciousness, which is bound to our physical body, as today's explanations have sufficiently shown, does this consciousness, which leads into the spiritual world, have no connection at all? One can have such a connection – and must even have it, and it is important that one has it. It is a very important thing that, while unfolding this higher consciousness, man should always have his quite ordinary rational human being at his side, so that he knows: as he otherwise looks at external objects that are before him and which he can neither imagine nor fantasize, he should look at his quite ordinary human being as he stands in the physical-sensual world; and while one dwells in the spiritual world, one must never for a moment lose sight of the quite ordinary physical man with his memory-producing thinking, with his will, which arises from desires, ideals, and so on. That is the characteristic. And anyone who understands this will immediately understand the truly foolish nature of the materialistic psychiatric objections that speak of an 'unhealthy mental life' in relation to spiritual research endeavors.

What happens when you enter into an unhealthy mental life, an abnormal mental life, a morbid consciousness? Then the consciousness, which may have been healthy before – I say “may” have been healthy, if it is not completely healthy but perhaps has certain aptitudes, these will develop the morbid, abnormal consciousness – then they become morbid and can no longer develop the healthy soul life, cannot develop one out of the other. For, to put it trivially, one cannot be a fool and healthy at the same time, otherwise one would no longer be a fool! But what is really necessary for proper spiritual research is that the person, so to speak, really knows himself as a duality, and that he, in his completely rational, healthy human being, equipped with the physical conditions of reality, has worked into all of way of life as it otherwise was, so that when he puts himself in the place of the other consciousness, which can see into the spiritual world, these two consciousnesses do not develop apart, but one must place itself next to the other. And that is the essential thing that must be thrown in more and more if one wants to put together in a dilettantish way that into which the spiritual researcher lives with some form of unhealthy consciousness: it is precisely the most healthy consciousness, because the spiritual researcher not only lives in his otherwise healthy human being, but because he also looks down on him, looks up to him or looks into him, if we want.

Now it is self-evident, dear attendees, that in order to start spiritual research, one cannot be a crank or something similar. Otherwise, one can only look at the crosshead, and one must not demand that any other starting point for spiritual research is the right one than that of a person who is in real life, who has a sound judgment for all things of immediate, practical life, who also has the corresponding sense of truth for all things of practical life. Nothing is more unhealthy than being in any way affected by untruthfulness or dishonesty and the like when it comes to the development of spiritual vision.

One must even say: that which is achieved on the two paths that have been indicated is achieved precisely by seeking out what is independent of physicality, what is not achieved with the help of physicality. One frees oneself precisely from physicality. Therefore, all things that are bound to physicality – and these are visions, hallucinations, which do not come from the spirit, as they are understood in the ordinary, trivial, superstitious, mystical sense – these have nothing to do with true spiritual research, because they depend on physicality. And they are not in a more spiritual realm than the one we are in when we are in the physical world; rather, they are in a more material realm than the one we are in when we are in the physical world. One can be a visionary because one works with fewer tools on one's physical body than one works in ordinary, external physical life. There one works with the entire healthy body and looks into ordinary reality.

The ordinary visions are only a kind of afterimage, are afterimages of what one can also see with the eyes; only that they are pressed out of the physical body. They are based on the fact that certain parts of our organism do not come into effect, and others can only then come into effect; so that we are driven to the undersensory, not to the supersensory in this case, that we see less reality than we see with the ordinary, healthy senses.

Spiritual science, when understood in its true basis, is not suitable for reinforcing any kind of superstition. On the contrary, it is precisely that which will eliminate any kind of superstition, of strange mysticism, because it wants to develop a different soul life, not out of a sick person, but out of a healthy one, and because it wants to reject everything that has to do with the ill visions and hallucinations, which must be eradicated root and branch, so that true clairvoyance can arise, leading to the spiritual worlds, on which alone spiritual science can be based!

In the way described, dear attendees, the human being discovers the eternal powers of the human soul, he discovers that which goes through births and deaths, he arrives at a certainty of the eternal significance of man.

And this is the task of spiritual science: to show, in a scientific way, that what science has produced so gloriously about the external world has a counterpart in the spiritual world of spiritual human development. That is the task of spiritual science.

For some centuries now, I would say, natural science has had to educate humanity to a sense of reality that did not exist in the past. The time could come – and it has now come – when, with the same rigor in the development of inner soul forces, man can also speak about the spiritual world. And even if today all the reasons that have already been mentioned are still being objected to this spiritual science – this spiritual science will become as much a part of the spiritual development of humanity as natural science has become a part of it. What is today taken for granted in natural science was, relatively recently, still fought against, fought against in the worst way. That which is fought against today in spiritual science will become a matter of course, like certain achievements in natural science. But then the time will come when people will realize that just as everyone does not have to be an astronomer to understand what astronomy contributes to general knowledge and to convey to the world, so too does not everyone need to be a spiritual researcher. Today, anyone can become one to a certain extent, as can be seen from my book 'How to Know Higher Worlds'. But it is not even necessary. It is just as little necessary as it is necessary, in order to understand a book, to have the gift of writing that book oneself. When the truths about the spiritual world have been brought forth by this spiritual world through this or that spiritual researcher, then ordinary human comprehension is enough to understand what the spiritual researcher says - not just to believe it, but to really absorb it and have it as soul food. So that even in such difficult times as these, when we are surrounded by hundreds and hundreds of deaths every day, we can develop an even greater awareness of the eternal significance of the human soul and the everlasting eternal powers that underlie the human soul.

I do not want to say, esteemed attendees, that our time – this time, which is so fateful – is more suitable than any other time to grasp these truths about the immortal powers of the human soul ; but what is happening around us and what we spoke about yesterday can be a pointer to point out to people that we need to reflect on what is happening around us a hundredfold every day, especially in our time. Our fateful time can serve as a pointer, if not as an extension of understanding, for these spiritual truths.

The spiritual researcher must speak when he, as I have indicated, looks into the spiritual world, a real, concrete spiritual world; not into the nebulous spiritual world already mentioned yesterday, which is spoken of by pantheism: “Spirit, spirit is behind everything! Spirit, spirit and always spirit again.” Abstract philosophy speaks of this. It is just the same as if one were always to say, “Nature, nature, nature!” and not “lilies”, “tulips” and so on. The spiritual researcher speaks of concrete spiritual facts and entities, with which spiritual life is related in the same way as our body is related to the outer sensory world through its senses.

However, when one enters this field, all those who, out of sheer cleverness in our time, have become foolish out of the obvious truths, which the spiritual researcher by no means denies, will rise up. But the time will also come when people will realize that just as there may still be people today who have not learned that there is air in the gap in the transcript, so too is there space. If space is empty, then air is not there. Just as it is a matter of course for someone who has learned something about these things to take the presence of air for granted, and even to consider it indispensable for life, so too will it be recognized as indispensable for the life of soul and spirit, that which constantly flows to us, as air flows to our lungs — flows to us from the spiritual and soul world that surrounds us and in which we live, just as the body lives in the physical and sensory world. A time will come when people will speak of this world, in which we are rooted spiritually and soulfully, just as the senses speak of the sensory world. However, there is still much to be improved, including the way in which spiritual science itself is practised. Today, strict scientists will say, and those who are immersed in and respect science will agree with them: 'Well, let's look at the people who talk about a spiritual world! We need only watch a little to see that some kind of enthusiasm, a morbid consciousness, is what brings it all about. And when you see how superficially this spiritual science sometimes behaves - well, then we have had enough!

One can certainly agree with those who, on the basis of their esteem for and application of the strictly scientific method, which is truly to be highly esteemed, come to such a judgment; because, as I have already indicated, that it can all too easily be lumped together with all kinds of amateurish and fantastic reveries and ravings, with starry-eyed nonsense. As true as it is on the one hand that there is a way into the spiritual world, to understand, to convince oneself of the eternal nature of the human soul, of its eternal life, as true as it is on the other hand that precisely this spiritual science, which by no means produces pathological clairvoyance, that this spiritual science must reject the community with all that wants to assert itself as a revelation of the spiritual world in a charlatan-like, twisted mystical way!

In our serious time, it is perhaps necessary that at the end such things are pointed out in more detail, dear attendees, so that people in wider circles do not believe that they can simply mix spiritual science, because it does not defend itself, with all kinds of confused stuff, and even worse than confused stuff. And so, because this has already been discussed in the circles of materialistic thinkers, let me, in conclusion, cite a fact, just as a fact, for a reason that will soon be apparent.

In 1912, in a yearbook published for 1913 by a person widely revered as a special prophetess who has much to say from the spiritual world, as many you could read in a yearbook that was published in 1912 for 1913, you could read – take note of the timing – you could read with reference to Austria: 'The one who still believes he can govern today will not govern. Instead, a young man will govern who should not yet govern. And the same assertion in a similar way then appeared again in 1913 in the same yearbook for 1914. And then, as we know, in June 1914 there was that assassination attempt on the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand. I just want to put the facts together. Of course, anyone in their right mind would think of something other than the fact that the person in question, who is a highly dubious character in many other ways, prophetically foresaw it!

But this becomes even clearer when one makes the following discovery – as I said, these things have also been discussed in a healthy way in the materialistic field, and spiritual science has every reason to show where it stands in relation to such things – the matter becomes even clearer when one considers that as early as 1913 in a Paris newspaper – “Paris-Midi” – the wish was expressed to commit the assassination of Sarajevo; that in this same newspaper it was also expressed, on the occasion of the introduction of the three-year term of service in France, that if there were to be a mobilization in France, Jaures would be killed in the first days of mobilization!

Combine these facts with the fact that they are prophetically - seemingly - bandied about among people - prophetically, seemingly from spiritual realms, bandied about among people - then you have the choice of either thinking of something that I don't want to insinuate – some kind of underground connection between this apparent prophecy and what actually happened – or the fact that what actually happened was really foreseen!

But spiritual science emphasizes that clear, realistic, healthy thinking is particularly important for it and that it does not want to be mixed with what, especially in our time, people are willing to accept who, through some external evidence, want to have the spiritual realm “proven” to them.

Just as little as any materialist will the true spiritual researcher think of the “prophecy” of that dubious personality, but of something else! And there is every reason, esteemed attendees, that now that things are being discussed publicly, it should be pointed out that spiritual science must shake off everything that likes to attach itself to its coattails: all that is charlatan-like, all frauds, and all that speculates on the credulity of humanity to achieve certain ends, which may sometimes be ends reprehensible. And in no other field does charlatanry, nonsense and speculation on the folly and superstition of people flourish more than in the field of striving for the truth about the spiritual worlds with the spiritual-scientific direction and world view.

This serious word is especially necessary if one wants to put the sense of truth, which is inseparable from spiritual scientific research, in the right light, and if one wants to draw attention to how everything spiritual must be inward, must be based on the internalization of human must be based on the internalization of human nature, and how it strictly separates itself – when spiritual science also speaks of things that can only be recognized from the spiritual world, even with regard to such things it will not be dismissive – but it will strictly separate itself from all that has just been characterized. This is especially necessary in our serious time, because it is necessary on the other hand that spiritual science incorporates the course of development, the spiritual course of development, as natural science once incorporated the spiritual course of development of humanity.

This will only be possible if it is understood how spiritual scientific endeavor is really sought in the sense indicated today, as paradoxical as it may seem, outside of the body and not through physical strength. If it is pointed out that these complicated spiritual scientists are vegetarians, for example, then that is a matter of taste, which has nothing to do with spiritual science as such, and should not be lumped together, just as one should not lump together the fact that some who consider themselves part of the spiritual scientific school of thought , wear short hair, if they are men, long hair, and that they wear these or those clothes and the like; just as little can the spiritual world be “eaten” through a false asceticism, through any mortification of the body - even if it is necessary, of course, to develop a healthy life - just as little can the spiritual world be “eaten” through an unhealthy mortification of the body! You cannot enter the spiritual world by eating or by doing this or that, but only through spiritual and soul forces!

I wanted to add this in particular, dear readers, to what true spiritual research is and what true spiritual research often has to face difficulties in asserting its position in the world today, compared to what presents itself as such.

One can only ever act from this or that point of view. Of course, much could be said in support of what has been presented today; I just wanted to hint at individual points of view - individual points of view that should once again show how well grounded in human experience, and especially in healthy human experience, the spiritual research direction is.

And if this spiritual research direction, esteemed attendees, is still fought today from many a self-evident side – the time will come when people will have worked themselves up in sufficient numbers to that inner activity that makes the spiritual world an immediate knowledge, and when that which is spiritual knowledge will be incorporated into human knowledge, just as the Copernican world view incorporated itself into human knowledge.

Yesterday we saw how anchored in Central European intellectual life in particular is the path of spiritual research and how virtually, if also forgotten, a tone of German intellectual life strives towards a real grasp of the spiritual world. Therefore, we may confidently point to what was mentioned yesterday as a faded note of German spiritual life, confidently to that which is effective after all, even if it is not seen today, which will be the germ and root of blossoms and fruits that must develop. What has been prepared in Fichte, Schelling and Hegel and the others mentioned yesterday must come to the fore, what is a preparation for actually stepping into the spiritual world.

But this progression will come about just as surely as the plant, if it cannot be prevented, will develop from germ and root to leaf, flower and fruit. And the spiritual cannot find obstacles in the physical if it is well grounded. Therefore, we can look with confidence at the further development of what is in the German spiritual life and may do so - as a special act of self-reflection on the German nation - in this present, serious hour of world history. And we may also say to ourselves: however high and ever higher all the prejudices accumulate, all the prejudices against true spiritual-scientific knowledge, however great the power of those who exclude this spiritual-scientific world view or do not want to allow it to arise for whatever reasons: Looking into the nature of spiritual science, one can say: If spiritual science is truth, it will find the ways that truth has always found. It will develop through clefts and crevices as it has always developed, and so will spiritual truth. Even if many prejudices and opposing forces should pile up, he who is able to examine the relationship between truth and the human soul from a genuinely human, truly human feeling must say to himself again and again: Let it seem to him as if the human soul and truth are connected like sisters.

Truth, dear attendees, can be fought as an enemy, but it will always find ways and means. Even if it is suppressed by opposing prejudice in any given time, it will always find ways and means to prevail in the times to come.

Those who mock and ridicule spiritual science may be told by those who, as indicated, think about truth and life as indicated: Whatever powers still want to suppress spiritual science today, spiritual science can rely on its own strength. It will find itself in its own strength against all suppression; for one can suppress the truth, but one cannot erase it from the world.

Truth and the human soul are related and belong together like siblings, siblings in spirit. And even if human souls that tend towards error, not towards truth, may also diverge to a greater or lesser extent at one time or another, They will always find each other again in brotherly and sisterly love, and let me say this as the final word of today's lecture: these siblings, truth and the human soul, must find each other more and more in the spiritual love that rejects them both to their common origin, in which their brotherhood is rooted. And this origin is the light of the world, from which they both come, the spiritual world, the world of origin, the spiritual world, which is the paternal-maternal principle for truth and soul and to which truth and soul will always strive, embrace each other as siblings, mindful of their common origin in the all-encompassing, world-imbuing and world-interweaving spiritual of the world, in which this world has its true, its only true origin.

The anthroposophic spiritual science that is represented here—of course, always only piecemeal—is regarded by a lot of people who do not know or do not want to know it as a field of daydreamers and of such human beings who, as one says so easily, are not in the real, in the practical life. Indeed, someone who wants to inform himself cursorily with this or that brochure or with a single talk about the contents and the goal of spiritual science can easily get to such a judgment. That applies, in particular if he—like many others—is less willing on penetrating into the real spiritual fields or if he has all prejudices and suggestions which arise from our civilisation so numerously against such a field of research. Moreover, it is not so seldom today that the bad will is added, no matter whether consciously or unconsciously, then the judgement is ready: oh, this spiritual science deals with matters which the practical human being who wants to stand firmly with both feet on the ground of life should not care about!

However, spiritual science feels intimately related with the most practical fields of life, and where it is appropriately pursued, it places the greatest value on the fact that thinking, the most certain guide, experiences a practical development with the real practical life. Because firstly spiritual science should not be anything that hovers unworldly and otherworldly anywhere in the cloud-cuckoo-land and wants to deduct the human being from the usual everyday life. However, it should be something that can serve our life with all that we think, act, and feel at every moment. Secondly, spiritual science is in a certain sense a preparation of our soul for those levels of knowledge, by which the human being himself penetrates into the higher worlds. One often stresses that spiritual science has a value not only for the human being who already has open eyes to penetrate in the spiritual world, but that the healthy human mind, the unclouded reason and power of judgement are able to understand what the spiritual researcher knows about the higher worlds. For the acceptance of his communications has an infinite value for the human being, long before he himself can penetrate into the spiritual fields. One can say, spiritual science is for everybody a preparation to develop the higher organs of knowledge bit by bit slumbering in the soul by which the spiritual worlds become discernible to us.

