The Rudolf Steiner Archive

My dear friends,

When people encounter the world conception of Spiritual Science their chief desire is to have an answer to their questions, a solution of their problems. That is quite natural and understandable, one might even say justifiable. But something else must be added if the spiritual scientific-movement is really to become the living thing it must be, in accordance with the general course of evolution of earth and humanity. Above all, a certain feeling must be added, a certain perception that the more one strives to enter the spiritual world, the more the riddles increase. These riddles actually become more numerous for the human soul than they were before, and in a certain respect they become also more sacred. When we come into the spiritual scientific world concept, great life problems, the existence of which we hardly guessed before, first appear as the riddles they are.

Now, one of the greatest riddles connected with the evolution of the earth and mankind is the Christ-riddle, the riddle of Christ-Jesus. And with regard to this, we can only hope to advance slowly towards its actual depth and sanctity. That is to say, we can expect in our future incarnations gradually to have an enhanced feeling in what a lofty sense, in what an extraordinary sense this Christ-riddle is a riddle. We must not expect just that regarding this Christ-riddle much will be solved for us, but also that much of what we have hitherto found full of riddles concerning the entry of the Christ-Being into humanity's evolution, becomes still more difficult. Other things will emerge that bring new riddles into the question of the Mystery of Golgotha, or if one prefers, new aspects of this great riddle.

There is no question here of ever claiming to do more than throw some light from one or other aspect of this great problem. And I beg you to be entirely clear that only single rays of light can ever be thrown from the circuit of human conception upon this greatest riddle of man's earthly existence, nor do these rays attempt to exhaust the problem, but only to illumine it from various aspects. And so something shall here be added to what has already been said that may bring us again some understanding of one aspect of the Mystery of Golgotha.

You remember the pronouncement of the God Jahve, radiating from the far distance, which stands at the beginning of the Bible, after the Fall had come about. The words announced that now men had eaten of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil they must be banished from their present abode, so that they might not eat also of the Tree of Life. The Tree of Life was to be protected, as it were, from being partaken of by men who had already tasted of the Tree of Knowledge.

Now behind this primordial two-foldness of the eating of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil on the one hand and the eating of the Tree of Life on the other hand, there lies concealed something which cuts deep into life. Today we will turn our attention to one of the many applications to life of this pronouncement: we will bring to mind what we have long known: i.e., that the Mystery of Golgotha, in so far as it was accomplished within the evolution of earthly history, fell in the Fourth Post-Atlantean epoch, in the Graeco-Latin age.

We know indeed that the Mystery of Golgotha lies approximately at the conclusion of the first third of the Graeco-Latin age and that two-thirds of this age follow, having as their task the first incorporation of the secrets of the Mystery of Golgotha into human evolution.

Now we must distinguish two things in regard to the Mystery of Golgotha. The first is what took place as purely objective fact: in short, what happened as the entry of the Cosmic Being ‘Christus’ in the sphere of earthly evolution. It would be-hypothetically possible, one might say, it would be conceivable, for the Mystery of Golgotha, that is, the entry of the Impulse of Christ into earthly evolution, to have been enacted without any of the men on earth having understood or perhaps even known what had taken place there. It might quite well have happened that the Mystery of Golgotha had taken place, but had remained unknown to men, that no single person would have been able to think about solving the riddle of what had actually occurred there.

This was not to be. Earthly humanity was gradually to reach an understanding of what had happened through the Mystery of Golgotha. But none the less we must realise that there are two aspects: that which man receives as knowledge, as inner working in his soul, and that which has happened objectively within the human race, and which is independent of this human race—that is to say, of its knowledge. Now, men endeavoured to grasp what had taken place through the Mystery of Golgotha. We are aware that not only did the Evangelists, out of a certain clairvoyance, give those records of the Mystery of Golgotha which we find in the Gospels; an attempt was also made to grasp it by means of the knowledge which men had before the Mystery of Golgotha. We know that since the Mystery of Golgotha not only have its tidings been given out, but there has also arisen a New Testament theology, in its various branches. This New Testament theology, as is only natural, has made use of already existing ideas in asking itself: What has actually come about with the Mystery of Golgotha, what has been accomplished in it?

We have often considered how, in particular, Greek philosophy that which was developed for instance as Greek philosophy in the teachings of Plato and Aristotle—how the ideas of Greek philosophy endeavoured to grasp what had taken place in the Mystery of Golgotha, just as they took pains to understand Nature around them. And so we can say that on the one hand the Mystery of Golgotha entered as objective fact, and on the other hand, confronting it, are the different world-conceptions which had been developed since antiquity, and which reach a certain perfection at the time in which the Mystery of Golgotha took place, and then go on evolving.

Whence were these concepts derived? We know indeed that all these concepts, including those which live in Greek philosophy and which approached the Mystery of Golgotha from the earth, are derived from a primeval knowledge, from a knowledge which could not have been at man's disposal if, let us say, an original revelation had not taken place. For it is not only amaterialistic, but an entirely nonsensical idea that the attenuated philosophy which existed at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha could at its starting point have been formed by human beings themselves. It is primeval revelation, which as we know was founded in an age when men still had the remains of ancient clairvoyance; primeval revelation which in ancient times had been given to man for the most part in imaginative form and which had been attenuated to concepts in the age when the Mystery of Golgotha entered, the Graeco-Latin age. Thus one could see an intensive stream of primeval revelation arise in ancient times, which could be given to men because they still had the final relics of the old clairvoyance that spoke to their understanding and which then gradually dried up and withered into philosophy.

Thus a philosophy, a world-conception existed in many, many shades and nuances, and these sought in their own way to comprehend the Mystery of Golgotha. If we would find the last stragglers of what was diluted at that time to a world-concept of a more philosophic character; then we come to what lived in the old Roman age.

By this Roman age I mean the time that begins approximately with the Mystery of Golgotha, with the reign of the Emperor Augustus, and flows on through the time of the Roman Empire until the migration of nations that gave such a different countenance to the European world. And what we see flare up in this Roman age like a last great light from the stream flowing from revelation—that is the Latin-Roman poetry, which plays so great a role in the education of youth even up to our own day. It is all that developed as continuation of this Latin-Roman poetry till the decline of ancient Rome. Every possible shade of world-conception had taken refuge in Rome. This Roman element was no unity. It was extended over numberless sects, numberless religious opinions, and could only evolve a certain common ground from the multiplicity by withdrawing, as it were, into external abstractions.

Through this, however, we can recognise how something withered comes to expression in the far-spread Roman element in which Christianity was stirring as a new impulse. We see how Roman thought is at great pains to seize with its ideas what lay behind the Mystery of Golgotha. We see how endeavour was made in every possible way to draw ideas from the whole range of world conception in order to understand what hid behind this Mystery of Golgotha. And one can say, if one observes closely: it was a despairing struggle towards an understanding, a real understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha. And this struggle as a matter of fact continued in a certain current throughout the whole of the first millennium.

One should see, for instance, how Augustine first accepts all the elements of the old withered world-conception, and how he tries through all that he so accepts to grasp what was flowing in as living soul-blood, for he now feels Christianity flow like a living impulse into his soul. Augustine is a great and significant personality—but one sees in every page of his writings how he is struggling to bring into his understanding what is flowing to him from the Christ Impulse. And so it goes on, and this is the whole endeavour of Rome: to obtain in the western world of idea, in this world of world-conception, the living substance of what comes to expression in the Mystery of Golgotha.

What is it, then, that makes such efforts, that so struggles, that in the Roman-Latin element overflows the whole civilised world? What is it that struggles despairingly in the Latin impulse, in the concepts pulsating in the Latin language, to include the Mystery of Golgotha? What is that? That is also a part of what men have eaten in Paradise. It is a part of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. We can see in the primeval revelations when the old clairvoyant perceptions could still speak to men, how vividly alive concepts were in this ancient time, concepts which were still imaginations, and how they more and more dry up and die and become thin and poor. They are so thin that in the middle of the Middle Ages, when Scholasticism flourished, the greatest efforts of the soul were necessary to sharpen these attenuated concepts sufficiently to grasp in them the living life existing in the Mystery of Golgotha. What remained in these concepts was the most distilled form of the old Roman language with its marvellously structured logic, but with its almost entirely lost life-element. This Latin speech was preserved with its fixed and rigid logic, but with its inner life almost dead, as a realisation of the primeval divine utterance: Men shall not eat of the Tree of Life.

If it had been possible for what had evolved from the old Latin heritage to comprehend in full what had been accomplished in the Mystery of Golgotha, had it been possible for this Latin heritage, simply as if through a thrust, to gain an understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha, then this would have been an eating of the Tree of Life. But this was forbidden, after the expulsion from Paradise. The knowledge which had entered humanity in the sense of the ancient revelation was not to serve as a means of ever working in a living way. Hence it could only grasp the mystery of Golgotha with dead concepts.

‘Ye shall not eat of the Tree of Life’: this is a saying which also holds good through all aeons of earthly evolution with regard to certain phenomena. And one fulfilment of this saying was likewise the addition: ‘The Tree of Life will also draw near in its other form as the Cross erected on Golgotha—and life will stream out from it. But this older knowledge shall not eat of the Tree of Life.’

And so we see a dying knowledge struggling with life, we see how desperately it strives to incorporate the life of Golgotha in its concepts.¹

Now there is a peculiar fact, a fact which indicates that in Europe, confronting as it were the starting point of the East, a kind of primordial opposition was made. There is something like a sort of archetypal opposition set against the primeval-revelation² decreed to mankind. Here, to be sure, we touch upon the outer rim of a very deep-lying secret, and one can really only speak in pictures of much that is to

There exists in Europe a legend concerning the origin of man which is quite different from the one contained in the Bible. It has gone through later transformations no doubt, but its essentials are still to be recognised. Now the characteristic feature is not that this legend exists, but that it has been preserved longer in Europe than in other parts of the earth. But the important thing is that even while over in the Orient the Mystery of Golgotha had been accomplished, this different legend was still alive in the feelings of the inhabitants of Europe. Here, too, we are led to a tree, or rather to trees, which were found on the shore of the sea by the gods Wotan, Wile and We. And men were formed from two trees, the Ash and the Elm. Thus men were created by the trinity of the gods, (although this was Christianised later, it yet points to the European original revelation) by fashioning the two trees into men: Wotan gives men spirit and life; Wile gives men movement and intelligence, and We gives them the outer figure, speech, the power of sight and of hearing.

The very great difference that exists between this story of creation and that of the Bible is not usually observed—but you need only read the Bible—which is always a useful thing to do—and already in the first chapters you will remark the very great difference that exists between the two Creation legends. I should like but to point to one thing, and that is, according to the saga, a threefold divine nature flowed into man. It must be something of a soul-nature that the Gods have laid within him, which expresses itself in his form and which in fact is derived from the Gods. In Europe, therefore, man was conscious that inasmuch as one moves about on earth, one bears something divine within; in the Orient, on the contrary, one is conscious that one bears something Luciferic within one. Something is bound up with the eating of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil which has even brought men death, something that has turned all men away from the Gods and for which they have earned divine punishment. In Europe man is aware that in the human soul a threefold nature lives, that the Gods have sunk a force into the human soul. That is very significant.

One touches with this, as I have said, the edge of a great secret, a deep mystery. But it will be readily understood: it looks as if in this ancient Europe a number of human beings had been preserved who had not been taken away from sharing in the Tree of Life, in whom there lived on, so to say, the tree or the trees of Life; ash and elm. And with this the following fact stands in intimate harmony. European humanity (and if one goes back to the original European peoples this would be seen with great clarity in all details) actually had nothing of the higher, more far-reaching knowledge that men possessed in the Orient and in the Graeco-Latin world.

One should imagine for once the immense, the incisive contrast between the naive conceptions of European humanity, who still saw everything in pictures, and the highly evolved, refined philosophical ideas of the Graeco-Latin world. In Europe all was ‘Life’; over there all was ‘Knowledge of Good and Evil.’ In Europe something was left over, as it were, like a treasured remnant of the original forces of life; but it could only remain if this humanity were, in a way, protected from understanding anything that was contained in such marvellously finely wrought Latin concepts. To speak of a science of the ancient European population would be nonsense. One can only speak of them as living with all that germinated in their inner soul nature, that filled it through and through with life. What they believed they knew was something that was direct experience. This soul nature was destined to be radically different from the mood that was transmitted in the Latin influence. And it belongs to the great, the wonderful secrets of historical evolution, that the Mystery of Golgotha was to arise out from the perfected culture of wisdom and knowledge, but that the depths of the Mystery of Golgotha should not be grasped through wisdom; they were to be grasped through direct life.

It was therefore like a predetermined karma that—while in Europe up to a definite point life was grasped—the ego-culture appeared purely naively, vitally and full of life where the deepest darkness was; whereas over there where was the profoundest wisdom, the Mystery of Golgotha arose. That is like a predestined harmony. Out of the civilisation based on knowledge which was beginning to dry up and wither ascends this Mystery of Golgotha: but it is to be understood by those who, through their whole nature and being, have not been able to attain to the fine crystallisation of the Latin knowledge. And so we see in the history of human evolution the meeting between a nearly lifeless, more and more dying knowledge, and a life still devoid of knowledge, a life unfilled with knowledge, but one which inwardly feels the continued working of the divinity animating the world.

These two streams had to meet, had to work upon one another in the evolving humanity. What would have happened if only the Latin knowledge had developed further? Well, this Latin knowledge would have been able to pour itself out over the successors of the primitive European population: up to a certain time it has even done so. It is hypothetically conceivable, but it could not really have happened, that the original European population should have experienced the after-working of the dried up, fading knowledge.

For then, what these souls would have received through this knowledge would gradually have led to men's becoming more and more decadent; this drying, parching knowledge would not have been able to unite with the forces which kept mankind living. It would have dried men up. Under the influence of the after effects of Latin culture, European humanity would in a sense have been parched and withered. People would have come to have increasingly refined concepts, to have reasoned more subtly and have given themselves up more and more to thought, but the human heart, the whole human life would have remained cold under these fine spun, refined concepts and ideas.

I say that that would be hypothetically conceivable, but it could not really have taken place. What really happened is something very different. What really happened is that the part of humanity that had life but not knowledge streamed in among those people who were, so to say, threatened with receiving only the remains of the Latin heritage. Let us envisage the question from another side. At a definite period we find distributed over Europe, in the Italian peninsula, in the Spanish peninsula, in the region of present France, in the region of the present British Isles, certain remains of an original European population; in the North the descendants of the old Celtic peoples, in the South the descendants of the Etruscan and ancient Roman peoples. We meet with these there, and in the first place there flows into them what we have now characterised as the Latin stream. Then at a definite time, distributed over various territories of Europe, we meet with the Ostrogoths, the Visigoths, the Lombardi, the Suevi, the Vandals, etc. There is an age when we find the Ostrogoths in the south of present Russia, the Visigoths in eastern Hungary, the Langobardi or Lombard's where today the Elbe has its lower course, the Suevi in the region where today Silesia and Moravia lie, etc. There we meet with various of those tribes of whom one can say: they have ‘life’ but no ’knowledge.’

Now we can put the question: Where have these peoples gone to? We know that for the most part they have disappeared from the actual evolution of European humanity. Where have the Ostrogoths, the Visigoths, the Langobardi, etc. gone? We can ask this. In a certain respect they no longer exist as nations, but what they possessed as life exists, exists somewhat in the following way. My dear friends, let us consider first the Italian peninsula, let us consider it still occupied by the descendants of the old Roman population. Let us further imagine that on this old Italian peninsula there had been spread abroad what I have designated Latin knowledge, Latin culture; then the whole population would have dried up.

If exact research were made, it would be impossible not to admit that only incredible dilettantism could believe that anything still persists today of a blood relationship with the ancient Romans. Ostrogoths, Visigoths, Lombardi, marched in, and over these there streamed the Latin heritage—though merely mentally as seed of knowledge—it streamed over-the life-without-knowledge, and this gave it substance for continuing. Into the more southern regions there came a more Norman-Germanic element. Thus there streamed into the Italian peninsula from the European centre and the East a life-bearing population. Into Spain there streamed the Visigoths and the Suevi in order later to unite with the purely intellectual element of the Arabs, the Moors. Into the region of France there streamed the Franks and into the region of the British Isles, the Anglo-Saxon element.

The following statement expresses the truth. If the southern regions had remained populated by descendants of the old Romans, and the Latin culture had gone on working in them, they would have faced the danger of completely losing the power of developing an ego-consciousness. Hence the descendants of ancient Rome were displaced and there was poured into this region where Latinism was to spread, what came from the element of the Ostrogoths and Lombardi. The blood of Ostrogoths and Lombardi as well as Norman blood absorbed the withering Latin culture. If the population had remained Romans they would have faced the danger of never being able to develop the element of the Consciousness-soul. Thus there went to the south in the Langobardi and the Ostrogoths what we can call the Wotan-Element, Spirit and Life. The Wotan-Element was, so to say, carried in the blood of the Langobardi and Ostrogoths and this made the further evolution and unfoldment of this southern civilisation possible.

With the Franks towards the West went the Wile-element, Intelligence and Movement, which again would have been lost if the descendants of the primitive European population who had settled in these regions had merely developed further under the influence of Rome. Towards the British Isles went We, what one can call: Configuration and Speech, and in particular the faculty to see and to hear. This has later experienced in English empiricism its later development as: Physiognomics, Speech, Sight, Hearing.

So we see that while in the new Italian element we have the expression of the Folk Soul in the Sentient-soul, we could express this differently by saying: The Wotan-element streams into the Italian peninsula. And we can speak of the journeying of the Franks to the West by saying: the Wile-element streams West, towards France. And so in respect of the British Isles we can express it by saying: the We-element streams in there.

In the Italian peninsula, therefore, nothing at all is left of the blood of the original European peoples, it has been entirely replaced. In the West, in the region of modern France, somewhat more of the original population exists, approximately there is a balance between the Frankish element and the original peoples. The greatest part of the original population is still in the British Isles.

But all this that I am now saying is fundamentally only another way of pointing to the understanding of what came out of the South through Europe, pointing to the fact that the Mystery of Golgotha was ensheathed in a dying wisdom and was absorbed through a living element still devoid of wisdom.

One cannot understand Europe if one does not bear this connection in mind; one can, however, understand Europe in all details if one grasps European life as a continuous process. For much of what I have said is still fulfilling itself in our own times. So, for instance, it would be interesting to consider the philosophy of Kant, from these two original polarities of European life, and show how Kant on the one hand desires to dethrone Knowledge, take all power from Knowledge, in order on the other hand to give place to Faith. That is only a continuation of the dim hidden consciousness that one can really do nothing with knowledge that has come up from below—one can only do something with what comes down from above as original life-without-knowledge. The whole contrast in pure and practical reason lies in this: I had to discard knowledge to make way for Faith. Faith, for which protestant theology fights, is a last relic of the life-without-knowledge, for life will have nothing to do with an analysed abstract wisdom.³

But one can also consider older phenomena. One can observe how an endeavour appears among the most important leading personalities to create a harmony, as it were, between the two streams to which we have referred. For the modern physiognomy of Europe shows that up to our own day there is an after-working of the Latin knowledge in the European life, and that one can immediately envisage the map of Europe with the Latin knowledge raying out to south and west, and the Life still preserved in the centre. One can then see, for instance, how pains were taken at one time to overcome this dying knowledge. I should like to give an example. To be sure, this dying knowledge appears in the different spheres of life in different degrees, but already in the 8th-9th Century European evolution had so progressed that those who were the descendants of the European peoples with the Life could get no further with certain designations for cosmic or earthly relations which had been created in old Roman times. So even in the 8th-9th Centuries one could see that it had no special meaning for the original life of the soul when one said: January, February, March, April, May, etc. The Romans could make something of it, but the Northern European peoples could not do much with it; poured itself over these peoples in such a way as not to enter the soul, but rather to flow merely into the language, and it was therefore dying and withering. So an endeavour was made, especially towards Middle and Western Europe (over the whole stretch from the Elbe to the Atlantic Ocean and to the Apennines) to find designations for the months which could enter the feelings of European humanity. Such month-names were to be:

1. Wintarmanoth
2. Hornung
3. Lenzinmanoth
4. Ostarmanoth
5. Winnemanoth (also Nannamanoth)
6. Brachmanoth
7. Henimanoth (using the word Hay)
8. Aranmanoth (Aran = harvest)
9. Widumanoth (Wide = what is left when one has gone over the field)
10. Windumemanoth (vintage)
11. Herbistmanoth
12. Heiligmanoth

He who was at pains to make these names general was Charlemagne.

It shows how significant was the spirit of Charlemagne, for he sought to introduce something which has not up to now found entrance. We still have in the names of the months the last relics of the drying-up Latin cultural knowledge. Charlemagne was altogether a personality who aimed at many things which went beyond the possibility of being realised. Directly after his time, in the 9th Century, the wave of Latinism drew completely over Europe. It would be interesting to consider what Charlemagne desired to do in wishing to bring the radiation of the Wile-element towards the West. For the Latinising only appeared there later on.

Thus we can say that the part of mankind which has been race, which, as race, was the successor of the old Europe,—of the Europe from which the Roman influence proceeded and which itself became the successor of Rome, wholly for the south, largely for the north—has simply died out. Their blood no longer persists. Into the empty space left, there has poured in what came from Central Europe and the European East. One can therefore say: the racial element both of the European South and West is the Germanic element which is present in various shadings in the British Isles, in France, in Spain and in the Italian peninsula, though in this last completely inundated by the Latin influence.

The racial element therefore moves from East to the West and South, whereas the knowledge-element moves from South to North. It is the race-element which moves from the East to the West and South and along the West of Europe to the North, and gradually flows away towards the North. If one would speak correctly, one can talk of a Germanic race-element,-but not a Latin race. To speak of a Latin race is just as sensible as to speak of wooden iron; because Latinism is nothing that belongs to race, but something that has poured itself as bloodless knowledge over a part of the original European people. Only materialism can speak of a Latin race, for Latinism has nothing to do with race.

So we see how, as it were, the Bible saying works on in this part of European history, how the destiny of Latinism is the fulfilment of the words: ‘Ye shall not eat of the Tree of Life.’ We see how the Life given to the earth with the Mystery of Golgotha cannot come to full harmony with the old knowledge; but rather how into what remained of the ebbing original wisdom, new life had to enter. If we are to give a concrete answer to the question: Where does that remain, which from such new life has not been preserved in its own special character, but has disappeared in history, the element of the Visigoths, the Suevi, the Langobardi, the Ostrogoths, etc.? we must give as answer: It lives on as life within the Latin culture. That is the true state of affairs. That is what must be known regarding the primeval Bible two-fold utterance and its working in early times in the development of Europe, if we are to understand this European evolution.

I had to give you this historical analysis today because I shall have things to say which assume that one does not hold the false ideas of modern materialism and formalism with regard to historical evolution.

• 1. See ‘The Christmas Thought and the Mystery of the Ego. The Tree of the Cross and the Golden Legend’—Rudolf Steiner.
• 2. See Genesis 3:3—The creation of man
• 3. Gap left between these sentences

I want, as I've said, to use these days to lay the foundation we will need to bring the right light to bear on the concepts chance, necessity, and providence. But today that will require me to introduce certain preparatory concepts, abstract counterparts, as it were, of the beautiful concrete images we have been considering.¹ And to do the job as thoroughly as we must, a lecture will have to be added on Monday. That will give us today, tomorrow (after the eurythmy performance), and Monday at seven. The performance tomorrow will be at three o'clock, and a further lecture will follow immediately.

For contemporary consciousness as it has come into being and gradually evolved up to the present under the influence of materialistic thought the concepts necessity and chance are indistinguishable. What I am saying is that many a person whose consciousness and mentality have been affected by a materialistic outlook can no longer tell necessity and chance apart.

Now there are a number of facts in relation to which even minds muddled by materialism can still accept the concept of necessity, in a somewhat narrow sense at least. Even individuals limited by materialism still agree that the sun will rise tomorrow out of a certain necessity. In their view, the probability that the sun will rise tomorrow is great enough to be tantamount to necessity. Facts of this kind occurring in the relatively great expanse of nature and natural happenings on our planet are allowed by such people to pass as valid cases of Necessity. Conversely, their concepts of necessity narrow when they are confronted with what may be called historical events. And an outstanding example is Fritz Mauthner, whose name has often been mentioned here; he is the author of Critique of Language, written for the purpose of out-Kanting Kant, as well as of a Philosophical Dictionary. An article on history appears in the latter. It is extremely interesting to see how he tries there to figure out what history is. He says, “When the sun rises, I am confronted with a fact.” To take an example, we have been able today, the 28th of August 1915, to witness the fact that the sun has risen. That is a fact. And now he concludes that we can ascribe this rising of the sun to a law, to necessity, only because it happened yesterday and the day before yesterday, and so on, as long as people have been observing the sun. It was not just a case of a single fact, but of a whole sequence of identical or similar facts in outer nature that brought about this recognition of necessity.

But when it comes to history, says Mauthner, Caesar, for example, was here only once, so we can't speak of necessity in his case. It would be possible to speak of necessity in his existence only if such a fact were to be repeated. But historical facts are not repeated, so we can't talk of necessity in relation to them. In other words, all of history has to be looked upon as chance. And Mauthner, as I've said, is an honest man, a really honest man. Unlike other less honest individuals, he is a man who draws the conclusions of his assumptions. So he says of historical “necessity,” for example, “That Napoleon outdid himself and marched to Russia or that I smoked one cigar more than usual in the past hour are two facts that really happened, both necessary, both—as we rightly expect in the case of the most grandiose as well as the most absurdly insignificant historical facts—not without consequences.” To his honest feeling, something that may be termed historical fact, like Napoleon's campaign against Russia (though it could equally well be some other happening) and the reported fact that he smoked an extra cigar, are both necessary facts if we apply the term “necessity” to historical facts at all.

You will be amazed at my citing this particular sentence from Mauthner's article on history. I cite it because we have here an honest man straightforwardly admitting something that his less honest fellows with a modern scientific background refuse to admit. He is admitting that the fact that Caesar lived cannot be distinguished from the fact of Mauthner himself having smoked an extra cigar by calling upon the means available to us and considered valid by contemporary science. No difference can be ascertained by the methods modern science recognizes! Now he takes a positive stand, declaring his refusal to recognize a valid difference, to be so foolish as to represent history as science, when, according to the hypotheses of present-day science, history cannot qualify as a science.

He is really honest; he says with some justification, for example, that Wundt set up a systematic arrangement of the sciences.² History was, of course, listed among them. But no more objective reason for Wundt's doing this can really be discovered than that it had become customary, or, in other words, it happens to be a fact that universities set up history faculties. If a regular faculty were provided to teach the art of riding, asserts Mauthner—and from his standpoint rightly—professors like Wundt would include the art of riding in their system of the sciences, not from any necessity recognized by current scientific insight, but for quite other reasons.

We really have to say that the present has parted ways to a very considerable extent with what we encounter in Goethe's Faust: this can be quite shattering if we take it seriously enough.³ There is much, very much in Faust that points to the profoundest riddles in the human soul. We simply don't take things sufficiently seriously these days. What does Faust say right at the beginning, after he has spoken of how little philosophy, jurisprudence, medicine, and theology were able to give him as a student, after expressing himself about these four fields of learning? What science and life in general have given him as nourishment for his soul has brought him to the following conviction:

No dog would endure such a curst existence!
Wherefore, from Magic I seek assistance,
That many a secret perchance I reach
Through spirit-power and spirit-speech,
And thus the bitter task forego
Of saying things I do not know,—
That I may detect the inmost force
Which binds the world and guides its course;
Its germs, productive powers explore,
And rummage in empty words no more
(Bayard Taylor translation)

What is it Faust wants to know, then? “Germs and productive powers”! Here, the human heart too senses in its depths a questioning about chance and necessity in life.

Necessity! Let us picture a person like Faust confronting the question of necessity in the history of the human race. Such an individual asks, Why am I present at this point in evolution? What brought me here? What necessity, running its course through what we call history, introduced me into historical evolution at just this moment? Faust asks these questions out of the very depths of his soul. And he believes that they can be answered only if he understands “productive powers and germs,” understands, in other words, how outer experience contains a hidden clue to the way the thread of necessity runs through everything that happens.

Now let us imagine a personality like Faust's having, for some reason or other, to make an admission similar to Fritz Mauthner's. Mauthner is, of course, not sufficiently Faustian to sense the consequences Faust would experience if he had to admit one day that he could distinguish no difference between the fact that Caesar occupied his place in history and the fact of having smoked an extra cigar in the past hour. Just imagine transferring into the mind of Faust the reflection on the nature of historical evolution voiced by Mauthner from his particular standpoint. Faust would have had to say, I am as necessary in ongoing world evolution as smoking an extra cigar once was to Fritz Mauthner. Things are simply not given their due weight. If they were, we would realize how significant it is for human life that an individual who embraces the entire scientific conscience of the present admits the impossibility of distinguishing, with the means currently available to science, between the fact that Caesar lived and the fact that Mauthner smoked an extra cigar, in other words, admits that the necessity in the one case is indistinguishable from the necessity in the other.

When the time comes that people sense this with a truly Faustian intensity, they will be mature enough to understand how essential it is to grasp the element of necessity in historical facts, in the way we have tried to do with the aid of spiritual science in the case of many a historical fact. For spiritual science has shown us how the facts relative to the successive historical epochs have been injected, as it were, into the sphere of external reality by advancing spiritual evolution. And what we might state about the necessity of this or that happening at some particular time differs very sharply indeed from the fact of Fritz Mauthner smoking his extra cigar. We have stressed the connection between the Old and the New Testaments, between the time preceding and the time following the Mystery of Golgotha, and stressed too how the various cultures succeeded one another in the post-Atlantean epoch and how the various facts occurring during these cultural periods sprang from spiritual causes.

The angle from which we view things is tremendously important. We should be aware of the consequences of the assumptions presently held to have sole scientific validity.

Days like yesterday, which was Hegel's birthday, and today, which is Goethe's, should be festive occasions for realizing how necessary it is to recall the great will-impulses of earlier times, to recall Hegel's and Goethe's impulses of will, in order to perceive how deeply humanity has become implicated in materialism. There have always been superficial people. The difference between our time and Goethe's and Hegel's is not that there were no superficial people then, but rather that in those days the superficial people could not manage to get their outlook recognized as the only valid one. There was that slight difference in the situation.

Yesterday was Hegel's birthday; he was born in Stuttgart on August 27, 1770. Since it was impossible for him, living at that time, to penetrate into truly spiritual life as we do today with the aid of spiritual science, he sought in his way to lay hold on the spiritual element in ideas and concepts; he made these his spiritual foothold. When we look at the phenomena surrounding us, we seek the spiritual life, the truly living life of the spirit that underlies them, whereas Hegel, since he could go no further, sought the invisible idea, the fabric of ideas, first the fabric of ideas in pure logic, then that behind nature, and finally that underlying everything that happens as a spiritual element. And he approached history too in such a way that he really accomplished much of significance in his historical studies, even if in the abstract form of ideas rather than in the concrete form of the spiritual.

Now what does a person who honestly adopts Fritz Mauthner's standpoint do if, let us say, he sets about describing the evolution of art from Egyptian and Grecian times up to the present? He examines the documented findings, registers them, and then considers himself the more genuinely scientific the less ideas play into the proceedings and the more he keeps—objectively, as he thinks—to the purely external, factual evidence. Hegel based his attempt to write the history of art on a different approach. And he said something, among other things, that we are of course able to express more spiritually today: If we conceive, behind the outer development of art, the flowing, evolving world of the ideal, then and then only will the idea that has, so to speak, been hiding itself, try to issue forth in the material element, to reveal itself mysteriously in the material medium. In other words, the idea will not at first have wholly mastered matter, but expresses itself symbolically in it, a sphinx to be deciphered, as Hegel sees it. Then, in its further development, the idea gains a further mastery over matter, and harmony then exists between the mastering idea and its external, material expression. That is its classic form. When, finally, the idea has worked its way through the material and mastered it completely, the time will come when the overflowing fullness of the world of ideas will run over out of matter, so to speak; the ideal will be paramount.

At the merely symbolic level, the idea cannot as yet wholly take over the material. At the classic stage, it has reached the point of union with matter. When it has achieved romantic expression, it is as though the idea overflowed in its fullness. And now Hegel says that we should look in the surrounding world to see where these concepts are exemplified: the symbolic, sphinx-like form of art in Egypt, the classic form in Greece, the romantic form in modern times. Hegel thus bases his approach on the unity of the human spirit with the spirit of the world. The world spirit must allow us thoughts about the course of art's evolution. Then we must rediscover in the outer world what the world spirit first gave to us in thought form.

This, says Hegel, is the way external history too is “constructed.” He looks first for the progressive evolution of ideas, and then confirms it at hand of external events. That is what the Philistines, the superficial people, have never been able to grasp, and it is their reason for reproaching Hegel so bitterly. A person who is superficial despite his belonging to a spiritual scientific movement wants above all to know about his own incarnation, and there were of course people in Hegel's time too who were superficial in their own way. You can see from one of Hegel's remarks that there was one such. As you've seen, Hegel followed the principle of first lifting himself into the world of ideas and then rediscovering in the world around him what he had come to know in the ideal world.

Now the superficial critics had of course risen up in arms against this, and Hegel had to make the following comment: “In his many-sided naivete Herr Krug has challenged natural philosophy to perform the sleight of hand of deducing his pen only.” “Deducing” was the term used to denote a rediscovering in the outer world of everything that had first been discovered in the inner world. The person referred to in this remark was Wilhelm Traugott Krug, who was teaching at Leipzig at that time.⁴ Oddly enough, Krug was the predecessor of Mauthner in having written a philosophical dictionary, though he did not succeed in becoming a leading authority in his day. But he said, “If individuals like Hegel search for reality in ideas and then want to show, from the idea's necessity, how external reality coincides with it, then someone like Hegel had better come and demonstrate that he first encountered my pen as an idea.” Krug remarks that Hegel with his “idea” is not convincing in his assertions about the development of art from Egyptian to Greek to modern times, but if Hegel could “deduce” Krug's pen from his idea of it, that would impress him.

Hegel comments in the passage mentioned above, “It would have been possible to give him the hope of seeing this deed accomplished and his pen glorified if science had progressed so far and so cleared up everything of importance in heaven and on earth in the past and present as to leave nothing of greater importance in doubt” than Herr Krug's pen. But in today's world the mentality characteristic of superficial people is really dominant. And Fritz Mauthner would have to say honestly that there is no possibility of distinguishing between the necessity of Greek art coming into being at a certain time and the necessity involving Herr Krug's pen or his own extra cigar.

Now I have already called your attention to the prime importance of finding the proper angle from which to illuminate these lofty concepts of human life. We need to find the right angles from which to study necessity, chance, and providence.

I suggested that you picture Faust in such relation to the world that he would have to despair of the possibility of discovering any element of necessity. But now let's imagine just the opposite and picture Faust conceiving of himself in relation to a world where nothing but necessity exists, a world where he would have to regard every least thing he did as conditioned by necessity. Then he would indeed have to say that if there were no chance happenings, if everything had to be ruled by necessity, “no dog would endure such a curst existence,” and this not because of what he had been learning but because of the way the world had been arranged. And what would a person amount to if there were truth in Spinoza's dictum that everything we do and experience is every bit as necessitated as the path of a billiard ball which, struck by another, has no choice but to move in a way determined by the particular laws involved?⁵ If that were true, nobody could endure such a world order, and it would be even less bearable for natures aware of “productive powers and germs!”

Necessity and chance exist in the universe in such a way that they correspond to a certain human yearning. We feel that we couldn't get along without both of them. But they have to be properly understood, to be judged from the right angle. To do that in the case of the concept of chance naturally requires abandoning any prejudices or preconceptions we may have on the subject. We will have to examine the concept very closely so that we can replace the cliche that this or that “chanced” to happen—as we are often forced to say—with something more suitable. We will have to search out the fitting angle. And we will find it only if we go a bit further in the study we began yesterday.

You are familiar with the alternating states of sleeping and waking. But we recognize that waking consciousness too has its nuances, and that it is possible to distinguish between varying degrees of awakeness. But we can go further in a study of that state. It is basically true that from the moment we awaken until we fall asleep again, our waking consciousness takes in nothing but objects in the world around us, senses their action, and produces our own images, concepts, and ideas. Sleeping consciousness, which has remained at the level of plant consciousness, then lets us behold ourselves as described yesterday, and, since our consciousness in this state is plantlike, this is a pleasurable absorption in ourselves.

Now if we penetrate fully into the nature of human soul life, we come upon something that fits neither day nor night consciousness. I am referring to distinct memories of past experiences. Consider the fact that sleeping consciousness doesn't involve remembering anything. If you were to sleep continuously, you wouldn't need to remember previous experiences; there would be no such necessity, in any case. We do remember to some extent when we are dreaming, but in the plant consciousness of sleep we remember nothing of the past. It is certainly clear that memory plays no special part in sleep. In the case of ordinary day-waking consciousness we must say that we experience what is around us, but experiencing what we have gone through in the past represents a heightening of waking consciousness. In addition to experience of our present surroundings we experience the past, but now in its reflection in ourselves. So if I draw a horizontal line (see drawing) to represent the level of human consciousness, we may say that we look into ourselves in sleep.

I will write “Looking into ourselves” here; we can call it a subconscious looking. Day-waking consciousness can be set down as “Looking out consciously into the world.” Then a third kind of inner experiencing that doesn't coincide with looking into the world is the conscious “Looking into ourselves in memory.” So we have

The fact is, then, that we have not just two sharply different states of consciousness, but three of them. Remembering is actually a deepened and more concentrated form of waking consciousness. The important thing about remembering is more than just being aware of something; we recapitulate awareness of it. Remembering makes sense only if we are aware of something all over again. Think a moment: if I encounter one of you whom I have seen before, but merely see him without recognizing him, memory isn't really involved. Memory, then, is recognition. And spiritual science teaches us too that whereas our ordinary day-waking consciousness, our consciousness of the world outside us, has reached the very peak of perfection, our remembering is actually only just beginning its evolution; it must go on and on developing. Metaphorically speaking, memory is still a very sleepy attribute of human consciousness. When it has undergone further evolution, another element of experience will be added to our present capacity, namely, the inner experiencing of past incarnations. That experiencing rests upon a heightening of our ability to remember, for no matter what else is involved, we are dealing here with recognition, and it must first travel the path of interiorization. Memory is a soul force just beginning its development./

Now let us ask, “What is the nature of this soul-force, this capacity to remember? What really happens in the remembering process?” Another question must be answered first, and that is, “How do we arrive, at this point in time, at correct concepts?”

You get an idea of what a correct concept is if you are not satisfied with a meager picturing of it; in most cases people have their own opinion of things rather than genuine concepts. Most individuals think they know what a circle is. If someone asks, Well, what is it? they answer, Something like this, and draw a circle. That may be a representation of a circle, but that is not what matters. A person who only knows that this drawing approximates a circle and remains satisfied with that has no concept of what a circle is. Only someone who knows enough to say that a circle is a curved line every point of which is equidistant from the center has a correct concept of a circle. An endless number of points is of course involved, but the circle is inwardly present in conceptual form. That is what Hegel was pointing out: that we must get down to the concept underlying external facts, and then recognize what we are dealing with in outer reality on the basis of our familiarity with the concept.

Let us explore what the difference is between the “half-asleep” status of the mere mental images with which most people are satisfied and the active possession of a concept. A concept is always in a process of inner growth, of inner activity. To have nothing more than the mental image of a table is not to have a concept of it. We have the concept “table” if we can say that it is a supported surface upon which other objects can be supported. Concepts are a form of inner liveliness and activity that can be translated into outer reality.

Nowadays one is tempted to resort to some lively movement to explain matters of this sort to one's contemporaries. One really has an impulse to jump about for the sake of demonstrating how a true concept differs from the sleepy holding onto a mental image. One is strongly prompted to go chasing after concepts as a means of bringing people slightly into motion and enlivening the dreadfully lazy modern holding of mental images that now prevails; one wants to devote one's energies to clarifying the distinction between entertaining ordinary mental images and working one's way into the real heart of a matter. And why is one thus prompted? Because we know from spiritual science that the moment something reaches the level of the concept, the etheric body has to carry out this movement; it is involved in this movement. So we really must not shy away from rousing the etheric body if we intend to construct concepts.

What, then, is memory? What is remembering? If I have learned that a circle is a curved line every point of which is equidistant from the center, and am now to recall this concept, I must again carry out this movement in my etheric body. From the aspect of the etheric body, something becomes a memory when carrying out the movement in question has become habitual there. Memory is habit in the etheric body; we remember a thing when our etheric body has become used to carrying out the corresponding movement. We remember nothing except what the etheric body has taken on in the form of habits. Our etheric bodies must take it upon themselves, under the stimulus of re-approaching an object, being repeatedly brought into motion by us and thus given the opportunity of remembering, to repeat the motion they carried out in first approaching that object. And the more often the experience is repeated, the firmer and more ingrained does the habit become, so that memory gradually strengthens.

Now if we are really thinking instead of merely forming mental images, our etheric bodies take on all sorts of habits. But these etheric bodies are what the physical body is based on. You will notice that a person who wants to clarify a concept often tries to make illustrative gestures, even as he is talking about it. Of course we all have our own individual gestures anyway. Differences between people are seen in their characteristic gestures, that is, if we conceive the term “gesture” broadly enough. A person with a feeling for gesture learns a good deal about others from observing their gestures and seeing, for example, how they set their feet down as they walk. And the way we think when remembering something is thus really a habit of the etheric body. This etheric body is a lifelong trainer of the physical body—or perhaps I had better say that it tries to train the latter, but not entirely successfully. We can say, then, that the physical body, for example, the hand, is here:

When we think, we constantly try to send into the etheric body what then becomes habit there. But the physical body presents a barrier. Our etheric bodies can't manage to get everything into the physical body, and they therefore save up the forces thus prevented from entering the physical body. They are saved up and carried through the entire period of life between death and rebirth. The way we think and the way we imprint our memories upon the etheric body then comes to the fore in our next incarnation as our instinctive play of gesture. And when we see a person exhibiting habitual gestures from childhood on, we can attribute them to the fact that in his previous incarnation his thinking imprinted certain quite distinct mannerisms on his etheric body. If, in other words, I study a person's inborn gestures, they can become clues to the way he managed his thinking in past incarnations. But just think what this means! It means that thoughts so impress themselves upon us that they resurface as the next incarnation's gestures. We get an insight here into the way the thinking element evolves into external manifestation: what began as the inwardness of thought becomes the outwardness of gesture.

Modern science, in its ignorance of what distinguishes necessity from chance, looks upon history as happenstance. In a list of words dating back to 1482, which Mauthner refers to, we read the words, “geschicht oder geschehcn ding, historia res gesta.” “Res gesta” is what history used to be called. All that is left of this today is the abstract remnant “regeste.” When notes are taken on some happening, they are called the “register.” Why is this? The word is based on the same root as “gesture.” The genius of speech responsible for the creation of these words was still aware that we have to see something brought over from the past in historical events. If what we observe in individual gesture is to be understood as the residue of past lives on earth, born with the individual into an incarnation, surely it is not complete nonsense to assume something like gestures in what we encounter in the facts of history. A series of facts surfaces in the way we walk, and these are the gestures of our thinking in past incarnations.

Where, then, must we look for the facts underlying history? That is the question now confronting us. In the case of individual lives we have to look for the thoughts underlying gesture. If we regard historical events as gestures, where must we look for the thoughts behind them? We will take up the study of this matter tomorrow.

• 1. This lecture was preceded by a eurythmy performance of the final scenes of Goethe's Faust, II.
• 2. Wilhelm Wundt, 1832–1907, German philosopher and philologist. See also Mauthner's article “History” in his Dictionary of Philosophy.
• 3. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1749–1832, German poet, playwright, and novelist. Faust, dramatic poem. The quotations from Faust in this book are all taken from the translation by Bayard Taylor.
• 4. Wilhelm Traugott Krug, 1770–1842, German philosopher, influenced by Kant.
• 5. Baruch Spinoza, 1632–1677, Dutch philosopher.

Today we shall be considering Hegel not from an anthroposophical but from a purely philosophical point of view. This is possible in an anthroposophical circle because, although the object of spiritual science is to be drawn from experiences in the supersensible world, the process of combining these experiences into a comprehensive, systematic world view requires clear and conscientious thinking that is well-trained in every single point. And if even untrained thinking causes quite a lot of harm in external science, in the anthroposophical movement, more harm is caused by this than by incorrect observations, because in many people the interest in supersensible things does not go hand in hand with an equally strong interest in logical thinking. And this purely logical thinking can be particularly trained by a study of the thinking of George William Frederick Hegel. From such a study, a certain light can also be shed on our present time, in which one speaks occasionally of a return to Hegel, but of which one cannot say that the intellectual prerequisites that it has would meet with an understanding of Hegel. Hegel, with his whole system of thought, has outgrown the time when it was the chief concern of philosophy to deduce the foundations of all knowledge and being from certain supreme points of view. It is no mere accident, but a profound necessity, that Hegel should have lived in an age when these supreme foundations were being sought in the most diverse fields.

Hegel was born on August 27, 1770, in Stuttgart. He entered the Tübingen seminary (1788-1793), which was so important for the development of German intellectual life at that time, as a pupil, where he was a fellow student of Schelling, who towered over him for a long, long time, and Hölderlin, who was deeply predisposed and soon sank into mental derangement, albeit not precisely because of his deep predisposition. They formed a kind of cloverleaf: the deeply intuitive Hölderlin, who sought in mystical chiaroscuro; Schelling, who was endowed with a sharp intellectual energy and an effervescent imagination; and Hegel, who was somewhat ponderous, with thoughts that came hard from the soul. Schelling and Hegel later worked together again at the University of Jena, which was a center of intellectual life at the time. Schelling carried his audience away with the powerful intellectual momentum with which he dealt with the problems of thought; he also carried away those who did not seek to penetrate the questions of existence out of feeling and mind. Schelling pointed out that in human knowledge there is something that goes beyond all thinking, an intellectual intuition, as he called it, which is supposed to be an original faculty for looking into the depths of existence. Hegel was his colleague as a lecturer (1801-1806). Even then, his thinking was still cumbersome because he wanted to shape every thought so that it never included more than it was supposed to mean. And because of this slowly drilling cumbersomeness of thinking, Hegel is not easily understood at first.

Then came the sad time of 1806. It was during this period that Hegel undertook, as he himself expressed it, the actual great voyages of discovery of his mind. It was under the thunder of the guns at Jena that he completed his first work, the “Phenomenology of Spirit”, which arose out of an intensive and tremendously deep concentration of the mind. It is a work that the whole of world literature has no equal. Above all, Hegel wanted to make clear to himself what experiences the soul can have when it ascends from the subordinate points of view, so to speak, to the highest, to what Hegel calls the self-comprehension of the spirit within itself. At first, one lives in a very close connection with the outside world, where every this or that, every tree and every house is something one lives with, every opinion is something one lives in. Only when one reflects on this and that, does perception arise. From perception, we then come through thinking to a sense of self at first, to a dark inkling of the self. Only then do we arrive at the first glimmer of true consciousness. But here the I is still, so to speak, enchanted with its surroundings. It works itself out of this enchantment through the content, which it is supposed to have only from itself, by increasingly leaving out what has to do with the outside world, what is connected with it. This is how self-awareness comes about and with it the interweaving of self-awareness with the spirit. It becomes spirit itself, which comprehends itself, becomes spirit that becomes aware of itself. And when a person now looks back, he recognizes what is comprehending itself as spirit, he recognizes the idea that he has, as it were, taken out of the enchantment of the outside world. He recognizes that he used to be stuck in the contradiction between subject and object, but that now, in the overcoming of subject and object, he grasps what Hegel calls the absolute idea in the idea that grasps itself, which is not only subject and not only object. Thus, through an immense effort of thought, Hegel had arrived at the foundation of so-called absolute idealism.

Hegel's life took many twists and turns after his time as a lecturer in Jena. He worked for a time as a political editor in Bamberg (1807-1808), then as a grammar school teacher and headmaster in Nuremberg (1808-1816), and through manifold external experiences he became the realistically thinking mind with whom we are later confronted. From Nuremberg, Hegel was briefly appointed to the University of Heidelberg, where he published his “Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften” (Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences) in 1817. Regarding the reception of the work, Hegel could well have said what legend attributes to him as a saying shortly before his death: “Of all my students, only one understood me, and he misunderstood me.

It is indeed a most remarkable feeling to have sunk something so tremendously deep into the stream of the world and at the same time to see how completely all the preconditions for absorbing the depth were absent. Only from Hegel's standpoint can something like a skeleton be drawn of what this “encyclopedia” should be. But when I now speak in Hegel's sense, I beg not to be looked upon as a Hegelian. For Hegel, it was about implementing the standpoint he had attained in the Phenomenology of Spirit by placing himself beyond subject and object on the standpoint of the idea – and now, if I may say so, to use this standpoint to gain an overview of the full scope of human thought and action.

According to Hegel, the absolute idea must not contain the concepts of subject and object, of knowing and believing, and the like. The idea is beyond all these contradictions. Hegel wants to grasp this idea as if it were being presented in its purity, this idea that does indeed operate in subject and object but goes beyond both. This idea can certainly be found in man, in the external world, in spirit and nature, but it is precisely beyond both, it lies beyond spirit and nature. So in Hegel's sense, one must not grasp the idea in the first instance in the abstract, like an abstract point. Rather, it is a complete entity in itself, which allows a rich content to sprout out of itself as an idea, just as the whole plant with all its individual parts is implicit in the plant germ. Thus, according to Hegel, the idea should allow a content to sprout out of itself that is independent of spirit and nature, and which, when applied, must therefore be applied to both. So before you get involved with the meaning of spirit and nature, you gain a point of view above both and then see a manifestation of the idea in nature and also see the idea being realized in the spiritual. So we have to gain a point of view from which the idea is developed as if the human being were not even there. The human being then abandons himself to the very own process of the world of ideas developing in and out of himself. This point of view results in what can be called the science of logic in Hegel's sense. Here one is not dealing with a subject and object, as in Aristotelian logic, but with the self-movement of the idea that stands above subject and object.

For any thinking that wants to devote itself only to the things of the external world, it is difficult to get used to the strictly closed columns of Hegelian concepts. One feels as if one is being subjected to violence, as if one is being thrust into a system of ideas that has absolutely nothing in common with the usual everyday rational argument. It is the idea that should think, not I: that is the feeling one has. That is why most people do not even try to get into the world of Hegelian ideas. But if you do, well, you might want to correct Hegel here and there – that is especially easy with Hegel – but that is not the point. The point is that by studying Hegel, a person undergoes a tremendous self-discipline of thought, because there is nothing like Hegel's logic to teach you where a system of human concepts, in general, a concept, may occur. A concept can only be recognized in its full scope if it can only be thought at a certain point in a whole fabric of concepts. In order to make this clear, Hegel begins with the most empty concept, the concept of being, which is usually presented without one actually being aware of where it is actually placed. Now, according to Hegel, this concept should be completely empty. So we have to disregard all later content that this concept has acquired, right from the very beginning of Hegel's logic. Thus the concept of being is not actually established by man, but rather it presents itself to man after man has thrown all other concepts out of it.

Now Hegel wants to find the method of developing the concept, that is, one concept must develop from another. Thus, if we look at it correctly, the concept of being must immediately rise above itself. When we apply the abstract concept of being to a thing, it is no longer pure. It then already refers to a this or that. Thus we come to recognize that being is a nothing, mind you, only within the concept. Through the dialectic living in itself, one has thus drawn out of being the concept of nothingness.

If you have disciplined yourself in thinking, you are already educating yourself at this point in Hegelian logic to think in a way that is only ever applied in Hegel's further discussions of being and nothingness as it has just emerged. Being and nothingness now give rise to a third: that is becoming. But in order for us to grasp becoming, it must be brought to a standstill. Thus, in the fourth place, the concept of existence emerges from the concept of becoming. The concept of existence may only be used in this way in Hegel's further logic, as a being that has turned into a nothing, that together with this has produced becoming, which, brought to a standstill, has produced existence. And in this method Hegel goes further. He arrives at the concept of the one and the many, he arrives at the concept of quantity and quality, of measure and so on.

Thus in the first part of Hegel's “Encyklopädie” we have an organism of the idea. Only when we have grasped everything else before that, can we then arrive at the concept of the end, which stands at the end of Hegel's logic. Through such absolute logic, an immense self-discipline of the spirit is indeed achieved, which at least as an ideal must be presented to our time. Through this, one learns to express a concept only when one has its content fully in consciousness. One must then have in one's concepts only what one has at some time in life made clear to oneself as a development of the concept. Within Hegel's logic, the following then emerge as later concepts: subject and object, knowledge, essence, causality, which one now has clearly in consciousness.

Once Hegel had established the complete system of concepts, he was able to show how the concepts reveal themselves, so to speak, in enchantment. The concept cannot only be in the subject, because then all talk about nature would make no sense. Rather, our concepts underlie natural phenomena; they have made them. Thus, it is immaterial to the concept whether it appears outside or inside. To us, it hides itself outside. Nature is the concept or the idea in its otherness, as Hegel says. Anyone who says something different about nature goes beyond what he knows for sure. So a natural philosophy arises, a natural science, that seeks the development of the idea outside, after it has first been sought in itself, in its purer existence, in logic.

The idea first realizes itself in subordinate phenomena, where the concept is most hidden, so that we might be tempted to speak of natural phenomena that are entirely without ideas. This happens in mechanics. But even within mechanical phenomena, Hegel's discipline of thought makes a distinction on two levels. He distinguishes between ordinary mechanics, as it underlies the phenomena of impact, force, and matter, which, as he says, is relative mechanics, and absolute mechanics; that is, he considers it inadmissible to apply the ordinary concepts of relative mechanics to the heavenly bodies. Only when one develops the concept of absolute mechanics does one find the idea that lies in celestial mechanics. But in today's science, nothing is to be found of this distinction. Hence Hegel's polemic against Newton, who has most readily transferred the concepts of relative mechanics to the concepts of absolute mechanics.

From the concept of absolute mechanics, Hegel moves on to the concept of the real organism. He recognizes three members of the organism:

Firstly, the geological organism. In his view, this does not mean that the whole structure of the earth can be understood by extending the laws of a small area to the whole world, as is the case with today's geology. Hegel sees in every mountain range, in every geological form, an organism that has become rigid.

Secondly, the plant organism, in which the concept manifests itself as it were in indifference to the idea, in uniformity for the idea.

Thirdly, the animal organism, which in a certain sense already represents the existence of the idea in the external world.

Thus the appearance of the idea, as it were the enchanted idea, is exhausted in earthly existence. Man now outgrows these enchanted ideas. He must first be understood in terms of his natural characteristics. This is the subject of anthropology. In his perception, man finds himself, as it were, dulled in external existence. But when he comes to consciousness, and from there to self-consciousness, he breaks away from external existence in a certain respect. This is where “phenomenology of the spirit” now enters the picture, following on from anthropology. Within this phenomenology, man finally grasps himself as spirit. In so doing, he recognizes himself as subjective spirit by first breaking free from the enchantment of nature. Gradually, the idea itself appears to him again. What it was in the first, very first concept of being now springs forth. Having recognized the idea in its being-in-itself in logic, in this being-out-of-itself in nature, man now comprehends it where it is in and for itself.

Now this initially subjective spirit becomes objective spirit. The idea reveals what it is in itself in what the spiritual institutions are: marriage, family, law, custom. All this comes together in the state. What emerges in the state as objective spirit, as the realization of the idea, what is found in the interplay from state to state, that is world history. Thus world history is the existence of the idea after its passage through the subjective spirit.

And the question arises: can we ultimately close the circle like a snake biting its own tail, that is, can we come back to the absolute idea, to a realization of the idea where it overcomes subjectively and objectively again? The absolute idea can appear in its absolute reality, initially in a preparatory way, so that it is not enchanted, hidden as in nature, but so that it shines through the appearance. That is the case in art. Beyond world history, Hegel thus creates the first realization of the absolute idea in art. But here it still has something of an objective, external nuance about it. But it can also work in such a way that it no longer has a nuance of the external, but a nuance of the internal. That is the case in religion. It is thus the realization of the absolute idea on the second level.

But the idea can also overcome the nuance of externality, which it still has in art, and the nuance of inwardness, which it still has in religion. It does this in the comprehension of itself, where it captures itself in itself, in philosophy in the Hegelian sense.

And so the circle is complete. In the whole field of history, there is nothing as complete as the Hegelian system.

He later developed some of its individual parts in more detail, such as the philosophy of law (1821), an area in which a strictly disciplined way of thinking has an especially beneficial effect. And in the preface to the “Outlines of the Philosophy of Right” Hegel makes a remarkable statement: When reason grasps the idea, everything must be grasped by seeing the idea, that is, the working of reason in things. Everything real is therefore reasonable in the Hegelian sense. This proposition can, of course, be immediately refuted by the arbitrariness of the usual reasoning, if one does not take into account Hegel's context of thought.

If we sketchily present Hegel's philosophy to ourselves, we have recognized the basic nerve of his philosophy in the most tremendously disciplined thinking.