We have already spoken partly; we will have still to speak partly about the different methods and performances, which the human being has to carry out in order to penetrate into the spiritual worlds. However, there is always an unconditional requirement: who wants to penetrate into the spiritual world, who wants to apply the methods exactly given by spiritual research, so that the spiritual senses are opened to him, that should never ever venture this way to the higher fields of life without standing on the ground of a healthy, a practically qualified thinking. This healthy thinking is the guide, the true leitmotif, in order to reach the spiritual worlds. Someone reaches them best of all using the methods of spiritual science who does not disdain to educate himself strictly to a thinking bound to reality and its principles. Indeed, if one speaks about the real practical thinking, one easily is contrary to practice, and probably practice of thinking in our world. One has only to remind of something that I have already often suggested here in order to characterise this. Many a person attributes practice to himself in our world. What is, however, practice about which today the so-called practical human beings talk? There is somebody apprenticed to a master. There he learns all those performances and measures which were carried out for decades, maybe since centuries and which are strictly compulsory. He appropriates that all, and the less he thinks, the less he forms an independent, free judgement, the more he goes beaten tracks, the more the world considers him as practical, in particular those consider him who are active in this field. One calls this often impractical what differs only in the least sense from anything that one practises since long time. Maintaining such a practice is mostly not bound to reason, but only to force. Someone who has any position in life and has to carry out things in a way, which appears to be correct for him, insists that every other who is active in this field must do this just as he does it. If he has the power, he pushes everybody out who wants to go forward differently.

Life praxis consists of such conditions in many cases. Then the right also results, as for example in the case where a big progress should be implemented: The first German railway should be built from Fürth to Nuremberg. One consulted an eminently practical board, the Bavarian Medical Council, whether generally this railway should be built. One can read this judgement, even today. It reads, one should build no railway because the driving would ruin the nerves. However, if one wanted to build railways, one should fence them on the left and on the right with high wooden walls, so that passing persons would not get concussions. This is a judgement of practitioners. Whether one would consider these practitioners as practitioners even today, this is the question. Probably not.

Another example, which can show us whether progress originates from those who call themselves practitioners or from other people: you find it certainly very practical that one has no longer to go to the post office with any letter where the postage has then to be determined according to distance and weight. Only during the forties of the nineteenth century, the uniform letter postage was introduced in England. However, not a practitioner of the postal system invented it, but such a practitioner said when the matter should be decided in the parliament, firstly he did not believe that such an advantage arose, as Hill (Sir Rowland Hill, 1795–1879) calculated, and secondly the post-office building had to be extended. He could not imagine that the post-office building has to comply with the postal traffic and not vice versa the traffic with the post-office building. When the first railway should be built from Berlin to Potsdam, a practitioner said, namely that who let two stagecoaches go to Potsdam for many years: if people wanted to throw their money out of the window, one could build the railway. Because this practice of the so-called practitioners is so impractical, if the big issues of life are considered, one can become contrary to these practitioners if one speaks about the practical development of thinking. Something presents to the impartial observer in all fields of life that can show how it is with the real life praxis.

Once I experienced a quite vivid example, what practical thinking can prevent. A friend of my study time came once excitedly with red head to me. He said, he must immediately go to the professor and inform him that he has made a great invention. Then he came back and said, he could speak the expert only in one hour, and then he explained his invention to me. It was a device, which set a machine in motion expending a very small quantity of steam power only once supplied, and then this machine perpetually performed an immense work. My friend himself was surprised that he was so clever to make such an invention, which exceeded everything and made good economic sense. I said to him, he should trace back the matter to a simple thought. I said, “Imagine, you stand in a railroad carriage and you try to push against the walls of the carriage in order to move it. If you succeed in moving the carriage standing and pushing in it, your engine is good, because it is based on the same principle.”

At that time, I realised that a main obstacle of all practical thinking can be called with a technical term: one is a “carriage pusher from within!” This fits the thinking of many people; they are “carriage pushers from within.” What does that mean? That one is only able to survey a certain narrow field and to apply to this field what one has learned to this field. However, one is also forced to stop within this field and cannot see at all that everything changes substantially, as soon as one exits from the “carriage.”

This is one of the principles, which one has to follow above all with a practical development of thinking: that every human being who is active in any field must try to connect it with adjacent fields regardless of his own activity. Otherwise, it is impossible that he gets to a practical thinking. For this is a peculiarity which is connected with a certain internal sluggishness that the human thinking likes to be encapsulated and forgets what is outdoors, even if it is palpable.

I have recently stated in other connections that one wants to prove the Kant-Laplace theory: Once the universal nebula was there. This started rotating by any cause; the single planets of the solar system separated bit by bit and received the movement, which they have still today. One makes this very clear in a school experiment, the so-called Plateau (Joseph P., 1801–1883, Belgian physicist) experiment: one gives an oil drop in a vessel with water. Then one cuts out a disc of cardboard as the equator. One lays this under the oil globule. Then one pierces it with a needle, rotates the needle—and small oil globules separate in the equator area like planets, and they move around the big globule. One has committed something very impractical in intellectual respect: the experimenter has forgotten himself what is sometimes rather good; he has forgotten that he himself has turned the thing. For one is not allowed to forget the most important of the matter. If one wants to explain an experiment, one has to invoke all things in the field to which it comes down; these are the essentials.

The first that must exist with that who wants to experience a practical development of thinking is that he confides in reality, in the reality of thoughts. What does this mean? You cannot scoop water from a glass without water. You cannot take out thoughts from a world without thoughts. It is absurd if one believes that the whole sum of our thoughts and mental pictures exists only in us. If anybody disassembles a clock and reflects the principles of its construction, then he must suppose that the watchmaker has joined the parts of the clock first according to these principles. Nobody should believe that one could find any thought from a world, which is not created and formed according to thoughts. All that we learn about nature and its events is nothing else than what must be put first into this nature and its events. It is no thought in our soul, which has not been outdoors in the world first. Aristotle said more correctly than some modern people did: what the human being finds in his thinking last exists in the world outdoors first.

However, if anybody has this confidence in the thoughts, which are contained in the world, then he sees very easily that he has to educate himself at first to a thinking full of interest in the world. He has to educate himself to that great, beautiful ideal of thinking as it distinguished Goethe: the concrete thinking, that thinking which isolates itself as little as possible from the things, that sticks to the things as intensely as possible. Heinroth (Johann Christian August H., 1773–1843, physician, formed the term “psychosomatics”), the psychologist, used a sentence concerning Goethe that his thinking is a concrete one, where the thoughts express nothing else than what is included in the things themselves and that in the things nothing else is searched than the real creative thought. If anyone has this confidence, this faith in the reality of thoughts, he easily realises that he can educate himself in harmony with the environment, in harmony with reality to a practical, healthy thinking not receding from the things.

One has to take into consideration three ways if the human being really wants to take on an education to practical thinking: firstly, the human being must and should develop an interest in the surrounding reality, interest concerning facts and objects. Interest in the environment, this is the magic word for the education of thought. Secondly, desire and love of that which we do. Thirdly, the satisfaction of that which we reflect. Who understands these three things: interest in the environment, desire, and love in the activities and the satisfaction of contemplation soon finds that these are the main demands of a practical development of thinking. Indeed, the interest in our environment depends on matters that we discuss with the next talks when we speak about the invisible members of the human nature and about the temperaments.

The biggest enemy of thinking is often thinking itself. If anybody thinks that only he himself can think and the things would not have any thought in themselves, he is hostile, actually, to the practice of thinking. Imagine that a person would have formed some narrow mental pictures of the human being, would have made a few stereotyped schematic concepts of the human being. Now any human being faces him who has roughly the qualities, which fit his pattern. Then he is ready with his judgement and does not believe that this human being can tell him anything particular. If we approach anything that surrounds us with the feeling that any fact can tell us something particular, that we are not entitled at all to let judge something else about the things than the things themselves, then we soon notice which fruits such concrete sense bears. The confidence that the things can tell us much more than we are able to say about the things is again such a magic ideal of the practice of thinking. The things themselves should be the educators of our thinking, the facts themselves.

Imagine once that a person brings himself to use the following two important means of education for his practical development of thinking: he opposes himself with any fact, for example, that somebody has done a walk to this or that place just today. He experiences that at first. Now the person concerned wants to educate his thinking. There it is good if he says to himself, I have experienced this and that, now I want to contemplate how the today's event was caused yesterday, the day before yesterday and so on. I go back and try to form a view from that which goes forward to that which could have been. If I have selected such an event and the cause of it after my intellectual imagination, then I can investigate whether the real cause complies with my thoughts. I have something very important from such compliance or non-compliance. If my thoughts comply with that which I can know as the cause, then it is good. In most cases, this will not be the case. Then one investigates in what one was deceived and tries to compare the wrong thoughts with the right course of the events. If one does this repeatedly, one notices that one no longer makes mistakes after a shorter or longer time, but that one can liberate such a thought from a fact, which corresponds, to the objective course of the events.

Alternatively, one does the following: again, someone takes an event and tries to construct in thoughts what can result tomorrow or in some hours from this event. Now he waits quietly whether that happens which he has thought himself. In the beginning, he experiences that this is not right which he has thought. However, if he continues this, he sees thinking immersing itself in the facts that it does not form any mental pictures for itself, but that the thoughts proceed as the things proceed. This is the development of the factual sense. If he even forbids to himself to form abstractions, then he experiences that he grows gradually together with the things and that he obtains a sure judgement.

There are people who are directed by a certain sure instinct to such a thinking. This is because they are already born with special dispositions to develop such a thinking. Such a person was Goethe. He had grown together with the things so that his thinking did not proceed in the head, but in the things inside. Goethe, who was once a lawyer, had a healthy power of judgement and a sure instinct to tackle the things. There was no long referring to documents and reviewing of documents if a case had to be undertaken. Goethe did not allow that. It was a practitioner.

If once all documents of the Weimar minister Goethe are published—I have seen big parts of them—then the world will recognise Goethe as an eminently practical nature, not as a quixotic human being. One knows that he accompanied his Grand Duke with the training of recruits to Apolda (small town near Weimar). He observed everything that took action—and, besides, he wrote his Iphigenia. Compare to it what disturbs a modern poet at work. Moreover, Goethe was a much greater poet than anyone was who is not allowed to be disturbed today. Because of the eminently practical thinking, he could also say, for example, if he looked through the window: today we cannot go out, because it will be raining in three hours.—He had done cloud studies, but had put up no theory. It was in such a way that from his thinking developed what developed in nature outdoors. One calls this concrete thinking. One obtains such concrete thinking if one does such exercises in particular as I have just stated them. However, this is connected with a certain unselfishness, as strange as this sounds. However, there are principles also in the soul, and someone will not attain very much who thinks only of himself if he does such experiments. If he looks, for example, at a fact and says then immediately, ah, have I not said it? Therefore, this is the most certain obstacle of practical thinking. Thus, we could state many things to show how one can systematically develop the sympathetic adherence of the thoughts to the things, so that one learns to think in the things.

The second is desire and love of all we do. They really only exist if we can renounce success. Where it depends only on success desire and love are not undimmed. Hence, not anyone who is dependent on success can develop that rest in trying which is necessary, so that desire and love of activity can inspire us bit by bit. By nothing, we learn more than by lending a hand to everything possible and renouncing the so-called success. I knew somebody who had the habit to bind his schoolbooks himself (Steiner himself). It looked bad, but he thereby learnt enormously. If he had looked at the success, he would have maybe refrained from it. However, just in the activities we develop the qualities, the talents that enable us to become dexterous up to the movements. We never become dexterous if we look at the success of our activities in particular. If we are not able to say to ourselves, the failures in our activities are as dear to us as our results, we never reach the second level, which is necessary if one trains thinking.

Thirdly, we have to find satisfaction in thinking itself. This is something that appears so unambitious and is mostly combated today. How often does one hear saying, why have our children to learn this and that? They cannot need this in the practical life.—This principle to think only what one can need is the most impractical principle. There must be areas for a human being if he wants to think practically where the mere activity of thinking grants satisfaction to him.

If a human being does not find time, may it be only short, to do something that he does purely intellectually and that satisfies him intellectually, he can remain always only on beaten paths. If he finds, however, such a thing that he does only because of his inner interest, then he has something that has a big, strong effect on him, on his finer organisation, on the finer structure of his organism. Never work the things on us creatively, which captivate us to life, which enslave us; they wear out our talents, they take vitality from us. The things, however, which we do intellectually only to our satisfaction create vitality, new talents and they go into the subtlest organisation of our being and increase the subtle structures of our organism. Not by working for the benefit of the outside world, but by working to our satisfaction we create something by which we advance a developmental step. If we approach practice with this finer organisation again, this affects the practice, and everybody can see that it is right.

Take a painting, for example, the Sistine Madonna by Raphael, and put a human being and a dog before it. The painting makes a different impression on the human being and the dog. The same applies to the life praxis. If one remains captivated in life, the things always make the same impression on us, and one is not able to intervene creatively. If anyone develops a level higher in his activity of thinking, he faces the impressions as the same being in two different forms. He faces it once with that on which he has not yet worked, the other time with that on which he has worked. He becomes more and more practical because the impressions, which make the things on us, are raised more and more. Hence, there is loss of time, indeed, if one does such a thing that does not belong to life praxis directly, however, it promotes life praxis extraordinarily indirectly.

These are the three levels of any practical development of thinking: interest in the environment, desire, and love of all trying and working, and perpetually controlling oneself. You see, for example, such an astute man like Leonardo da Vinci already describing the way in which one can advance just while trying. He does not despise to say how one can appropriate the art of drawing bit by bit. He says, draw on tracing paper, put what you have drawn on the template, and look at that in which the drawn differs. Then make it once again and try—doing so—to do the right thing at the wrong places.—Thus, he shows how it depends on working with desire and love. The third is the satisfaction within contemplation that refrains from the external world and can quietly rest in itself. These are such things that can show us first that we grow into a real practice of thinking by the trust in the thoughts in nature, in the world building of thoughts. However, if we also believe that thinking itself is a creative force, we advance. Someone does much for the practical development of his thinking who does the following systematically: he thinks about something, for example, about what he has to do or about a question of the worldview, it may be anything usual or anything of the highest. If he is out now to find a solution quickly, then he develops no practical thinking as a rule. This rather means saying to himself: you are as little as possible allowed to interfere, actually, in your own thoughts.—Besides, most human beings can imagine nothing at all if one says this. This is a main requirement: that we open ourselves to the thoughts in ourselves that we get used to becoming the scene of the work of our thoughts. We could think, there would be only one single way to accomplish a certain thing, or only one single answer to a question. Nevertheless, we are no dogmatists to whom only one single answer is right.

If we want to learn practical thinking, we have to try to give ourselves also another answer, maybe also a third one, or a fourth. There are things to which one can think ten sorts of answers. One has to imagine them all carefully, of course, only such things where this is possible, not with such ones, which must be made quickly; one often makes them rather badly than too slowly. If one has ten possible solutions, one carries out each in thoughts with love. Then one says, I want to think no longer about it, I wait until tomorrow and open myself to the thoughts. These thoughts are forces that work in my soul, even if I am not at all involved with my consciousness. I wait until tomorrow or the day after tomorrow, and then I cause this thought again in myself.—Maybe I do this still a second or a third time, and each time I survey the single things much clearer and can then decide better than before. This is an incredible schooling of practical thinking presenting different possible solutions of a thing in thoughts to oneself, to allow them to rest and to take up them later again.

Who does this for a while notices that his thinking becomes versatile, that he develops presence of mind and repartee by a certain practice. Then he grows together with life until the most usual things and recognises what is clever and clumsy, what is wise, and what is foolish. It does not come into his mind to behave in such a way as often so-called practical persons behave. I already had to know many practical persons who can use the beaten paths of their occupation very well; if you see such persons in other situations, for instance, at travelling, their practice is often rather odd. The proof that the practical development of thinking can lead to real life praxis is founded in experience. This works up to the hands, up to the way to seize something. Much less, you drop plates and pots than other persons if you work in such way on your inside. Practical thinking works up to the limbs. If it is carried out actively and not in the abstract, it makes pliable and flexible.