Hegel then taught this philosophy in Berlin from 1818 to 1831, where he died on November 14, 1831, the anniversary of the death of Leibniz, who had once put forward the completely opposite philosophy. In Hegel's philosophy, the idea, which remains entirely with itself, is at the center. In Leibniz, the idea disperses into the immense sum of monads. But only a single monad, which contains the pre-established harmony, would have to take the path of the Hegelian absolute idea if it develops. Thus, Hegel's system lies in the development of a single monad. Hegel has set up the strictest monistic system, Leibniz the strictest monadological system. As long as we remain within Hegel's trains of thought, we are in a strictly closed cycle of the mind. We go beyond him when we measure Hegel's system against monadology. Indeed, one thinker found that Leibniz's monadology exploded Hegel's monism. This is how Schelling felt.

After remaining silent since 1814, he was appointed to Berlin in 1841, ten years after Hegel's death, and now tried to go beyond Hegel, with whom he had previously worked and co-edited the “Critical Journal of Philosophy” in 1802-03. These were peculiar lectures that he now gave in Berlin.

There is only one way to get beyond Hegel, and that is by drilling a hole from the outside where, in Hegel, the self grasps itself in the “Phenomenology of Spirit”. But one also gets stuck in Leibnitz's monad if one does not drill the hole at the same place. If one starts here, one goes beyond the ego, which only grasps itself, and arrives at supersensible experiences that really go beyond what Hegel comprehends in his system. And that is what Schelling did in fact. He began to teach 'theosophy', real 'theosophy', though in an abstract form, and he had the same success that a person would have today who wanted to teach 'theosophy' at a university.

A triplicity of the world ground, a threefold potency, Schelling taught: first, the being-can; secondly, pure being; thirdly, the summary. In this way he foreshadowed what is being sought today in the threefold Logos. And now Schelling sought to recognize the secrets of the ancient mysteries in his 'Philosophy of Mythology'. He sought to teach what we are exploring today, enriched by the possibility of supersensible experiences since then. Schelling then strove to do justice to the Christian mysteries in his Philosophy of Revelation, which attempts to elucidate Christianity in a theosophical sense. Schelling was only able to give these lectures because he had once before stood at a professorship with different views. All the more was the rage against Schelling now. Today, in all the textbooks and other histories of philosophy, this last 'theosophical period' of Schelling is presented with great horror, where he, having already asserted the madness of his 'intellectual view', now went completely mad — so they think.

With this transition from Hegel to Schelling, however, an era had now come of age that lived entirely under the spell of natural science. And since then we have been witnessing a remarkable spectacle, through the observation of which we shall recognize why Theosophy, spiritual science, must be received today as it is received.

No one can marvel more at the results than I do, and yet the following must be said. The discovery of the plant and animal cell by Schwann and Schleiden in the 1830s was a great achievement, but it was followed by little in the way of opinions. There was the doctrine of force and matter, which regarded everything of a spiritual nature as no more than a bubble on the surface of physical processes. The worst result of this school of thought was the rigid system in which Baechner, in his book “Kraft und Stoff” (Force and Matter), conceived theoretical materialism. Of course, Baechner's bold courage remains to be admired. The other researchers simply did not have the courage to think their thoughts through to the end.

But even more refined minds went other ways than Hegel and Schelling under the constraint of natural science, for example, Hermann Helmholtz, who made truly great contributions in the fields of psychophysics, sensory physiology, physiological optics, and phonetics. His discoveries led him, through the nature of the experiments and their suggestive power, not through thinking, to reject Hegel, so that he said: “When I open Hegel and read a few sentences from his ‘Natural Philosophy’, it is pure nonsense.

And again, a fine mind that was also trained in thinking was not understood in his thoughts, Julius Robert Mayer, who discovered the law of conservation of energy. His law did indeed have an enormous physical significance, and this was also appreciated. But Mayer's train of thought on the mechanical equivalent of heat in his paper on “The Organic Movement in its Connection with Metabolism” (1845) was never understood. People preferred to read Helmholtz, who was much easier to understand. So people preferred to read his work “On the Interaction of Natural Forces” (1854), in which he proved the validity of Mayer's Law, starting from the impossibility of perpetual motion.

Then came the achievements of Darwinism, and a bold mind like Haeckel's, who was averse to all intellectual culture and therefore could see nothing in Hegelian philosophy but a tangle of concepts, was thus called upon to expand the scientific facts in the sense of an external, material history of development. Thus he became the founder of the materialistic Darwinism of the sixties and seventies. No school of philosophical thought rose up against it. At that time, the world could no longer be grasped by philosophy; for it there was nothing but an interrelationship between philosophy and natural science.

Thus a thinker as important as Eduard von Hartmann, who in his “Philosophy of the Unconscious” (1869) dragged materialistic Darwinism, so to speak, before the forum of an intellectual philosophy, was decried as a dilettante who had no idea of natural science. Many refutations appeared, including a highly ingenious anonymous one: “The Unconscious from the Point of View of Philosophy and Descent Theory” (1872). Haeckel said of this writing that it was so excellent and so thoroughly demonstrated the errors of Eduard von Hartmann's philosophy that he himself (Haeckel) could have written it, and Oscar Schmidt, the biographer of Darwin, vividly regretted that his esteemed colleague did not emerge from his anonymity. Then a new edition of this writing appeared, and Eduard von Hartmann himself named himself as the author.

Thus philosophy had once provided the most brutal proof of the fact that it can very well understand natural science, even if trained thinking leads it to completely different results than those of materialism. This struggle is not just about sentence against sentence, but about cultural forces that confront each other.

More subtle minds always retained an understanding of both, of philosophy and of natural science. But due to the dominant power of suggestion of natural science, they could only be heard in the narrowest of circles. Thus Vincenz Knauer's extraordinarily fine and comprehensive history of philosophy, 'Die Hauptprobleme der Philosophie', could only be understood by a very limited circle. Not even what the narrow Herbartian philosophy put forward against external materialism was able to have an effect. And so it came about that a strictly logical mind, even though schooled in scholasticism, which wanted to build within itself the bridge to the scientific method, could not even do this within itself. This was the case with Franz Brentano, who wanted to combine the scientific method with strictly logical thinking in his Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkte (Psychology from an Empirical Point of View), the first volume of which appeared in 1874. But his mental self-discipline did not prevail; inwardly he was still too much under the sway of natural-scientific materialism. He could not come to terms with himself, and so the second volume, announced for the fall, was not published for some time. And today Brentano lives as an old man in Florence, and the second volume has still not been published.

I myself was a witness to the terrible conflict that this conflict could have on the individual soul. I saw how the methodical in the training of thought almost lost its power through the suggestion of natural science. It was at a solemn session of the Vienna Academy in the 1880s, at which I was present, when Ernst Mach gave a lecture on the economy of natural phenomena. He could not find a way to grasp natural phenomena in his method. In each sentence, it was painfully felt how all method of thinking disappeared, how everything shrank to the principle of the least expenditure of energy in the recognition of nature. Thus, thinking was pushed from the central position it had with Hegel to the lowest conceivable economic significance.

Thus Hegel himself remained, as it were, an enchanted spirit, and even a Kuno Fischer could not release him. The truth of what Rosenkranz had said in the introduction to his Hegel biography proved to be true: we philosophers of the second half of the 19th century are, at best, only the gravediggers of the philosophers of the first half of the 19th century. And by that he meant – biographers.

The works of Otto Liebmann, Zeller and others, which went back to Kant, seemed to bring a new impetus to the method of thinking. Liebmann wrote one of the most ingenious treatises ever written in the field of epistemology. He tried by all means to found a transcendental epistemology, but in the end he arrived at a kind of epistemology that can be roughly described as something akin to a dog running around in circles. He did not get beyond the starting point of his epistemology.

And so the present situation developed. There was the important formulation of the theory of heat by Clausius, which had an effect on the physiology of sense and this finally again on the theory of knowledge. Here also, therefore, a subjection of philosophy under natural science.

Thus, those who spoke in terms of the old way of thinking were not heard. In the 1880s, one researcher did attempt to advance epistemology on the basis of Kant, but he was not listened to. Under the pressure of the circumstances, he left the field entirely and turned to aesthetics. It was only in 1906 that he published another small epistemological work, by Johannes Volkelt, on “The Sources of the Certainty of our Knowledge”. The conditions for a true epistemology were as little present as they were for a true understanding of Hegel.

Our time finds itself far more satisfied with a Spencerian encyclopedia, which goes beyond natural science by very little and very superficially. And when the view of the smallest economic measure, as proposed by Mach, was brought back from the New World in the pragmatism of William James, it was enthusiastically received as something new. However, the strict columns of Hegel's absolute logic and the completely unphilosophical raisonnement of pragmatism make a rather strange combination.

But the good cannot be completely suppressed, it can only be suppressed temporarily. Where a misunderstood Kantianism could not lie like a mildew on the thinking, so to speak, out of the strength of the people, a healthy thinking stirred. Thus the Russian philosopher Solowjow brought in fact new significant methodological approaches by the fact that he based on a young national strength, which, if you want, has not even brought it to a right culture, but not on an old one like Franz Brentano. The Frenchman Boutroux also introduced a new useful concept into the history of development. But such efforts are ignored. Under the ashes, the truth continues to glow, as it were. It can be overgrown by prejudice and impotence, but as a self-discipline of thought it continues to work secretly. And precisely those who believe they have to represent spiritual science must hope that this self-discipline of thought will pave the way for spiritual science. They must find the way to Hegel's strictest logic, for only in this way can they firmly establish on the foundation of thought that which they must often bring down from higher spiritual worlds in loose structures. Thus, in the supersensible realm, if we may be permitted the expression, there is nothing that strictly trained thinking must reject. ke more acute and self-trained mind will find the transition, the bridge that leads from the highest product of the physical plane, thinking, to the supersensible.

... Picture what the universe is, apart from the earth, if regarded by the Copernican world-conception alone: a set of calculations! It cannot be this for spiritual science, but must be something which is presented to spiritual knowledge. Why do we have a geology which believes that the earth has only developed through the purely mineral world? Because the Copernican world-conception had, as a matter of course, to produce the present-day materialistic geology. It has nothing in it that could show how the earth is to be thought of, from the cosmos, or from the spiritual, as a being with soul and spirit. A world thought of in Copernican terms could only be a dead earth! A living, ensouled, spiritually permeated earth has to be conceived from another cosmos—really from another cosmos—than that of the Copernican view. Naturally, each time only a few characteristics of the being of the earth can be given, as it appears when it is looked at from the universe.

Is that an entirely unreal conception; to picture the earth as seen from the universe? It is not unreal, but very real. It occurred once to Herman Grimm, but he immediately apologised, when he had written about it. In an essay written in 1858 he said that one could imagine—but he remarks at once ‘I do not want to put forward an article of faith, but a fantasy’—that the human soul, when it is freed from the body, could move freely in the cosmos about the earth, and would then in this free movement observe the earth. Then what happens on the earth would appear to man in quite a different light, thinks Herman Grimm. Man would get to know every event from another point of view. For example, he would look into human hearts ‘as into a glass bee-hive’. The thoughts arising in the human heart would appear as if out of a glass bee-hive! That is a beautiful picture. And then one could imagine: this human being, who has floated round the earth for a time, and observed it from outside, might come to incarnate again on earth. He would have father and mother, a native country and everything that there is on earth—and would then have to forget everything that he had seen from another point of view. And if he was a historian, for instance, in the present-day sense (Herman Grimm at this point writes in a subjective way!) he could not help forgetting the other—for with the other way of looking at things one cannot write history!

This is a conception which strongly approaches the reality. It is quite right that the human soul is as if floating around the earth, between death and a new birth, but—in a way conditioned by karmic connections, as I have often described—looks down at the earth. Then the soul has the definite feeling that the earth is an ensouled and spiritually permeated organism—and the prejudiced view ceases, that it is something without a soul, only something ‘geological’. And then the earth becomes something very much differentiated; it becomes, for observation between death and a new birth, differentiated in such a way that for instance the Orient appears otherwise than the American Occident. It is not possible to speak with the dead about the earth, as one speaks about it with geologists; for the dead do not understand geological conceptions. But they know: when from cosmic space the East, from Asia until far into Russia, is observed, then the earth appears as if wrapped in a bluish radiance—bluish, blue to violet; such is the earth seen from this side of cosmic space. If one comes to the Western hemisphere, if one looks at it where it is America—it appears more or less in burning red. You have there a polarity of the earth, seen from the cosmos. The Copernican world-conception can of course not of itself provide this—it is another way of seeing, from another point of view. For him who has this point of view it becomes comprehensible: this earth, this ensouled earth-organism shows itself outwardly otherwise in its eastern half, otherwise in its western; in the east it has its blue covering, in the west something like a glowing out of its interior, hence the reddish, burning glow. There you have one of the examples of how man can be guided between death and a new birth by what he then learns. He gets to know the configuration of the earth, the different appearance of the earth out into the cosmos, into the spiritual; he gets to know—it is on one side bluish-violet, on the other burning red. And according to his spiritual need, which he will develop out of his karma, this determines for him where he will next enter again into incarnation. Naturally one must picture these things as much more complicated than I have said now. But from such relationships man develops between death and new birth the forces which bring him to incarnate in a particular inherited child body.

What I have given are only two specific colours; apart from colours, there are other definite qualities, many others. For the present I will only mention: between East and West, in the middle, the earth is more greenish as seen from outside, in our regions for instance greenish. So that in fact a threefold membering is produced, which can lead to significant conclusions about the way in which the human being can use what he can observe between death and a new birth to guide him to come into incarnation in this or that region of the earth.

If this is taken into consideration, one will gradually acquire the conception that between the human beings incarnated here on the earth in the physical body and the human beings who are out of the body certain things play a part, which are generally not taken into account at all. When we go into a foreign country and want to understand the people, we must acquire their language. When we want to come to an understanding with the dead, we have also gradually to acquire the language of the dead. This is at the same time the language of spiritual science, for this language is spoken by all who are called alive and all who are called dead. It reaches from over there to here, and from here to over there. But it is specially important to acquire not just abstract conceptions, but such pictures of the universe. We acquire a picture of the earth when we imagine a sphere floating in cosmic space, gleaming on one side in shades of blue and violet, on the other side burning, sparkling red and yellow; and between a belt of green. Conceptions which have the character of pictures gradually carry us over into the spiritual world. That is what matters. It is necessary to put forward such picture-conceptions, if one is speaking in an earnest sense about the spiritual worlds; and it is necessary too that such conceptions are not regarded as if they were arbitrary inventions, but that something is made from them—on this one depends. Let us consider it once more: the eastern earth, gleaming in blue and violet—the western earth, sparkling reddish-yellow. But other differentiations come in. If the soul of one who has died contemplates certain points in our present age, then he perceives at the place that is designated here as Palestine, as Jerusalem, out of the bluish-violet something of a golden form, a golden crystal form, which comes to life. That is Jerusalem, seen from the spirit! That is what also plays a part in the Apocalypse (in so far as I speak of Imaginations) as ‘heavenly Jerusalem’. These are not things which are thought out. These are things which can be seen. Contemplated from the spirit, the Mystery of Golgotha was as it is in physical observation when the astronomer directs his telescope into cosmic space and then sees something that amazes him, for example the appearance of new stars. Spiritually, observed from the cosmos, the event of Golgotha was the appearance of a golden star in the blue earth-aura of the eastern half of the earth. Here you have the Imagination for what I described in conclusion the day before yesterday. It is really important that through such Imaginations conceptions of the universe are acquired, which enable the human soul to find its place in feeling within the spirit of this universe.

Try to think this with someone who has died: the crystal form of the heavenly Jerusalem, building up in golden radiance, amid the blue-violet earth-aura. This will bring you near. This is something which belongs to the Imaginations, into which the soul enters at death: ‘Ex Deo nascimur, in Christo morimur!’

There is a method of shutting oneself off from spiritual reality, and there is a method of approaching it. One can shut oneself off from spiritual reality by attempting to calculate reality. Mathematics is certainly spirit, indeed pure spirit; but employed upon physical reality it is the method for shutting oneself off from the spiritual. The more you calculate the more you shut yourself off from the spiritual. Kant once said: there is as much science in the world, as there is mathematics. But from the other point of view, which is equally justified, one could say: there is as much darkness in the world, as man has succeeded in calculating about the world. One approaches spiritual life the more one penetrates from external observation, and particularly from abstract conceptions, to picture conceptions. Copernicus brought men to calculate the universe; the opposite way of seeing things must bring men to form pictures of the universe again; to think of a universe, with which the human soul can identify itself—so that the earth appears as an organism, shining out into the cosmos: blue-violet, with the golden, shining heavenly Jerusalem on the one side, and on the other side sparkling reddish-yellow.

From what does the blue-violet on one side of the earth-aura originate? If you see this side of the earth-sphere, what is physical of the earth disappears, seen from the outside; rather, the light-aura becomes transparent, and the dark of the earth vanishes. The blue which shows brings this about. You can explain the phenomenon from Goethe’s Theory of Colour. But because the interior of the earth sparkles out from the western half—sparkles out in such a way that it is true, as I described the day before yesterday, that man is determined in America by the sub-earthly; because of this the interior of the earth shines and sparkles as a reddish-yellow glow, as a reddish-yellow shooting fire out into the universe. This is only intended as a sketch, in quite feeble outlines; but it is meant to show you that it is possible to speak today not only in general abstract ideas about the world in which we live between death and a new birth, but in very concrete conceptions. All this is capable of preparing our souls to reach a connection with the spiritual world, a connection with the higher Hierarchies, a connection with that world in which man lives between death and a new birth.

Dear Attendees!

For many years, I have had the privilege of speaking in other German cities, as well as here in Hamburg, about subjects related to the humanities, the science that is aware of being a true continuation of the scientific way of thinking for the knowledge of the spiritual life of man, which has developed within humanity for three to four centuries. Now it is not out of short-sighted feelings, but, as I believe, precisely out of the knowledge of this spiritual science itself, that the power to recognize the human being in a spiritual way, to recognize that in man which extends beyond birth and death, that the power for this must be sought for humanity from that which one is justified in calling the spiritual idealism of the German people, that idealism which has developed in the most profound and also in the sharpest way in the greatest period of German intellectual life from the end of the eighteenth to the beginning of the nineteenth century, but which continues to have an effect into our own days. And I believe – just as this belief already underlay the reflection that I was allowed to make last year here in this city – I believe that it is well suited to the great facts and developmental impulses that we face in our time when the members of the German people immerse themselves in can bring in the deepest sense of the word knowledge of their own nature, which can then lead to an evaluation of this own nature in relation to the insults and slander that are without precedent - like these world events in the entire history of the development of mankind. I believe that it is more appropriate in the face of these insults and slander to pursue an objective course of thought that is more in keeping with the nature of the German people, to objectively clarify the significance that the German people could assume through their achievements in the overall development of humanity. Above all, attention must be drawn to a prejudice, one might say, if the word were not strongly taken out against the feelings in the present, above all attention must be drawn to a prejudice that repeatedly and repeatedly arises within the circles of our people, the prejudice that the newer intellectual life must, for the very reason that it wants to appear on scientific ground, have an international character from the outset. How often have we heard it said, and how matter-of-factly we accept it: science must be international. Certainly, to a certain limited degree that is absolutely true. But the question is whether it is really one of the fruitful perceptions and feelings that we should keep building on this saying over and over again when we want to express our thoughts about the relationship between individual nations. The sun is certainly international, and so is the moon. But how different are the ideas, the perceptions, the feelings that the various peoples are able to express about the moon and the sun. International is certainly the science; but is the way in which the individual peoples approach science international, and why do some approach it perhaps more superficially, while others delve into it? And is it not especially important for Germans to reflect on a word spoken by one of the greatest Germans, Goethe, when he had completed a great part of his journey to the south and had occupied himself not only with the contemplation of various art treasures, but had also occupied himself with the contemplation of the most diverse natural objects and natural facts, when he said: He would most like to make a journey to India, not to discover anything new, but to contemplate what has been discovered in his own way, that is, to see it again. viewing the most diverse natural objects and natural facts, he said: He would most like to make a journey to India, not to discover something new, but to view what has been discovered in his own way, that is, to see again in the external phenomena that which is alive in his soul.

It is not that which is internationally abstract that acts as a motivating and sustaining element in the forces of nations, but rather that which the individual souls of the individual nations are able to see in the [gap in the transcript]

Now, ladies and gentlemen, I would like to approach the consideration from the point of view of spiritual scientific knowledge. And I firmly believe that the German may approach this observation of his relationship to other nations in this objective way. Spiritual science, as it is meant here, dear honored attendees, is still very young, even if, as we shall see, this spiritual science can develop in a very organic way out of German idealism. But regardless of this, it is all too easy to understand that this spiritual science still finds opponents everywhere today, and that what it has to say – has to say from a consideration that is just as thorough and profound as that [for science] – is still sometimes ridiculed and mocked as something paradoxical, perhaps even insane. But it is precisely such a question, as that about the souls of different peoples, that spiritual science attempts to grasp objectively in a certain sense.

If you look at the human soul in a spiritual scientific sense, it does not appear to you from this point of view as today's conventional soul science or psychology often believes. I would say that everything in the soul is mixed up.

Spiritual science must observe the soul as natural science observes any phenomenon. Just as the natural scientist must seek to recognize the essence of sunlight by observing its manifestation in the world of colors, so the soul researcher must seek the soul essence in its manifestations if he is to strive for an understanding of this essence. Sunlight reveals itself in reddish, greenish and blue-violet color shades. Just as the natural scientist distinguishes the reddish-yellow shade on the one side of the color spectrum of light, so the spiritual scientist distinguishes on the one side of the soul that which can be called the sentient soul. And just as the natural scientist distinguishes the greenish center as a phenomenon in sunlight, so it appears to the spiritual scientist, as it were, in the center of the soul being, that which can be called the intellectual soul; viewed from another side, this intellectual soul can appear as the soul of feeling. And as the other end of the soul rainbow, so to speak, appears that which can be addressed as the consciousness soul.

When one looks at the human soul in this way, from a spiritual science perspective, one comes to the conclusion that in the sentient soul, everything lives that emerges more from the subconscious depths of the soul, that lives out more in sensations, in will impulses, in a semi-unconscious, instinctive way. But at the same time it contains that which is first lived out in an indeterminate way within the soul, that which is the soul's share in the spiritual, in eternal life. The mind soul is that through which man comprehends the surrounding world in such a way that he brings concepts and ideas into everything, that he, so to speak, builds the world for himself like an external structure of natural laws. The consciousness soul contains that which is most closely related to what man recognizes as his position in the physical world, whereby he places himself most in the finite, in the interwoven nature of death.

This is how it is initially with the three – I would say rainbow – shades of the soul. And just as the light, the common light, lives in all colors, lives in the three color shades, so the I, the actual self, the eternal being of the human being that passes through births and deaths, lives in these three soul shades. And just as these three soul nuances are found in the individual human soul, so they show themselves in the different nations. So that in the soul life of nations - I now say explicitly: of nations, not of individuals within nations, not of individuals, but of nations as a whole - the soul of the different nations is expressed in the one national soul, especially the sentient soul, while the other aspects of the soul are more in the background: in the case of the other people, the intellectual soul is more in the background, in the case of a third people, the consciousness soul is more in the background, and in the case of a fourth people, what permeates and imbues the individual soul aspects: the I, the self. And, however paradoxical it may still appear to many today, one understands a part of European humanity only when one knows how these individual shades of soul are distributed among the souls of the individual nations.

Thus, when we consider the Italian national soul, we find that the soul of feeling predominates in this Italian national soul. In the French national soul, what must be called the soul of reason predominates in the most eminent sense. In the British national soul, what must be called the consciousness soul predominates. In the German national soul – and this is not spoken out of some particular feeling, but out of knowledge – what must be called the ego, the self, that which seeks to harmonize and unify the various soul nuances, that which radiates through the various soul nuances, predominates. And all the individual phenomena of life within the individual nations, even the way in which the different nations do not understand each other, all this follows from this knowledge of the national souls. If the German people in particular seems to me to be called upon to gain an understanding of what actually prevails between nations, based on an awareness of the nature of the soul, while the one-sidedness of other nations prevents them from truly gaining an understanding of the nature of each different nation. Can it not be grasped with one's hands – if I may use the image, ladies and gentlemen – that in the Italian national soul, unconscious, instinctive impulses live everywhere? Even when we go to the greatest, whose greatness should certainly not be belittled, we find the life of feeling prevailing everywhere. If you immerse yourself in the works of thinkers such as Giordano Bruno or Dante, you will find that it is the life of feeling that wells up from the unconscious and is given visual form, that which is not first sought after in a thought that justifies it, but which one simply wants to bring up from the soul and, I would say, let it speak.

And if you take the French national soul – not the individual Frenchman – if you take the national soul, then you have to say to yourself – and this is something that, for example, in an external relationship, not out of the knowledge with which we are dealing here, is recognized by many who think objectively, for example in neutral countries, for example, if you look at the French national soul, you will find wit everywhere; you will find what the intellect can crystallize; but you will especially find a certain constructive spirit, that understanding spirit that seeks to build the world in the way that the intellect can build the world.

And there is nothing clearer, dear attendees, than the way in which – I would say – one of the greatest minds, especially in the French world view, shows how reason works in the soul in particular.

The French are now calling one of their greatest philosophers – yes, I don't know, should we say 'fils de montagne'? He was called 'Bergson' until the war, and that's what I call him after the war, but they don't want us to call him that across the border. He is the one who, in the most incredible way, I would say, imagines his French world view into the German people, because, yes, he seems to have believed that when the French advance with cannons and rifles, the Germans will confront them with recitations of Novalis or Goethe or Schiller. And since they didn't do that, since they also have cannons, and bigger cannons than the French have, and have set them against the French, he talks about how all of German culture is mechanized, how everything is just like one big machine. And at a certain hour – you can read about it in foreign newspapers – he entertained his audience at a French academy by showing them how the Germans have degenerated in modern times from the heights they occupied under Goethe, Schiller, under Fichte, under Schelling, under Hegel and Kant and Schopenhauer, how they cling to everything, everything hang on to superficialities, how they are, in a hypocritical way, something like [gap in the transcript], how, in a hypocritical way, especially in the present, they refer again to Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, but how they understand them today in a very mechanical way and unite them with their soul in a very mechanical way. Admittedly, these Germans are unpleasant – but the French will perhaps only realize this when the borders are open again – [the Germans] are unpleasant, because they could prove that they have indeed recently been dealing more intensively with the aforementioned spirits, who drew their world view deeply from their essence, and thus sought to deepen the German essence. But something else could be proven. They could, for example, prove that Henri Bergson copied entire long pages almost word for word from Schelling, Schopenhauer and so on, and that basically his entire philosophy, which is certainly a sign of our time, is largely German plagiarism. That is non-mechanical appropriation!

And, esteemed attendees, if we now look, say, for example, across to the British national soul: just as the Italian national soul bears the main nuance of the sentient soul, and the French national soul bears the intellectual soul, so the British national soul bears the consciousness soul for our present time. The Italian feels, the Frenchman thinks, the Briton asserts himself in the physical world, that is, he seeks to develop his relationship to the physical world in some way. I am not speaking out of some national sentiment, but out of what can be proven down to the details. One might say: How Kant had to strive to deepen this view, which was only directed towards the physical world, in a conceptual sense. Kant's entire striving is, from a certain point of view, a working out of what he has become, for example through Hume, through Locke and other British minds. And it is fitting to take a good look at this aspect of the development of more recent spiritual life. Hume – let us single him out. What did he achieve?

He managed to say: Yes, when we look at the world, we actually find everywhere not the truth, not even cause and effect, no connections, but only that one phenomenon follows on from another. The most superficial of world views!

With regard to everything else, he arrives at what is called skepticism, a doubting of everything. Kant had to work his way out of this. But now, if we look at where this world view – insofar as it is now the expression of the soul of the people – has led, what has it led to? We see a remarkable world view developing in modern times, in the present, which has emerged precisely from the British national spirit, which is supported in this by the American national spirit. We have seen that out of this consciousness soul, which above all wants to assert the I in the world, in the physical world, what is called pragmatism has developed. We cannot speak about this objectively, because a number of Germans have also fallen for it – if I may use the trivial word – because they are philosophers, have fallen for this pragmatism. What is this pragmatism? Well, this pragmatism actually does no more or no less than say: Oh, truth, as it is supposed to develop out of the soul as truth, does not actually exist. What we summarize in individual judgments, in ideas that we then regard as truth, is only thought up by the human mind in order to prove useful out in the world. When you speak of the soul, soul is only a pragmatic concept. We see how there are individual phenomena in human life that fall apart and we cannot hold them together properly if we do not presuppose a unity. We only have it to grasp what is an external phenomenon. The truth must be something, an advantage that can be used in the external physical world. That is pragmatism. One must not believe that this is just a philosophical hair-splitting. It is deeply connected with the national spirit and with what creates out of this national spirit. In the 1880s and 1890s, [Robert Seeley], a professor of history, looked at English history – the relevant work was published in 1883 – and pointed out that it is actually a kind of prejudice – because that is the meaning of the history book – that in the nineteenth century, in Englishness, one has always regarded the struggle of Englishness for freedom and democracy as running through English history. He goes back a little further and tries to look at this English history and finds that what has happened can be summarized under the name “British expansion”; first Great Britain, then Greater Britain. The Italians were just parroting them, talking about “greater Italy.” And then the professor says, “But history is not just there to be learned from, to gain some truth that you now carry with you, so that you know something from history. Rather, history must be shaped, must be introduced into life.” And how is it shaped? It is characterized by the fact that one sees: Britain has expanded more and more over the last few centuries. So one must learn from it how to expand further. – The truth, as one can use it, as one can put it at the service of outer physical life!

I do not believe, esteemed readers, that I am presenting a one-sided view of these things, but rather that people have always been one-sided in their consideration of these matters because they have not been willing to consider the things in their real essence. In this context, it should always be emphasized how we Germans actually fared in the course of the nineteenth century in the spiritual realm with regard to the formation of a world view.

Goethe – I am in a position to speak about this because I have spent the whole of my life, thirty-five years, studying Goethe – Goethe tried to build a world view from the observation of external facts, which considers the relationship of external nature in detail. He tried to find the spirit in the development of beings. But basically, he made very little impression on the time. Then Darwin came along. He approached the task in an English way, truly in an English way, that is, he approached it in such a way that it is not particularly difficult to delve into his train of thought. And he gave everything that can be followed externally in the physical world, that can be seen with the eyes and grasped with the hands. That made an impression. And when it comes to Goethe, the world is still indebted to recognize – even if it is of course more difficult to find one's way into Goethe's theory of evolution – to recognize how much higher Goethe's theory of evolution is than that which arose in the nineteenth century on the basis of Darwinian research.

However, a Frenchman, a French philosopher, yes, I would almost say, of course, one who not so long ago before the war traveled around in Germany, even spoke at a German university about the deep friendship between the French and German mind, a Frenchman, he has tried to highlight the differences in recent weeks between the scientific world view that the German is seeking and that which the Frenchman and the Englishman are seeking. He told the French audience in Paris that if they want to get to know animals, want to have knowledge of animals, want to integrate their concepts of things into their world view, then they go to a menagerie and look at the animals. That's one way, certainly. The Englishman, said this French philosopher to his Parisian audience, the Englishman goes on a journey around the world, sees the animals in the various parts of the world and then describes what he has seen. And the German – he would go neither to the menagerie nor to the different parts of the world, but he would go into his room and delve into his own inner being to bring the essence of the lion, the essence of the hyena, and so on, to the surface from his own inner being. If you want to characterize the three peoples with a certain wit, which is certainly not to be denied the French, and perhaps also want to characterize them according to the proportion of thought and ideas present in their world view, then you can do that. Yes, but there is a catch to this story. The wit that the French professor has made out of his thoroughness is not his own, but Heinrich Heine's.

Now, ladies and gentlemen, it is clear to a certain extent that German intellectual life has always tried to avoid one-sidedness and to find something that can shine through the whole of the individual shades of the soul. To do this, however, German intellectual life had to penetrate again and again into the innermost part of the human soul. And in order to show – I would like to say – by the facts how the German tried to get to the essence of the world, to the essence of what the world springs from and wells up from, I would like to present three German figures today. Not because, dear attendees, I believe that one could somehow dogmatically accept what these three figures have created as a world view within German idealism, but because I believe that there are indeed three figures that have emerged from the innermost essence of German nationality, the German national soul. I would like to say: Today we can go far beyond regarding a figure that appears in the world history of the spirit in such a way that we accept what he has expressed as individual sentences, as individual ideas, as individual opinions, as if it were a dogma. We can look at people as they have striven, as they stand in their search for a world view. Here we encounter a German figure whom I tried to point out from a different point of view here in this city last winter, and who is much talked about now. First of all, we encounter the figure who was aware that what he had to say about a world view had been created entirely, as it were, through a dialogue with the German national soul itself: Johann Gottlieb Fichte. I would like to give just a few traits of this Johann Gottlieb Fichte, to show that he is indeed a figure that could only have emerged from the wholeness of German intellectual life; for such a figure as Fichte really did arise out of German intellectual life. When we see Fichte in the blue peasant's coat, we can meet him as a seven-year-old boy standing on the bank of a stream, the stream that flows past his father's house, throwing a book into the stream, the Siegfried saga. His father comes along. The father is angry about it because he gave Fichte the Siegfried saga as a present last Christmas. But it turned out that Fichte, who had been a good student until then, became completely absorbed in the Siegfried saga and was now less inclined to study. He only needed to be made aware of his duty, and he would immediately say: “Duty must give way to everything.” And we can find the seven-year-old boy throwing the Siegfried saga, which has kept him from his duty, into the stream. The soul felt and sensed everything in the deepest, most intimate connection with this soul.

On a Sunday, a neighboring landowner came to the simple farming village where Fichte grew up. At that time, Fichte was a nine-year-old boy. The neighboring landowner had come to hear the sermon, but he was too late. The sermon was no longer being heard by the landowner. So they called for nine-year-old Fichte, because they knew how Fichte, even as a nine-year-old boy, knew how to connect what he heard with his soul. He came in his blue farmer's coat and repeated word for word the sermon he had just heard, with such inner fire that it was clear that every word he said had grown together with the innermost part of his soul. It was not just the soul of feeling or the soul of mind or consciousness that was at work, but the soul as a whole. In this sense, Fichte is – I would say – one of the most quintessentially German minds, but one that was also intimately connected with the whole mission, or rather, with the whole essence of German nationality.

I would say that one has to let one's gaze wander far and wide if one wants to characterize this essence of German nationality in just a few words.

Let us look across to Asia, where the Germans' relatives, their Aryan relatives, are to be found. There we find in these Aryan relatives the urge to find the divine and spiritual in the world. But everywhere we find this urge coupled with another: to tone down the self, to dampen it so that it feels extinguished in order to merge into the universe. The other pole has found expression in the German nature, in the German being's search for a world view. Do the Aryan relatives in Asia seek to pour themselves out into the universe and thus find a world picture by muting the ego, as they do in India, for example? The German, on the other hand, seeks to find within this ego that which pours the divine into this ego by elevating and strengthening, ensoulings and spiritualizing this ego within himself. So that it is not by being subdued, but by being elevated, by the elevated striving of the ego, that this ego is led up into that which, as the divine-spiritual, pulsates through, permeates and interweaves the world.

And so Fichte again confronted the human ego, the human self, with his whole being, in order to discover in the self the forces that give a world view. I would say that he does this not only by attempting to express through abstract theories and through all kinds of mere abstract ideas what a world view can constitute, but rather that it is his entire being, the totality of this being, through which he presents himself, whether to his students or to his people in general.

Someone who listened to him once said: When Fichte speaks publicly or even to his students, his speech rolls like a thunderstorm that breaks into individual fires. His imagination is not lush, but energetic; his images are not magnificent, but strong and powerful. And he reigns in the realm of ideas, so that it becomes apparent that he not only dwells in this invisible world of ideas, but can rule in it. But in this way of speaking, there was something in Fichte by which he tried to let his whole soul overwhelm his listeners. Therefore, a friend who knew him well could say: He sought not only to educate good people, but to educate great people. And he did not just seek to tell his listeners something, but he sought to make a living whole out of what he and his listeners together were.

Those people who prefer to just listen passively and accept what does not demand any thought of their own while listening would not have been particularly fond of Fichte, the quintessentially German mind. For example, he repeatedly did the following with his audience. He said: “Think about the wall!” And so the audience thought about the wall, tried to think about the wall. Of course they managed it quite well. — “So,” he said, “now try to think of the one who thinks the wall!” — Then you could see how many were stunned, how many were quite strangely affected. But by such an imposition, Fichte tried to reject the human being to that which wells up and overflows within himself. For he could not say like Cartesius: “I think, therefore I am,” but he regarded this I in its perpetual liveliness, in its perpetual arising. And only such an I did he allow, which continually generates itself, which has the power to arise anew in each moment, in each following moment. The will, the will prevailing in the I, became for him the fundamental power of the I. And in that the I grasps itself in the highest sense in its fundamental powers, it grasps the highest divine power, which weaves and undulates into the I.

For Descartes, the world view was such that he did not even admit souls in animals, but rather, to him, they were mechanisms, machines - the whole world a mechanism. Of course, Fichte also saw how the mechanical is present in the external physical world; but for him, this mechanical was not dismissed when it was observed. Rather, one could only find one's way into this mechanical if one found the divine-spiritual source of things, which, however, could only be found in the will nature of man.

And so for Fichte, the spiritual that permeates and flows through the world became, for Fichte, the moral order of the world - above a mechanical order of the world. The divine-spiritual appeared to him in the effect of duty, which pulsates into the human soul. And the mechanisms, the external products of nature, appeared to him in this way in relation to the whole of creation in his world view, as if the human being, who first and foremost wants to be morally active, makes individual machines for himself, in which he cannot ask to what extent they are moral, but which nevertheless serve the moral, the moral order of the human being. Thus, for Fichte, mechanical nature was only, as he says, the expression of the realization of duty, of the moral order of the world, that it was the sensitized material of duty. For Fichte, the mechanical nature is everywhere the world-moral world order, and everything that is not moral is there so that duty has tools to realize itself in the world. That is the power of the mind that prevailed in Johann Gottlieb Fichte.

Today, you don't have to take Fichte's point of view. You don't have to accept what he expressed as his opinion. But that is not the point at issue. The point is what can be gained by allowing oneself to be inspired, as it were, by the way that a thinker like Fichte approached the spiritual world and formed one of the worldviews of German idealism on that basis. Strengthening of the soul, but also development of the soul, can be gained by not engaging dogmatically, but humanly, with the kind of striving that appears in Johann Gottlieb Fichte.

Now we turn to his successor, the much-misunderstood Schelling. For him, external nature was not something soulless either. He could not stop at considering external nature only a sensualized material of the moral world order, but for him, external nature was a strengthened spirit. And the spirit was a nature endowed with soul. And in his world view, the two combined to form a whole. And the divine-spiritual that rules the world was for him the great artist who creates by bringing forth the world out of the divine-benevolent, because it is meant to stand as beauty in the face of the invisible spiritual. In this much-misunderstood Schelling, contemplation of spirit and contemplation of nature grow together in an intimate way. But in fact this man was a reflection of his whole personality, who in his old age still stood before his audience with sparkling eyes, from which, as if through the gaze of man, a deep contemplation of nature spoke naturally, a contemplation of nature that glowed with beauty. This man was such that we can say: he only represented the other side of German intellectual life, of the German national soul, so to speak. Fichte, too, could be said to represent something like the consciousness soul of the human being, but this consciousness soul is illuminated by the I. Schelling, too, represents something like the intellectual soul of the human being; but this intellectual soul is illuminated by the I, so that it has an effect on the human mind. Again, it is the exaltation, the strengthening of that which is always in the human soul that Schelling seeks. He goes so far as to make the following statement, which certainly cannot be substantiated: To know nature is to create nature. But this saying is still so fruitful that it should not be accepted as a dogma, but rather be recognized as coming from the soul of a man who wants to plunge with his whole soul into nature and seek the spirit in nature.

The third aspect of German national character is portrayed by the much-misunderstood Hegel. Only he presents this German folk-spirit with the greatest power. For him, that which reigns through the world as the Divine-Spiritual is thought everywhere. Man seeks thought. But man not only imagines thought, he draws thought out of all phenomena, because thought lives in everything. One may, of course, unreservedly acknowledge the one-sidedness. The spiritual-divine appears as a mere logician. The world recognizes Hegel as if it were only thought. Of course, one will never come to a different understanding of the world than to an understanding of the world as thought. But that is not the point; rather, the point is that one should be able to reflect, I would say, to reflect, in order to develop thought in such a fine way as Hegel developed it. And that is how he came to see, in terms of his world view, that we only know the world to the extent that we can recognize it as reasonable in all its aspects. Everything real is reasonable, and everything reasonable is real. You can scoff, but the sneer is cheap. You can even scoff at such passion and write it off, as Bergson does! But the sneer is cheap. That is not the point. The point is that this one-sidedness was bound to emerge from the very depths of German national character, because, by immersing himself in this pure, crystal-clear thought, which emerged through Hegel in the development of the spiritual being of humanity, because man thereby grows together in this pure thought with what, in turn, pulses and weaves through the world as pure thought. What matters is not the thoughts that Hegel produced, but the feeling that he associated with his thought life, this feeling: to know oneself as one with the divine thinking that permeates the world and that is reflected in the individual human soul. Everywhere it is the exaltation, the strengthening, the energizing of the self that is sought, in order to find, through this exaltation, energizing, strengthening of the self, that which can open up in the innermost part of the soul, can reveal itself as the most divine, which in the life of human beings, in the life of all beings, in the life of all nature, reveals itself.

These thoughts were too great, these aspirations were too comprehensive, which emerged from the three – I would say – most powerful world view personalities of the German people, to immediately gain a complete foothold. But they are there. And they should be considered not in so far as they said this or that, but in so far as the German essence can be recognized by the fact that such thoughts and feelings and possibilities of knowledge lay within it. Our intention cannot be to get to know Hegel, Schelling, Fichte, but to get to know the German essence in its revelations, in so far as they express this German essence. That is what matters.

Certainly, this world view of German Idealism, this tripartite world view, as I would call it, has passed its peak, the justified peak of the scientific world view. And so far, no one has been able to combine both, this scientific world view and this world view of German Idealism, in a living way. But they will become one. And it is my conviction that it is precisely through spiritual science that this becoming one can be made possible.

What does the Italian ask today — I mean, insofar as he grows out of his nationality, not as an individual — what does he ask, how does what he creates as a world view relate to religious feelings? What does the Frenchman ask about when he wants to develop a scientific world view? The Englishman asks more about it. But he asks about it in a peculiar way. We can study this with Darwin, but also with many others. This Darwin seeks a world view purely from the facts of the physical world. But he draws no conclusions from it. He allows to exist alongside the world view that is based only on convention, on external origin. And so we find that Darwin does not feel the need to somehow modify his convictions about spiritual matters by creating an external world view about the physical world - although, by immersing himself in German development, this does become a big, all-encompassing question. The German cannot see a mere mental image based on tradition alongside a natural image, because that would seem like a lie to him. And he would rather accept Haeckel's materialism than a British world view, which can place the most pious sentiments next to naturalism without motivation and without seeking a connection.

Therefore, we are witnessing such a tragic phenomenon, one that I would go so far as to call heartbreaking. Ernst Haeckel, who today, out of his German sensibilities, is vigorously turning against Britain, has become completely Germanized, and with stronger words than some others, because basically his entire world view is based on Huxley and Darwin. Anyone who can sense what can live in the human soul from the heights of a world view will see the tragedy in Haeckel's soul, the tragedy that is based purely on the fact that the German - Haeckel - could not, like Darwin, let a spiritual world view exist alongside a purely natural world because he strove for wholeness and did not have the strength, like Fichte, like Schelling, like Hegel, to get into the spirit, and therefore constructed a world view that was directed towards Darwinism, towards the contemplation of external nature.

But one should not think that what is now beginning to assert itself, where spiritual science begins, that what this spiritual science itself has to say, could basically be based on anything other than - I would say - the world view of German idealism. That is, so to speak, the root. And spiritual science will have to be its blossoms and fruits. In spiritual science, we speak of the fact that the human soul can be shaped in a certain way – and those of you who have listened to me here in the past year will know what these various methods there are for slowly freeing the soul, as it were, from the physical, from the bodily, so that it may, as it were, enter the spiritual world outside the body and truly see the spiritual world. We know that we really see the spiritual world when we undergo certain spiritual exercises in the soul. The spiritual researcher cannot conduct external experiments, but he conducts research in a higher, spiritual realm just as the natural scientist does. He brings his soul to the point where this soul can truly free itself from the tools of the body, and also from the thinking apparatus, and can face the spiritual phenomena of the world as a soul. Once these things are considered in a deeper sense, it will be found that what we call meditation and concentration of thought today, through which the soul attains liberation from physical existence, through which it recognizes within itself the eternal powers that pass through birth and death and remain present when man lays aside his physical body. It will be recognized that these exercises had their strongest beginning in the days when Fichte wanted to strengthen the will, Schelling the mind, and Hegel the thought; for it is essentially the strengthening of thinking, feeling, and willing that brings the soul to contemplate the eternal, whereby we also bring the soul to that objectivism by which it recognizes that it carries within itself an eternal essence, which has united with the physical body through birth, and which re-enters the spiritual world for other experiences of existence when the outer, physical body is discarded.

The world view of German idealism has not yet been able to lead to actual spiritual science, just as the root is not yet the flower and the fruit. But if one does not want to use materialism in its most real form to contemplate the spirit, where, for example, one uses external events, which can only exist in the sensual-physical world, to recognize the spirit, when one physical nature to recognize the spirit, but when one wants to recognize the spirit through the spirit, then one will find that one has the best guidance in what Fichte, Schelling, Hegel tried to do.

And when we speak today of the fact that man, completely absorbed in himself, is searching for the foundations of his soul, by having to live what we call meditation, and when we now turn our gaze again to the whole German national spirit, we cannot do so in that dreamy way, like the Asian-minded spirit, but in a lively way. Through the elevation and invigoration of the self, what Fichte, Schelling and Hegel sought has come about: a meditation of the whole German people, a striving for knowledge of the real spirit. And in this striving for knowledge of the real spirit, there really was a release of the soul from the body. And to prove this to you, I would like to read a few words from Schelling, where Schelling says:

“The soul in man is therefore not merely the principle of individuality, but that by which he rises above all selfhood, by which he becomes capable of the sacrifice of self, disinterested love, and, what is the highest, of the contemplation and knowledge of the essence of things.”

This liberation of the soul from the body is the goal of German idealism's world view. This world view is not a one-sided scientific one, it is not something that can be gained through an international science, but it is something by which the soul of man in all its powers, in its totality, makes itself inclined and suited to face the divine-spiritual of the world directly.

The depth of feeling cannot be conceived from this world view. And basically, something always weaves and lives in the deepest striving of the German for a world view of what Jakob Böhme expresses so beautifully:

"When you see the depth

he means the blue depth of the sky

“heaven and the stars and look at the earth,”

says Jakob Böhme

“See your God, and in the same you live and are also. And the same God reigns through you and also reigns you.” “You are created from this God and live in the same. Also, all your knowledge stands in this God, and when you die, you will be buried in this God.”

This is the depth that is inseparable from German thought, and that can be sought within the West on the paths that are indispensable for the further development of humanity, that which the Aryan Indian seeks on paths that can no longer be the paths of the present, that must be abandoned must be abandoned for the sake of the present, what is sought as an experience of the Divine-Spiritual permeating the world in a world picture that does not exclude sensuality, but which also encompasses the spirit and includes sensuality, indeed, which recognizes sensuality itself as a spiritual one.

Such is the world view, dear attendees, such is the world view of German Idealism, sought on new paths of life in the Divine-Spiritual, but not by a damping down of the I, of the self, but by an upward forcing, so that the I and that which, as Divine-Spiritual, pulsates through the world, can become one, that is, can experience each other in each other. And so this striving for a world view in German Idealism actually places itself in the context of the entire more recent historical development, insofar as it is spiritual, and knows: because it is about a world view that has been experienced, that is why the German is so difficult to understand. For one would have to be able to identify with his experience, one would have to seek in his totality that which he seeks as a totality, and which the others can only see as one-sidedness.

And if we now turn our gaze away from Western and Central Europe and look towards Eastern Europe, we find a people living there in large areas who, above all, are characterized by the fact that the soul has not yet emerged at all , neither to the sentient soul nor to the consciousness soul nor to the mind soul, that it also does not grasp what can be experienced in the I, but that it still longs and wants to see, quite like an external being, what pulses through the world as its essence. The Russian people are a very peculiar people. They are a very peculiar people because, unlike the peoples of the West, they do not have within themselves the source from which a world view can arise. The longing to receive a world view from outside lives in this Russian people, but at the same time there is an unwillingness to receive this world view from the West. That is why in modern Russian literature we repeatedly encounter the view that all Western and Central European culture is rotten and dead, and that only from the young Russian spiritual life can arise that world view which can redeem humanity. Again and again it comes to us. I would like to say: It comes to us in such a way that one sees the enormous arrogance that lies in regarding everything Western as something decrepit and wanting to start the world over, but with the awareness that one is starting with something better.

And so we see in Russian minds, for example in Herzen, as in his - one only has to read his writing “From the Other Bank” - as in his, to be sure, a precise knowledge - let us say, for example, of Hegel, also of the other German achievements in relation to an idealistic world view - as he explicitly says: With that, nothing is done. All of this is in the world. What he finds particularly unappealing about Hegel is that he claims that reality is reasonable. He claims that reality is fundamentally unreasonable and foolish; and that the Russian must first come to bring something reasonable to the world. For the other thing that is considered reasonable in Europe, he says, is decrepit and ripe for extinction. “From the other bank” is the title of his book, because, he says, all these minds: Hegel and the rest, have all stood on the other side of the river in a hustle and bustle that must disappear, that only deserves to be viewed from the other bank.

But on the other hand, one must say that at least this Russian national soul understood something at the end of the nineteenth century, understood it while at the same time connecting it with a tremendous arrogance. As it were, the Russian national soul looked out over the vast expanse of Asia and saw that something there was also ripe for destruction and needed to be fertilized by the West. But what was to fertilize was seen as the Russian element. And this is expressed very particularly in a book by Yushakov published in 1885. It is an interesting book, a very interesting book. Let us first consider the positive part, for it is interesting to let the world picture of German idealism take full effect on us. If you take it all in, you can say that through the way in which the German, in this idealism, seeks a world view, he creates in modern times that which Pan-Asianism created in primeval times, which found expression in Asia, but at an earlier stage of human development.

How does the Russian Yushakov see the matter? Well, of course, he first finds a Russian mission, Russianizing all over Asia. Then he says: Well, in Asia one has seen how, over the course of long periods of time, two spiritual forces have confronted each other, so to speak. And the ancient Iranians – he says, Yushakov – saw quite correctly these two opposing spiritual forces as Ahriman and Ormuzd, in the Iranians, Persians, Indians and so on – Ahriman and Ormuzd. In the Iranians, Ormuzd was the predominant influence. Ormuzd worked in such a way that man sought to bring forth from nature everything that could be turned to his benefit. Work with nature could have made man rich, if the earlier Asiatic spirit had not been condemned from the start, by its suppression of the ego, to a kind of dream existence, and not to a certain degree of elevation. But in a way these Iranians, under the leadership of Ormuzd, were happy. Then came the Turanian spirit under the leadership of Ahriman, which devastated everything. Yushakov says that the Russians are destined to restore the balance between Ormuzd and Ahriman in Asia, in the whole of Asia, because the whole of Asia must be flooded and churned up by the way in which order and harmony can be created between Ormuzd and Ahriman from Russian spiritual life. After all, what have the Europeans done in Asia so far? What have they done that must arouse the disgust of the Russians in particular, that must show the Russians how they must be different in everything they accomplish? What have these Europeans done? They have discovered over the centuries that under the stimulus of the Ormuzd force, the Asians produce many, many material goods. They set out to snatch from the Asians what they had acquired under the beneficent influence of Ormuzd – so the Russian says; the Russians must come and join forces with the Asians in Asia, not out of selfishness but out of love, and they must help the Asians to defeat Ahriman. And now he goes on to explain how Russia has the task of liberating the Asians from Ahriman through selfless devotion to and coexistence with the Asian peoples; while the Europeans have so far only taken from them what they had acquired under the beneficent Ormuzd.

And it is quite characteristic of the Russian Yushakov to find in which European nation he can identify the one that has primarily stolen the Ormuzd goods from the Asians, and in which European nation he believes that it must be thoroughly and energetically opposed by the Russians. Yushakov calls the thieves of the Ormuzd culture of Asia the English, namely! I think that this is particularly interesting today, in our time, because we will find a remarkable connection in this alliance between Russianness and Englishness. In 1885, as I said, Yushakov wrote in his book “The Anglo-Russian Conflict”: “Ah, these poor Asian peoples, what they have become through the English!” These English have treated these poor Asian peoples as if these Asian peoples were there for no

“to clothe themselves in English cloth, fight with English weapons, work with English tools, eat out of English vessels, and play with English baubles.”

And further he says:

"England exploits millions of Hindus, but its very existence depends on the obedience of the various peoples inhabiting the rich peninsula; I do not wish anything similar for my fatherland - I can only rejoice that it is sufficiently far removed from this state of affairs, which is as glorious as it is sad.

Now, esteemed attendees, I would like to say that the Russian world view is still in the future, and that this has a truly irrepressible nature alongside, I would say, absolute passivity. This is where all the grotesque contradictions that confront us when we engage with this Russian world view come from. And yet, again and again in the course of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, we are confronted with the fact that what we have been able to characterize, and what we needed to characterize, of the outstanding Russian minds, really by stating the facts - and I have actually only tried to present facts in order to characterize the idealistic world view of the Germans - that this idealistic world view is presented as something decrepit, as something that must be overgrown by that which emanates from Russia. And especially at the end of the nineteenth century, it is not only the legacy of Peter the Great in the political sphere - anyone who takes my writing in hand, “Thoughts During the Time of War,” will see how this conviction lived in the most outstanding Russian minds, that Russianism must expand towards the West.

They soon abandoned the Pan-Asian dream and the European dream arose from the belief that the aging Western and Central European culture would have to experience salvation after the Russians conquered Constantinople, destroyed Austria, destroyed Germany and so on. Only deeply insightful Russians themselves were able to see through what this was actually about. And I cannot refrain from quoting what a reasonable Russian, Solowjow, said about this arrogance of the Russians from his Russian point of view. Solowjow wants to refute such a spirit, the Danilewski, who has so rightly pointed out how Europeanism must be eradicated root and branch and replaced by the Russian. And Solowjow replies. Danilewski has in fact brought to light the saying

“Why does Europe not love us?”

And Solowjow answers.

“Europe,”

says Danilewski,

“is afraid of us as the new and higher type of civilization, which is called upon to replace the decrepitude of the Romance-Germanic civilization.”

“Nevertheless,”

writes Solowjow,

“both the content of Danilevsky's book and his later admissions, as well as those of his like-minded friend,”

Soloviev means Strakhov,

“point to a different answer.”

And now Solowjow gives his answer from what he calls the Russian soul:

“Europe looks at us with hostility,”

says Solowjow,

"and with apprehension, because dark and unclear elemental forces live in the Russian people, because its spiritual and cultural forces are poor and insufficient, but its demands are clearly and sharply defined. The calls for what the Russian people want as a nation resound powerfully out into Europe: that it wants to destroy Turkey and Austria, conquer Germany, conquer Constantinople and, if possible, also India. And when we are asked how we intend to make humanity happy after all the destruction and ruin we have wrought, what spiritual and cultural rejuvenation we will bring to world development, then we either have to remain silent or spout meaningless phrases. And if Danilevsky's bitter confession is true, that Russia is beginning to fall ill, then instead of dealing with the question “Why doesn't Europe love us?” we would have to deal with a different, more important question that is closer to us: “Why and how did we get sick?”

And now Solowjow answers the question of why Russia is sick. And from the answer he gives, I think you can see, dear attendees, that he thinks differently about how to cure this disease than those who are now leading Russia against Europe, who believe that sick Russia should be cured by stamping the corroded culture of Central Europe into the ground. But Solowjow says:

"Physically, Russia is still quite strong, as it showed in the last Russian war.

That was the war in the 1870s.

"So our suffering is a moral one. According to the words of an old writer, we are burdened by the sins hidden in the national character and not conscious of them - and so it is above all necessary to bring these into the light of clear consciousness. As long as we are spiritually bound and paralyzed, all our elementary instincts can only harm us. The essential, indeed the only essential question for true patriotism is not the question of power and vocation, but of Russia's sins.

And Solowjow himself tried to absorb as much as possible of Western European and especially Central European culture into his thinking. And to combine it with what the Russian people have as a result of their Orthodox faith. That is precisely what makes Solowjow great.

But he also became important for another reason. We have seen the revival – I would like to say, already in Central Europe, of the great period of German Idealism, which initially fell into a kind of dream but did not live on any less because of it. We have also seen a revival of intellectual Slavophilism there, which has now become a kind of intellectual Pan-Slavism. They tried to justify, almost with scientific ideological arguments, that the Russian spirit must come over Europe. Solowjow took a look at that, really immersed himself in the works of those who wanted to be completely original by showing the essence of the Russian world view, how it must come over Europe. And what did Solowjow find? Very strangely, he found only Western European ideas everywhere, and not exactly the best ones, those Western European ideas that are derived from the great ideas of the world view of German idealism as minor ideas. These have become interwoven, and from them they have justified their spiritual Slavophilism.

It is a very characteristic phenomenon, very characteristic in that what must happen in reality does happen, that the forces that come from the world-historical mission of the German people must work, that they are needed within the world views of the other nations.