However, impractical thinking is most obvious where the practice of thinking should work, for example, in science. I have stated the hypothetical astronomic experiment as an example. One often experiences, how frightfully impractical just the scientists of today are. I do not attack the real methodical work, the excellent activity of our science in the slightest. Nevertheless, the thoughts, which the modern human beings form, are often almost dreadful. Our microscopes and the photograph are very well developed. One can observe all possible mysterious facts in the various little beings. One observes plants and sees certain strange things in these plants, possibly faceted organs like the eyes of a fly, and one even sees a sort of lenses in some plants at this or that place.

One observes with other plants that certain insects are attracted, and then the plants close their leaves and catch the insects. One has excellently observed that all. How does the present impractical thinking explain these phenomena? One confuses the human soul, which reflects the outer processes internally, with that which one observes purely externally in the plants. One talks about the ensoulment of the plant, and one throws plant soul, animal soul and human soul in a mess. One throws this in a mess. Indeed, I object nothing to the marvellous observations of nature, which are popularised in the world. However, the thinking of our contemporaries is confused if anybody says, certain plants have their stomachs at the surface with which they draw in the food and devour it. This thought is approximate in such a way, as if anybody says: I know a being, this is organised artfully and has an organ in itself by which something like a magnetic force is exercised on little living beings, so that they are drawn in and are devoured; this being, which I have in mind, is the mousetrap! This thought is completely the same as that which assumes the ensoulment of the plant. You could speak in the same sense of an ensoulment of the mousetrap as you talk about the ensoulment of the plant if you really thought in this peculiar way.

The matter is that one is able to penetrate into the very own nature of thinking, and that one becomes no “carriage pusher from within” in such fields. Something else is important for the practical development of thinking and this is that one has confidence in the inner spiritual organ of thinking. With most human beings, the benevolent nature provides that this spiritual organ of thinking is not ruined too very much because the human being must sleep.

Because the spiritual does not stop then, because it is there always, this organ of thinking works for itself and the human being cannot ruin it perpetually. However, it is quite another matter if the human being allows nature to take care of thinking with important and serious facts of life only, or if he himself takes this in hand. It is a very important principle to let the organ of thinking work in yourselves. You are practicing this best of all if you try not to think for a while, howsoever short. A big, immense decision belongs to it to sit or to lie somewhere without letting thoughts go through the head. It is much easier to let your thoughts surge up and down in yourselves, until you are released from them by a good sleep than to tell yourselves: now you are awake and, nevertheless, you do not think, but you think nothing at all. If you are able to sit or to lie quietly and to think nothing with full consciousness, then the organ of thinking works in such a way that it gains strength in itself, accumulates strength. Who puts himself in the situation over and over again not to think with full consciousness notices that the clearness of his thinking increases, that in particular repartee grows because he does not only leave his apparatus of thinking to itself by sleep, but that he lets this apparatus of thinking itself work under his guidance.

Only somebody who has taken leave of his spiritual senses can believe that then it is not thought at all. Here the word applies that Goethe says about nature: “She has thought and thinks continuously.”

In addition, the innermost nature of the human being has thoughts, even if the human being is not present with his conscious thoughts. Nevertheless, in the case where he is not at all with his thinking, something thinks in him of which he is not aware. At these moments, if he lies there without his own personal thoughts, something higher really thinks in him, and this higher works tremendously educating on him. This is essential and important that the human being also lets the superconscious, the divine work in himself, which does not announce itself directly but in its effects. You become a clear and glib thinker gradually if you have dedicated yourselves to such exercises of thinking. A certain energy belongs to it to carry out such exercises of thinking.

You realise at the single examples, which I have given today, how one can develop this thinking with own strength. I could only give some examples of self-education of thinking, but these examples have shown that one is able to point to real remedies of thinking whose fruits life and experience can give only.

Who exercises his thinking that way experiences that—on the one side—he can go up to the highest fields of spiritual life, that he can use this thinking—on the other side—also in the everyday life. What one gains with the overview of the big spiritual facts one should apply to practical life. All fields of the everyday life, education in particular, could experience a tremendous fertilisation because of this, and another view of life praxis would make itself noticeable all around us. In addition, someone who wants to develop the qualities slumbering in him in order to penetrate to the spiritual fields would have a sure base and stand firmly in life. This is something that one has to demand absolutely, before anybody penetrates to the higher spiritual fields. In addition, the usual science would be able to attain tremendous knowledge if it is fertilised by spiritual science.

The carriage pushers of thinking who fancy themselves often as great practitioners do not have this practical thinking; they lack it. They are not able to lead back something to a simple, comprising thought. Spiritual science gives us this: it enables us to survey what is usually small and detailed in life, with big, comprising viewpoints. The human being thereby gets the survey because he is able to think from great viewpoints into the details; then he is led to real life praxis.

We can take Leonardo da Vinci as an example, who was a practitioner in many fields. He said, theory is the captain, and practice is the soldiers.—Who wants to be a practitioner without controlling the viewpoints of practical thinking is like someone who goes on board a ship without compass, he does not have the possibility to steer the ship correctly. Goethe showed repeatedly from his practical way of thinking how just scholarship gets by impractical thinking to infertile fantasising. There are people, who lead the outside world back to atoms, and others who lead them back to movements; others deny any movement. On the other hand, the most practical thinkers point to the fact that simplicity comes from the greatness of the worldview. Goethe's dictum is suitable, and we can put it before our eyes:

Some hostile may occur,
Keep quiet, remain silent;
And if they say
There is no movement,
Walk around right
Under their noses.

As an introduction, I should like to tell you two short stories. The first (I shall omit certain details) is as follows:—

Once upon a time there lived two boys who from earliest childhood had been close friends. One of them was outstandingly gifted, learned with extraordinary facility and as he grew older gave every promise of attaining high academic honours. The other boy was much less talented. His friend who was deeply attached to him, taught and helped him in every way, but he was incapable of learning very much. This, however, did not greatly affect his circumstances as a small inheritance provided for his living. The more gifted boy grew to adolescence but when he was on the point of getting a University Degree, he died. As in the country where these young men lived, it was customary to marry and start a family very early in life, it devolved upon the other, less gifted youth to provide for the family of the friend who had died. This he did, but before long his own means were exhausted. He said to himself: “As my friend's talents have proved so transient, my mundane possessions too, will probably soon have disappeared; I must set about making a livelihood.” This he did by becoming a travelling merchant. Once when he was sitting in front of a house in a strange neighbourhood, a gigantic man came and sat down beside him. He gave the impression of not having eaten anything for days and seemed to be famished with hunger. The other took compassion on him and ordered a meal to be brought. It was very quickly consumed, to the astonishment of the merchant, but as the one meal was not enough to appease the other's hunger, he ordered a second. The big man ate this just as ravenously and then said that to satisfy his hunger he must have a whole ham and a number of cakes. He devoured all these and, after his enormous meal, seemed satisfied. This incident led to friendship between the big man and the little man, and they set out together on their travels. Very soon, however, the little man found the big man something of a burden and told him that he could well dispense with his company. The big man, however, assured the little man of his friendship, saying that man now felt a wish to question the big man about his life, and the latter replied: “I have no house on the earth, no boat on the sea; by day I live in the village, by night in the town” To begin with, the little man had no notion of what this meant. Then it happened that they must cross a wide river. Their boat capsised and sank, and both fell into the water. The big man extricated himself very quickly, carried the little man to a safe spot, brought up the boat and put the little man into it then he dived again into the water and brought up all the goods, even the tiniest articles, which the little man was intending to trade. This naturally aroused in the little man the greatest respect for the other, and as friends they had many talks together, sometimes on profound subjects. Thus on one occasion the little man said to the big man: “Oh! if only one could rise consciously to heaven; if only it were possible to know what is going on up there!” Thereupon the big man answered him: “Maybe you would like to soar into the air” ... and when the little man had assented he very soon became aware of fatigue and fell asleep. When he woke up the stars were above him, like pollen in the cup of a lotus-flower in heaven; he was even able to pluck one of these flowers, hiding it in his sleeve. Then he saw a great ship approaching, drawn and steered by dragons In it was a great vessel of water, and the big man who was with the little man in the clouds, showed him how the water could be poured out and allowed to trickle down to the earth. Then the little man realised that he was able to act as do the Spirits of the Air, when they let the rain pour down upon the earth. He begged the big man to pour the water in the vessel on his native soil and to let him go down again to the earth by a rope. The big man said to him: “Now you have rescued me; I am a son of the Thunder-God, and my duty has been to bestow rain and other blessings upon the earth. Because for a time I did not perform my duty properly, I was obliged to lead on earth the life of which you know.” Then he let the little man go down again to the earth. The latter was now in his home once more, having with him the star he had gathered in the meadow of heaven This he placed upon the table and it filled the whole room with miraculous light, strong enough even to read by. During the day it looked like a simple meteor-stone, but at night it was radiant and luminous. This continued until one night the little man's wife, rather a vain woman, was combing her hair by its light. This displeased the star-stone and it shrank to a tiny size. One day the wife had a strange impulse to swallow the stone! Thereupon there came to the little man a vision of the big man whom he knew so intimately, and the latter said to him: ”Owing to what has happened now, I can reach a particular stage of development Now I shall be able to come to the earth for a time as a son of the Thunder-God. Your wife will bear me as your son.” And he was actually born as the son of the little man. A peculiarity of this child was that in the dark he shone like a star, so that people called him the “Star Child.” He lived on, and although as he grew older his radiance waned, it still revealed itself in the form of his great talents Very soon he became a man of high importance in life....

This is the one story. You will wonder why I am telling you these tales, but before answering I will tell you a second, very similar one.

Once upon a time there lived a man who, in our country, might rank as a “Councillor” or “Governor.” He and his family lived in a spacious, very beautiful house. But after a time, strange things began to happen there. By day, and especially by night, nobody in it could get any rest; they were always being knocked, pinched and dragged about in all directions; objects were hurled at them and the house swarmed with ghosts. Because of this the family left the house and went to another, leaving a servant behind as caretaker; but after a few days he died. They sent a second and then a third, both of whom also died They then decided to leave the house without any servant at all. A young sceptic now turned up, a youth who was preparing for an examination, and he wanted to take the house for his studies. The Councillor warned him that he would probably never come out alive, and that at any rate terrible things happened to everyone in the house. But the young man replied: “I have written a treatise on the very subject of the “Unreality of Spirits,” proving that they do not exist. I could write a great many more and nobody who has written about such matters is in the least afraid of what may happen in such a house!” So the Councillor was prevailed upon to let him have the house. The young man took with him masses of books to study and sat down to begin his work. It was not long, however, before one of his ears was pinched, then the other; then he was attacked somewhere else and molested in all sorts of ways. When he went to bed the trouble began in real earnest! He could get no rest the whole night long and, sceptic though he was, he began to be dreadfully frightened. Nevertheless, he refused to give way to terror and held out valiantly. On account of his power of endurance, the spectral figures who were wont to bend over his books and play pranks by closing his eyes when he wanted to read, and so on, revealed themselves to him. This heartened the brave young man considerably, but it was a really ghastly state of affairs. Things went on like this until his good-heartedness enabled him to set up a kind of friendship with two spirit-beings who were always annoying and molesting him. After a time he discovered that the spirit-beings could not read but would like to be able to do so. And so it came about that he established a kind of school for the spirits, teaching them how to copy out all sorts of things from his books. Not only were the spirits extremely grateful for this, but they had actually learnt something. Spirit-intercourse was now quite a pastime to the young man and the spirits who lived in the house had, moreover, profited greatly through him. The time came for his examination; as well as having had a great deal of amusement, he had imbibed so much knowledge that he was hopeful of passing, but the intrigues of an enemy caused the rumour that he had cheated in his written papers. As in that country the rules about such matters were extremely strict and because to begin with the rumor was believed, he was sent to prison and retained there for some time with nothing to eat. Finally, however, one of his spirit-friends brought food to him. She then began to bring the other spirits with her and they provided for all his needs. Thus there grew up between the young man and one of his spirit-friends a friendship much greater even than it had been before. And after his innocence had been established and he had been set free, although he had formerly “proved the unreality of spirits,” his spirit-friend was now such a reality to him that he resolved to marry her! She answered, however, that situated as she was, she could not marry, for she belonged to the spiritual worlds, but that if he would go to a certain priest-magician and ask his advice, there would be a way out of the dilemma. So he went to the priest-magician who gave him a charm, saying that if, when a funeral was passing, his spirit-friend would go to the coffin and swallow this charm, she could then become a human being and marry him. Not long afterwards a funeral was actually taking place. The spirit-friend approached the procession, swallowed the charm and then and there disappeared into the coffin. People were astounded in the highest degree when the figure they had seen disappeared into the coffin (for when she had swallowed the charm she became visible). They therefore put the coffin on the ground, opened it, and found that it contained no body at all! The burial could not, therefore, take place. But after a few days the spirit-friend came to the young man, told him that she had now become a human being—the one who had been in the coffin—and that they could now enter into wedlock. And so the two whose acquaintance had begun in the haunted house, now lived on in the companionship of marriage.

If you give some thought to these two stories, you will have to admit that however close a search you may make in the literature accessible to Europeans, right back to the time when there was universal belief in ghosts, no such stories will be found. You will find indications of how the spirit-world plays into the world of men—but stories of this kind, giving the feeling that there could be no more natural and spontaneous way of depicting the interplay between the spirit-world and the human world, simply do not exist in European literature. They are quite unique. A curious feature strikes us when we study their composition. In the first story we are told, for instance, that a star is born as the son of a human being and goes on living as a man upon the earth. To the kind of consciousness underlying the first story, it is a natural matter of course that beings exist in the stars, beings who are the primordial kith and kin of men, and that those who walk the earth as men may, in reality, be embodied Star-beings. This underlies the first story as a natural and accepted fact. In the second, a human being who enters into actual wedlock with another, first came to know her in the spiritual world; she then descends into the physical world and her life continues there. The trend of the two stories is identical. This sense of “togetherness” with the spiritual world—not in the form in which it is expressed in European sagas and legends, but on the totally different ground of which we shall presently speak—will nowhere be found, in the same peculiar form, in the literature of Europe—except it were to be imitated by some modern writer.

And now remind yourselves of something I said in one of the last public lectures.¹ In the way that is possible in such a lecture, I spoke about the beginnings of Earth-evolution and of the genesis of man in connection with Earth-evolution. I said that the process of the evolution of humanity began at a comparatively late stage. We ourselves speak of the evolution of man and of mankind in the following way. When a human being is to enter physical existence on the earth, the innermost kernel or core of his being works within a certain field of activity, moulding the finer organs, the brain, and the more delicate bodily tissues. Thus there is in man a kernel of spirit-and-soul which passes over from earlier incarnations, envelops itself in what comes from the forefathers and is carried through the generations by the process of physical heredity. In a human being who appears on the Earth, a union takes place between what comes from earlier incarnations and what is carried through the generations, enveloping the kernel of spirit-and-soul which passes from incarnation to incarnation. I said that this form of the evolutionary process began only during the Atlantean epoch, when conditions rendering such a development possible arose for the first time on the Earth. I indicated that this particular process of evolution had been preceded by another, in which the human being did not pass into earthly existence by way of union between man and woman and then the descent of the soul which passes through the several incarnations. In very early periods of Earth-evolution, the human being originated in an altogether different way. The reason for this is that not until the Post-Atlantean period did the Earth actually resemble its present configuration. In the latest Atlantean period the Earth did not really differ, in essentials, from what it is at present; but the early Atlantean epoch was fundamentally different from the later, and anyone who ignores the fact that at that time entirely other conditions prevailed, has a totally false conception of the configuration of the Earth. After having passed through the periods of Old Saturn, Old Sun and Old Moon, the Earth was not only a living organism, but also a spiritual being, a great organism permeated by spirit-and-soul. We do not get back to an inanimate ball of gas as intimated by the Kant-Laplace theory, but to the Earth as a huge, living being. In that ancient time the evolutionary process of humanity was such that fecundation did not take place between man and woman, but between the “above” and the “below”—in this sense, that the Earth with its forces of life, provided the element of substance, the more material element—whereas the spiritual principle came from above like rain which fertilises the soil of meadows, and united with the more material principle. It was by this method of fecundation that the first human beings came into existence. This was indicated in the public lecture and can be established on logical grounds, in accordance with the principles of natural existence. Then the Earth separated out from itself a solid mass, like a kind of bony system, and it was impossible thereafter for it to provide, as before, the substance for fertilisation. The process had now to take place within the human organism. Instead of the fertilisation “from above,” fertilisation now came about by way of the two sexes, and the process which had formerly been set in train by interaction between the “above” and the “below,” now passed over into the operations of heredity and into those of reincarnation which are bound up with heredity. Thus what had taken place on the surface of the Earth in earlier times, had now passed into the being of man. Human beings came into existence and were able to inherit or carry over from one incarnation to the next, those qualities which had formerly been received directly from the spiritual world but were now transmitted by heredity. As was said in the public lecture, the very first human beings were bi-sexual, then there was differentiation into the male and the female, and then a gradual development into the conditions prevailing at present; what in earlier times had operated more from above—the female element—passed into the woman, and what had operated more in the earthly element, passed over in the stream of heredity into the male.