That is what I have tried to put before you today, ladies and gentlemen, that this world view of German idealism, which lives within the German nation and which is destined to bring forth greater and greater things for the whole of humanity from the German nation in the development of the world Germanic people. One need only look at this world view of German idealism objectively, and not, as our enemies are doing, try to justify their actions and hatred of what the Germans have achieved in the intellectual field. Of course, the German could never help but look objectively at how the intellectual achievements of other nations compare with those of the Germans. The German always has that which he calls his Germanness more in mind as a duty, while the other nations really do not understand what the German actually means by his national principle.

Carneri, an important or perhaps even the most important Austrian philosopher of the nineteenth century, Carneri – the wonderful man who, from an ailing body, also tried to grasp world-view ideas on the basis of Darwinism but built pure, noble, ethical thoughts on the basis of this Darwinism, the German deepened this Darwinism – Carneri now also delves into a consideration of the different national souls of the European peoples. And with such a mind, which speaks not out of passion but out of knowledge, one can already see that what spiritual science creates out of its knowledge about the different national souls has already been instinctively recognized.

What has emerged in English pragmatism as a concept of truth is that one should actually only use the truth in order to find one's way in the world. Carneri says, not yet using the word “pragmatism”, which was only coined very recently: the English are certainly very often ahead: they are practical, practical. They can apply their practicality to anything they can think of, create and invent. But they are so practical that their practicality has even led them – Carneri says this, as I said, from a deep insight – to the fact that the insight that they produced the greatest playwright of all time, Shakespeare, had to be taught to them by the Germans. That is absolutely the case. For whoever has to write the history of the recognition of Shakespeare will have to write a chapter of the history of German intellectual life, not English intellectual life. Shakespeare was only recognized from the depths of the idealistic German world view. And Shakespeare is actually homeless in today's England.

We do not need to talk in the way that French philosophers or Englishmen talk about German nature today. We can simply point to that which is. But in pointing to it, we are aware that it is the force that must work, must work when the great world conflict has been decided, which now presents humanity with the greatest task that has ever been set. Ladies and gentlemen, the weapons, the circumstances, will decide what happens next, not the word. But there is also something to be decided that will only be decided slowly and gradually: that is the full penetration of the German spirit into the overall development of humanity. And certainly, it is not for me in this reflection to point out the more detailed cause of the war or the like. But the consciousness that must live in us in this time is certainly connected with what we can call: a sinking into the own essence of the German people and that which must continue to live and work in the German people, and in which we must trust.

What is the external situation like? Yes, actually in a most peculiar way. It is remarkable that this thought is so rarely expressed – not by us, but by our enemies. Do these enemies really need to hate the German character so much? If one may put the question in this way, does the German character take up so much of the earth's surface? The figures also answer this question: the Entente Powers possess 68 million square kilometers of the earth; the Central European Powers, on the other hand, possess 6 million square kilometers! 68 million square kilometers against 6 million square kilometers. The Central European powers have 150 million inhabitants; the Entente powers 777 million! One should also reflect on this outside the borders of Central Europe, and consider what it means in the face of this fact that 777 million people are standing against 150 million people and do not want to defeat them in open battle, but want to starve them out by surrounding them. That is the better part of valor! But to draw attention to such things so readily - it is understandable that one does not love that, and that one can love in contrast the suspicions and slanders of what the Germans have not only achieved intellectually, but are, because what has been achieved can show it to anyone who wants to see it.

Admittedly, it is easier to become discouraged when considering the German character as a Frenchman, for example, who finds – and has also told his Parisians – that a Frenchman, the same Frenchman, incidentally, who first spoke of the deep friendship between the German character and the Frenchman, who was the first to speak of the deep friendship between the German and the French character here in Germany when he traveled around: “He says that you can see from some phenomena of the German language, for example, how the Germans cannot have the nobler side of the human ideal in their world view because they do not have words for it. For example, the Germans have no word for 'generosity'; so they don't have this beautiful quality at all. The French, on the other hand, have no word for 'gloating', which the Germans often use: 'Schadenfreude haben'. So the Germans have gloating in their world view, the French have generosity!

One day, esteemed attendees, it will be recognized that there is much to whitewash and dream away, because one cannot place oneself in relation to this Central European intellectual culture today, that if one places oneself as one should place oneself, one could still appear to some extent as a person justified before himself. If you want to characterize the Germans from abroad today, you need something other than objectivity and truth. Another Frenchman, Ernest Renan, did indeed once manage –- even during the Franco-Prussian War in 1870 –- to say: when he became acquainted with German literature and German intellectual life in the time of Herder and Goethe, it was as if he had entered a temple. And what he had known before seemed to him to be no more than worn scraps of paper compared to the inner gold value, compared to what German intellectual life has produced as a world view at the time of its highest idealism. But the same Frenchman, he now decides, his Frenchmen at the same time to establish such a relationship in Europe that it corresponds to the value of the German essence that he himself has acknowledged? No, says Ernest Renan, who says that what the rest of European humanity has achieved in comparison to German intellectual life is like elementary mathematics in comparison to the differential calculus. He says:

"This is a solemn hour. In France, there are two schools of thought. The first judges thus: “Let us put an end to this hateful trade as quickly as possible; let us give up everything, Alsace, Lorraine; let us sign the peace; but then, hatred to the death, preparations without rest, alliance with whomever it suits, unlimited concessions to all Russian pretensions; a single goal, a single driving force for life: extermination against the Germanic race.

This trend has triumphed in France. Nothing else can be said, except that this trend has triumphed in France. But if one has an idea of what one actually wants to destroy, if one swears destruction on the Germanic race - one actually means only the German people - then one must not admit it to oneself. And these individual nations must not admit it to themselves at all. They dare not even think about what might live in the German national character as the soul of this national character, out of which, for example, the high point of the German world view of idealism arose. They dare not admit it to themselves. Therefore, they have to whitewash it with something else. And with what? For example, Russia has to whitewash it with a mission - of course with the mission of rejuvenating Europe. One of their newer poets once characterized the French, his own French, by pointing out how the cockerel that crows in the morning when the sun rises becomes aware that there is a connection between his crowing and the rising of the sun. He imagines: if I don't crow, the sun cannot rise.

Of course, dear attendees, the tragedy of the present French people should not be in the slightest diminished by this; because it is not about the misled people at all. For those who have in fact led this “led people astray”, who can already be compared to the crowing cock, who believe that if they do not crow the sun will not rise - for there are leading French minds who hold this view: that nothing can happen in the world unless they crow to it – for this, Frenchness needs a new fantasy image from time to time. And it is from such a fantasy image that those who, in such a desolate way, especially in Paris, such as Bergson or Boutroux, want to so disparage the German essence in what is its soul.

The English – yes, these English, one does not want to do them wrong. Do the Russians need a new mission, the French a new fantasy image of their own greatness in the world – they have always needed that, and they have only ever forgotten that they had to be pushed back so that the others would also have some space – yes, what do the English need? One would not want to be harsh; one would want to be fair to the enemy. But when you hear the enlightened minds over there saying that the English only went to war because they, with their fine sense of morality, could not reconcile the fact that the unfortunate Belgian people had been invaded – because they are enthusiastic about the fact that small nations can live out freedom and independence – when you look at how strangely these Englishmen have taken on the freedom of these small nations, yes, and then hear how the enlightened minds over there keep declaiming: “For freedom” and against “unfreedom” England had to go to war, because the Germans, they are completely imbued with the saying - an outstanding English politician said that recently — the Germans are completely imbued with the saying: “might is right”; he forgot, the poor — clever man, I mean to say — that this saying was first made by Thomas Hobbes, the Englishman, yes, even advocated as an entire philosophy, that this saying is deeply anchored in the whole world view of English naturalism. Yes, if one wants to be objective, dear attendees, one cannot say otherwise: the English need a new lie to conceal the truth and justify themselves to the world. There is simply no other way than to say that this must be the verdict of history, at least with regard to the behavior of the speaking people during the war.

The Italians – they need something to whitewash what is really there. They are the people of the sentient soul. Before the war, before the world war, an outstanding Italian politician confessed to me – because one did not need to be naive before the world war, believing that when the world war came, Italy would be on the side of the medium-sized powers, right? – an outstanding Italian politician confessed to me at the time: When the world war comes, Italy will have to take part. Yes, but why? “It simply has to take part,” he said, “because the Italian people are lazy, they are depraved. If they are allowed to continue living like this for much longer,” he said, “they will become completely depraved. They need to feel something properly again” - that's where we have the sentient soul - “they need to have a feeling, a sensation.” I am not saying that this is the only cause of war. The Russian needs a new mission, since the Pan-Asian one has been extinguished; the Englishman needs a new lie; the Frenchman needs a new fantasy; the Italian needs a new sensation in – yes, in the form of a new saint, because it must first be possible to grasp it with the sentient soul: holy egoism was invented in Italy, holy egoism. In the name of holy egoism, we have been told over and over again, Italy went to war. A new saint, a new saint who is fully worthy of his great representative d'Annunzio. D'Annunzio, the priest of holy egoism – a sensation, as if made for the inner pages of the sentimental soul character!

I do not think we need to fall back on the mistakes of our enemies when we think about what is at the heart of the German people and their tendency towards a particular world view. We only need to look at what we have found to be great, significant and effective in this German people, in the folklore of Central Europe. In this respect, the Germans of Austria and the Germans of Germany are one and the same. Today they feel completely at one. The concept of Mitteleuropa must not only become a reality in an economic sense, but also in a spiritual sense. This can be said in particular by someone who, like me, lived in Austria for thirty years.

And when we look, esteemed attendees, at what appears to us as the innermost – I may say – spiritual essence, as the spiritual essence of German nationality, we must say: this essence is not directly something that can only be grasped in terms of concepts and ideas. It is something that is experienced at the center, at the core of the German soul. The German soul must remain, which can only flourish if the German soul can carry it alive from the present into the future. History will be able to show this, the actual course of the history of the Germans and Germanness, of all humanity on earth, that there is something in this German nation that has only just taken root and put forth leaves, and that carries within itself the strength to become blossoms and fruit.

But we Germans can doubt the arrogance of other peoples without being unjust to other peoples. Especially in the present difficult times, but also in the great and promising times to come, we can realize how we can feel German precisely when we also permeate ourselves with its highest development, with its spiritual life, how we can then believe: Yes, this spiritual life shows itself to us in its roots and in its leaves in such a way that we can have the deepest faith and trust in the blossoms and fruits to be borne. And so, precisely from this point of view, by keeping in mind the numbers 777 million people against 150 million people, 68 million square kilometers against 6 million square kilometers, we should never allow ourselves to be distracted from the fact that our German past presents itself to us in such a way that it guarantees our German future by its own strength, precisely by its spiritual strength, and we should never never allow ourselves to be dissuaded from the fact that our German past presents itself to us as being guaranteed by its own strength, and especially by its intellectual strength, for our German future, to which we want to fully embrace not only out of mere instinct and feeling, but also out of bright insight.

This is the 9th of 16 lectures given by Rudolf Steiner at Berlin, in Autumn of 1911 through the Spring of 1912. The title of the series of lectures is: Human History in the Light of Spiritual Investigation. It was published in German as: Menschengeschichte im Lichte der Geistesforschung.

If it was already somewhat difficult from the point of view of the ideas ruling at present to explain the origin of man spiritual-scientifically (what should have been done in the last lecture of this cycle) it will be today still less easy to speak about the origin of the animal world. For, if on the one hand the difficulty results from the fact that everything concerning the animal world is still much more remote for the human observation—at least seemingly—than everything concerning nature and essence of man, so on the other hand a quite special difficulty must arise because according to the present world conception, an influence of spiritual events, spiritual causes on the development and origin of animal existence will not at all be admitted. Instead, we find that in the course of the development of our mental life in the last periods the notion is formed quite specially that exactly the same causes, powers and realities partake in the development of animals' life as in the development of the lifeless, so-called inorganic nature, and we know that the greatest triumphs of natural science have been realized just in this sphere of the so-called pure natural development of living beings.

Now we must certainly say, on the one side the great longing aims at a pure natural development—as one usually says—that means such a development that only considers those powers which also rule in lifeless existence, and we see on the other side how a research moving in this direction thinks to hurry from triumph to triumph—nay, if we interpret it in the right sense, even does so. Nevertheless, on the other hand we can perceive how deeper thinkers who stand entirely on the basis of facts of natural science, and who are also fully acquainted with that which natural science has brought forward in recent times, are not in a position to share the opinion of those thinkers who want throughout to derive life from a mere union or a mere combination—although from a very complicated one—of those powers and events which are also present in lifeless nature. A great part of the thinkers of the present and the recent past did not take much trouble saying: up to a certain time probably the development of our earth has principally consisted in unfolding out of itself lifeless processes, and at a certain point of time some materials have joined in such a complicated way that the simplest living beings originated ... where after then the development progressed in such a way that out of these simpler living beings, in the struggle for life and in adaptation to the surrounding, so to speak, more and more complicated living beings have developed up to man. But in contradiction to this idea many philosophers of recent time have argued that it is impossible to think that at any time, that which can be called in the real sense an original procreation or an issuing forth of the living from the lifeless, could arise out of a mere union of lifeless matter.

To such thinkers mentioned above Gustav Theodor Fechner, a man of genius in many ways, belongs. Because really important progress in natural science in various regions is connected with this personality, we should truly not pass by so lightly the theories of such a thinker as it is generally done today. Gustav Theodor Fechner cannot understand that the living ever could have developed out of the lifeless. It is much more obvious to Fechner to imagine that the lifeless can go forth out of the living through processes of isolation, because we see indeed that the inner life process of the living beings excretes the materials which, after having served a certain time in the life process, pass over to the rest of nature and belong then, as it were, to lifeless, to inorganic processes. So Fechner can well imagine that our earth at its starting point has been a single whole living being. This huge living being “earth” has done its breathing—so to say—from the cosmos and has perhaps also taken its nutrition from the (space of the) universe. Out of the entirety of this huge, enormous organism, which has once been our earth, on the one hand, living beings have developed as through a special constriction of that which in the huge earth organism has been living organs only, which thus became independent. And on the other hand—so Fechner imagines—those substances which today belong to the lifeless nature processes were excreted in a similar way as today substances are excreted from an organism after having served the living processes for a certain time. Thus, on the lines of this thinker, not the living came forth from the lifeless, but the lifeless came forth from the living. In a similar way, perhaps in a still more fantastic one, the natural investigator Wilhelm Preyer forms his own imagination. He has proved his legitimacy, his qualification for speaking about natural science not only through his abundant physiological and biological research, but also through his publications about Darwinism. Preyer also pictured to himself that the earth, at its starting point, was a kind of living being; he was always disinclined to speak of something lifeless in an absolute sense. He says we have really no right to look upon a flame as a kind of life process on the lowest level, a life process which is simplified, and has descended from a higher level; just so such life processes as we observe today could have developed in ascending. What Preyer means is: when a flame is burning, then it seems as if something like a life process is displayed to us in the consuming of the matter, in the entire method and way in which the burning, as a fact, presents itself to us. And he therefore supposes that it may not be out of the question that the earth itself was a huge life process, a life process that took place, nevertheless, under quite other conditions than the life processes of today. And so we see the most curious imagination has issued from the head of an investigator of nature, which Preyer expresses as follows: The earth could have been at the starting point of its evolution a huge enormous organism, the breathing of which we have to look for in the glowing vapors of iron, the blood flow of which we have to imagine in the glowing liquid metals, and the nourishment of which must have been brought about through meteorites drawn from the universe. This is certainly a peculiar life process, but this natural investigator thinks he couldn't go in another way if he were to trace back, not the living from the lifeless, but the apparently lifeless from the original living. And that which appears to us today as our life, in various realms appeared to him only as a life shaped especially, whereas the life of a burning candle seemed to him as a life formed backwards, in a certain way, so that the latter may appear to us outwardly as lifeless.

If we must say that such developments in recent mental life can show us—so to speak—how notable thinkers standing firmly upon the grounds of natural science, not only with regard to their convictions but also their comprehension, do not refer to the earth at all as the glowing liquid lifeless gas ball of the Kant-Laplace, but look upon the earth at its origin as a huge living being, in order to be able to explain that what is living today, this fact can, in some respects, teach us that it is, indeed, not so easy to trace back the living to the lifeless. Yes, we even must say that just the (human?) spirits having struck out in a new direction who have obtained the greatest results of research in natural science recently, cannot teach us that natural-scientific thinking has traced back all living to the lifeless, and that in this regard, natural science would just contradict what Spiritual Science has to say: that all substances, and then in general, all life can be traced back to spiritual causes. It is indeed true that the great results of natural science performed by Darwin or Lamarck or other pioneer spirits exclude any regard of spiritual causes, fundamental for these phenomena.

I have already, several times, pointed out a notable passage in Darwin's publications, in which this great pioneer points out the way in which he succeeded in showing the metamorphosis of one form of life into another, and how, by this experience, it seemed to him quite well possible to trace back today's complicated living beings to earlier, perhaps less complicated living beings and thus explain the variety of today's life forms, perhaps by means of a few differentiated original life forms. But then Darwin says, in a very characteristic manner: (in this way) we succeeded in tracing today's various forms of life back to an original one and in explaining the life of today, in its multifariousness, through evolution. But Darwin is speaking of these original forms of life in such a way that he assumes that—as he says literally—“the Creator once has poured life into them.” Yes, we may say outright that this natural investigator, Darwin, working in the midst of the 19^th Century, was convinced he was authorized in his explanation of the metamorphosis of the species in living nature, by just simply assuming that he retraced back the development in nature to issue from the Creator. As we can know from Darwin's whole manner of thinking, he must have realized at once the insufficiency of his explanation if he were not permitted to assume the action of spiritual realities at any point in earth evolution. He felt himself firm and strong on the grounds he took a stand upon, just by saying that if we could assume there was life in its simplest forms created out of the spiritual, then we also could expect of this life of simplest forms full of such impulsion power, such impetus that it was able to transform itself to complicated and manifold forms.—And in a stronger sense, this can be applied to Jean Lamarck, who was the first to speak about the natural development of living beings to more and more complicated forms through adaptation to their surroundings. We see that Lamarck's idea is the following: We may assume a development from the outwardly unaccomplished to the outwardly more and more accomplished, because by so thinking we are not at all in contradiction to evolution as a whole being interwoven with, and inspired by, spiritual fundamental forces. How else could it be possible that there is a passage in one of Lamarck's fundamental works, which we can take quite literally, and which is just significant for the way and manner characteristic for earlier natural-scientific thinkers. Lamarck says in his “Philosophie Zoologique” (“Volksausgabe's Leipzig”, ed. Alfred Kroener, p. 21):

“As it had not been taken into consideration that the individuals of one specie must remain unchanged as long as the conditions mainly influencing their manner of life don't change, and as the ruling prejudices are in accordance with the assumption of this progressive generation of similar individuals, it is assumed that every specie is unchangeable and as old as nature, and that they are separately created by the sublime Originator of all things.”

Lamarck is conscious that he must break with the concept of the one and only creation of all species at their starting point, and that he must imagine the species, now around us, as having arisen through evolution. But then he continues as follows:

“Surely, everything exists only through the will of the sublime Originator of all things. But can we order His rules in the exercise of His will? Or could we decide the way and manner in which he has done this? Could not the Almighty Infinite create an order of matter (things?) unknown to us which lets all that we see and all that exists enter into it one after another? Whatsoever His Will may have been, the immeasurable magnitude of His Might is surely always the same, and in whatsoever manner He May have accomplished His Will, nothing can diminish His Magnitude.
“Thus honoring the dispensations of this infinite wisdom, I restrict myself to the limits of a simple observer of nature.”

Thus speaks he to whom one appeals today—quite rightly—when one speaks about the doctrine of evolution. But at the same time we see that this man has thereby pointed out to himself his program in the most distinct way. What is this program?

Lamarck argues that by ascertaining through observation all that is of service to the mere natural observer, the possibility results of imagining that organisms have gradually developed in a running(?) succession; however, we must also imagine that spiritual impulses were originally holding sway in the entirety of evolution, otherwise we have no firm basis at all. We recognize this by all means as the conviction of the pioneer Lamarck. And certainly in this case we must say: Thus this natural investigator has traced for himself his special program by restricting himself to the species of the outer world, and by not ascending farther to that which must be spiritually fundamental for the whole process of evolution. He consigns the spiritual to a world into which he is not inclined to penetrate, and which he presumes, from the outset, to be a region of total, unimpeded Will of the Creator—but he restricts himself to the presentation of what has emanated out of this Will of the Creator and what issues forth in the progress of evolution.

Now on the other hand we must again say, as matters stand today, that it can never result from the experiences or research of the natural-scientific observer, that at any time the living could have developed out of the lifeless on our earth, in the conditions which are available for today's external observation. The imagination that the living developed out of the lifeless is by no means a new one—it is, in truth, the older one. In this regard I have already emphasized that it was a great progress in natural science, if one goes back only about two centuries ago, when Francesco Redi spoke the sentence: “Living can only go forth from living.” It is interesting that throughout all the earlier centuries before Francesco Redi's time, it was assumed that not only simple, but also even very complicated, living beings could come forth out of mere lifeless matter. Not only was it assumed that out of the mud of the rivers, something lifeless for the outward consideration—lower animals such as rainworms, for instance—could develop without a living germ of the rainworm ancestor put into the mud, but it was also systematically assumed that animals up to the insects or still higher ones, could develop out of lifeless matter. It is interesting that we find in a work of St. Isidor, who died in 636, that it is quoted quite systematically that out of an ox corpse—that means something gone over already into the lifeless—that if it is beaten enough, a species of worms would develop which could become bees. Indeed, this man at the head of the erudition of his time not only indicated how bees could come out of an ox corpse, but he also tells us how in the same way hornets can develop out of horse corpses, drones out of mules and wasps out of donkey corpses. And as if this were not enough, it was alleged up to the 17^th Century how mice, eels, and frogs originate out of that which is already transformed into the lifeless. And the belief that life can originate out of the lifeless in the simplest way, this belief was so strong that Francesco Redi narrowly escaped from the fate of Giordano Bruno, because he was so bold as to proclaim that the living can only originate from the living; for the supposition that living beings can originate out of lifeless matter could only depend on inexact observation, because the living germs of the living beings must have been already in the river mud if living should originate.

Spiritual Science must add to the achievements of Francesco Redi the sentence that the spiritual can only originate from spiritual. And because the entirety of earth evolution finally culminates in the spiritual, as it presents itself in a simple way and on an inferior level in the animal world, on a higher level in normal man, and on the highest one in the human spirit itself, thus this spiritual likewise originating itself at last out of the seeming unspiritual, can only be traced back to an original spiritual. If Spiritual Science is compelled today to state this fact, as we have heard in the earlier lectures and also in the past years in these cycles of lectures, and if in order to confirm further entirely in every region the sentence: “the spiritual can only originate from spiritual” it says, all that appears to us as matter is only a transformed spiritual—then it (Spiritual Science) is today not doomed to the fate of Francesco Redi or Giordano Bruno (for other things are now in fashion and people are no longer burned), but suffer other fates. It has today, anticipating, advocating a truth which will familiarize itself with the cultural life as likewise the sentence “living can only originate from living” has done, and therefore man will consider Spiritual Science as a revere, as something which is by no means based on the fundamentals of a real, scientific knowledge.

Now, at first an outline of what Spiritual Science has to say from its point of view about the question of the origins of the animal world will be outlined. Then it will be shown how the comprehension of Spiritual Science about the origin of the animal world can be entirely reconciled with the acquisitions of natural-scientific knowledge of the present, for I have set myself the task in these lectures to harmonize what Spiritual Science produces out of itself with the acquisitions of natural science.

Spiritual Science as such cannot go back to that which Gustav Theodor Fechner or Preyer have assumed as the original earth organism. On the other hand, however, we must emphasize again and again that no explanation will succeed in making it logically plausible, if only to some extent, that the manifoldness of the living beings could have, in earth evolution, developed out of a mere nebular organization, as assumed by Kant-Laplace's theory; unless we had, so to speak, to take up the expedients of the most recent mental attitude, if we would reconcile the origin of the organic or animal world with this idea. Then we would arrive at the method of thinking of the Swedish investigator Svante Arrhenius, today indeed very much admired, but not less fantastic: that germs of living beings got planted into the earth, from the space of the universe, by “compression (gravitation) of radiation” just—let us say—at the right time, when the earth was in a state to receive such germs. Everyone will realize very easily that such an explanation is no explanation, for we have then to explain where and how these living beings originated, even if they are only flown as simple germs into the earth through compression (gravitation) of radiation.

Spiritual Science must go back to a form of the earth where the earth does not present itself to us as so occupied and populated by such living beings as we know today. In a certain regard, Spiritual Science shows us something similar to what Fechner and Preyer have pictured to themselves by mere intellectual conclusions (deductions); namely, that the earth at and since its beginning has been a living being, which contained in itself gas and vapor, not only in a lifeless manner, as the theory of Kant-Laplace assumes. This theory can be explained very easily to the simplest pupil by saying: Look here, by mere rotation something can split off from a drop of a liquid, if we let it rotate, and as a little drop is thrown off it rotates around the big drop—thus in this way we originate a world system on a small scale. But doing this, we forget that we ourselves have moved this drop by rotation and that, in case such an event should have indeed happened once on a large scale—namely, that the planets have split off by means of the rotation of a gas ball—then a giant professor or a giant teacher must have ruled in the cosmos, for if we exercise an experiment we must consider all conditions and not forget our own part. If it is already impossible to explain from what we know at present the splitting off of the planets, from a gas ball which at any time may have existed, it is far less possible to explain life in a planetarian life without something living, if only lifelessness existed beforehand.

Spiritual Science leads us back to an earth which, indeed at its starting point, was not only full of life, but also spiritualized, impregnated, by spirit, so that we have to trace back earth evolution to an originally spiritualized earth being. If we picture this spiritualized earth being to our senses, as it were, in an image, this being would present itself to us in its substance in such a way that we have, comparatively around us today like the last reminders of this original state of the earth, moving, but not formed, living matter in the most inferior organisms, which are really not quite exactly easy to define as plant beings or animal beings. These most inferior organisms could really be defined as flowing life, for they appear at first as a round drop which changes its matter, so to say, through no outward cause with regard to shape and situation—lengthens into tentacles or feet, creeping over the ground, but has in itself no distinct shape. If we picture to ourselves these inferior organisms, this original life substance, then we have before us, in the sense of Spiritual Science, the whole of the original earth matter, and within this earth matter nothing at all that we have today as lifeless matter. The whole earth matter is, so to say, a living but still unformed substance, and Spiritual Science must imagine, aside from this unshaped substance, that which we call the formative principle, the transcendental formative principle, as something purely spiritual at the starting point of earth evolution.

We can imagine today what the earth had been at the starting point of its evolution along the lines of Spiritual Science, by imagining, as we have often done in previous lectures, the sleeping human being. Then we picture to ourselves sleeping man—we have the physical body, lying in bed, and this physical body is permeated with that which in a spiritual-scientific way we no longer call a material bodily form: the etheric body—but outwardly, comparatively, in the sphere of this physical body we have that which is within this physical body during the waking day life: the living life of the soul, which we call the connection between the ego and the astral body of man. So we have before us in man who is awake, the inner mental essence, or essential part of the soul nature, permeating the external bodily nature; but in sleeping man we have the external-bodily secluded from the inmost soul life. The inner soul life is unconscious in sleeping man of today. It is, as it were, not permeated with a real inner content, at least not consciously. But for a real thinker it is impossible to imagine that the sleeping man really still has this in himself, or that what is living and acting in sleeping man also brings about the appearance of soul life itself during waking. What else can we imagine, when we proceed to really logical thinking? Today we can only sketch it in rough outlines—but anyone who thinks logically cannot as a result come to any other conclusion—we can imagine nothing else than that the man, who is awake, practices, expresses his soul activity through the organs of his body, so that the man who is awake needs his bodily organs in order to develop consciousness, and that the bodily organs must be formed in such a way that when enlivened from the soul principle, they can be the bearers or mediators of the life of consciousness. But a man can never imagine that, by means of inner, living, organic action, that which comes into our consciousness as inner soul processes while awake can be produced in sleep. We only have to make a simple comparison, entirely sufficient for this purpose, to discover this fact.