From intimations given through the course of years concerning the evolution of humanity, you will have realised that these conditions prevailed right on into the Atlantean epoch; it was not until the second half of the Atlantean epoch that the evolutionary process assumed, more or less, its present form. The Atlantean peoples on the Earth were really living in the aftermath of still earlier conditions, when the substantiality of the Earth was fertilised by the spirituality of the Heavens. The Atlantean peoples saw the birth of a human being as a direct embodiment of the Spiritual, a descent of the Spiritual into the Material. As we today see the rain falling from heaven and moistening the Earth, so did the people of Atlantis see human beings coming down from heavenly heights, uniting with substance provided by the Earth and then wandering over its surface. Conditions changed only by slow degrees; in certain regions the preparatory stages of conditions as they are at present, had long since been in existence, whereas in other regions where the old conditions had persisted, the Atlantean peoples knew that the human being exists, to begin with, in the spiritual world and then seeks bodily substance in order to become part of Earth-humanity. Thus when a man in Atlantean times saw his fellow-men moving about the Earth, he said to himself: “The form I see there derives from the Earth, but what is within it derives from the same world to which the stars belong: the human being has descended from the worlds of the Stars!” ... It sounds like a fairy-tale echoing from olden time ... Man comes down from heavenly heights, surrounds and clothes himself with earthly substance. The Atlantean peoples knew of the interaction between the Heavens and the Earth. They knew: To begin with, man is a Spirit; then he descends, clothes himself in matter and moves about the Earth. Man was seen as a heavenly being, a being from the spiritual world. For it was known that as he moved about, he differed from the Spirits only in that he was clothed in matter. The transition from the spiritual world to the physical world was a much gentler, more delicate process. Not that the Atlantean would in any sense have denied the existence of the spiritual world ... on the contrary, he saw clearly that there was no very essential difference between physical men and the spirit beings who belong to that other world. He knew: One can communicate with a human being through signs, by employing the early rudiments of human speech ... and with the Spirits, too, for the way in which man communicates with the Spirits does not differ from the way he communicates with other men.

Naturally, only very little of this direct knowledge of man's connection with the spiritual world survived the Atlantean catastrophe. The mission of the Post-Atlantean epoch was to develop in man an understanding of Earth-existence proper, of all that can be acquired by the development of the body as a physical instrument. And so the perfectly natural communion with the spiritual world very soon ceased in the course of the Post-Atlantean epoch. But what disappeared from the normal consciousness was preserved in those periods or moments of atavistic clairvoyance when the soul withdrew more into itself. What in earlier times had been actual experience when the soul turned its gaze into the spiritual world around, was born again later on ... in the form of Imagination, Phantasy. Let us assume that in some particular people belonging to the Post-Atlantean age, the characteristics and faculties of the Atlantean epoch still survived, more strongly than in all the others. It would not, of course, be possible for such a people, in the Post-Atlantean epoch, to have experiences in the form they had taken in Atlantis. But there would certainly be something in their phantasy distinguishing it from that of new races—races which cannot really be said to be survivals of Atlantean peoples. In the leading races of the Post-Atlantean epoch there will, obviously, be less evidence of this natural communion with the spiritual world.

In a people characterised by having carried over into the Post-Atlantean epoch a constitution of soul reminiscent of the Atlantean period, the after-effects of this communion will be quite different from those working in the typical Post-Atlantean races. In the case of a people who would be regarded from the point of view of occultism as belonging, not to the progressive races, but to the “laggard” races of ancient Atlantis, it is to be expected that their phantasy, when it speaks of the connection between the world of men and the world of spirits, will express itself in a form differing altogether from the phantasy of other peoples. We can understand that the imagination of such a people might well take the form of narrating how a Star-being suddenly resolves to incarnate as the son of a human being who had rendered service to the Star. Think of the first story, where a Star-being—a son of the Thunder-God—was born as the son of the friend with whom he had for a time wandered about the Earth. The second story suggests the gentler transition . . . a human being falls in love with a spirit-being from above; such a being does not descend to human existence in the ordinary way but chooses a dead body. It is as though an Atlantean soul, accustomed to seeing human beings descend and take on earthly substance, had gone astray by choosing a body which was suitable, not for the Post-Atlantean epoch, but for that of Atlantis, when human beings were not born as they now are, but merely assumed a mantle of earthly substance. In the light of this interpretation we can perceive in such stories the aftermath of earlier conditions. As the products of a race surviving from ancient Atlantis, their trend and content do not surprise us. It is interesting that a number of similar stories has been collected by Martin Huber and published by Rütten and Loening in Frankfurt-am-Main under the title of Chinese Ghost and Love Stories.

All this indicates that what may be surmised from a study of occult science, is actual fact—although, of course, these things are now no more than tradition.

Light can be shed upon a great deal that comes our way in life, if only we have patience to study the more intimate connections of world-evolution. Men of the present day will often stand amazed at such things and will only begin to understand them when they realise that anyone who is cognisant of the more intimate connections of human evolution, accepts them as self-evident. Understanding of Spiritual Science is not furthered by pedantic demands for “logical proof”; proof, after all, is useful only to those who are willing to believe what is asserted; it is useful only to those who can believe that it is proof. Nobody need believe in it at all—and then they are spared from believing anything! Spiritual Science will be received into the souls of men because of increasing evidence that those laws of which knowledge can be acquired only along the occult path, can be applied even in the most hidden recesses of spiritual and material culture. The treasures of wisdom will come into their own when more and more people have patience enough to observe the harmony between all the facts of existence to which a spiritual conception of the world is applied, and to realise that only in this way can there be a true explanation of things which must otherwise remain incomprehensible.

Thinking of all these matters, we shall be able to say: Post-Atlantean civilisation has its particular mission. Human beings who rightly understand their times will unfold the knowledge, will-activity and qualities of heart to be acquired through the instrumentality of the body. In these domains there will be greater and greater progress—progress which, fundamentally, is connected with the phase of evolution stretching from the time of the Holy Rishis of India to the descent of the Christ-Impulse into humanity. But side by side with this there has existed much that is like “imprisoned” spiritual treasure. The people of Europe were astonished in the highest degree at the vistas of spiritual life opened up by the discoveries concerning the wisdom of India, of ancient Persia, concerning the Krishna- or Brahman-culture, or the ancient Zoroastrian culture. In the older civilisations there was, naturally, a deeper spirituality than in the products of later forms of knowledge. People in the West were dumbfounded by what German scholarship in the first half of the nineteenth century disclosed concerning these ancient civilisations, were astonished at the light shed upon the wisdom of India by Friedrich Schlegel, and, later on, upon the wisdom of Persia. These disclosures were so dumb-founding that the deep influence exercised by Oriental Philosophy upon the minds of thinkers like Schopenhauer or Eduard von Hartmann is readily understandable. There we have the first expressions of the wonder and astonishment of the West at what is contained in these ancient civilisations as a kind of “imprisoned” spirituality.

We are now confronting another epoch, in which imprisoned spirituality in a different form will be capable of throwing the West into amazement, namely, the spirituality that does not belong to the mission of Post-Atlantean humanity, but has remained as an heirloom from earlier times, concealed until our own time in the Chinese wisdom of which the West hitherto has known practically nothing. Very little will be sufficient to enable what will happen over there, to overwhelm the spiritual culture of the West—to such an extent indeed, that it might well forget its own mission, its own specific significance and task. As men live on into the future they will have to realise that from the Atlantean epoch there has survived upon our Earth, an imprisoned spiritual wisdom and knowledge greater than anything revealed by the disclosures concerning the old Brahman and Zoroastrian civilisations; this wisdom will be unleashed when the spiritual life of China emerges from its concealment. Two things will have to be realised by those who turn their eyes towards the future. From over yonder there will flow a mighty stream of spiritual life, containing, even in external details, most wonderful teachings ... although such teachings would in any case be available to those willing to penetrate into the spiritual life along the path revealed by Spiritual Science. If, however (to quote words used in a different connection by our friend M.B... . at our General Meeting) the great majority of human beings pull nightcaps over their eyes in regard to what Spiritual Science has to offer, then one day, in a form unsuited to Western mentality, spiritual treasures will pour from Chinese culture, and this portion of humanity, in their amazement, will realise that the products of such culture cannot be grasped by the pedantic thought common in the West, but only by deeper insight into the ancient Taoist culture which arose on the soil of the ancient Chinese civilisation. Spiritual Science often goes against the grain because, by its very nature, study of it will induce belief. Those who deliberately pull nightcaps over their eyes will be amazed, but on the other hand also rather relieved when, in Spiritual Science, they come across many things that have passed over into Chinese culture from Atlantean times. They will comfort themselves by saying: “There is no need to believe in that, for what history has preserved is studied simply because it is of interest!” This is the attitude of the philologists and archaeologists ... there is no need to believe in it; one can get hold of it by study and be exempt from having to “believe.” But when the wisdom casts off its fetters over yonder, it will have another effect as well: its obvious and intrinsic greatness will shock and amaze. It will pour over what mankind has acquired in Christian culture in such a way that it will have to be seen in its true perspective, studied from the right point of view. The proper approach will be to say: This spirituality existed; in bygone ages it constituted the spiritual culture of our Earth. But every epoch has its own mission, and that of Western culture is to drink at the well-springs of the spiritual reality behind world-existence, so that this spiritual reality is perceived behind the material world, behind what eyes can see and hands can grasp—as a revelation from the spiritual world. Men will have to understand that their mission now belongs to a different age and that they must stand firm on the ground prepared by Christianity!

That is the other picture. Men will joyfully receive what derives from olden times but will illumine it, vivify it with what the more recent, Post-Atlantean, Christian culture has imparted to the soul. Weaklings, however, will say: “We will accept spirituality from whatever source it may come, for all that interests us is a sensational vista of the spiritual worlds.” There may actually be neo-theosophists who will say: “The truth is not to be found through deep comprehension of the Christ-Principle; it lies in what has been preserved by the Chinese, coming to light again when they bring forth the Atlantean wisdom hidden in the deepest strata of their souls.” Europe might well be offered a new “Secret Doctrine” compiled from the truths of Chinese wisdom. This would imply that, after all, the proper model for modern theosophists is a much more ancient Theosophy which did not feel called upon to derive the founts of spiritual life from Christian Mysticism and Christian Love—nor, for the matter of that, to plagiarise—and even that very imperfectly—the wisdom of ancient India somewhat embellished by the wisdom of ancient Egypt! As for the weaklings, they will be just as eager for Chinese wisdom as for the spirituality which they think is opened up for them by the ancient or also by the “newly revealed” Indian wisdom. After all, to Europeans, India is almost as remote as China; and if people are told of revelations made possible in China owing to certain forces having been set free, this may well seem more credible to them than that anything of the kind should have transpired in Berlin.

If we ponder over these things, we shall find the true balance between joyful acceptance of what has been preserved from ancient epochs of culture and a firm footing on the soil resulting from evolution through the ages. That heed shall be paid to the importance of maintaining this balance, is and will remain the constant care of the Movement with which we identify ourselves. It is simply an untruth when here or there it is said that we are out to reject or ignore what is offered in the way of Indian spirituality, for example. It is an untruth, as every one who has taken part in our work well knows; and it would be grievous if such untruths were to take root in the world in connection with our Movement. Opinions that are at variance are easy to deal with; they soon balance themselves out. But inaccurate statements give rise to one misunderstanding after another ... for it is the peculiarity of misunderstanding that it constantly gives birth to fresh misunderstandings! With this in mind it must be our primary task to realise how far our own standpoint on the soil of Western spiritual life is justified in face of the other phases of human evolution. On the other hand, we must take care that everything we say about those other phases of evolution, about other forms of spirituality, is presented honestly and truthfully. Again and again it must be repeated and realised by Theosophists that even if much of the spiritual insight we have been able to gain, goes under, its influence will remain! No matter what transpires, our work must be full of sincerity, integrity and truthfulness. And if, in future times, all that people will be able to say of our particular work is that many a thing was improved, many another has not survived—nevertheless it was an example of the fact that occultism and earnest spiritual research can be entirely free from charlatanism or humbug, that the striving for occult knowledge can be true, genuine and sincere ... if that can be said of us, we shall really have done something to further the development of the occult life! And the fact that we would not admit anything of which in the future these things could not be said, may be accounted among our finest achievements.

• 1. 4th Jan. 1912. The Origin of Man in the Light of Spiritual Science. Not yet published in English.

From the previous lecture you will have been able to see that the very form of man's body is a result of the co-operation of Luciferic and Ahrimanic powers.

It is particularly important in the present age for man to recognize this co-operation between Luciferic and Ahrimanic powers; for only by such recognition can he gradually learn to understand the forces that are at work behind the external phantasmagoria of existence. We know very well that we have no occasion either to hate Ahriman or to fear Lucifer, since their powers are inimical only when they are working outside the realm where they belong. We spoke on this subject at some length in Munich last year [ see Secrets of the Threshold, by Rudolf Steiner. ]; and we have also given indications in this direction in lectures here in Dornach.

When we saw last time how the physical spatial body of man owes its form to the interaction of Luciferic and Ahrimanic powers, we were dealing with the most external element of human life in which Lucifer and Ahriman play a part. We come a little nearer to the inner nature of man when we pass from the physical to the etheric body. The etheric body may be regarded as the shaper of the physical body. At the foundation of our physical organism—and embedded at the same time in the whole etheric world—lies this etheric organism, in perpetual inner movement. Luciferic and Ahrimanic powers are active here too, as well as in the physical body. Man as etheric being—and it is important to recognize the fact—is also placed into the counterplay of these forces.

In order to give focus to our study of this question, let us now turn our attention to the three fundamental activities of the human being in so far as he is not physical human being. I refer to the activities of Willing, Feeling and Thinking.

So long as we regard man in respect of his physical body alone, we do not of course see this willing, feeling and thinking. Only in its physiognomy or in the performance of certain gestures or the like, does the physical body give us any indication of what is in man's inner nature. The etheric body, however, which is in perpetual movement, is continually giving expression to man's thinking, feeling and willing.

A purely external science finds itself in difficulties when it comes to consider these activities of the human soul. If you will study the various philosophies you will find that one gives pre-eminence to the will, another to thought; and there are again others which consider feeling as the most important force in man. But as to how thinking, feeling and willing unite in man to form a whole—to that problem none of the philosophies of modern times can offer a solution. This inability to form a correct idea of the relationship between thinking, feeling and willing in the life of the soul is not unlike the difficulty someone might experience who, in order to relate himself rightly to the world around him, set out to form a clear conception of man as he appears in the external world. We do not know—so say the philosophers—whether the human soul in its essential nature has more the character of willing or feeling or thinking. It is exactly as if someone were to say: “I have no idea what a ‘man’ really is. One person brings me a five-year-old child and says: There is a man for you! Then another person comes along and points me out a much taller being, who is what is called ‘middle-aged.’ Finally a third person comes and shows me an entirely different being, with wrinkled countenance and grey hair. And now I am really at a loss to know what the being called ‘man’ is, for I have been shown three totally different beings with this name.” Of course the true answer is that they are all of them “man.” The one is very young, the second somewhat older and the third quite old; they are very different in appearance. But by taking all three ages together we acquire a knowledge of “man.” It is the same with willing, feeling and thinking. The difference there too is one of age. Willing is the same soul-activity as thinking, but willing is still a child. When it grows a little older, it becomes feeling, and when it is quite old it is thinking. The matter is made difficult by the fact that the different ages live together in our soul in these three activities.

We have explained on other occasions (and you may read of it in my book The Threshold of the Spiritual World) that when we leave the physical world we come into a world where the law of change prevails instead of the law of persistence or fixity. There all is in constant change; what is old can suddenly grow young again and vice versa. Hence in that world the three activities can and actually do appear at one and the same time. Willing shows itself contemporaneously as young willing, as older willing (i.e., feeling) and at the same time also as quite old willing (i.e., thinking). The different ages are in that world intermingled, everything is mobile. This is how it is with the etheric body of man.

These changes cannot, however, simply come about of themselves. To begin with, a uniform and single action of the soul does not come to consciousness at all in ordinary life, we are quite incapable of bringing such a thing into consciousness. If we think of the etheric body in the likeness of a flowing stream—for it is in the etheric body that we have to make our observations—then we are obliged to say that this stream of soul-activity does not come to consciousness at all in our life; but into this stream, into this perpetual movement of the etheric body that flows in the current of time, Luciferic—and again Ahrimanic—activity enters. Luciferic activity has the result of making the will young. When the activity of our soul is streamed through by Luciferic activity the result is will. When the Luciferic influence predominates, when Lucifer makes his forces felt in the soul, then will is active in us. Lucifer has a juvenating influence on the whole stream of our soul-activity.

When, on the other hand, Ahriman brings his influence to bear on our soul-activity, he hardens it, it becomes old, and thinking is the result. Thinking, the having and holding of thoughts, is quite impossible in ordinary life unless Ahriman exerts his influence within our etheric body. We cannot get on in our life of soul, in so far as this comes to expression in the etheric body, without Ahriman and Lucifer. If Lucifer were to withdraw entirely from our etheric body, we would have nothing to fire our will. If Ahriman were to withdraw entirely from our etheric body, we would never be able to attain cool thinking. In between stands a region where Lucifer and Ahriman are in conflict. Here they interpenetrate; their activities play into one another. It is the region of feeling. The etheric body has actually this appearance; one can perceive in it Luciferic light and Ahrimanic hardness. If you could look at it, you would not of course see it as we might try to show it in a drawing; you would see it all in movement. But there are places where the etheric body seems to be quite untransparent, as if it had ice tracings in it. Forms and figures show themselves which resemble the patterns made by ice on a window pane. These are hardenings in the etheric body, and they are the result in it of the life of thought. This freezing of the etheric body at certain places is due to Ahriman; his forces have found entry there by means of thought. There are also places which seem to be full of light. Here the etheric body is transparent and gleams and glows with light. It is Lucifer who sends his rays into the etheric body of man and makes there centers of will. Then there are regions in between, where the etheric body is in perpetual movement and activity. Here you see at one moment hardness—and then suddenly the hardness is caught by a ray of light and melts right away. Hardening and dissolving, in perpetual alternation—such is the expression of the activity of feeling in the etheric body.

Not only, therefore, is the form of the physical body of man called into being by the interplay of Luciferic and Ahrimanic forces—now creating a balance, now disturbing it again—but in the whole etheric body too, Luciferic and Ahrimanic forces are continually active. When the Ahrimanic forces gain the upper hand, we have an expression of thinking; when the Luciferic forces are in ascendance, we have an expression of willing; and when they are in mutual conflict one with the other, we have an expression of feeling. Thus do Luciferic and Ahrimanic forces play into one another in the etheric body of man. We human beings are as it were ourselves the resultant of these forces, we are placed into their midst.

Now we must not imagine that we are present in this interplay with our full Ego. Our earthly Ego, the Ego that we have acquired in the course of earth evolution, can only come to its full consciousness in the physical body. Not until the time of Jupiter will the Ego be able to unfold itself completely within the etheric body. In all that takes place within the etheric body the real Ego of the human being has no immediate part. Had the progress of world evolution gone on without the intervention of Luciferic and Ahrimanic forces, then man would have been an altogether different being. He would, for example, have been able to have perceptions in his physical body, but he would not have been able to have thoughts. The capacity to have thoughts he owes to the fact that Ahriman can acquire influence over his etheric body. And he has impulses of will because Luciferic forces can acquire influence over his etheric body. These forces are therefore necessary for man, they must needs be present.

We have said that with our earthly consciousness we cannot descend fully into the etheric body. Only in the physical body can we experience our full Ego-consciousness. With the etheric body we enter a world with which we cannot fully identify ourselves. And it is so, that when Ahriman enters into our etheric body, something more enters in with him besides the thoughts he forms there. Nor is it only impulses of will that enter our etheric body with Lucifer. And the same must be said of the feelings, the realm where the two are in conflict. In so far as Ahriman lives in our etheric body we dive down with our etheric body into the sphere of the elementary Nature spirits—the Earth, Water, Air and Fire spirits. We are not cognizant of the fact because we are not able to descend fully into our etheric body with our Ego. Nevertheless it is always so. Within this etheric body not only does there live the power of the thoughts that we ourselves think, but the influences also of the Nature spirits; these enter in and make themselves felt. When a man has met with these Nature spirits he is able afterwards to tell of some experience he has had which he did not have in his ordinary Ego-consciousness. For it is when he, is in an abnormal condition that man meets the Nature spirits, namely, when the etheric body is to some extent loosened from the physical body.

How can such a thing happen? It can happen in the following way. The etheric body of man is in communion with the whole surrounding etheric world, therefore also with the whole sphere of the Nature spirits. Let us imagine, to take a simple case, that a man is walking along a road. When he is walking along a road in the daytime with his ordinary consciousness, his etheric body is properly in his physical body and he perceives with his Ego-consciousness what one is normally able to perceive with the Ego-consciousness. But now suppose that he is walking along a path by night. When we walk along a path by night, it is generally dark, and this fact will of itself produce in many persons a “creepy” feeling. And just because he gets into this condition, then the peculiar sensations that he experiences enable Lucifer to seize hold of him. His etheric body becomes loosened from the physical body, and then this emancipated etheric body can enter into relation with the surrounding etheric world.

Now let us suppose that the man comes into the vicinity of a churchyard where etheric bodies are still present over the graves of recently deceased persons. In the condition in which he is, with his etheric body loosened, he is perhaps able to perceive something of the thoughts which are still remaining in the etheric bodies of the dead persons. Suppose someone has died only a short time ago leaving debts behind him; he died with the thought that he has incurred debts. Then it can be that this thought is still present in the etheric body of the person after he has died. We do not of course ordinarily perceive the thoughts in the etheric body of a dead human being. But for a man who has come into the condition I have described it might well be possible. He could enter into relation with the etheric body of the other and perceive within it the thought: “I have incurred debts.” And then because this experience strengthens the Luciferic power in him, there arises in him the feeling: “I must pay the debt for him.” He experiences in this way in his etheric body something he would never experience in the physical body in normal life. Such an experience does not happen to us in ordinary human life, and when it comes it makes an extraordinary impression upon our consciousness. For it arouses the knowledge: “I have had a strange and singular experience. I have not had this experience within the body, nor can I ever have it within the body.” We have the feeling quite distinctly that we are somewhere else than in our body, and that is a strange, an unaccustomed feeling. We experience at the same time an overpowering desire to return once more into the body, we long for help to return again into the body.

This feeling of longing to return attracts to us certain elementary Nature spirits for whom this very feeling in us is food and nourishment. They come, because they are attracted by the feeling, “I want to be drawn into my physical body,” and they help us to find the way back to it. If one is asleep in the ordinary way, one finds the way back quite easily. But when one has undergone an experience such as I have described, it is difficult to find the way back. You must not of course imagine that we see the situation as we perceive things in the physical body; no, we see it imaginatively, in pictures. Someone comes to us—it is really a Nature spirit, appearing perhaps in the guise of a shepherd, and gives us the advice: “Go to a certain castle, I will take you there in my wagon,”—or some similar words. The situation may even be still further developed. The body which we have left and outside of which we have had the experience, may assume the appearance of an enchanted castle from which we have to release someone when we return into it. So do we “imaginate” in pictures the longing for the physical body and the help that the Nature spirits bring to us. And then we come back into the physical body—that is to say, we wake up.

People who have had such experiences will tell us that they feel they have in actual reality come into contact in this way with the thoughts of a dead man. They say to themselves: “That feeling I had was not something that was merely in myself, it was no mere dream that I dreamed, it was a feeling that communicated to me something that was taking place in the world outside. It is of course all expressed in pictures, but it does truly correspond to an event.” I will now read to you such a picture, where a man narrates what he has experienced. As you will see, it was an experience somewhat similar to the one of which I have spoken. He describes it as follows. “When I had taken leave of the soldiers I met three men. They wanted to exhume a dead person who owed them three marks. I was filled with compassion and at once absolved the debt, in order that the dead man might rest in peace and not be disturbed in his grave. I walked on a little further. A strange man with pale countenance accosted me, invited me to mount a leaden carriage, and persuaded me to go with him to a castle. In the castle, he said, dwelt a princess, who had declared she would marry only a man who came to her on a carriage of lead. He turned to the driver and said: ‘Drive in the direction of the sunrise.’ Then came a shepherd who said: ‘I am the Count of Ravensburg.’ He ordered the driver to drive faster. We came to a door and we could hear a tumult within. The door was opened. The princess asked the man whence he came and how it had been possible for him to drive in company with that old man—and behold, I saw that he who had led me thither was a spirit. Then I entered in at the door and took possession of the castle.”

That is to say, he came back into his body. There you have the description of just such an experience as I have been speaking of.

And what is such an event, when it happens to someone who then tells others of it? It is a Märchen (a fairy-tale [ see Goethe's Standard of the Soul, by Rudolf Steiner. ]).

You must not imagine that an experience of this nature is the only way in which man comes into relationship with the external etheric world through his etheric body. There is another. And that is, in an activity which is only half conscious, an activity in which the Ego only half participates—namely, the act of Speech. Our speaking is not so conscious as our thinking. It is not the case that speaking is something which belongs to us and which we have in our power. In speech live etheric Powers, and a good part of our speaking is unconscious. The Ego does not reach fully down into speech. When we speak we are in communication through our etheric body with the surrounding etheric world. We learn to think as individuals, but not to speak. We are taught to speak through the fact that our Karma places us into a particular set of circumstances in life. We have already seen how we may come into relation with the Nature spirits in abnormal conditions when the etheric body is loosened, and now we find that inasmuch as we speak and do not merely think silently, we come into relation with the Folk Spirits. The Folk Spirits enter our etheric body and live there—without our being aware of it. This life of the Folk Spirit within the human being really belongs just as little to his fully conscious Ego activity as does the “Märchen” of which I have told you. So much, then, for the activity of Lucifer and Ahriman in man's etheric body.

The Luciferic and Ahrimanic forces enter also into the astral body. When we come to study the astral body of man, we must turn our attention to what is the distinguishing mark of the astral human being as he is on earth—namely, consciousness. In the physical body form and force are the essentials, in the etheric body, movement and life: in the astral body, consciousness. Now in the body of man we have not only one consciousness, but two; the ordinary waking state and the state of sleep. But, strange to say, neither of these two states is entirely natural to us. Natural would be for us an intermediate state between the two, a state which, as a matter of fact, we never really consciously have.

If we were perpetually awake we would scarcely be able to develop in a proper, orderly manner through the various ages of life. Something is always present in us which is less awake than we are in our day-consciousness, and only by virtue of this are we in a position to evolve and develop. Ask yourselves, how much do you expect to be able to evolve through all that you experience and receive in ordinary life? For the most part, we merely satisfy thereby our desire, our curiosity, or our need of sensation. It is not often we act with deliberate intent to place what we experience in waking day life in the service of our development. The truth is, development takes place through the fact that something is continually sleeping in us, even in the daytime. I am not alluding to the habit of dropping off to sleep in the daytime! But when man is wide awake by day, something still remains fast asleep in him, and this it is which brings it about that he does not remain for ever a child, but evolves further.

The ordinary waking state is what comes to consciousness through our astral body. In this ordinary waking state we are, however, too strongly awake, we are too intensely given up to the external world; we are, in fact, quite lost in it. How does this come about?

The reason is that the waking consciousness lives under the influence of Ahriman. Ahriman has great power over our waking consciousness. It is quite different in the case of the sleep consciousness. In sleep consciousness we are too little awake. We are too engrossed in our own evolution; we are so completely and so powerfully within ourselves that all consciousness is obliterated. In sleep consciousness, Lucifer has the upper hand.

This is then how the matter stands with our astral body. When we are awake, Ahriman has the upper hand over Lucifer, and when we are asleep Lucifer has the upper hand over Ahriman. They are in equilibrium only when we dream; there they pull with equal force, they strike a balance between them. The ideas which are called forth by Ahriman in day consciousness and which he causes to harden and crystallize, are dissolved and made to disappear under the influence of Lucifer; everything becomes pictures when Ahriman is no longer busy fixing them in rigid ideas. They melt and become mobile in themselves. A state of equilibrium is induced in a pair of scales by having both scale-pans equally laden; we have, then, not a state of rest but a state of equilibrium. It is the same with the life of man. We have not in man a state of rest, but a state of equilibrium; and the two forces which hold the scales and each of which at certain times brings extra weight to bear, are Lucifer and Ahriman. In waking consciousness Ahriman's side sinks down, in sleep consciousness Lucifer's. Only in the intermediate state, where we dream, are the two scale-pans held in poise, not at rest, but delicately poised in equilibrium.

We can go on to carry our study into still higher regions of human life. Here too we shall find evidence of how Lucifer and Ahriman fill the world with their inter-working. Two ideas play a great part in human life. One is the idea of duty. We might also say, when we consider it from a religious point of view, the idea of commandment or behest. We speak sometimes, do we not, of the “behest of duty.” The other idea, which can be placed over against it, is the idea of right (or rights).

If you will reflect a little on the part played in human life by these two ideas of duty and of right—I mean, the “right” one has to do this or that—you will very soon realize that they are polar opposites, and that men's inclinations are turned now more in the direction of duty, and now again in the direction of right. We live certainly in an age when people are more ready to speak of right than duty. All possible spheres of life claim their rights. We have Workers' Rights, Women's Rights, and so on and so on.

Duty is the opposite idea of right. Our age will be followed by an age when duties will be more regarded than rights, and this will be directly attributable to the influence of the anthroposophical spiritual world-conception. In the future—certainly, in a rather distant future—we shall have movements where less and less emphasis will be laid on the demand for rights and people will inquire more and more as to their duty. The question will rather be: What is our duty as man, as woman, e.g., in this or that situation of life? The present epoch that demands rights will be succeeded by an epoch that asks after duties.

We said that right and duty play into life like two polar opposites. Whenever a man turns his thought and attention to duty, he looks right away from himself. Kant has given great and grand expression to this fact. He pictures duty as a lofty goddess, to whom man looks up: “Duty, thou great and exalted Name, thou has nought to do with fondness nor with favor; all that thou requirest is to submit thyself and serve.” Man beholds duty, so to say, raying down upon him from regions of the spiritual world. In a religious sense, he feels duty as an impulse laid upon him by the Beings of the higher Hierarchies. And when man surrenders himself to duty, he goes right out of himself. It is in this going-out-of-himself in the feeling of duty, that man can begin to learn how to get beyond his ordinary self.

There is, however, a danger to man in all such going-out-of his ordinary self, in all such endeavor after spiritualization. If man were to give himself up entirely to this, he would lose the ground from under his feet, he would lose his feeling of gravity. Therefore he must endeavor, when he surrenders himself to duty, to find within himself at the same time something that shall give him weight, so that he may keep his sense of gravity. Schiller expressed it very beautifully when he said that man has the best relation to duty when he learns to love duty.

This is really saying a great deal. When a man speaks of learning to love duty he no longer merely surrenders himself to duty; he rises out of himself, taking with him the love with which otherwise he loves himself. The love that lives in his body, in his egoism—this love he takes out of himself, and loves with it duty. So long as it is self-love, so long is it a Luciferic force. But when man takes this self-love out of himself and loves duty in the way that otherwise he loves only himself, he releases Lucifer. He takes Lucifer into the realm of duty and gives him, so to say, a justified existence in the impulse and feeling of duty.

If, on the other hand, a man cannot do this, if he cannot draw forth the love out of himself and offer it to duty, then he will continue to love only himself; and since he cannot love duty, he is obliged to subject himself to her, he becomes a slave to duty, he becomes, as we say, a man who “does his duty,”—hard and cold and uninspired. He hardens in an Ahrimanic sense, notwithstanding that he follows duty devotedly.

You see how duty stands, as it were, in a midway position. If we surrender ourselves to her, she annuls our freedom, we become her slaves, because Ahriman draws near on the one hand with his impulses. But if we bring ourselves—if we bring all our power of self-love—as an offering and offer it up to duty, bringing thus to duty the Luciferic warmth of love, then the result is that, through the state of balance induced in this way between Lucifer and Ahriman, we find a right relation to duty.

Thus we are truly, in a certain connection, redeemers of Lucifer. When we begin to be able to love our duty, then the moment has come when we can help towards the redemption and release of the Luciferic powers; we set free the Lucifer forces which are held in us as by a charm, and lead them forth to fight with Ahriman. We release the imprisoned Lucifer (imprisoned in self-love) when we learn to love our duty.