Instead of the brain let us place, as the soul organ mediating our waking conscious state, the lung which breathes and mediates the life processes. Then we must say the lung breathes only by means of oxygen flowing into it from outside. But the action of the lung does not consist only in receiving the oxygen flowing into it, for the organic action cannot have an influence on the supply of oxygen. We cannot experience anything about the nature and substance of oxygen from the manner in which we nourish and enliven our lung, and the lung cannot be supplied with oxygen from inside, either. But just as we have to imagine the inner life process as going over into the lung, so we also have to imagine the inner life process going over into the brain and other organs during sleeping life. In the evening our organs are exhausted, because soul activity wears out the organs, and they must be impregnated again with a pure life activity in order to again be able to be mediators of soul activity. But just as the mere inner life activity cannot supply the lung with oxygen, the activity of the inner life cannot supply sleeping man with that which we can call the instincts, desires, and passions (emotions) of man. The nature of the soul life is not a consequence or result of the mere bodily activity of man, just as the nature of oxygen, which only unites itself with the lung from outside, is not the result of mere life activity. No one can escape the quite cogent conclusion that just as soul activity must flow into the organs for knowledge of man from outside on the moment of waking, likewise the oxygen flows into the lungs from outside, just as the oxygen as such exists in the outer world and imparts itself to the lung, with the only difference being that the lung is supplied with oxygen not alternately but always, because the lung does not sleep. Consequently, there must be something which, combining with the human ego, flows into the bodily function in the morning, when man wakes, and then works in the human soul organs. Thus we must conclude that in the life during sleep the spiritual is separated and we must regard this spiritual essence, as it were, as something that wakens in the morning apart from our bodily organs, to act as soul organs.

Consequently we have, comparatively speaking, in sleeping man a living organism, and floating over him a self-dependent, spiritual one. We must picture to ourselves the following: While we are awake, the soul processes, going on in us—that means the spiritual soul life—can really only effectuate certain processes, doubtlessly parallel with the soul processes in the organism. They are effects of the soul processes and cause fatigue, as it were—processes of dissolution of matter, whereas during sleep the body annuls these processes of fatigue.

In a similar way Spiritual Science reveals that the earth, at its starting point, had really consisted of a duality, of something not quite like sleeping and waking man, but that could be compared with what has been, so to say, moving life substance, as the last remainder of the simplest organisms are still today, but that which, in no way, have been organisms transformed into animal or human forms, not even into vegetable, plant forms. And so, if we have to imagine in connection with man's body that which is man's soul content hovering over him in sleep, so we have to picture to ourselves the earth, at its beginning, hovering over what we can call the spirit of the earth, the common, united earth spirit. And within this earth spirit we have to seek that which later becomes form in earth evolution—in this earth spirit we also, above all, have to seek that which affects stimulation of the flowing material substance, so to say the sleeping earth, so that the entire life substance comes into movement in various ways. Thus we have to imagine the stimulating causes as, I might say, spiritual streams from the surrounding of the earth, working into flowing, living matter (substance). At first these causes created in the flowing substance only such forms that did not solidify, but after having formed themselves for the time being, adopted their formless shape again, as the storm whips the ocean and forms it in various wave structures. Formed life must be derived out of formless living. The formative principle itself is to be imagined as a super-sensible, spiritual principle that was connected with the original earth substance. If today we would imagine something similar to this way of working in regard to the earth at its starting point—this reciprocal effect between spirit and matter—so could we imagine a more narrow region, where what happened was similar to what happened at the starting point of earth evolution. (Natural science of the future will prove this). We can still show something that affects unformed life substance. All those processes bringing forth our own spiritual life in brain substance or in blood substance can be compared to the processes which took place, at the earth's beginning, between the spiritual, formative principle and the living substance fundamental to the evolution of earth.

Such a thing is not able to be proved along the lines of our thinking today—it is to be proved only by Spiritual Science, that by means already described, for the whole of earth evolution something is produced, similar to what is produced in the single life of man in memory. By the training of certain forces, here also mentioned, which are resting in the depths of the soul, human memory expands, and man's spiritual outlook—and these powers are the same—the development of which enables the spiritual investigator to look immediately into the spiritual earth being. Thus matter and material life can be penetrated entirely by the spiritual view, and material processes in their existence can display themselves in such a way that not only present conditions, but also previous ones out of which they have developed, can confront the spiritual eye as living memory. Just as man in the present carries in himself that which has formed in the life of his soul since his childhood and can therewith follow the line of remembrance, so also he follows his soul life into earlier conditions; he can thus trace it back, how it has been not only now, but decades ago. If the spiritual outlook does not adhere only to external matter, but penetrates the surface of things and into a spiritual basis, then something works within the spiritual that puts man into a kind of world memory, which is also called reading in the Akasha Chronicle (see Rudolf Steiner, From the Akasha Chronicle, Ed. Phil. Anthropos., Dornach). Man is placed into a world memory, and through this he looks back into earlier original conditions of the earth.

Proofs are therefore only to be given in such a spiritual way and manner and if these things are then so investigated we have the means at our disposal to confirm what is brought to light through spiritual investigators and which reveal that a full harmony exists between that which things present to us still today, and that which the spiritual investigator must proclaim. For this reason, in a popular lecture one can take no other direction but to reveal what presents itself to the spiritual investigator, and what flows out of immediate spiritual observation, while placed by this spiritual-scientific observation, as it were at the starting point of earth evolution. At the same time, however, we must emphasize that in such conditions which we have to recognize as spiritual, the spiritual is much nearer to material production than the spiritual is today to material production. Today the spiritual uses the counter position, the resistance of the material body, so that it forms the spiritual soul-like in man only to those pictures of the material which we can put before our eyes in our imaginations. We don't accomplish a densification stronger than these pictures.

But Spiritual Science is based on the following idea. (The following lectures will draw your attention yet on the origin of matter.) All material being has been originally a spiritual one; once the spiritual was, when it itself had been creating matter, in a more original state, full of will and force, than it is today in man's spirituality. Therefore we have to imagine that what hovered over the earth as spiritual formative principle was more closely connected in a certain way to the original life substance than the soul hovering over sleeping man is connected today to his physical body. Progressing further, we have to imagine that through the interference of the super-sensible formative principle on substance, all that which is today called lifeless nature is originated. We have really to imagine that through the action of the formative principle such matter, which then becomes lifeless, has isolated itself out of a moving and stirred substance. Once again Spiritual Science is, in this way, closely connected with the investigations of Fechner and Preyer. But such unliving matter is again seized in a certain way by the formative principle, now proceeding in this lifeless matter as a crystallizing principle, so that we have to imagine all minerals issuing, going forth, from an originally spiritual, living matter, becoming lifeless and then seized by the formative principle. Therefore, when we speak about crystals, we can speak today not yet about life, but only recognize a transcendental formative principle. In another way, the formative principle was in force in the matter which remained as a living one. If today we put aside plants, we must imagine that under the influence of those substances which separated gradually as lifeless ones from the living one (and which grouped themselves in various ways)—earth differentiated, grouped itself so that we designate firm earth, liquid water, air, and so on. Further we must imagine that during this time the formative principle worked upon the entire living and lifeless substance, and that thereby the living-formed matter is exposed to the external lifeless. And while previously it was throughout only living, in itself, it now had to permeate itself with lifeless matter, because in the course of earth development the principle of nutrition—the taking in of non-living matter into living matter, became important.

Thus we see the living, so to speak, taking up the nonliving, which it had previously separated from itself in a certain way. Thereby the living on earth comes more and more into those conditions which signify themselves through the lifeless as the elements—earth, water, air, etc. and the formative principle can act in the necessary way only by forming the living, so that the shapes (forms) are adapted to the external elements.

Now we must imagine life on earth in such a way that in the course of time, by means of the formative principle, the living and the lifeless are kept separated in various ways. We must imagine that materials which today are fallen from the heights and are connected with the firm body of the earth, were in a medium earth period still dissolved (diluted), were present in the earth atmosphere as mist. We can absolutely speak about such an earth's age in which such an air veil, as it is today, was non-existent—and we must speak about mists and gasses, which nowadays have been consolidated and united with the earth for a long time. We must imagine the entire distribution of water and air in a middle earth period, in an entirely different way. We must imagine that the formative principle—which we should think of as purely spiritual—by working living substance into the lifeless, formed, matter, had to take from that latter the conditions for breathing, etc. Thus the formative principle had to create in this way the most varied forms adapted to the old earth conditions, which now do not exist at all. However, Spiritual Science now shows that the development progressed in such a way that, in those times, only a part of the living substance, as it were, was really formed and that, when the unformed matter was seized upon immediately by the spiritual principle, a part of the old, moving unformed, living substance was held back. In older times, when the earth was surrounded in quite a different way by layers of matter, which today as it is fall down because of compression, or are present in the inside of the earth in liquid form and literally lead a liquid life—that the formative principle was working, as it were, by crystallizing, into the living, forms which in today's conditions cannot exist any longer. Let us look at such a state, in which our earth did not have at all the planetary shape that it has today. At this time quite obviously other, different forms of living beings must originate, living beings which were adapted to the old conditions, and which nowadays could no longer exist. Now that may easily be accounted for, explained by the fact that many of these life forms had to die out entirely when the earth changed its formation. We find (which is geologically demonstrable and shown by paleontology) that animals have lived which, we have to imagine, were only adjusted, let us say to water, only coming to its present form, but still permeated with quite different substances, and we find other animals, as the saurian species, etc. To be brief: we can meet manifold animal species (forms) which were adapted to the conditions then. Aside from these, other forms originated which were adjusted to the conditions, so to speak, in such a way that they really could no longer be shaped out of the unformed, moving matter by the original formative principle, but which were able to transform themselves through successive generations, and to themselves improve by means of heredity in such a way that they developed the later forms out of the older ones. The new ones were then adapted to the new earth conditions. While those forms which in olden times were so strongly penetrated by the formative principle that they could not be reshaped had to die out, those organizations which had remained more movable in themselves, in which the living was not yet fashioned so strongly, could remodel themselves and thus develop themselves further on in successive generations.

With regard to man, development shows itself as follows: In olden times we cannot see him in such forms which can be seen with outer external eyes, but we find him in matter of such a fine, unfashioned moving kind, that in times where animals were already present, he could have become everything. Man was the last to descend out of the unformed into shape, into form. Whereas the animals, which are today on earth, had already earlier taken up the formative principle so that they had to reshape their earlier figure in adapting to the transformation of the earth, man did not prevail himself to descend in solid form, during old conditions, but waited until earth had approximately the distribution of air and water as it now has. As late as then a condensation of the scarcely-shaped matter into the human figure took place for man. Because man entered out of the unformed and into shaped form so late, he appeared so that he is therefore adapted not only to certain specific earth conditions, but to the whole earth. Going back to the animals, however, we must imagine their origin in such a way that determined forms had adapted themselves to quite determined territories of the earth. These animals then got the form, which by no means is still similar to today's offspring, but which was adapted to conditions then. But because they were adapted only to territorial conditions which in certain regions changed quickly, they could develop only in determined limits. But at the time when earth was liable to quick changes, man had not entered into a form, but only later, when it was possible to put formation into his bodily nature over the whole surface of the earth in such a way that he, as man, was adapted to the earth as a whole. Thus man could populate earth as a being which is adapted least of all to external conditions, and most of all to internal motive powers. Man was, from the outset, thus adapted to the formative powers in such a manner that his inner being corresponded with the spiritual, that the formative powers could work immediately in the soul, making his outer physical form an upright one, making his hands as living tools for the spirit, and his larynx a living instrument for the spirit. But all this could only happen when earth had passed through certain principles of formation (Gestaltungsprinzipien). Thus man had to be adapted no longer immediately to external life, but to that which determined out of his inner being, what was his figure and presentation in life (Sich-Darleben)—so that with man, the formative principle determines his figure indirectly through the spiritual, while with the animal the formative principle had to work much more into the lifeless and inorganic. We can today still perceive in animals how they have connected their entire soul life more closely with their bodily nature, whereas man is able to develop a soul life which can lift itself up beyond the life of the body.

Let us look at the animal, how its soul life is plunged entirely into the bodily life, as it is formed, how the delight of digestion impregnates the body, how the soul life immediately penetrates the body and shows itself connected with its bodily functions. If we compare the way in which man's soul life lifts itself up beyond the bodily nature as something independent, we will see then that man is fashioned as he is because the animal world, adapted to other conditions of our earthly being, is fashioned out of the unformed earlier than man is. In man, such a soul being independent of the bodily life could become active only because man is able, within his being of soul, to keep the formative principle when he passes through the gate of death, and discards, to begin with, his bodily life. Because the formative principle has seized the animal's soul so much earlier that an intense connection with the bodily life was produced and because the animal thereby had to be entirely absorbed by its bodily life—for this reason that which is experienced in the single animal does not get detached (free) from the bodily life. With man, it gets free; it also keeps a formative principle, aside from the organic, physical substance; it can form a new bodily life again after the time between death and a new birth. Only because being seized immediately by the formative principle, can man's spiritual-soul being have that independence which enables him to go from life to life, which enables him to pass his being in repeated lives. On the other hand, we see that the intense connection with the form of being which had to be produced in animal between alternative principles and living matter, brought it about that the formative principle, when the animal dies, is exhausted in the organic, and that animal's soul falls back again into a general, animal soul-life and continues, not individually, but in a general, animal-like way, in a living on of the animal's group soul, not of a single animal soul.

Thus we see that we have to seek the origin of the animal (like) in the fact that that which penetrates into man later and permeates him in a later state, penetrates into the animal earlier. The animal is, as it were, left behind by the continuous principle of development; it is a backward being compared with man, who is an advanced being. We can easily imagine how this formation came to pass through a simple comparison, if we picture to ourselves a liquid in a glass, in which a substance is dissolved in such a manner that we cannot distinguish it from the liquid. If we let this solution stand, then a sediment deposits itself and the finer liquid remains. In this way we have then to imagine the whole progress of earth evolution as the duality of the spiritual forming principle and the living substance below. And in the spiritual principle the formative principle for man is contained likewise. But for man the formlessness in this living substance remains the longest. For the animal, the shaping happens earlier so that in a time when man has, as it were, preserved himself still above in an unformed, thinner, finer substance, the animal being below is already consolidated and lives on in such a way that below it can only get at more and more rigid forms, which change in the course of time. Over against this man, relating to the form, can be traced back only to that which is originally in a formless living, but into which the spirit works as a motive principle and brings it gradually to the present figure. Progressing further on, we also have to imagine the animal forms such that they are not produced from a single animal form; but while here and there certain animals formed themselves, others remained behind that formed themselves later; others again descended still later, etc. And then man descended latest.

It is remarkable (peculiar) that that which now has been said is entirely explained in such books as for instance those by Haeckel if we read them in the correct way. Indeed, it is stated that in his external appearance man is to be traced back to the animal. But if we continue the scale (trace back the scale to its source) we see that man at last is to be traced back to something which cannot refer to the present earthly conditions, but to imaginary living beings. And just so with animals—we find those beings to which Spiritual Science points out as hypothetical beings—also in Haeckel's pedigree—only these trace back not to something formed, but to something formless. It is now not possible to argue this further, but it results from my Occult Science that that which presents itself now as earth has developed downward from earlier spiritual stages. That results in one not being able to say at all that Spiritual Science invents again, after all, only something unknown. No! At last the earth is traced back to earlier planetary stages of being, just as man, relating to his present life is traced back to earlier lives. And going back to earlier stages we find as the starting point of all life and of all matter, not only a living entity, but also a spiritual one. We recognize as the starting point of all life the spirit, which we experience in us ourselves. Thus we trace back foundations to the spirit, which is something we have in ourselves, that means to something known, that is in ourselves, while external science traces itself back to something unknown. Spiritual Science is in another, different position as is the present hypothetical doctrine of evolution. Spiritual Science traces evolution back not to something unknown, but to something which has been there, been present, as spiritual, and that also today can be experienced as spiritual. Only the spiritual living in us discloses itself in the same manner as it does in our glass; the thinner liquid is segregated from the more solid substance. The finer spiritual in man even disclosed itself as separated, secluded, just like the finer substance in the glass is segregated from the more solid one, which has been deposited.

Thus we must trace back the animal world to the fact that man, in order to cultivate his spiritual nature as he has it today, had to begin with to separate from the whole animal world, so that he could develop himself as a finer spiritual being, above the basis of the animal world, just as in our comparison, the finer substance reveals itself when it has separated out the more solid substance below, on the bottom. Today these events can be pointed out only inasmuch as they demonstrate the origin of the animal world. It must be left for another lecture to explain in detail how the spiritual and soul nature (Seelische) developed later. Still it must be mentioned that the facts of immediate sense perception do not at all contradict this principle, and that it will arrive at the knowledge that progress really could not be otherwise than that set forth today—because do animals present themselves to us so that we need to speak about a special spirituality, only present in man? On the contrary! It will reveal itself to closer observation that there is sometimes much more intelligence among the animal world, and that man must first gain his intelligence, and that perhaps man's priority to an animal exists in the fact that he can achieve his little intelligence. Everywhere we look into the animal world—with the structure of the beaver's dam, of the insects, with the wasps, etc., we see intelligence at work, spirit holding sway, which makes use of the animals. We cannot say that this intelligence is in the single animal. We only need to refer to how certain insects take care of their offspring—there we see that we have a super-sensible intelligence, ruling the species of animals, objective for the animal world, like matter itself is objective for the animal world. This we can perceive when the insect deposits its eggs so that the larva must live in quite different circumstances of life; perhaps the insect itself has lived in the air—the larva must live at first in the water. The insect doesn't know at all the conditions in which the larva must live; thus only an instinct, ruling it, can guide it to deposit the eggs there where the larva can live. Or let us observe animals such as the beaver, etc., which form with their organization, form what we can call outer architecture, grown from within themselves—then we are not far from admitting according to the laws of external observation that intelligence works into animal substance itself. When we look at man, we see that after he is present he has to appropriate, at first, those faculties which are already formed into animals. He is not so far advanced that he has within himself that which the animals have already formed in themselves. That is a measure by which we can see that the animals are formed earlier and that the forming of man is still going on after he is already born. Thus it is no proof that man originated from the apes when the natural scientist Emil Selenka found that the ape nature, in its embryo stage, is much nearer to man's figure, than the later ape's figure. On the contrary, we can assume from this fact that the plan for man's figure was a more original one than that for the ape's figure; only that man realizes his figure as late as he enters into earth evolution.

Everywhere natural science shows in its facts that that which Spiritual Science has to say is proved, confirmed, just through the most advanced science. Yes, we could go even farther—I don't shy away from doing so!—and show how natural science today brings to light, as it were, something against their theories, which furnishes full evidence for Spiritual Science. Just if we yield to such results of research as those about propagation of lower animals through the brothers Oscar and Richard Hertwig in 1875 (what later on is confirmed many times) that the principle of fertilization; for instance with the eggs of the sea-hedgehog (echinus)—can be replaced through the influence of acids, that consequently a fertilization can come about out of a seemingly purely inorganic process—it must be said that processes which today are bound to the principle of heredity can only be imagined, and can happen in such a way that they present themselves outwardly, while they have presented themselves quite differently in olden times. Thus we can speak very well about the fertilization of the living nucleus of the earth (which was unformed living matter) by the spiritual formative principle flowing around it, by agreeing with the facts of natural science, so that the living had fashioned (formed) itself out of the formative principle, and that then the lifeless separated from the living which was the uniform substance of the entire earth.

Contemplating the origins of the animal world it becomes clear to us that in truth the entire earthly existence reveals itself in such a way that we can understand it only along the lines of Goethe, who has said, but only by way of a hint, in such a way that results concerning the origin of man and animal, have reality for the spiritual researcher. For if we turn our gaze to the whole world, by what means, in truth, does all that which surrounds us gain its real worth, its value? Only, as Goethe says, through mirroring at last in a human soul. For Spiritual Science the natural earth process shows itself really progressing from the oldest forms to the youngest ones, in such a way that everything is composed towards presenting man as the flower of the earth form—as that which finally must be brought forth out of the earth process, as likewise blossom or fruit is brought forth, finally, out of the plant. Thus from the contemplation of the origin of the animal world as a fundamental conviction of spiritual-scientific knowledge, results what we can consider in the following words, enlightening the human being, awakening the consciousness of the dignity of man, which is built up on the basis of every other being (alles uebrigen Daseins), and at the same time really imposing on us a responsibility: because we could become man only because the whole rest of earth evolution was aimed at us, we must prove ourselves worthy of this earth by endeavoring to progress from one stage of perfection to another: for evolution shows us that it is aiming at the shape of perfection of man. And that imposes on us the obligation that binds us not to stand still, but to move upwards to more and more sublime forming of spiritual life. This spiritual life which man carries in him today could be built up only on the basis of what is lower by pushing off what is material. So we must likewise assume that we must push off and leave to lower elements that which we carry in us today in order to develop a still higher spiritual life in us. Considering this, we can say that it is true for man, but also establishes what follows as his highest duty:

The elements let permeate themselves
By forming spirit,
They must receive
The last impulse of power of the spirit;
To clothe the human being
Into spirit form and soul life!

It seemed well yesterday, on the last night of the year, to enter deeply into many of the secrets of existence connected with the great supersensible mysteries, such as the annual passing of one year into another—and of the great cosmic New Year’s Eve and New Year. It seemed good to enter yesterday into those things which speak to the depths of our souls, mysteries far removed from the outer world; so, at the beginning of a New Year, it may perhaps be important to let a few at least of our great and important duties be brought before our souls.

These duties are connected above all with that which is made known to us in the course of human evolution, through Spiritual Science. They are associated with the knowledge of the road humanity must travel as it advances towards its future. A man cannot recognise the duties here mentioned, if he does not, in his own way, keep an open view in many directions. We have again and again endeavoured to do this in the course of our studies. To call up a few only of such duties before our souls may perhaps be fitting at this time, at the opening of a New Year.

It is true, that in view of this material age and all that it brings in its train, we recognise that Spiritual Science must form the basis from which we can work in a higher way for the progress of mankind. It is true, that all that seems to us necessary is so enormous, so incisive—there is (to put it mildly) so much to do at the present time, that we cannot believe that with our feeble powers we should ever be in a position to do much of what has to be done. One thing at least is important, that we should connect our interest with what has to be done, that we should acquire ever more and more interest in those things of which humanity in our time has need.

As a beginning, a group of people, however small, must be interested in that of which humanity has need, and gain a clear insight into those forces which in the evolution of time have a downward tendency, those that are harmful forces. At the opening of a New Year it is specially good to turn the interest of our circle somewhat from our own personal concerns and to direct them to the great objective interests of the whole of humanity.

To do this requires, as I have said, clear insight into that which is moving along the downward path in the human evolution of today. We need only carry those very thoughts which have been ours during the last few days over into the realm of the actual, there to find many of the things of which the men of the present day have need.

Wo have seen how at a certain moment of evolution, a far-reaching wisdom was actually lost to man; how this wisdom of the Gnostics perished; and how it is now necessary to work, so that an understanding of spiritual things may again be established, though of course in accordance with the progress of the time.

During the past autumn we have considered the deeper causes of the flood tide of materialism which took place in the nineteenth century, and I have again and again emphasised that the view of Spiritual Science in regard to this flood of materialism, in no way tends to a lack of appreciation, or want of understanding of the great progress of external, material science. This has always been recognised by us. But what we must keep specially before us is this, that the great progress made in the materialistic realms of natural science during the nineteenth century and on into the present time, has been accomplished with a falling off in the power of thought—of clear, precise thinking.

This decline in the power of thinking has taken place more especially in the domain of science. There—however much people may disbelieve it—the faith in authority has never been so strong as in our day, so that want of confidence as regards the certainty of thinking has spread widely through all the realms of popular thought. We live in an age of the most careless thinking and at the same time it is an age of the blindest trust in authority. People live today entirely under the impression that they must believe in, they must recognise authority, that they must have the sanction of outside powers. They desire a warrant for this or that. For the most part men do not consider today that it is an individual concern, that they will eventually have to take up the matter for themselves I So, they go to whom ‘right and law is bequeathed like a hereditary sickness’ and accept conclusions without weighing how those conclusions were reached; for they consider it right to accept authority blindly.

A man is ill—he takes not the least trouble to learn the simplest thing about the illness. Why should he? We have recognised and certified physicians whose business it is to look after our bodies; we need not trouble in the least about them!

If information on any subject be desired, people go to those who ought to know, to the theologian, to the philosopher, to this one or to that.

Any one following up this line of thought for himself, will find that on numberless points he himself is sunk in blindest belief in authority. If he cannot find them—do not take it ill of me, if I say—that the less he finds of this belief in authority in himself, the larger the dose he must have swallowed!

But I would now like, to show how a narrow, cramped and impoverishing mode of thought has slipped even into the finest domain of spiritual life, all the world over—without distinction of nation, race or colour; that a certain element of cramped thinking is to be found where the life of spiritual culture exists in its finest form. Let us take a philosophical idea and watch how it has developed. Who is not convinced today, on the grounds of a belief in an authority which has come down to him through very many channels—who is not convinced that one cannot by any means arrive at ‘the thing in itself,’ but can only catch the outward phenomena, the impression on the senses, the impression made on the soul by the thing. Man can but arrive at the ‘results’ of things, but not at ‘the thing in itself.’ This is indeed the fundamental type of the thought of the nineteenth century. I have described the whole wretched business in that chapter in my book The Riddles of Philosophy, which is called ‘The World of Illusion.’ Anyone who studies this chapter will find a resume of the whole matter. Man can only perceive ‘effects,’ he cannot attain to ‘the thing in itself;’ this remains unknown.

The most capable thinkers of the nineteenth century, if we can speak of them as capable in this connection, are infected by this necessary ignorance regarding the ‘thing in itself.’

If we now turn to the trend of thought which is at the base of what I have just described, it presents itself thus: It is wrongly insisted on, that the eye can only reflect that which it can evoke within itself by means of its nervous or other activities. When an external impression comes, it responds to it in its own specific way. One only gets as far as the impression—not to that which causes the impression on the eye. Through his ear a man only gets as far as the impression made on the ear—not to the thing that makes the impression, and so on.

It is, therefore, only the impressions of the outer world that act on the senses of the soul. That which was at first established as regards a certain realm, that of colour, tone and the like, has now for a long time been extended to the whole thinking world—that can receive only the impression or effects of what is in the world. Is this incorrect? Certainly it is not incorrect, but the point—as has often been said—is not in the least whether a matter is correct or not, quite other things come into consideration. Is it correct that only pictures, only impressions of things, are called forth by our senses? Certainly it is correct, that cannot be doubted; but something very different is connected with this. This I will explain by means of a comparison.

If someone stands before a mirror and another person also stands there beside him, it cannot be denied that what is seen in the mirror is the image of the one man and also of the other. What is seen in the mirror is without doubt images—merely images. From this point of view all our sense perceptions are in fact mere images: for the object must first make an impression on us and our impression—the reaction as one might say—evokes consciousness. We can quite correctly compare this with the images which we see in the mirror; for the impressions are also images.

Thus in the Lange and Kant train of thought we have a quite correct assertion—that man is concerned with images and that therefore, he cannot come into touch with anything real, with any actual ‘thing in itself.’ Why is this? It is solely because man cannot think things out further than one assumption, he remains at one correct assumption. The thought is not incorrect, but as such it is frozen in—it can go no further—it is really frozen in. Just consider; The images that we see in the mirror are true images, but suppose the other person who stands beside me and looks into the mirror too, gives me a box on the ear, would I then say (as these are but images I see in the mirror) that one reflection has given the other reflection a box on the ear? The action points to something real behind the images I And so it is. When our thoughts are alive and not frozen, when they are connected with realities, we know that the Lange-Kantian hypothesis is correct, that we have everywhere to do with images; but when the images come in touch with living conditions, these living conditions reveal what first leads us to tho thing in itself. It is not so much the case here that certain gentlemen who have thus led thoughts astray, have started from a wrong hypothesis; the whole matter hangs on the fact that we have to reckon with thoughts that were frozen, with thoughts which when at last they are reached, make people say: true, true, true—and get no further. This unworthy thinking of the nineteenth century is wanting in flexibility, in vitality. It is frozen in, truly ice-bound.

Let us take another example. During the past year I have often communicated certain things to you from a celebrated thinker—Mauthner, the great critic of language. Kant occupies himself with Critique of Idea. Mauthner went further, (things that follow must always go further)—he wrote a Critique of Speech. You will remember that during the autumn I gave you examples from the Critique of Speech. Such a man has many followers at the present day. Before he took up philosophy he was a journalist. There is an old saw which says: ‘One crow does not peck out the eyes of another.’ Not only do they not peck out each other’s eyes, but the others even give eyes to the crows that are blind, especially when these are journalists! And thus this critic of language—but as I said I wish in no way to raise any question as regards the honesty of such a thinker, even as regards his solidity and depth, for I must always insist again and again that it is incorrect to say that criticism of natural or of any other science is practised here, its characteristics are only defined. So I say expressly, that Mauthner is an honourable man, ‘so are they all honourable men’—but just let us consider one process of thought which is along the lines of this Critique of Language. For example it is stated there: Human knowledge is limited. Limited—why limited according to Mauthner? Well, because all that man experiences of the world enters his soul by way of his senses. Certainly there is nothing very profound in this thought, but yet it is an undeniable fact. Everything comes to us from the outer world through the senses. But now the thought came to Mauthner that these senses are merely accidental-senses, which means that supposing that we had not our eyes and ears and other senses, we might have other senses instead, then the world around us would appear quite different. An exceedingly popular thought, especially among many philosophers of our day! So it is actually by chance that we have these particular senses, and therewith our conception of the world about us. Had we different senses we should have a different world! Accidental senses!