Schiller sets himself this very question in his “Aesthetic Letters”: How is it possible to rise above slavery to duty and attain to love of duty? Of course he does not use the expressions “Lucifer” and “Ahriman,” because he does not see the problem in its cosmic aspect. Nevertheless these wonderful letters of Schiller on the Aesthetic Education of Man are directly translatable into Spiritual Science.

Right, on the other hand, immediately shows that it is united with Lucifer. Man does not need to learn to love his right, he loves it already! It is perfectly natural that he should do so. It is natural for Lucifer to be connected with right in man's feeling—man feels that this or that is his right. Everywhere that right asserts itself, Lucifer is speaking there too. It is very often only too evident how Lucifer makes his voice heard in the demand of some right. Here it is a question of calling in something that can be set over against right. We have to call in Ahriman to create a polarity to Lucifer. And this we can do by cultivating the polar opposite of love.

Love is inner fire, its opposite is calmness—the quiet acceptance of what happens in the world. As soon as we approach our right with this quiet and calm interest we call in Ahriman. It is not easy to recognize him here, for we set him free from his merely external existence, we summon him into ourselves and warm him with the love that is already united with right. Calm and peace of mind have the coldness of Ahriman; in the quiet understanding of what is in the world, we unite our warmth and our understanding love with the coldness that is in the world outside. And then we release Ahriman, when we meet what has come about with understanding, when we do not merely demand our rights out of self-love but understand what has come about in the world. This is the eternal battle that is waged between Lucifer and Ahriman. On the one hand man learns in a conservative way to understand the conditions that are in the world, he learns to understand how they have come about from cosmic, karmic necessity. That is one aspect of the matter. The other aspect is that he feels in his heart the urge to make new conditions possible, continually to let the old give place to the new. This is the revolutionary current in human life. In the revolutionary stream lives Lucifer, in the conservative stream Ahriman, and man in his life of right lives in the midst between these two poles.

Thus we see how right and duty show each of them a state of equilibrium between Lucifer and Ahriman. We only learn to understand how the physical body, the etheric body and the astral body manifest in life, or how duty and right come to expression in the life of duty and the life of right, when we learn to recognize the interplay of great spiritual Powers, above all of those spiritual Powers who bring about the state of equilibrium.

For just as what is in the external world stands under the influence of the spiritual forces that bring about balance, so does our moral life too belong in a world of polar opposites. The whole morale of human conduct, the whole ethical life of man with its poles of right and duty, only become comprehensible when we take into account the instreaming forces of Lucifer and Ahriman. And when we look at the life of man in history, that takes its course in an alternation between, on the one hand, revolutionary and warlike—that is to say, Luciferic—movements, and on the other hand, conservative—that is, Ahrimanic—movements, there too we find a condition of balance between Lucifer and Ahriman. In no other way is the world to be understood than by recognizing in it these opposite forces and influences.

What we behold in the world outside is dualistic, it shows itself to us in opposites. And in this connection Manichaeism, correctly understood, has its complete justification. How Manichaeism is fully justified even within a spiritual monism—of that we shall have more to say in the future. The object I have had in view in these lectures is to show you how the whole world is a result of the working of balance.

Particularly evident is the result of the working of balance in the life of art. With this as our starting-point we will go on in later lectures to consider the arts and their evolution in the world, and the part that has been taken by different spiritual Powers in the evolution of the life of art among mankind.

The teacher of the present day should have a comprehensive view of the laws of the universe as a background to all he undertakes in his school work. And clearly, it is particularly in the lower classes, in the lower school grades, that education demands a connection in the teacher's soul with the highest ideas of humanity. A real canker in school constitution of recent years has been the habit of keeping the teacher of younger classes in a kind of dependent position, in a position which has made his existence seem of less value than that of teachers in the upper school. Naturally this is not the place for me to speak in general of the spiritual branch of the social organism. But I must point out that in future everything in the sphere of teaching must be on an equal footing; and public opinion will have to recognise that the teacher of the lower grades, both spiritually and in other ways, has the same intrinsic value as the teacher of the upper grades. It will not surprise you, therefore, if we point out to-day in the background of all teaching—with younger children as with older—there must be something that one cannot of course use directly in one's work with the children, but which it is essential that the teacher should know if his teaching is to be fruitful.

In our teaching we bring to the child the world of nature on the one hand and the world of the spirit on the other. In so far as we are human beings on the earth, on the physical plane, fulfilling our existence between birth and death, we are intimately connected with the natural world on the one hand and the spiritual world on the other hand. Now the psychological science of our time is a very weak growth. It is still suffering from the after-effects of that dogmatic Church pronouncement of A.D. 869—to which I have often alluded—a decree which obscured an earlier vision resting on instinctive knowledge: the insight that man is divided into body, soul and spirit. When you hear psychologists speak to-day you will nearly always find that they speak only of the twofold nature of man. You will hear it said that man consists of matter and soul, or of body and spirit, however it may be put. Thus matter and body, and equally soul and spirit, are regarded as meaning much the same thing.¹ Nearly all psychologies are built up on this erroneous conception of the twofold division of the human being. It is impossible to come to a real insight into human nature if one adopts this twofold division alone. It is for this fundamental reason that nearly everything that is put forward to-day as psychology is only dilettantism, a mere playing with words.

This is chiefly due to that error, which reached its full magnitude only in the second half of the nineteenth century, and which arose from a misconception of a really great achievement of physical science. You know that the good people of Heilbronn have erected a memorial in the middle of their city to the man they shut up in an asylum during his life: Julius Robert Mayer. And you know that this personality, of whom the Heilbronn people are to-day naturally extremely proud, is associated with what is called the law of the Conservation of Energy or Force.

This law states that the sum of all energies or forces present in the universe is constant, only that these forces undergo certain changes, and appear, now as heat, now as mechanical force, or the like. This is the form in which the law of Julius Robert Mayer is presented, because it is completely misunderstood. For he was really concerned with the discovery of the metamorphosis of forces, and not with the exposition of such an abstract law as that of the conservation of energy.

Now, considered broadly and from the point of view of the history of civilisation, what is this law of the conservation of energy or force? It is the great stumbling-block to any understanding of man. For as soon as people think that forces can never be created afresh, it becomes impossible to arrive at a knowledge of the true being of man. For the true nature of man rests on the fact that through him new forces are continually coming into existence. It is certainly true that, under the conditions in which we are living in the world, man is the only being in whom new forces and even—as we shall hear later—new matter is being formed. But as modern philosophy will have nothing to do with the elements through which alone the human being can be fully comprehended, it produces this law of the conservation of energy; a law which, in a sense, does no harm when applied to the other kingdoms of nature, to the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms—but which applied to man destroys all possibility of a true understanding and knowledge.

As teachers it will be necessary for you on the one hand to give your pupils an understanding of nature, and on the other hand to lead them to a certain comprehension of spiritual life. Without a knowledge of nature in some degree, and without some relation to spiritual life, man cannot take his place in social life. Let us therefore first of all turn our attention to external nature.

Outer nature presents itself to us in two ways. On the one side, we confront nature in our thought life which as you know is of an image character and is a kind of reflection of our pre-natal life. On the other side we come into touch with that nature which may be called will-nature, which, as germ, points to our life after death. In this way we are continuously involved with nature. This might of course appear to be a two fold relationship between man and the world, and it has in point of fact given rise to the error of the twofold nature of man. We shall return to this subject later. When we confront the world from the side of thinking and of the mental picture, then we can really only comprehend that part of the world which is perpetually dying. This is a law of extraordinary importance. You must be very clear on this point: you may come across the most marvellous natural laws, but if they have been discovered by means of the intellect and the powers of the mental picture, then they will always refer to what is in process of dying in external nature.

When, however, the living will, present in man as germ, is turned to the external world, it experiences laws very different from those connected with death. Hence those of you, who still retain conceptions which have sprung from the modern age and the errors of present-day science, will find something difficult to understand. What brings us into contact with the external world through the senses—including the whole range of the twelve senses—has not the nature of cognition, but rather of will. A man of to-day has lost all perception of this. He therefore considers it childish when he reads in Plato that actually sight comes about by the stretching forth of a kind of prehensile pair of arms from the eyes to the objects. These prehensile arms cannot of course be perceived by means of the senses; but that Plato was conscious of them is proof that he had penetrated into the super-sensible world. Actually, looking at things involves the same process as taking hold of things, only it is more delicate. For example, when you take hold of a piece of chalk this is a physical process exactly like the spiritual process that takes place when you send the etheric forces from your eyes to grasp an object in the act of sight. If people of the present day had any power of observation, they would be able to deduce these facts from observing natural phenomena. If, for example, you look at a horse's eyes, which are directed outwards, you will get the feeling that the horse, simply through the position of his eyes, has a different attitude to his environment from the human being. I can show you the causes of this most clearly by the following hypothesis: imagine that your two arms were so constituted that it was quite impossible for you to bring them together in front, so that you could never take hold of yourself. Suppose you had to remain in the position of “Ah” in Eurythmy and could never come to “0,” that, through some resisting force, it were impossible for you by stretching your arms forward to bring them together in front. Now the horse is in this situation with respect to the super-sensible arms of his eyes: the arm of his right eye can never touch the arm of his left eye. But the position of man's eyes is such that he can continually make these two super-sensible arms of his eyes touch one another. This is the basis of our sensation of the Ego, the I—a super-sensible sensation. If we had no possibility at all of bringing left and right into contact; or if the touching of left and right meant as little as it does with animals, who never rightly join their fore-feet, in prayer for instance, or in any similar spiritual exercise—if this were the case we should not be able to attain this spiritualised sensation of our own self.

What is of paramount importance in the sensations of eye and ear is not so much the passive element, it is the activity, i.e. how we meet the outside world in our will. Modern philosophy has often had an inkling of some truth, and has then invented all kinds of words, which, however, usually show how far one is from a real comprehension of the matter. For example, the Localzeichen of Lotze's philosophy exhibit a trace of this knowledge that the will is active in the senses. But our lower sense organism, which clearly shows its connection with the metabolic system in the senses of touch, taste and smell, is indeed closely bound up with the metabolic system right into the higher senses—and the metabolic system is of a will nature.

You can therefore say: man confronts nature with his intellectual faculties and through their means he grasps all that is dead in Nature, and he acquires laws concerning what is dead. But what rises in Nature from the womb of death to become the future of the world, this is comprehended by man's will—that will which is seemingly so indeterminate, but which extends right into the senses themselves.

Think how living your relationship to Nature will become if you keep clearly in view what I have just said. For then you will say to yourselves: when I go out into Nature I have the play of light and colour continually before me; in assimilating the light and its colours I am uniting myself with that part of Nature which is being carried on into the future; and when I return to my room and think over what I have seen in Nature, and spin laws about it, then I am concerning myself with that element in the world which is perpetually dying. In Nature dying and becoming are continuously flowing into one another. We are able to comprehend the dying element because we bear within us the reflection of our prenatal life, the world of intellect, the world of thought, whereby we can see in our mind's eye the elements of death at the basis of Nature. And we are able to grasp what will come of Nature in the future because we confront Nature, not only with our intellect and thought, but with that which is of a will-nature within ourselves.

Were it not that, during his earthly life, man could preserve some part of what before his birth became purely thought life, he would never be able to achieve freedom. For, in that case, man would be bound up with what is dead, and the moment he wanted to call into free activity what in himself is related to the dead element in Nature, he would be wanting to call into free activity a dying thing. And if he wished to make use of what unites him with Nature as a being of will, his consciousness would be deadened, for what unites him as a will being with Nature is still in germ. He would be a Nature being, but not a free being.

Over and above these two elements—the comprehension of what is dead through the intellect, and the comprehension of what is living and becoming through the will—there dwells something in man which he alone and no other earthly being bears within him from birth to death, and that is pure thinking; that kind of thinking which is not directed to external nature, but is solely directed to the super-sensible nature in man himself, to that which makes him an autonomous being, something over and above what lives in the “less than death” and “more than life.” When speaking of human freedom therefore, one has to pay attention to this autonomous thing in man, this pure sense-free thinking in which the will too is always present.

Now when you turn to consider Nature itself from this point of view you will say: I am looking out upon the world, the stream of dying is in me, and also the stream of renewing: dying—being born again. Modern science understands but little of this process; for it regards the external world as more or less of a unity, and continually muddles up dying and becoming. So that the many statements about Nature and its essence which are common to-day are entirely confused, because dying and becoming are mixed up and confounded with one another. In order clearly to differentiate between these two streams in Nature the question must be asked: how would it be with the world if man himself were not within it?

This question presents a great dilemma for the philosophy of modern science. For, suppose you were to ask a truly modern research scientist: what would Nature be like if man were not within it? Of course he might at first be rather shocked, for the question would seem to be to him a strange one. Then, however, he would consider what grounds his science gives for answering such a question, and he would say: in this case, minerals, plants and animals would be on the earth, only man would not be there; and the course of the earth right through from the beginning, when it was still in the nebulous condition described by Kant and Laplace, would have been the same as it has been, only that man would not have been present in this progress. Practically speaking this is the only answer that could result. He might perhaps add: man tills the ground and so alters the surface of the earth, or he constructs machines and thereby also brings about certain alterations; but these are immaterial in comparison with the changes that are caused by Nature itself. In any case the gist of the scientist's answer would be that minerals, plants and animals would develop without man being present on the earth.

This is not correct. For if man were not present in the earth's evolution then the animals, for the most part, would not be there either; for a great many animals, and particularly the higher animals, have only arisen in the earth's evolution because man was obliged—figuratively speaking, of course—to use his elbows. The nature of man formerly contained many things which are not there now, and at a certain stage of his earthly development he had to separate out from himself the higher animals, to throw them off, as it were, so that he himself could progress. I will make a comparison to describe this throwing out: imagine a solution where something is being dissolved, and then imagine that this dissolved substance is separated out and falls to the bottom as sediment. In the same way man was united with the animal world in earlier conditions of his development and later he separated out the animal world like a precipitate, or sediment. The animals would not have become what they are to-day if man had not had to develop as he has done. Thus without man in the earth evolution the animal forms as well as the earth itself would have looked quite other than they do to-day.

But let us pass on to consider the mineral and plant world. Here we must be clear that not only the lower animal forms but also the plant and mineral kingdoms would long ago have dried up and ceased to develop if man were not upon the earth. And, again, present-day philosophy, based as it is on a one-sided view of the natural world, is bound to say: certainly men die, and their bodies are burned or buried, and thereby are given over to the earth, but this is of no significance for the development of the earth; for if the earth did not receive human bodies into itself it would take its course in precisely the same way as now, when it does receive these bodies. But this means that men are quite unaware that the continuous giving over of human corpses to the earth—whether by cremation or burial—is a real process which works on in the earth.

Peasant women in the country know much better than town women that yeast plays an important part in bread making, although only a little is added to the bread; they know that the bread could not rise unless yeast were added to the dough. In the same way the earth would long ago have reached the final stage of its development if there had not been continuously added to it the forces of the human corpse, which is separated in death from what is of soul and spirit. Through the forces present in human corpses which are thus received by the earth, the evolution of the earth itself is maintained. It is owing to this that the minerals can still go on producing their powers of crystallisation, a thing they would otherwise long ago have ceased to do; without these forces they would long ago have crumbled away or dissolved. Plants, also, which would long ago have ceased to grow are enabled, thanks to these forces, to go on growing to-day. And it is the same with the lower animals forms. In giving his body over to the earth the human being is giving the ferment, the yeast for future—development.

Hence it is by no means a matter of indifference whether man is living on the earth or not. It is simply untrue that the evolution of the earth with respect to its mineral, plant and animal kingdoms, would continue if man himself were not there. The process of Nature is a unified whole to which man belongs. We only get a true picture of man if we think of him as standing even in death in the midst of the cosmic process.

If you will bear this in mind then you will hardly wonder at what I am now going to say: when man descends from the spiritual into the physical world he receives his physical body as a garment. But naturally the body received as a child differs from the body as we lay it aside in death, at whatever age. Something has happened to the physical body. And what has happened could only come about because this body is permeated with forces of spirit and soul. For, after all, we eat what animals also eat. That is to say, we transform external matter just as the animals do; but we transform it with the help of something which animals have not got; something that came down from the spiritual world in order to unite itself with the physical body of man. Because of this we affect the substances in a different way than do animals or plants. And the substances given over to the earth in the human corpse are transformed substances, something different from what man received when he was born. We can therefore say: man receives certain substances and forces at birth; he renews them during his life and gives them up again to the earth process in a different form. The substances and forces which he gives up to the earth process at death are not the same as those which he received at birth. In giving them up he is bestowing upon the earth process something which continuously streams through him from the super-sensible world into the physical, sense-perceptible, earth process. At birth he brings down something from the super-sensible world; this he incorporates with the substances and forces which make up his body during his earthly life, and then at death the earth receives it. Man is thus the medium for a constant be-dewing of the physical sense world by the super-sensible. You can imagine, as it were, a fine rain falling continuously from the super-sensible on to the sense world; but these drops would remain quite unfruitful for the earth if man did not absorb them and pass them over to the earth through his own body. These drops which man receives at birth and gives up again at death, bring about a continual fructification of the earth by super-sensible forces; and through these fructifying super-sensible forces the evolutionary process of the earth is maintained. Without human corpses therefore, the earth would long ago have become dead.

With this presupposition we can now ask: what do the death forces do to human nature? The death-bringing forces which predominate in outer nature work into the nature of man; for if man were not continually bringing life to outer nature it would perish. Now how do these death-bringing forces work in the nature of man? They produce in man all those organisations which range from the bone system to the nerve system. What builds up the bones and everything related to them is of quite a different nature from what builds up the other systems. The death-bringing forces play into us. We leave them as they are, and thereby we become bone men. But the death-bringing forces play further into us and we tone them down, and thereby we become nerve men. What is a nerve? A nerve is something which is continually wanting to become bone, and is only prevented from becoming bone by being in a certain relationship to the non-bony, or non-nervous elements of human nature. Nerve has a constant tendency to ossify, it is constantly compelled towards decay; while bone in man is dead to a very large extent. With animal bones the conditions are different—animal bone is far more living than human bone. Thus you can picture one side of human nature by saying: the death-bringing stream works in the bone and nerve system. That is the one pole.

The other stream, that of forces continuously giving life, works in the muscle and blood system and in all that is connected with it. The only reason why nerves are not bones is that their connection with the blood and muscle system is such that the impulse in them to become bone is directly opposed by the forces working in the blood and muscle. The nerve does not become bone solely because the blood and muscle system stands over against it and hinders it from becoming bone. If during the process of growth bone develops a wrong relationship to blood and muscle, then the condition of rickets will result, which is due to the muscle and blood nature hindering a proper deadening of the bone. It is therefore of the utmost importance that the right alternation should come about in man between the muscle and blood system on the one hand and the bone and nerve system on the other. The bone nerve system extends into the eye, but in the outer covering the bone system withdraws, and sends into the eye only its weakened form, the nerve; this enables the eye to unite the will nature, which lives in muscles and blood, with the activity of mental picturing. Here again we come upon something which played an important role in ancient science, but which is scorned as a childish conception by the science of to-day. But modern science will come back to it again, only in another form.

In the knowledge of ancient times men always felt a relationship between the nerve marrow, the nerve substance, and the bone marrow, the bone substance. And they were of the opinion that man thinks with his bone nature just as much as with his nerve nature. And this is true. All that we have in abstract science we owe to the faculty of our bone system. How is it, for instance, that man can do geometry? The higher animals have no geometry; that can be seen from their way of life. It is pure nonsense when people say: “Perhaps the higher animals have a geometry, only we do not notice it.” Now, man can form a geometry. But how, for example, does he form the conception of a triangle? If one truly reflects on this matter, that man can form the conception of a triangle, it will seem a marvellous thing that man forms a triangle, an abstract triangle—nowhere to be found in concrete life—purely out of his geometrical, mathematical imagination. There is much that is hidden and unknown behind the manifest events of the world. Now imagine, for example, that you are standing at a definite place in this room. As a super-sensible human being you will, at certain times, perform strange movements about which as a rule you know nothing; like this, for example: you go a little way to one side, then you go a little way backwards, then you come back to your place again. You are describing unawares in space a line which actually performs a triangular movement. Such movements are actually there, only you do not perceive them.

But since your backbone is in a vertical position, you are in the plane in which these movements take place. The animal is not in this plane, his backbone lies otherwise, i.e. horizontally; thus these movements are not carried out. Because man's backbone is vertical, he is in the plane where this movement is produced. He does not bring it to consciousness so that he could say: “I am always dancing in a triangle.” But he draws a triangle and says: “That is a triangle.” In reality this is a movement carried out unconsciously which he accomplishes in the cosmos.

These movements to which you give fixed forms in geometry—when you draw geometrical figures, you perform in conjunction with the earth. The earth has not only the movement which belongs to the Copernican system; it has also quite—different, artistic movements, which are constantly being performed; as are also still more complicated movements, such as those, for example, which belong to the lines of geometrical solids: the cube, the octahedron, the dodecahedron, the icosatetrahedron and so forth. These bodies are not invented, they are reality, but unconscious reality. In these and other geometrical solids lies a remarkable harmony with the subconscious knowledge which man has. This is due to the fact that our bone system has an essential knowledge; but your consciousness does not reach down into the bone system. The consciousness of it dies, and it is only reflected back in the geometrical images which man carries out in figures. Man is an intrinsic part of the universe. In evolving geometry he is copying something that he himself does in the cosmos.

Thus on the one hand we look into a world which encompasses ourselves and which is in a continuous process of dying. On the other hand we look into all that enters into the forces of our blood and muscle system; this is continuously in movement, in fluctuation, in becoming and arising: it is entirely seedlike, and has nothing dead within it. We arrest the death process within ourselves, and it is only we as human beings who can arrest it, and bring into this dying element a process of life, of becoming. If men were not here on the earth, death would long ago have spread over the whole earth process, and the earth as a whole would have been given over to crystallisation, though single crystals could not have maintained themselves. We draw the single crystals away from the general crystallisation process and preserve them, as long as we need them for our human evolution. And it is by doing so that we keep alive the being of the earth. Thus we human beings cannot be excluded from the life of the earth for it is we who keep the earth alive. Theodore Eduard von Hartmann hit on a true thought when, in his pessimism, he declared that one day mankind would be so mature that everybody would commit suicide; but what he further expected—viewing things as he did from the confines of natural science—would indeed be superfluous: for Hartmann it was not enough that all men should one day commit suicide, he expected in addition that an ingenious invention would blow the earth sky-high. Of this he would have no need. He need only have arranged the day for the general suicide and the earth would of itself have disintegrated slowly into the air. For without the force which is implanted into it by man, the evolution of the earth cannot endure. We must now permeate ourselves with this knowledge once again in a feeling way. It is necessary that these things be understood at the present time.

Perhaps you remember that in my earliest writings there constantly recurs a thought through which I wanted to place knowledge on a different footing from that on which it stands to-day. In the external philosophy, which is derived from Anglo-American thought, man is reduced to being a mere spectator of the world. In his inner soul process he is a mere spectator of the world. If man were not here on earth—it is held—if he did not experience in his soul a reflection of what is going on in the world outside, everything would be just as it is. This holds good of natural science where it is a question of the development of events, such as I have described, but it also holds good for philosophy. The philosopher of to-day is quite content to be a spectator, that is, to be merely in the purely destructive element of cognition. I wished to rescue knowledge out of this destructive element. Therefore I have said again and again: man is not merely a spectator of the world: he is rather the world's stage upon which great cosmic events continuously play themselves out. I have repeatedly said that man, and the soul of man, is the stage upon which world events are played. This thought can also be expressed in a philosophic abstract form. And in particular, if you read the final chapter about spiritual activity in my book Truth and Science. you will find this thought strongly emphasised, namely: what takes place in man is not a matter of indifference to the rest of nature, but rather the rest of nature reaches into man and what takes place in man is simultaneously a cosmic process; so that the human soul is a stage upon which not merely a human process but a cosmic process is enacted. Of course certain circles of people to-day would find it exceedingly hard to understand such a thought. But unless we permeate ourselves with such conceptions we cannot possibly become true educators.

Now what is it that actually happens within man's being? On the one hand we have the bone-nerve nature, on the other hand the blood-muscle nature. Through the co-operation of these two, substances and forces are constantly being formed anew. And it is because of this, because in man himself substances and forces are recreated, that the earth is preserved from death. What I have just said of the blood, namely that through its contact with the nerves it brings about re-creation of substances and forces—this you can now connect with what I said yesterday: that blood is perpetually on the way to becoming spiritual but is arrested on its way. To-morrow we shall link up the thoughts we have acquired in these two lectures and develop them further. But you can see already how erroneous the thought of the conservation of energy and matter really is, in the form in which it is usually put forward; for it is contradicted by what happens within human nature, and it is only an obstacle to the real comprehension of the human being. Only when we grasp the synthesizing thought, not indeed that something can proceed out of nothing, but that a thing can in reality be so transformed that it will pass away and another thing will arise, only when we substitute this thought for that of the conservation of energy and matter, will we attain something really fruitful for science.

You see what the tendency is which leads so much of our thinking astray. We put forward something, as for example, the law of the conservation of force and matter, and we proclaim it a universal law. This is due to a certain tendency of our thought life, and especially of our soul life, to describe things in a one-sided way; whereas we should only set up postulates on the results of our mental picturing. For instance, in our books on physics you will find the law of the mutual impenetrability of bodies set up as an axiom: at that place in space where there is one body no other body can be at the same time. This is laid down as a universal quality of bodies. But one ought only to say: bodies and beings of such a nature that in the place where they are in space no other similar object can be at the same time are “impenetrable” bodies. You ought only to apply your concepts to differentiate one province from another. You ought only to set up postulates, and not to give definitions which claim to be universal. And so we should not lay down a “law” of the conservation of force and substance, but we should find out what beings this law applies to. It was a tendency of the nineteenth century to lay down laws and say: this holds good in every case. Instead of this we should devote our soul powers to acquainting ourselves with things, and observing our experiences in connection with them.

• 1. The words here translated as matter and body are Körper and Leib, for which we have no precise equivalent in English. Körper is equivalent to physical body. Leib denotes a living body, i.e. an organism penetrated with life.

Originally published in Anthroposophical Quarterly, Volume 21, Number 4, Winter 1976.

In a public lecture such as the one given yesterday on Spiritual Science and the Future of Man, account must always be taken of the very limited receptive capacity of the world today. In our time, data of knowledge that are essential for humanity do indeed flow down from the spiritual worlds but can be accepted open mindedly only by very few people. To most individuals who have not prepared themselves adequately for the reception of such knowledge, the deeper aspects of our Spiritual Science prove to be something of a shock, something that seems fantastic or dreamlike.

All the more it behoves us to deepen our feeling for the most significant questions that arise in the course of fairly lengthy study in a Group. And now I want to speak of the need for a closer study of the great truth of the implanting of the Ego, the ‘I’, in man and to indicate that the subject is more complicated than it is usually thought to be at the present time.

We have heard that during the period of Old Saturn man was endowed with the rudiments of the physical body, during the period of Old Sun with that of the etheric body, during the period of Old Moon with that of the astral body, and that the essential task of our Earth evolution is the incorporation of the Ego into the other members of man’s constitution. Not until the end of Earth’s evolution will the human being be completely permeated—as is possible—by the Ego. If we study the man of Earth as such, we can say that the actual centre of his being is the Ego, the ‘I’ But then it must occur to us that in each of the different periods of our present life this Ego is connected with us differently, by no means always in the same Way. We must realise above all that the different members of our being are not understood when we simply enumerate them as physical body, etheric body, astral body and Ego. Now let us consider in what different ways the members can be connected with each other both during the various epochs of mankind’s evolution and during the single life of the human being.

Let us think, to begin with, of a child. We know that it is not until a comparatively late period that he learns to say ‘I’ of himself. This is very indicative. Although modern psychology, in its endeavours to be a bona tide science, does not grasp the fact, it is deeply significant that the inner experience, the mental conception of the ‘I’ wakens in the child comparatively late. In the very earliest years, until the age of 3 or 3½, although now and then the child babbles the sound ‘I’, he has no real experience of Egohood. You may come across a book by Heinrich Lhotzky entitled Die Seele deines Kindes (Your Child’s Soul) which contains the curious statement that the child learns to think before he learns to speak. This is nonsense, because it is by speaking that the child learns to think. Those who strive to grasp Spiritual Science must be cautious of what purports to be Science today. It is approximately) after the third year of life that a child learns for the first time to experience and be cognisant of the ‘I’.

This is connected with another fact, namely that in normal consciousness—not in higher, clairvoyant consciousness—we have no remembrance of our life before a certain point of time. If you think back over the past, you will realise that remembrance ceases at a certain point and does not extend as far as birth. What others have told us can often be confused with what we ourselves have experienced, but the thread breaks at approximately the point when the ‘I’ is experienced for the first time. A very young child has no such experience; it arises later on and it is then that a very dim kind of remembrance begins.

We now ask ourselves: if the experience of ‘I’ was not present during the first three years of life, was the ‘I’, the Ego, itself also not there in the child? The question to put to ourselves is this. Are we cognisant of something that is actually within us or is it within us without our knowledge? The Ego is indeed within the child only he is unaware of it, just as during sleep a person is connected with the Ego but is not cognisant of it. The fact is that we know of something, but that can be no criterion for us. We must say: the ‘I’ is present in the child but the child is not conscious of it.

What, then, is there to be said about the Ego? It has its own task to perform. If you were to investigate the human brain purely physically, you would find that just after birth it looks very imperfect compared with its later structure. Many of the finer convolutions have to be elaborated and moulded later on, during the subsequent years. This is what the ‘I’ achieves in the human being and because this is its task it cannot itself become conscious of it. The Ego has to elaborate the brain into a more delicately complicated structure, in order that later on the human being will be able to think. During the first years of life the Ego is very active.

When the Ego becomes conscious of itself, we could ask in vain: how have you managed to construct this brain with such artistry?—you will admit that during the whole span of life between birth and death the Ego does not develop consciousness on a par with that by which the brain is elaborated. Nevertheless we can ask ourselves the question. And the answer is that in its activity the Ego is under the guidance of the Beings of the higher Hierarchies. When we observe a child clairvoyantly, his Ego—as Ego-aura—is certainly there, but streams go out from this aura to the higher Hierarchies, to the Angels, Archangels, and so on; the forces of the Hierarchies stream in. Therefore when naive consciousness speaks of a child having a Guardian Angel, this is a very real truth. Later on this closer connection ceases; the ‘I’ experiences itself more in the nerves and can therefore become conscious of its own existence. A kind of detachment takes place. In the child a sort of ‘telephonic connection’ exists, inasmuch as the ‘I’ extends into the divine-spiritual Hierarchies. The statements of Spiritual Science must be taken seriously. I once said that the very wisest person can learn a great deal from a child. He can also learn a great deal because he need not look only at the child himself but also through him into the spiritual world, because in the child there is the ‘telephonic connection’ with the spiritual world—the connection that is ultimately severed.

Hence during the first three years of life we have before us a being quite different from the one who is there later on. Under the guidance of the Beings of the higher Hierarchies a childhood Ego works at the development of man’s instrument of thinking. This ‘I’, this Ego, then passes into the instruments themselves and can no longer work at them. Man’s instruments of thinking must then already have developed. Certainly they can develop to further stages, but the ‘I’ can no longer be working at this development.

The human being may therefore be thought of as twofold: the one we see during the first three and a half years, and the one which represents the rest of his life. In the language of esotericism, the first being is called the divine man, or the Son of God, because he is connected with the higher Hierarchies; the other is called the Son of Man. In the latter the Ego is present, moves the limbs and works—as far as it is possible to work—from within outwards. A distinction must therefore be made between the Son of God and the Son of Man.

The Son of God who is preeminently active for the first three and a half years of life embraces all the vitalising forces, stimulates the human being to pour these life giving forces in greater and ever greater measure into his organism. In comparison with those in an older person these forces are also health giving, strengthening factors. If we are not content in later life to be human beings who have to rely entirely on the senses and on the instrument of the physical body for our connection with the surrounding world but determine in our later years to strive upwards to the spiritual world, then we must contrive by some means to awaken these forces within ourselves; we must evoke the forces that are within us in earliest childhood, but with the difference that now we awaken them consciously, whereas a child awakens them unconsciously. In this respect too, therefore, it is obvious that man is a twofold being.

What is it, in reality, that is brought to light by these forces during the first three and a half years of life? In these forces—which are active under the direction of the higher Hierarchies—what is working over from earlier incarnations is asserting itself. You can easily convince yourselves of this by handling the human skull, where you find individual mounds and depressions. No skull is exactly similar to another, hence there is no universally valid Phrenology. Each case must be studied individually. The forces working in the formation of the human skull come over from earlier incarnations and their impetus ceases after the first three and a half years of life. During these years everything is still pliable and the spirit is still able to work in it. Later on, everything has become solid and the spirit can no longer come into play.