One of the followers of Fritz Mauthner has said roughly as follows: ‘The world is infinite; but how can man know anything of this infinite world? He can but gain impressions through his accidental senses. Through the door of these chance senses many things enter our souls and group themselves, while without, the infinite world goes on, and man can learn nothing of the laws in accordance with which it progresses. How can man believe, that what he experiences through these chance-senses of his, can have any connection with the great cosmic mysteries beyond? So speaks a follower of Mauthner, who did not, however, look upon himself as an adherent of his, but as a clever man of his day. Yes, so he said. But you can transpose this line of thought into another. I will absolutely retain the form and character of the thought, but translate it into another. I will now state this other thought.

One cannot form any idea of what such a genius as Goethe really has given to mankind, for he has no other means of expressing what he had to say to men, than by the use of twenty-two or twenty-three chance letters of our alphabet which must be grouped in accordance with their own laws and set down on paper. This goes still further. How is it possible to learn anything of the genius of Goethe, through the chance grouping of letters on paper?

Clever such a man might be who believes that because Goethe had to express his whole genius by means of twenty-three letters, A.B.C. and so on—we could learn nothing of his genius or of his ideas,—clever he might be who used such an excuse and still maintained that he had before him nothing but the twenty-three chance letters grouped in various ways! ‘Away with your explanations,’ he would say, ‘they are but fancy, I see nothing before me but letters!’ Clever, in the same way, is he who says: The world beyond is infinite, we cannot learn anything of it, for we know only what comes to us through our chance-senses. The fact is that such inaccurate thinking does not only exist in the domain of which I am speaking, where it comes very crudely into evidence, it is present everywhere. It is active in the profoundly unhappy events of the present day, for these would not be what they are if the thinking of all humanity was not permeated with what has been pointed out in a somewhat crude form.

People will never be able to take the right interest in such things, I mean the things concerned with the true efforts of man for his real progress—true effort in the sense of Spiritual Science—if they have not the will really to enter into such matters, if they have not the desire to recognise the things of which man stands in need. Objections are ever being raised from this side and from that, to the teaching of Spiritual Science, that it is only accessible to those who have clairvoyant perception of the spiritual worlds. People will not believe that this is not true, that what is required is, that by thought they should really be able to attain understanding of that which the seer is able to bring forth out of the spiritual world. It is not to be wondered at that people cannot today grasp with their thought what the seer derives from the spiritual world, when thought is built up in this way I have described. This kind of thought is ‘trumps’ and rules life in every department.

It is not because man is unable to understand with his thoughts all that Spiritual Science teaches, that it fails to be understood, but because he permits himself to be infected with the slip-shod thinking of the present day. Spiritual Science should stimulate us to intensive, courageous thinking; that is what matters: and it is well able to do this.

Of course, as long as we take Spiritual Science in such a way that we only talk about the things with which it is concerned, we shall not advance very much in the establishing of the thought for the future of humanity, which is exactly the mission of our movement to establish. When, however, we take the trouble really to understand—really to grasp the things, the matter taught—we shall certainly make progress.

Even the conceptions of Spiritual Science are affected by the careless thinking of the present day. I have explained to you how this careless thinking acts; I quoted: ‘results only do we have in the external world, so we cannot attain to the thing in itself.’ This thought is as it were immediately frozen in; people do not wish to go any further, the thought is frozen in, they no longer see that the living interchanging activity of the reflected images leads further than to the mere image-character. This method is then applied to the conceptions of Spiritual Science. Because people are fully infected by such kind of thoughts, they say: Yes, what Spiritual Science tells on page a,b,c, are facts of Spiritual Science; these facts we cannot have before us, if we have not acquired the seer’s gift. Therefore, they do not go on to think whether in their present attitude to what Spiritual Science teaches they are not making the same mistake that the whole world makes today. The worst of it is, that this fundamental failing of contemporary thought is so little recognised. It is dreadful how little it is recognised. It enters into our everyday thinking, and makes itself felt there, just as in the more advanced thinking of the philosophers and scientists. It is but seldom that people recognise what a really tremendous duty springs from an insight into this fact, how important it is to be interested in such things, how lacking in responsibility to permit our interest in them to be blunted.

The fact is now apparent, that in the course of the last century purely external sense-observation obtained and gave its tone to science; people laid the greatest value on the results of observation in the laboratory, or in the clinic, in the Zoological Gardens and the like, (the value of which observation must be recognised, as I have often remarked) but they desired to hold to these only and go no further. It is true that extraordinary progress has been made by these methods of natural science, quite extraordinary progress; but it is just through this progress that thought has become quite unreliable. Therefore it becomes a duty not to allow those persons to attain power in the world, who exercise this power from the standpoint of a purely materialistic experimental knowledge,—and it is power that such people want. At the present day we have reached the point, when all that is non-materialistic learning is to be driven out of the world by the brutal language of force which is used in materialistic erudition. It has already become a question of force. Among those who appeal most eagerly to the external powers to gain their external privileges, we have to recognise those who stand on the foundation of material science alone. Therefore, it is our duty to understand that force rules in the world. It is not enough that we should be interested only in what concerns ourselves personally, we must develop interest in the great concerns of the whole of humanity. It is true that as individuals and even as a small society we cannot do much today, but from small germs like these a beginning must be made. What is the use of people saying today that they have no faith in doctors; that they have no confidence in the system, and seek by every other means, something in which they can feel confidence? Nothing is affected by this, all that is but personal effort for their own advantage. We should be interested in establishing, alongside the material medicine of today, something in which we can have confidence. Otherwise things will get worse from day to day. This does not only mean that those who have no faith in the medical science of the day should seek out someone whom they can trust; for this would put the latter in a false position, unless he interests himself in seeing that he too should be suitably qualified to interest himself in the progress of the general condition of humanity. It is true that today and to-morrow we cannot perhaps be more than interested in the matter, but we must bear in our souls such interest for the affairs of humanity if we wish to understand in their true meaning the teaching of Spiritual Science. We still often think that we understand the great interests of humanity, because we frequently interpret our personal interests as if they were the greatest interests of mankind.

We must search deeply, within the profoundest depths of our soul, if we wish to discover in ourselves how dependent we are on the blind faith in authority of the present day—how profoundly we are dependent on it. It is our indolence, our love of ease that withholds us from being inwardly kindled, and set aflame by the great needs of humanity.

The best New Year greeting that we can inscribe in our souls is that we may be enkindled and inspired by the great interests of the progress of mankind—of the true freedom of humanity. So long as we allow ourselves to believe that he who blows his trumpet before the world must also be able to think correctly,—so long as we hold beliefs derived from the carelessly organised thinking of the present day,—we have not developed within ourselves true interests in the great universal cause of mankind.

What I have just said is in no way directed against any great man in particular; I know that when such things are said especially in a public lecture, there are many who say: Natural Science and the authorities of the day were attacked by Spiritual Science; and the like. I specially quote instances from those of whom I can say, on the other hand, that they are great authorities of the present day, that they are great men,—to show that they support things which Spiritual Science has to extirpate, root and branch. Even without being a great man, one can recognise the careless thinking of great men, which has been so greatly enhanced just because of the brilliant advance in the experimental science of the day. One example, one among many,—I choose a book written by one of the best known men of the day and which is translated into German. No one can say that greatness is unrecognised by me. I repeat, I choose a book by a celebrated man of the day, in the domain of experimental Natural Science. I look up a passage in the introduction to the second volume, which deals specially with the question of the cosmology of the day; in which the great man goes into the history of the development of cosmo-conception. It runs somewhat as follows: In the times of the ancient Egyptians, the Greeks and the Romans, men tried to form a picture of the world in such and such a way; then in the last four hundred years there arose the Natural Science of today, which has at last drawn the great prize, which has swept all previous ideas aside and has attained to actual truth, which now has but to be further built up.

I have often laid stress on the fact that it is not so much the individual assertions that people make, it is the Ahrimanic or Luciferic characteristics which at once lay hold on people, so that they become Ahrimanic or Luciferic. Thus at the close of this introduction we read the following, which is in the highest degree noteworthy. Take a special note of what is presented to us by one who is without doubt a great and celebrated man of the day. After remarking how grand the knowledge of Natural Science is today, he says: ‘The time of sad decline endured until the awakening of humanity at the beginning of the new age. The new age placed the art of printing at the service of learning, and contempt of experimental work disappeared from the minds of educated people. Opposition to old opinions as expressed in the writings of various investigators, advanced at first but slowly. These hindering conditions have since disappeared, and immediately the number of workers and the means of furthering Natural Science increased in rapid succession. Hence the extraordinary progress of recent years.’

There then follows the last sentence of this introduction—‘We sometimes hear it said that we live in the best of all possible worlds: there might be some objection raised to this, but we scientists at least can assert with all certainty, that we live in the best of times. And we can look forward with confidence to a still better future...’ Now follows what really is astounding! This author attaches to himself, and to his age, that which great men have discovered and thought, regarding nature and the world. Therefore he says: ‘In the firm hope that the future may be better, we can say with Goethe—the great authority on man and nature:

‘Es ist ein gross Ergötzen
Sich in den Geist der Zeiten zu versetzen,
Zu schauen, wie vor uns ein weiser Mann gedacht,
Und wie wir's dann zuletzt so herrlich weit gebracht.’

[It is a great delight, to enter into the spirit of the age, to see how wise men thought before our time, and how splendidly we have advanced things.]

In all seriousness a great man closes his remarks with these words, the pronouncement of Goethe, the great authority on nature and on man; words to which Faust replies—for it is Wagner who says:

‘By your leave it is a great delight,
To enter into the spirit of the age, etc.’

But Faust answers: (and perhaps we may accept what Faust says as the thought of Goethe, the great authority on nature and on man.)

‘O yes! As far as to the stars!’

This is exactly fitted for a man who can reach as far as to the stars, thus:

‘O yes! As far as to the stars!
The ages that are past, my Friend,
Are for us a book with seven seals;
What we call the spirit of the age,
Is in fact the spirit of ourselves
In which the times are mirrored.
This is in truth, often but a wail!
Men fly from the first glance of it.
A rubbish heap, a lumber room,
At most some act or state of law
With excellent pragmatic maxims
Such as are put in puppets’ mouths!’

And so on...

Thus in 1907 wrote one of the greatest men of the day who had surely got ‘as far as to the stars,’ and who looking back on all those who had worked before him had also got so far as to make use of the saying ‘of Goethe, the great authority on man and nature.’

It is a great delight
To enter into the spirit of the age.

You smile! One could wish that this smile always might be directed against those who are capable at the present day of making such carelessness valid; for the example I have given shows that it is those who are firmly established on the ground of the scientific outlook of the day, and who are associated with progress in this domain, who are able to put forth such negligent thinking. It just proves that what is called Natural Science today by no means excludes the most superficial thinking. A man may be a thoroughly careless thinker today, and yet be held to be a great man in the realm of natural science. This has to be recognised, and in this sense we must approach it. It is a sign of our time. If this were to continue; if any one is labelled as a great man, and given out as a great authority and if people put forward what he says in this or that domain without proof, as of something of great worth—then we should never surmount the great misery of our time. I am fully convinced that countless people pass over the sentence I read out to you today, without a smile, although it shows forth in the most eminent degree, where the greatest faults of our day lie, which are bringing about the decline of the evolution of humanity.

We must see clearly where to make a beginning with those things necessary for man; and also see that in spite of the immense advance in external natural science, the greatest scientists of the nineteenth century, even down to our own day, have shown themselves the worst dilettantists in regard to all questions of world-outlook. The great fault of our day is, that this is not recognised—that people do not recognise that the greatest investigators in natural science in the nineteenth century proved themselves the worst of dilettantists in the question of world-outlook, when they entirely left out that which as spirit rules in the realm of natural science. People blindly followed after these great persons, not only when they gave out the results of investigations in the laboratory, or of clinical research, but also when they asserted things regarding the secrets of the universe.

So, parallel with the popularising of science which is useful and beneficial in the highest degree, we have at the same time a deterioration as regards all questions of wide import and a heedlessness of thought which is infectious and very harmful, because it is founded on the very worst kind of dilettantism of great men.

Here are to be found the tasks with which our interests must be closely associated, even if we ourselves are not able to produce anything. We must at least look things in the face, we must see clearly that it will above all lead to far, far more unhappy times than we are at present passing through, if mankind does not realise what has been here pointed out;—if, in place of careless, inexact thinking, a clear and genuine method of thought be not established again among men. Everything can be traced back to this careless thinking. All those external, often very unhappy phenomena which we encounter would not exist if this inexact, negligent thought were not there.

It seems to me specially necessary to speak of these matters at the beginning of a New Year, for they are connected with the character and attitude of our whole task. For when we accustom ourselves to consider without prejudice the method and nature of modern thought, and see how powerful it is in all the varied conditions of life, we can then form some picture of what we have to do and of what mankind stands in need. We must in the first place overcome all tendency to slackness, all love of sloth and laziness, we must see clearly that a spiritual-scientific movement has duties other than that of merely listening to lectures or reading books.

I must continually remind you to make yourselves acquainted with the necessary ideas. It is clear to all that as a few individuals,—as a small society—we cannot do much. But our own thought must move in the right direction; we must know what is in question, we must not ourselves be exposed to the danger (to put it trivially) of succumbing to the different conceptions of the world, of those who are the great men of the day in the external sciences. Great men, but dilettante thinkers as regards questions of universal import, found numerous associations of monistic or other nature without the opposition that would arise if at least it were realised that, when such societies are founded, it is as if one said: ‘I am letting this man make a coat, because he is a celebrated cobbler!’

This is foolishness, is it not? but it is just as foolish when a great chemist or a great psychologist is accepted as an authority on a conception of the world. We cannot blame them if they claim it for themselves, for naturally they cannot know how inadequate they are; but that they are so accepted is connected with the great evils of the present day. To me it seems as if a thought for New Year’s Eve must ever be associated with our feelings; whereas it seems to me that that which faces us as the more immediate duty of the day, must be directly associated with our reflections on New Year’s Day; I thought therefore, that the tone of what has been said today might, be fitly associated with what was said yesterday.

It seemed well yesterday, on the last night of the year, to enter deeply into many of the secrets of existence connected with the great super-sensible mysteries, such as the annual passing of one year into another—and of the great cosmic New Year's Eve and New Year. It seemed good to enter yesterday into those things which speak to the depths of our souls, mysteries far removed from the outer world; so, at the beginning of a New Year, it may perhaps be important to let a few at least of our great and important duties be brought before our souls.

These duties are connected above all with that which is made known to us in the course of human evolution, through Spiritual Science. They are associated with the knowledge of the road humanity must travel as it advances towards its future. A man cannot recognise the duties here mentioned, if he does not, in his own way, keep an open view in many directions. We have again and again endeavoured to do this in the course of our studies. To call up a few only of such duties before our souls may perhaps be fitting at this time, at the opening of a New Year.

It is true, that in view of this material age and all that it brings in its train, we recognise that Spiritual Science must form the basis from which we can work in a higher way for the progress of mankind. It is true, that all that seems to us necessary is so enormous, so incisive—there is (to put it mildly) so much to do at the present time, that we cannot believe that with our feeble powers we should ever be in a position to do much of what has to be done. One thing at least is important, that we should connect our interest with what has to be done, that we should acquire ever more and more interest in those things of which humanity in our time has need.

As a beginning, a group of people, however small, must be interested in that of which humanity has need, and gain a clear insight into those forces which in the evolution of time have a downward tendency, those that are harmful forces. At the opening of a New Year it is specially good to turn the interest of our circle somewhat from our own personal concerns and to direct them to the great objective interests of the whole of humanity.

To do this requires, as I have said, clear insight into that which is moving along the downward path in the human evolution of to-day. We need only carry those very thoughts which have been ours during the last few days over into the realm of the actual, there to find many of the things of which the men of the present day have need.

We have seen how at a certain moment of evolution, a far-reaching wisdom was actually lost to man; how this wisdom of the Gnostics perished; and how it is now necessary to work, so that an understanding of spiritual things may again be established, though of course in accordance with the progress of the time.

During the past autumn we have considered the deeper causes of the flood tide of materialism which took place in the nineteenth century, and I have again and again emphasised that the view of Spiritual Science in regard to this flood of materialism, in no way tends to a lack of appreciation, or want of understanding of the great progress of external, material science. This has always been recognised by us. But what we must keep specially before us is this, that the great progress made in the materialistic realms of natural science during the nineteenth century and on into the present time, has been accomplished with a falling off in the power of thought—of clear, precise thinking.

This decline in the power of thinking has taken place more especially in the domain of science. There—however much people may disbelieve it—the faith in authority has never been so strong as in our day, so that want of confidence as regards the certainty of thinking has spread widely through all the realms of popular thought. We live in an age of the most careless thinking and at the same time it is an age of the blindest trust in authority. People live to-day entirely under the impression that they must believe in, they must recognise authority, that they must have the sanction of outside powers. They desire a warrant for this or that. For the most part men do not consider to-day that it is an individual concern, that they will eventually have to take up the matter for themselves! So, they go to whom ‘right and law is bequeathed like a hereditary sickness’ and accept conclusions without weighing how those conclusions were reached; for they consider it right to accept authority blindly.

A man is ill—he takes not the least trouble to learn the simplest thing about the illness. Why should he? We have recognised and certified physicians whose business it is to look after our bodies; we need not trouble in the least about them!

If information on any subject be desired, people go to those who ought to know, to the theologian, to the philosopher, to this one or to that.

Any one following up this line of thought for himself, will find that on numberless points he himself is sunk in blindest belief in authority. If he cannot find them—do not take it ill of me, if I say—that the less he finds of this belief in authority in himself, the larger the dose he must have swallowed!

But I would now like to show how a narrow, cramped and impoverishing mode of thought has slipped even into the finest domain of spiritual life, all the world over—without distinction of nation, race or colour; that a certain element of cramped thinking is to be found where the life of spiritual culture exists in its finest form. Let us take a philosophical idea and watch how it has developed. Who is not convinced to-day, on the grounds of a belief in an authority which has come down to him through very many channels—who is not convinced that one cannot by any means arrive at the ‘thing in itself,’ but can only catch the outward phenomena, the impression on the senses, the impression made on the soul by the thing. Man can but arrive at the ‘results’ of things, but not at the ‘thing in itself.’ This is indeed the fundamental type of the thought of the nineteenth century. I have described the whole wretched business in that chapter in my book Riddles of Philosophy, which is called ‘The World of Illusion.’ Anyone who studies this chapter will find a résumé of the whole matter. Man can only perceive ‘effects,’ he cannot attain to ‘the thing in itself;’ this remains unknown.

The most capable thinkers of the nineteenth century, if we can speak of them as capable in this connection, are infected by this necessary ignorance regarding ‘the thing in itself.’

If we now turn to the trend of thought which is at the base of what I have just described, it presents itself thus: It is wrongly insisted on, that the eye can only reflect that which it can evoke within itself by means of its nervous or other activities. When an external impression comes, it responds to it in its own specific way. One only gets as far as the impression—not to that which causes the impression on the eye. Through his ear a man only gets as far as the impression made on the ear—not to the thing that makes the impression, and so on.

It is, therefore, only the impressions of the outer world that act on the senses of the soul. That which was at first established as regards a certain realm, that of colour, tone and the like, has now for a long time been extended to the whole thinking world—that can receive only the impression or effects of what is in the world. Is this incorrect? Certainly it is not incorrect, but the point—as has often been said—is not in the least whether a matter is correct or not, quite other things come into consideration. Is it correct that only pictures, only impressions of things, are called forth by our senses? Certainly it is correct, that cannot be doubted; but something very different is connected with this. This I will explain by means of a comparison.

If someone stands before a mirror and another person also stands there beside him, it cannot be denied that what is seen in the mirror is the image of the one man and also of the other. What is seen in the mirror is without doubt images—merely images. From this point of view all our sense perceptions are in fact mere images: for the object must first make an impression on us and our impression—the reaction as one might say—evokes consciousness. We can quite correctly compare this with the images which we see in the mirror; for the impressions are also images.

Thus in the Lange and Kant train of thought we have a quite correct assertion—that man is concerned with images and that therefore, he cannot come into touch with anything real, with any actual ‘thing in itself.’ Why is this? It is solely because man cannot think things out further than one assumption, he remains at one correct assumption. The thought is not incorrect, but as such it is frozen in—it can go no further—it is really frozen in. Just consider: The images that we see in the mirror are true images, but suppose the other person who stands beside me and looks into the mirror too, gives me a box on the ear, would I then say (as these are but images I see in the mirror) that one reflection has given the other reflection a box on the ear? The action points to something real behind the images! And so it is. When our thoughts are alive and not frozen, when they are connected with realities, we know that the Lange-Kantian hypothesis is correct, that we have everywhere to do with images; but when the images come in touch with living conditions, these living conditions reveal what first leads us to the thing in itself. It is not so much the case here that certain gentlemen who have thus led thoughts astray, have started from a wrong hypothesis; the whole matter hangs on the fact that we have to reckon with thoughts that were frozen, with thoughts which when at last they are reached, make people say: true, true, true—and get no further. This unworthy thinking of the nineteenth century is wanting in flexibility, in vitality. It is frozen in, truly ice-bound.

Let us take another example. During the past year I have often communicated certain things to you from a celebrated thinker—Mauthner, the great critic of language. Kant occupies himself with Critique of Idea. Mauthner went further, (things that follow must always go further)—he wrote a Critique of Speech. You will remember that during the autumn I gave you examples from the Critique of Speech. Such a man has many followers at the present day. Before he took up philosophy he was a journalist. There is an old saw which says: ‘One crow does not peck out the eyes of another.’ Not only do they not peck out each other's eyes, but the others even give eyes to the crows that are blind, especially when these are journalists! And thus this critic of language—but as I said I wish in no way to raise any question as regards the honesty of such a thinker, even as regards his solidity and depth, for I must always insist again and again that it is incorrect to say that criticism of natural or of any other science is practised here, its characteristics are only defined. So I say expressly, that Mauthner is an honourable man, ‘so are they all honourable men’—but just let us consider one process of thought which is along the lines of this Critique of Language. For example it is stated there: Human knowledge is limited. Limited—why limited according to Mauthner? Well, because all that man experiences of the world enters his soul by way of his senses. Certainly there is nothing very profound in this thought, but yet it is an undeniable fact. Everything comes to us from the outer world through the senses. But now the thought came to Mauthner that these senses are merely accidental-senses, which means that supposing that we had not our eyes and ears and other senses, we might have other senses instead, then the world around us would appear quite different. An exceedingly popular thought, especially among many philosophers of our day! So it is actually by chance that we have these particular senses, and therewith our conception of the world about us. Had we different senses we should have a different world! Accidental senses!

One of the followers of Fritz Mauthner has said roughly as follows: ‘The world is infinite; but how can man know anything of this infinite world? He can but gain impressions through his accidental senses. Through the door of these chance-senses many things enter our souls and group themselves, while without, the infinite world goes on, and man can learn nothing of the laws in accordance with which it progresses. How can man believe, that what he experiences through these chance-senses of his, can have any connection with the great cosmic mysteries beyond?’ So speaks a follower of Mauthner, who did not, however, look upon himself as an adherent of his, but as a clever man of his day. Yes, so he said. But you can transpose this line of thought into another. I will absolutely retain the form and character of the thought, but translate it into another. I will now state this other thought.

One cannot form any idea of what such a genius as Goethe really has given to mankind, for he has no other means of expressing what he had to say to men, than by the use of twenty-two or twenty-three chance letters of our alphabet which must be grouped in accordance with their own laws and set down on paper. This goes still further. How is it possible to learn anything of the genius of Goethe, through the chance grouping of letters on paper?

Clever such a man might be who believes that because Goethe had to express his whole genius by means of twenty-three letters, A.B.C. and so on,—we could learn nothing of his genius or of his ideas,—clever he might be who used such an excuse and still maintained that he had before him nothing but the twenty-three chance letters grouped in various ways! ‘Away with your explanations,’ he would say, ‘they are but fancy, I see nothing before me but letters!’ Clever, in the same way, is he who says: The world beyond is infinite, we cannot learn anything of it, for we know only what comes to us through our chance-senses.

The fact is that such inaccurate thinking does not only exist in the domain of which I am speaking, where it comes very crudely into evidence, it is present everywhere. It is active in the profoundly unhappy events of the present day, for these would not be what they are if the thinking of all humanity was not permeated with what has been pointed out in a somewhat crude form.

People will never be able to take the right interest in such things, I mean the things concerned with the true efforts of man for his real progress—true effort in the, sense of Spiritual Science—if they have not the will really to enter into such matters, if they have not the desire to recognise the things of which man stands in need. Objections are ever being raised from this side and from that, to the teaching of Spiritual Science, that it is only accessible to those who have clairvoyant perception of the spiritual worlds. People will not believe that this is not true, that what is required is, that by thought they should really be able to attain understanding of that which the seer is able to bring forth out of the spiritual world. It is not to be wondered at that people cannot to-day grasp with their thought what the seer derives from the spiritual world, when thought is built up in this way I have described. This kind of thought is ‘trumps’ and rules life in every department.

It is not because man is unable to understand with his thoughts all that Spiritual Science teaches, that it fails to be understood, but because he permits himself to be infected with the slip-shod thinking of the present day. Spiritual Science should stimulate us to intensive, courageous thinking; that is what matters: and it is well able to do this.

Of course, as long as we take Spiritual Science in such a way that we only talk about the things with which it is concerned, we shall not advance very much in the establishing of the thought for the future of humanity, which is exactly the mission of our movement to establish. When, however, we take the trouble really to understand—really to grasp the things, the matter taught,—we shall certainly make progress.

Even the conceptions of Spiritual Science are affected by the careless thinking of the present day. I have explained to you how this careless thinking acts; I quoted: ‘results only do we have in the external world, so we cannot attain to the thing in itself.’ This thought is as it were immediately frozen in; people do not wish to go any further, the thought is frozen in, they no longer see that the living interchanging activity of the reflected images leads further than to the mere image-character. This method is then applied to the conceptions of Spiritual Science. Because people are fully infected by such kind of thoughts, they say: Yes, what Spiritual Science tells on page a,b,c, are facts of Spiritual Science; these facts we cannot have before us, if we have not acquired the seer's gift. Therefore, they do not go on to think whether in their present attitude to what Spiritual Science teaches they are not making the same mistake that the whole world makes to-day. The worst of it is, that this fundamental failing of contemporary thought is so little recognised. It is dreadful how little it is recognised. It enters into our everyday thinking, and makes itself felt there, just as in the more advanced thinking of the philosophers and scientists. It is but seldom that people recognise what a really tremendous duty springs from an insight into this fact, how important it is to be interested in such things, how lacking in responsibility to permit our interest in them to be blunted.

The fact is now apparent, that in the course of the last century purely external sense-observation obtained and gave its tone to science; people laid the greatest value on the results of observation in the laboratory, or in the clinic, in the Zoological Gardens and the like, (the value of which observation must be recognised, as I have often remarked) but they desired to hold to these only and go no further. It is true that extraordinary progress has been made by these methods of natural science, quite extraordinary progress; but it is just through this progress that thought has become quite unreliable. Therefore it becomes a duty not to allow those persons to attain power in the world, who exercise this power from the standpoint of a purely materialistic experimental knowledge,—and it is power that such people want. At the present day we have reached the point, when all that is non-materialistic learning is to be driven out of the world by the brutal language of force which is used in materialistic erudition. It has already become a question of force. Among those who appeal most eagerly to the external powers to gain their external privileges, we have to recognise those who stand on the foundation of material science alone. Therefore, it is our duty to understand that force rules in the world. It is not enough that we should be interested only in what concerns ourselves personally, we must develop interest in the great concerns of the whole of humanity. It is true that as individuals and even as a small society we cannot do much to-day, but from small germs like these a beginning must be made. What is the use of people saying to-day that they have no faith in doctors; that they have no confidence in the system, and seek by every other means, something in which they can feel confidence? Nothing is affected by this, all that is but personal effort for their own advantage. We should be interested in establishing, alongside the material medicine of to-day, something in which we can have confidence. Otherwise things will get worse from day to day. This does not only mean that those who have no faith in the medical science of the day should seek out someone whom they can trust; for this would put the latter in a false position, unless he interests himself in seeing that he too should be suitably qualified to interest himself in the progress of the general condition, of humanity. It is true that to-day and tomorrow we cannot perhaps be more than interested in the matter, but we must bear in our souls such interest for the affairs of humanity if we wish to understand in their true meaning the teaching of Spiritual Science. We still often think that we understand the great interests of humanity, because we frequently interpret our personal interests as if they were the greatest interests of mankind.