What, then, is responsible for the fact that in later life we are no longer able to work with these forces? To what is this due? It is due to the essential character of our Earth evolution. When the ‘I’ has become conscious of itself in the body, this presupposes that the body is very firmly knit and can no longer be elaborated by the forces just described. There are also forces which essentially belong to man as a generic being, which mould him in accordance with the architectural principles of the human form. Were we to work in the physical body with the forces of early childhood for more than the three and a half years which are the appropriate period, the physical body could not .survive. It would be rent asunder, shattered, for now the forces by which the physical body is attached to the line of physical heredity become operative. If the action of the other forces did not cease, the body would break up, disintegrate. The Son of Man within us brings about our destruction; the Son of God within us cannot offer resistance to the Son of Man after a period of three years. For all that, we bear this Son of God within us. These forces work within the physical body throughout life but they cannot participate directly in the up-building process. If we look within our own inmost being, however, we can nevertheless find the continuation of the Ego with the ‘telephonic connection’. It is only that the physical body has become too coarse, too solid, too wooden to enable the Son of God to mould it any further.

Thus the best forces are present in us during the first three to three and a half years of childhood. The whole of life is nourished by them but they are obscured. In an entirely different form they are nevertheless present in the later years of life. We are permeated by these forces but cannot allow them to come to direct expression. When through Spiritual Science we endeavour to acquire ideas and conceptions of the higher worlds, this will be all the easier, the more forces have remained in us of those that were within us during the first three years when our ‘I’, our Ego, was within us but without self-consciousness. The fresher, the more flexible these forces have remained, the less time-worn they have become in advanced age, the more easily we can bring about transformation in ourselves through these spiritual forces.

It is the very best part of manhood that we have within us during these early years, only the solid physical body prevents us from using these forces then to the fullest extent. Even if someone in his later years succeeds in developing them to a special extent, he cannot transform his physical body which is by no means as pliable as wax. But if through esoteric wisdom he is able to use these forces to the full, their power streams through the tips of his fingers, and he acquires the gift of healing, of health-bestowal, through the laying on of hands—if, that is to say, these spiritual forces are still active. They can no longer transform his body but when they stream out from him they bring about healing.

The goal of Earth evolution is to enable these forces—the best that are within us—to take effect. When the evolution of the Earth is at an end and we have lived through our many incarnations, we must consciously have permeated our whole being with the forces that are within us unconsciously during the first years of childhood. There is a difference between bearing these forces unconsciously and bearing them consciously. At the end of Earth evolution human beings must be completely permeated by this childhood consciousness. And then, because the process of expansion will be slow, the body will not burst asunder.

In world-evolution a prototype of penetration of the forces of childhood into mankind was necessary. Needless to say, this prototype could not be a child. It was necessary that an individual of a certain age should be permeated in full consciousness by the same forces by which all human beings are permeated unconsciously in earliest childhood. Suppose we were to remove his Ego from a human being, empty his Ego and pour into him the forces that are active in a child during the first years of life, he would become conscious of these forces with his developed brain. What had been active within him during the first years of childhood would become a conscious experience in him. For how long is a human life on Earth able to endure this? For no longer than three years, for then the body would be shattered. If there can be no transformation—in the case of man this takes place in the process of ordinary evolution—the human body can endure this state of things for no longer than three years. Were it possible for any being to bear the forces of early childhood consciously within himself, the karma of that being must be so adjusted that the physical body involved is shattered.

It is conceivable that what man attains through all the incarnations leading to the goal of Earth evolution can be brought to the notice of the world by a prototype, by an individual whose bodily nature makes it possible for his Ego to depart and be replaced by another Being. In such a case the human body would not tolerate the presence of the other Being for longer than three years. It would be the karma of the body to be shattered. And this actually happened. At the baptising by John in the Jordan we see this human body which made it possible for the Ego, the Zarathustra-Ego, to depart. A Being, the Christ Being, came down into this body, indwelt it for three years but could remain in it no longer. After three years the body broke up when the Mystery of Golgotha took place.

What was able to live for three years in a human body at that time must be tended and cherished by man and gradually, in the course of incarnations, made a living reality in his soul, in order that at the end of the incarnations it may be present in full strength.

A remarkable connection is apparent between the Son of God in man and the Christ Event. Everything to be found in the domain of occultism can be illuminated from different sides. Proofs such as are demanded by conventional science cannot satisfy occultism. Proofs must convince by virtue of truths being gathered together from all sides, truths which sustain and support each other. We can study the Christ Event from still another side by deriving it, as has been done today, from the very nature of man. We realise that the best way to understand the Christ is to develop the attitude of soul arising from such a truth. We must realise too that in a fully evolved human body, there was present in Jesus of Nazareth through the Baptism in Jordan a Being who is present in every human body, but unconsciously only, during the first three years of life. And then we must contemplate the three years when this child has become conscious. That is how understanding of the Christ can best be acquired.

Ancient utterances have different meanings. One such meaning is disclosed by the words: Unless you become as a little child you cannot enter into the Kingdoms of Heaven. There we have a glimpse of the deeper meaning often contained in single sentences of the religious texts.

Let us contemplate this life of childhood especially in the period when it is actually developing. Science today does not know much about what can contribute to the study of the true nature of man. In the first place we must realise clearly that from the very beginning man differs quite radically from all other beings. Take an example near at hand, let us say, an ape. Its gait is determined from the very outset because the characteristic equilibrium is established by the arrangement of its limbs. The human being cannot, to begin with, walk at all, for he must first bring about equilibrium in his body. Through the work of his Ego his limbs must be brought into the positions which enable him to stand upright and walk. Thus in the first years of childhood the Ego must work not only at moulding the brain but must also bring about the equilibrium that is not, from the beginning, established in the human being as it is in the animal. The bones of the human being must first be arranged in the angles necessary for the main-tenance of his centre of gravity, in order that he may be able to walk and make his way about. This capacity is implanted from the beginning in every animal, up to those of the highest species, whereas in the human being it must be acquired gradually though the work of the Ego. Before then he crawls about or falls down. He would be fettered to the same spot on the ground if his Ego was not at work during the first three years of his life.

We have already heard that the Ego works at man’s brain, sculps and moulds it into a form that enables him later on to become a being possessed of intelligence. Thus it can be said that we acquire the capacity to recognise the truth in life as a result of the Ego having moulded its instrument. It must become obvious to us that there can be no further life unless we bring it about by work and activity.

What further distinguishes man so radically from all other things is his speech. That capacity too must be acquired through the work of his Ego. Man is not, from the beginning, organised for speech. Cows utter the sound ‘moo’ but that is not speech. The acquisition of speech depends upon the Ego sojourning among other human Egos. If a human being were transported to a remote island he would not learn to speak. The coming of the second teeth is due to heredity; so too is the fact that we grow. The teeth would come even if we were on a lonely island. But it is through the Ego that we acquire the faculty of speech. These differences are important. Thus in human life, speech is the third faculty acquired through the Ego.

Through the activity of these forces the human beings finds his way on Earth, he recognises the truth and lives his life in common with the surrounding world. If a child were able to express what he thus acquires, he could say: the Ego within me transforms me in such a way that I am the Way, the Truth and the Life. Think of this translated into a higher, spiritual reality, and let us ask: what will be said to man by a Being who with fully conscious forces of childhood lives for three years in a human body? Such a Being will say: “I am the Way, the Truth and the Life.” In very fact, when the forces of childhood rise to a higher, fully conscious stage, there we have the great prototype of what is revealed at a lower stage in the child. Through Christ Jesus it becomes a basic, fundamental truth. Not only is the utterance “Except ye become as little children, ye cannot enter into the kingdoms of Heaven” incomprehensible without a knowledge of what Spiritual Science has to say about the connection with the life-giving forces of early childhood, but it is also true that we can best understand the radical utterance, “I am the Way, the Truth and the Life” when we recognise its prototype in what the Ego achieves by its activity in the body of early childhood.

Such truths make it possible for us to generate—if not for the body at least for the soul—some measures of the life-giving forces we need on the Earth. The man of today who does not acknowledge the reality of the spiritual world has no genuine feeling for such facts. If you go to a number of individuals in outer life and tell them something of what has been said here today: ‘Unless you become as a little child you cannot enter into the kingdoms of Heaven’—you will find that these people say: “Well, yes, these are quite clever analogies, but what use can be made of them?” They consider it more advantageous to go to some blood-curdling drama, if not anything worse! Those who have no feelings that these facts are significant will regard them as unjustifiable because it is in the feeling for such things that there lies the power to instil the gift of childhood into life. If we lack enthusiasm for the idea of Christ being compared with the activity of the human Ego during the first years of life, if we reject such a comparison as unjustifiable, then we have no faculty for kindling to life the forces of earliest childhood. Wizened scholars have so little power to awaken these forces and thereby to approach the reality of the spiritual world! But if we have the enthusiasm to concern ourselves with such truths, we can permeate our whole being with these forces.

Thereby something is given to an individual which enables him to uphold the principle of universality in his Christianity. Have I not often said that we are only at the beginning of a true conception of Christ? Until the twelfth or thirteenth century there was no possibility of hearing the Bible read. Christians were obliged to rely upon preaching and the proclamations of evangelists. Then came the Christianity which adhered strictly to the Bible, deriving its knowledge from that one source. We are not mindful of Christ’s power if we ignore His words: “I am with you until the end of the ages.” We are Christians when we realise that after Christ had once revealed Himself He will do so again, for anyone who has eyes to see Him. The content of the Gospels by no means represents all that Christ has to say. We should not constantly be quoting the words: “You could not bear it now”. Humanity must become mature enough to understand Christ’s declaration.

It also follows that we ought to be able to adopt the right attitude to what is revealed through the Baptism by John, namely, the manifestation of the health-giving, fertile forces of early childhood. That in itself would be a fruitful conception. Even if there were no human being who knew anything about the name of Christ or about the Gospels—we do not overstress the importance of names—what is all-important is the Being Himself. We leave it to others to say that an individual who does not swear allegiance to Buddha is no true adherent. What matters to us is the reality, not the name. This is the principle we follow when, for example, we recognise that during the first years of life there are within the human being forces which once streamed down into the body of Jesus of Nazareth.

Think of a remote, lonely island to which no single record of the Mystery of Golgotha has ever found its way. If human beings there through their spiritual life consciously draw the powers of earliest childhood into themselves until they reach old age, then they are Christians in the true sense of the word. In such circumstances there is no need for them to search in the Gospels, for Christianity in itself is a living power and will evolve to further and further stages.

There is a difference here that must be strictly remembered. We shall realise ever more clearly how intimately Christ’s mission is connected with the very being of the Earth. We shall be able to say that the mission of Christ is something that can be understood by contemplating man as he is today. The need to be filled with the power of Christ, to make a reality of Paul’s affirmation “Christ in me”, is confirmed when we say that the whole of our life must be dedicated to the transformation of what is present within us during the first years of childhood. Then the Christ is in us in very truth.

This realisation makes it possible to have a wide understanding of Christianity and reveals the prospect that it will take quite different forms. Times will come when Christ will be referred to in an entirely different way, when sources of an essentially different character will be in existence, when there will be no reference to the external history of the existence of such a Being, but when this fact will be revealed by the actual consciousness of mankind.

These matters are brought forward because they show how deeply Spiritual Science can influence man’s life of feeling and must become actual practice. It is only then that what we find in original sources becomes really intelligible to us. For many human beings, however, these original sources are verily a book with seven seals. At the end of the Earth’s existence, a man of today will have reached the stage where his soul is inwardly Christian in the truest sense. Today he is only at the beginning of this development. Nevertheless Christ lives within him and will do so in an ever wider sense through all the following incarnations.

What was the state of things before Christ came to the Earth, before He revealed Himself on the Earth? The Ego was then only in the preparatory stage, for it is by Christ that the Ego is given its very purpose and meaning. When the mission of a Being is in the preparatory stage, his predecessors must help him. Until the Mystery of Golgotha, man’s Ego was still at the stage of preparation. Until then it was necessary for other Beings to help man, Beings who had reached the human stage previously, namely, during the

Old Moon embodiment of the Earth. We know that these are the Beings of the Hierarchy immediately above us—the Angels. Their evolution has reached a stage higher than that reached by man. It was chiefly these Beings who took over the guidance of humanity before man was in a position to say: Christ gives my Ego purport and meaning. Man could not lead himself to Christ but had perforce to be led to Him by the Beings who are his elder Brothers.

The Bible records this with wonderful accuracy. Let us think of John, the forerunner of Christ Jesus. The true forerunner could not have been the Being who is presented in external history, for as we now know man had as yet no Ego. Therefore it cannot be strictly true to say that John the Baptist himself was Christ’s forerunner. Remarkably, the Gospel of St. Mark begins at once with the words: “I send my Angel before thee, who shall prepare thy way.” We must pay attention to something that theologians have, it is true, noticed in a very abstract form but ignored as a concrete reality. The external world is primarily maya. We must learn to see it in the right way and then it is no longer maya. The narration of the external events connected with John the Baptist on the physical plane, is maya. We do not understand them. The biblical picture of John the Baptist is maya. The truth is that an Angel lives in John, takes possession of his soul, and it is this Being who leads men to Christ. John is the sheath in which the Angel is revealed. The reborn Elijah was able and ready to receive into himself the Angel who entered into and spoke out of him, using him—John—simply as an instrument. The story given in the Bible is accurate in every detail.

It can therefore be said that it was only because the Beings who had reached the human stage on the Old Moon embodiment of the Earth became the leaders of man in the pre-Christian era that he could be prepared to receive the Ego. In point of fact, all the leaders of humanity in the pre-Christian era could be leaders because Angels were working through them. What would happen in the case of a man of the modern age? In pre-Christian times the Angel could work in a man because he had no Ego of his own. Since the Christ has come, man can turn to Him and a power enters into him instead of the Angel, as formerly. Man today must take the Christ into himself through devotion and reverence. John could still say: Not I but the Angel in me has been sent and uses me as the instrument for preparing the way. Man must say as did St. Paul: ‘Not I, but Christ in me.’ Man must learn to understand Christ in the light of the teaching of Spiritual Science.

What has been said today about the first three years of childhood can, for example, usefully be emphasised. Man is ‘christianised’ when the truth is brought home to him that the forces at work during the age of earliest childhood shed their sunlike radiance over the whole of life. Modern science, on the other hand, is ultimately responsible for the onset of senility, for resistance to the sunlike forces in early childhood, for ossification of parts of the brain, and a great deal else besides.

From such truths we realise that it is possible to understand the living truth of Christianity even when original records are left out of account and we simply study the nature and being of man. If our understanding of Spiritual Science is such that we do not simply say, ‘now I know that man consists of four members—physical, etheric, astral bodies and Ego’ but realise that what matters is to know how these single members are interconnected in his constitution—then we can become aware that the Ego working in early childhood is related to another entity, that the first Ego is like a sheath and that after about three years its connection with all the members of the rest of man’s nature changes entirely.

This knowledge acquires genuine value when it becomes a power within us and when we say to ourselves that because in the future many incarnations lie ahead of us we can develop what is in us to further and further stages of consciousness, that we can enable the forces of the higher man, The Son of God within us, to be victorious over the Son of Man, thereby rising higher in each succeeding incarnation until the Earth reaches its goal. The Earth then becomes a corpse just as the individual human being becomes a physical corpse; the corpse sinks into the Earth and the soul rises into the spiritual world. This is what will also happen to the Earth as a whole.

If we think of the Earth as the body of all humanity, we can say: the Earth dies as a corpse, dissolves into the substance of the Universe, is pulverised in order to be used in a new material form. But man rises into spiritual worlds in order to pass over into the next planetary existence. It behoves us to remember that these are no abstract words.

Strange to say, there are people who believe that our Earth, together with the Sun and the other planets, was once a great nebula and nothing else, that then Sun, Earth and man himself, through the consolidation of matter, came into existence, that he will evolve to further and further stages and will eventually be entombed in the Earth the whole process being an aimless episode!

In future histories of civilization great efforts will have to be made to understand this patho-logical fantasy, to grasp how it could have been possible for man’s imagination to become sickly enough to accept this as a serious conception. To uphold the Kant-Laplace theory is exactly the same as to think that man can be explained by studying the dust produced by his cremation. Such science is pernicious, incapable of engendering living power in the soul.

The aim of Spiritual Science is to kindle the power to develop our stature as human beings to higher and higher stages, no longer connecting ourselves with the dust of the Earth but evolving towards a new planetary existence.