We must search deeply, within the profoundest depths of our soul, if we wish to discover in ourselves how dependent we are on the blind faith in authority of the present day—how profoundly we are dependent on it. It is our indolence, our love of ease that withholds us from being inwardly kindled, and set aflame by the great needs of humanity.

The best New Year greeting that we can inscribe in our souls is that we may be enkindled and inspired by the great interests of the progress of mankind—of the true freedom of humanity. So long as we allow ourselves to believe that he who blows his trumpet before the world must also be able to think correctly,—so long as we hold beliefs derived from the carelessly organised thinking of the present day,—we have not developed within ourselves true interests in the great universal cause of mankind.

What I have just said is in no way directed against any great man in particular; I know that when such things are said especially in a public lecture, there are many who say: Natural Science and the authorities of the day were attacked by Spiritual Science; and the like. I specially quote instances from those of whom I can say, on the other hand, that they are great authorities of the present day, that they are great men,—to show that they support things which Spiritual Science has to extirpate, root and branch. Even without being a great man, one can recognise the careless thinking of great men, which has been so greatly enhanced just because of the brilliant advance in the experimental science of the day. One example, one among many,—I choose a book written by one of the best known men of the day and which is translated into German. No one can say that greatness is unrecognised by me. I repeat, I choose a book by a celebrated man of the day, in the domain of experimental Natural Science. I look up a passage in the introduction to the second volume, which deals specially with the question of the cosmology of the day; in which the great man goes into the history of the development of cosmo-conception. It runs somewhat as follows: In the times of the ancient Egyptians, the Greeks and the Romans, men tried to form a picture of the world in such and such a way; then in the last four hundred years there arose the Natural Science of to-day, which has at last drawn the great prize, which has swept all previous ideas aside and has attained to actual truth, which now has but to be further built up.

I have often laid stress on the fact that it is not so much the individual assertions that people make, it is the Ahrimanic or Luciferic characteristics which at once lay hold on people, so that they become Ahrimanic or Luciferic. Thus at the close of this introduction we read the following, which is in the highest degree noteworthy. Take a special note of what is presented to us by one who is without doubt a great and celebrated man of the day. After remarking how grand the knowledge of Natural Science is to-day, he says: ‘The time of sad decline endured until the awakening of humanity at the beginning of the new age. The new age placed the art of printing at the service of learning, and contempt of experimental work disappeared from the minds of educated people. Opposition to old opinions as expressed in the writings of various investigators, advanced at first but slowly. These hindering conditions have since disappeared, and immediately the number of workers and the means of furthering Natural Science increased in rapid succession. Hence the extraordinary progress of recent years.’

There then follows the last sentence of this introduction—‘We sometimes hear it said that we live in the best of all possible worlds: there might be some objection raised to this, but we scientists at least can assert with all certainty, that we live in the best of times. And we can look forward with confidence to a still better future. ...’ Now follows what really is astounding! This author attaches to himself, and to his age, that which great men have discovered and thought, regarding nature and the world. Therefore he says: In the firm hope that the future may be better, we can say with Goethe,—the great authority on man and nature:

‘Es ist ein gross Ergotzen
Sich in den Geist der Zeiten zu versetzen,
Zu schauen, wie vor uns ein weiser Mann gedacht,
Und wie wir's dann zuletzt so herrlich weit gebracht.’

[‘It is a great delight, to enter into the spirit of the age, to see how wise men thought before our time, and how splendidly we have advanced things.’]

In all seriousness a great man closes his remarks with these words, the pronouncement of Goethe, the great authority on nature and on man; words to which Faust replies,—for it is Wagner who says:

‘By your leave it is a great delight,
To enter into the spirit of the age, etc.—’

But Faust answers: (and perhaps we may accept what Faust says as the thought of Goethe, the great authority on nature and on man.)

‘O yes! As far as to the stars!’

This is exactly fitted for a man who can reach as far as to the stars, thus:

‘O yes! As far as to the stars!
The ages that are past, my Friend,
Are for us a book with seven seals;
What we call the spirit of the age,
Is in fact the spirit of ourselves
In which the times are mirrored.
This is in truth, often but a wail!
Men fly from the first glance of it.
A rubbish heap, a lumber room,
At most some act or state of law
With excellent pragmatic maxims
Such as are put in puppets' mouths!’

And so on. ...

Thus in 1907 wrote one of the greatest men of the day who had surely got ‘as far as to the stars,’ and who looking back on all those who had worked before him had also got so far as to make use of the saying ‘of Goethe, the great authority on man and nature.’

It is a great delight
To enter into the spirit of the age.

You smile! One could wish that this smile always might be directed against those who are capable at the present day of making such carelessness valid; for the example I have given shows that it is those who are firmly established on the ground of the scientific outlook of the day, and who are associated with progress in this domain, who are able to put forth such negligent thinking. It just proves that what is called Natural Science to-day by no means excludes the most superficial thinking. A man may be a thoroughly careless thinker to-day, and yet be held to be a great man in the realm of natural science. This has to be recognised, and in this sense we must approach it. It is a sign of our time. If this were to continue; if any one is labeled as a great man, and given out as a great authority and if people put forward what he says in this or that domain without proof, as of something of great worth—then we should never surmount the great misery of our time. I am fully convinced that countless people pass over the sentence I read out to you to-day, without a smile, although it shows forth in the most eminent degree, where the greatest faults of our day lie, which are bringing about the decline of the evolution of humanity.

We must see clearly where to make a beginning with those things necessary for man; and also see that in spite of the immense advance in external natural science, the greatest scientists of the nineteenth century, even down to our own day, have shown themselves the worst dilettantists in regard to all questions of world-outlook. The great fault of our day is, that this is not recognised—that people do not recognise that the greatest investigators in natural science in the nineteenth century proved themselves the worst of dilettantists in the question of world-outlook, when they entirely left out that which as spirit rules in the realm of natural science. People blindly followed after these great persons, not only when they gave out the results of investigations in the laboratory, or of clinical research, but also when they asserted things regarding the secrets of the universe.

So, parallel with the popularising of science which is useful and beneficial in the highest degree, we have at the same time a deterioration as regards all questions of wide import and a heedlessness of thought which is infectious and very harmful, because it is founded on the very worst kind of dilettantism of great men.

Here are to be found the tasks with which our interests must be closely associated, even if we ourselves are not able to produce anything. We must at least look things in the face, we must see clearly that it will above all lead to far, far more unhappy times than we are at present passing through, if mankind does not realise what has been here pointed out;—if, in place of careless, inexact thinking, a clear and genuine method of thought be not established again among men. Everything can be traced back to this careless thinking. All those external, often very unhappy phenomena which we encounter would not exist if this inexact, negligent thought were not there.

It seems to me specially necessary to speak of these matters at the beginning of a New Year, for they are connected with the character and attitude of our whole task. For when we accustom ourselves to consider without prejudice the method and nature of modern thought, and see how powerful it is in all the varied conditions of life, we can then form some picture of what we have to do and of what mankind stands in need. We must in the first place overcome all tendency to slackness, all love of sloth and laziness, we must see clearly that a spiritual-scientific movement has duties other than that of merely listening to lectures or reading books.

I must continually remind you to make yourselves acquainted with the necessary ideas. It is clear to all that as a few individuals,—as a small society—we cannot do much. But our own thought must move in the right direction; we must know what is in question, we must not ourselves be exposed to the danger (to put it trivially) of succumbing to the different conceptions of the world, of those who are the great men of the day in the external sciences. Great men, but dilettante thinkers as regards questions of universal import, found numerous associations of monistic or other nature without the opposition that would arise if at least it were realised that, when such societies are founded, it is as if one said: ‘I am letting this man make a coat, because he is a celebrated cobbler!’

This is foolishness, is it not? But it is just as foolish when a great chemist or a great psychologist is accepted as an authority on a conception of the world. We cannot blame them if they claim it for themselves, for naturally they cannot know how inadequate they are; but that they are so accepted is connected with the great evils of the present day. To me it seems as if a thought for New Year's Eve must ever be associated with our feelings; whereas it seems to me that that which faces us as the more immediate duty of the day, must be directly associated with our reflections on New Year's Day; I thought therefore, that the tone of what has been said to-day might be fitly associated with what was said yesterday.

To-day I wish to speak to you of some fundamental pieces of knowledge of the science of initiation, which will then supply to us a kind of foundation for that which we shall consider tomorrow and the day after tomorrow. To-day we shall first speak of something which lies in the consciousness of every human being, but is not grasped clearly enough in the ordinary course of life. When we speak of such things, we always speak of them from the standpoint of our present time, in the sense and meaning which I have often explained to you: namely, that knowledge is not in any way valid for all time and for every place, but that it is only valid for a certain definite time, indeed, only for a definite region of the earth. Thus, certain standpoints of knowledge would be valid, for instance, for the European civilisation, and other standpoints would be valid—let us say—for the knowledge of the East.

Everybody knows that we live, as it were, between two poles of our knowledge. Everyone feels that, on the one hand, we have the knowledge gained through our senses. A plain, unprejudiced person learns to know the world through his senses, and is even able to sum up what he sees and hears, and, in general, what he perceives through his senses. After all, that which science supplies to us, in the form in which science now exists in the Occident, is merely a summary of that which the senses convey to us.

But everyone can feel that there is also another kind of knowledge, and that it is not possible to be in the full sense of the word a real human being living in the ordinary world, unless another kind of knowledge is added to the one which has just been characterized. And this kind of knowledge is connected with our moral life. We do not only speak of ideas pertaining to the knowledge of Nature, and explaining this or that thing in Nature, we also speak of ethical ideas, ethical ideals. We feel that they are the motives of our actions, and that we allow them to guide us when we ourselves wish to be active in the ordinary world. And every man will undoubtedly feel that this knowledge of the senses, with the resulting intellectual knowledge (for, the intellectual knowledge is merely a result, an appendix of the knowledge transmitted by the senses) is a pole of our cognitive life which cannot reach as far as the ethical ideas. The ethical ideas are there, but when we pursue, for instance, natural science, we cannot find these ethical ideas by contemplating the plant-world, the mineral world, or by following any other branch of modern natural sciences. The tragic element of our time consists, for instance, in trying to discover, upon a natural-scientific basis, ideas which are to be applied to the social sphere. If sound common sense were adopted, this would never be possible. The ethical ideas exist as if on another side of life. And our life is indeed under the influence of these two streams: on the one hand, the knowledge of Nature, and on the other hand, the ethical knowledge.

From my The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity you will know that the highest ethical ideas required by us as human beings are given to us when we grasp moral intuitions, and that when we begin to gain possession of these ethical ideas, they are the foundation of our human freedom. On the other hand, you may perhaps also know that for certain thinkers there has always been a kind of abyss between that which is given, on the one hand, by the knowledge of Nature, and on the other hand, by ethical knowledge. The philosophy of Kant is based upon this abyss, which he is unable to bridge completely. For this reason, Kant has written a Critique of Theoretical Reason, of Pure Reason, as he calls it, where he grapples with natural science, and where he says all that he has to say about natural science, or the knowledge of Nature. On the other hand, he has also written a Critique of Practical Reason, where he speaks of ethical ideas. We might say: The whole human life is born for him out of two roots which are completely severed from one another, which he describes in his two chief critical studies.

Of course, it would be unfortunate for the human being if there were no connecting bridge between these two poles of our soul-life. Those who earnestly pursue, on the one hand, spiritual science, and on the other hand, earnestly consider the tasks of our present time, must eagerly ask themselves: Where is the bridge connecting ethical ideas and the ideas of Nature?

To-day we shall adopt the standpoint which I would like to characterize as a historical standpoint, in order to come to a knowledge of this bridge. You already know from the explanations which have recently been given here, that in past times man's soul-constitution was essentially different from that of a later time. The origin of Christianity really forms a deep incision in the whole evolution of humanity. And only if we understand what has really arisen in the evolution of humanity through the birth of Christianity we shall understand human reason.

That which lies behind the rise of Christianity—not to mention Jewish history—is the whole extent of pagan culture. Jewish culture was, after all, a preparation for Christianity. This whole extent of pagan culture is essentially different from our modern Christian culture. The more we go back into time, the more we shall find that this pagan culture had a uniform character. It was principally based upon human wisdom. I know that it is almost offending for a modern man to hear that, as far as wisdom is concerned, the ancients were far more advanced than modern man; nevertheless it was so. In ancient pagan times a wisdom extended over the earth, which was far nearer to the origin of things than our modern knowledge, particularly our modern natural sciences. This ancient, this primeval knowledge, was very concrete, it was a knowledge intensively connected with the spiritual reality of things. Something entered the human soul through man's knowledge of the reality of things. But the special characteristic of this ancient pagan wisdom was the fact that the human beings obtained it in such a way (you know that they obtained it from the Mysteries of the Initiates) that this wisdom contained both a knowledge of Nature, and an ethical knowledge. This extraordinarily significant truth in the history of human evolution, this truth which I have just explained to you, is ignored to-day only because people cannot go back to the truly characteristic times of the ancient pagan wisdom. A historical knowledge does not reach back so far as to enable us to grasp the times when the human beings who looked up to the stars really received from the stars, on the one hand, a wisdom explaining to them in their own way the course of the stars, but on the other hand, it also told them how they were to behave and act here upon the earth. Metaphorically speaking, (yet it is not entirely metaphorical, but quite objective up to a certain degree), we might say, that the ancient Egyptians and the ancient Chaldean civilisations were, for instance, of such a kind that men could read the laws of Nature in the course of the stars, but in the star's course they could also read the rules governing that which they were to do upon the earth.

The codices of the ancient Egyptian Pharaohs contain, for instance, rules concerning that which was to become law. It was so that for centuries ahead that which would later on become law was foretold prophetically. Everything contained in these codices was read from the course of the stars. In those ancient times there was no astronomy such as we have it now, merely containing mathematical laws of the movements of the stars or of the earth, but there was a knowledge of the cosmos which was at the same time moral knowledge, ethics.

The doubtful element of modern astrology, which does not go beyond the stage of dilettantism, is that people no longer feel that its contents can only be a complete whole if the laws discovered in it are at the same time moral laws for the human beings. This is something extraordinarily significant.

In the course of human evolution, the essence of that primeval science was lost. This lies at the foundation of the fact that certain Secret Schools—but the schools of an earnest character have really ceased to exist at the end of the 18th century—and even certain Secret Schools of the Occident, have again and again pointed back to this lost science, to the lost Word. As a rule, those who came later no longer knew what was meant by the expression “Word”. Nevertheless, this conceals a certain fact. In Saint-Martin's books we may still find an echo showing that up to the end of the 18th century it was very clearly felt that in ancient times men possessed a spiritual wisdom which they obtained simultaneously with their knowledge of Nature. Their spiritual wisdom also contained their moral and ethical wisdom; this had already disappeared in the eight centuries preceding the rise of Christianity. We may even say: Ancient Greek history is, essentially, the gradual loss of primeval wisdom.

If we study the philosophers before Socrates, namely Heraclitus, Thales, Anaximenes, Anaxagoras, the philosophers of the tragic epoch, as Nietzsche called them—I have dealt with them in my book Riddles of Philosophy, and have tried to give as good as possible a picture, from an external standpoint—if we study these philosophers (but the external writings tell us very little about them), we shall find again and again that the passages which have remained like oases in a desert, re-echo a great, encompassing wisdom and knowledge which existed in the remote past of human evolution. The words of Heraclitus, of Thales, Anaxagoras and Anaximenes, appear to us as if humanity had, as it were, forgotten its primeval wisdom and only remembered occasionally some fragmentary passages. The few passages of Thales, Anaxagoras, of the seven Greek sages, etc., which have been handed down to us traditionally, appear to us like fragmentary recollections.

In Plato we still encounter a kind of clear consciousness of this primeval wisdom; in Aristotle everything has been transformed into human wisdom.

And among the Stoics and Epicureans this gradually disappears. The ancient primeval knowledge only remains like an old legend. This is how matters stood with the Greeks.

The Romans—and they were by Nature a prosaic, matter-of-fact nation—even denied that this primeval knowledge had any meaning at all, and they transformed everything into abstractions. The course which I have just described to you in regard to the primeval knowledge, was necessary for the evolution of humanity. Man would never have reached freedom in the course of his development, had the primeval wisdom, which came to him indirectly through atavistic clairvoyance, remained in its original intensity and significance. Nevertheless, this primeval knowledge was connected with everything which could reach man from divine heights in the form, I might say, of moral impulses. This had to be rescued. The moral impulse had to be rescued for man.

Among the many things which we have already explained in regard to the Mystery of Golgotha we have also explained that the divine principle which descended to the earth trough the man, Jesus of Nazareth, contained the moral power which was little by little dispersed and cleft through the waning and gradual dying out of the ancient primeval wisdom. It is indeed so—although this may seem paradoxical to a modern man—that we can say: Once upon a time there was an old primeval wisdom. Man's moral power and moral wisdom were connected with primeval knowledge; this was contained in it as an integrant. The ancient primeval wisdom then lost its power, it could no longer be the bearer of a moral impulse

This moral impulse had, as it were, to be taken under the wing of the Mystery of Golgotha. And for the civilisation of the Occident, the further continuation was the Christ Impulse which has arisen from the Mystery of Golgotha containing that which had remained as a kind of moral extract from the ancient primeval wisdom.

It is very strange to follow, for instance, that which Occidental civilisation contains in the form of true science, true wisdom, up to the 8th or 9th century after Christ. Try to read the description of Occidental wisdom up to the 8th and 9th century, as contained in my book, Riddles of Philosophy, and you will see that, after all, this course of development contains nothing of what may be designated as knowledge, in our modern meaning. For this arises towards the middle of the 15th century, at the time of Galilei. Until that time, knowledge has really been handed down traditionally from the primeval wisdom of the past. It is no longer a wisdom gained through inner intuition, no longer a primeval wisdom experienced inwardly, but an external wisdom handed down traditionally. I have often told you the story of Galilei, the story which is not an anecdote, namely, how Galilei had to make a great effort in order to convince a friend of the truth of his statements. Like all the other people of the Middle Ages who pursued wisdom, this friend was accustomed to accept what was contained in the books of Aristotle, or in the other traditional works. Everything which was taught at that time was traditional. That which was contained in the books of Aristotle was handed down traditionally. And the learned friend of Galilei agreed with Aristotle that the nerves go out from the heart. Galilei endeavoured to explain to him that according to the knowledge he had gained by studying a corpse, he was obliged to say something else: namely, that in the human being the nerves go out from the head, or the brain. This Aristotelian thinker could not believe it. Galilei then led him to the corpse, showed him that the nerves in fact go out from the brain and not from the heart, and felt sure that his friend would now have to believe what he saw with his own eyes. But his friend said: “Indeed, this appears to be true; I can see with my own eyes that the nerves proceed from the brain. But Aristotle says the opposite, namely that the nerves proceed from the heart. If I have to choose between the evidence of the senses in Nature and Aristotle's statements, I prefer to believe in Aristotle, and not in Nature!” This is not an anecdote, but a true occurrence. After all, in our time we simply experience the same thing, only the other way round.

You see, at that time all knowledge was traditional. A new knowledge only began with the time of Galilei, Copernicus, and so forth. But throughout these centuries the moral impulse was borne by the Christian impulse. It was essentially connected with the religious element. This was not the case in pagan times. The pagans realised that when they obtained cosmic wisdom, they obtained at the same time a moral impulse.

A new impulse arose towards the middle of the 15th century, an impulse which completely severed the connection with everything that existed in the form of ancient wisdom, even though this merely existed traditionally. It is very interesting to see the passion with which those who brought to the surface this new science—for instance, Giordano Bruno—abuse everything which existed in the form of old traditional wisdom. Bruno almost begins to rave when he rails against the recollections of ancient wisdom. Something entirely new arises. In fact, we shall be far from understanding human evolution if we are unable to look upon this new element which thus arises, as a beginning.

We may say (a drawing is made on the blackboard): If we indicate, here, the Mystery of Golgotha ... the moral impulse will continue from there, but what was that which the Mystery of Golgotha carried from an older into a more recent time? What was it, in reality, while it was being borne in that direction? It was an end. The more we progress, the more the ancient wisdom disappears, even in its traditional form. We may say that it continues to drip like water, in the form of traditional knowledge; but a new element, a beginning, arises with the 15th century.

Indeed, we have not advanced very far in this new direction. The few centuries which have elapsed since the middle of the 15th century have brought us some natural science, but we have not progressed far since that beginning.

What is this new wisdom? You see, it is a wisdom which, to begin with, in the form in which it has appeared, has this peculiarity: Contrary to the ancient pagan wisdom, it does not contain a moral impulse. You may study as much as possible of this new wisdom, of this Galilei wisdom—mineralogy, geology, physics, chemistry, biology, etc. etc.,—but you will never be able to draw a moral impulse out of this knowledge of Nature.

If modern people think that they can establish sociology upon the foundation of natural sciences, this is a tremendous illusion. For it is impossible to squeeze out of natural science, such as it exists to-day, that kind of knowledge which can be an ideal for human actions. For natural science is altogether in an elementary stage, and we can only hope that by developing more and more, it will again come to the point of containing, as natural science, moral impulses.

If the knowledge of Nature were to continue only in accordance with its own form, it would not be able to produce moral impulses out of its own nature. A new super-sensible knowledge will have to develop by the side of this knowledge of Nature. This super-sensible knowledge will then contain once more the rays of a moral will. And when the beginning which was made towards the middle of the 15th century will have reached its end at the conclusion of the evolution of the earth, then super-sensible knowledge will flow together with the knowledge of the senses, and a unity will arise out of this.

When the old pagan sage, or the follower of pagan wisdom received pagan wisdom from his initiate in the Mysteries, he received at one and the same time a knowledge of Nature, a cosmic knowledge, an anthropogenesis and a moral science, and this was simultaneously a moral impulse. All this was one.

To-day it is necessary to admit that we obtain on the one hand, a knowledge of Nature, and on the other hand, super-sensible knowledge. This knowledge of Nature is, as such, devoid of moral impulses. Moral impulses must be gained through a super-sensible knowledge. Since the social impulses must, after all, be moral impulses, no true social knowledge, and not even a sum of social impulses can be imagined, unless man rises to super-sensible knowledge.

It is important that modern man should realise that he must strike out a new course in regard to social science; he must tread a different path than that of natural science. But I am at the same time obliged to draw your attention to a strange paradox:—I have often explained to you here that the deepest truths of the science of initiation appear strange to the ordinary every-day consciousness, may even appear crazy to an extreme materialist, but in our time it is necessary to grow acquainted with this wisdom which appears so paradoxical to-day. For in our time many things which appear foolish to men are wisdom before God. It would be a good thing if this bible passage were to be considered a little by those who brush aside Anthroposophy with a supercilious smile, or who criticize it in a vile way. They should consider that what they look upon as foolishness may be “wisdom before the Gods”. It would be a very good thing if several people—and by “several” I mean many—particularly those who go to church with their prayer book and revile Anthroposophy, were to insist less upon their proud faith and look more closely into that which is really contained in the Christian faith. In our time it is necessary to become acquainted with several things which appear paradoxical. You see, two things are possible to-day. Someone may become acquainted with the natural science of to-day (I shall now characterize these two things rather sharply), he may, for instance, take up the facts supplied by the science of chemistry, physics, biology, etc. He may study diligently and eagerly the Theory of Evolution which has arisen from the so-called Darwinism. If he studies all this he may become a materialist, as far as his world conception based on knowledge is concerned. Indeed, he will become a materialist; this cannot be denied. Since men, as it were, so quickly arrive at an opinion, they become materialists if they give themselves up wholly to the external knowledge of Nature, according to the intentions of some of their contemporaries. But it is also possible to do something else. In addition to that which physics, chemistry, mineralogy, botany, geology, biology, offer, in addition to that which these sciences teach, we may also direct our attention to what we do in the physical laboratory, to our behaviour during an experiment; we may watch carefully how we behave in the chemical laboratory and what we do there; we may watch the way in which we investigate plants, animals, and their evolution.

Goethe's knowledge of Nature is chiefly based upon the fact that he has deeply studied the way in which others have come to their knowledge. The greatness of Goethe depends upon this very fact, namely, that he has deeply occupied himself with the way in which others have attained to their knowledge. And it is very, very significant to penetrate really into the essence and spirit of an essay by Goethe, such as “The Experiment as Mediator between Object and Subject”. Here we may see how Goethe carefully follows the way in which phenomena of Nature are handled. What we may call the method of investigation, this is something which he has studied with the greatest attention. If you read my Introduction to Goethe's Natural-Scientific Writings you will find what great results Goethe has reached by thus pursuing the natural-scientific method.

In a certain way, that which Goethe has done can be developed further for the achievements of the 19th century and up to the 20th century ... but Goethe was no longer able to do this.

I therefore state: Two things are possible. Let us keep to this, to begin with. We remain by the results which natural science supplies, or else we investigate the attitude needed in order to arrive at these natural scientific results. Let us keep to what we have said in regard to the knowledge of Nature; let us now observe the human striving after knowledge from another standpoint.

You know that beside natural science there is also a spiritual knowledge; in the form of Anthroposophy, the knowledge of man, we may pursue cosmology, anthropology, etc., in such a way that they lead to the kind of results described, for instance, in my Occult Science. There, we may find positive knowledge pointing to the spiritual world. Just as we obtain positive knowledge in natural science, in mineralogy, geology, etc., so we have, here, a positive knowledge referring to the spiritual world. In our anthroposophical movement it was particularly important for me to spread also this kind of positive knowledge concerning the spiritual world in the various books which I have written. Now we may also tackle things in such a way that we observe chiefly the way in which these things are done, and do not merely aim at obtaining knowledge. We observe how a person describes something, how he rises from external observation to inner observation; how he arrives to a higher spiritual conception, not through scientific investigations in the laboratory, in the clinic, in the astronomical observatory, but through his inner soul-development, along a mystical path. This would be parallel to the observation of the natural-scientific method, of the handling, of the way in which things are done. Also here we have this twofold element: to watch the results, and to watch the way in which our soul comes to these results.

Let us take hypothetically something which may seem rather paradoxical. Let us suppose that someone were to pursue the natural-scientific methods, like Goethe: he will certainly not become a materialist, but will undoubtedly accept a spiritual world-conception. An infallible way of overcoming materialism in our modern time is to have in insight into the natural-scientific methods of investigation. In the natural-scientific sphere, men become materialists only because they do not observe, because they insufficiently observe the way in which they carry on their investigations. They are satisfied with results, with what the clinic, the laboratory, the observatory supply. They do not progress as far as Goetheanism, i.e. the observation of their manner of research; for those who allow themselves to be influenced by the natural-scientific manner of contemplating the world and of handling things in order to reach knowledge, will at least become idealists, and probably spiritualists, if they only proceed far enough.

If we now try to avoid reaching the positive results of spiritual science, if we find it boring to enter into the details of spiritual science, and only like to hear again and again how man's soul becomes mystical, if we concentrate our chief attention upon the methods leading to the spiritual sphere, this will be the greatest temptation for really becoming materialists. The greatest temptation for becoming materialists is to ignore the concrete results of spiritual science and to emphasize continually the importance of mystical research, mystical soul-concentration, and the methods of entering the spiritual world.

You see this is a paradox. Those who observe natural science, natural research, become spiritualists; those who disdain to reach a real spiritual knowledge and who always speak of mysticism and of how spiritual knowledge is gained, are exposed to the great temptation of becoming more than ever materialistic. This should be known to-day. We cannot do without the knowledge of such things.

To-day we have monistic societies. Those who give themselves the air of leaders in these monistic societies spread a very superficial world-conception. They condense the external materialistic results of natural science to a superficial world-conception. This is so easy for modern men who do not wish to make a great effort, who prefer to go to the “movies” rather than to other places, and consequently prefer to accept a kind of cinema-science—for materialism is nothing else—they prefer this to something which must be worked out inwardly. These leaders of monistic societies therefore supply a superficial materialism. Undoubtedly they are, at least for a time, temporarily noxious creatures, for they spread errors. It is not good if they flourish, for of course they turn the heads of people in a materialistic way. Nevertheless they are the less dangerous elements, for to begin with they are generally honest people, but this honesty does not protect them against this spreading of errors; however, they are for the most part frankly honest and their errors will be overcome. They will only have a temporary significance.

But there are other people who systematically, knowingly, refuse to lead man towards the concrete positive results of spiritual-science. Indeed, they nourish the aversion which exists to-day through a certain love of ease, the aversion of penetrating into the positive concrete results of spiritual science. You know that the things described in my Occult Science must be studied several years if we wish to understand them, they are not comfortable for a modern man, who may indeed send his son to the university, if he is to become a chemical scientist; nevertheless, if he is to recognize and grasp heaven and earth in a spiritual way, he expects him to do this in a twinkle, at least in one evening, and from every lecture on the super-sensible worlds he expects to have the whole sum of cosmic wisdom. Concrete results of a positive spiritual research are uncomfortable for most men, and this aversion is made use of by certain personalities of the present time who persuade men that they do not need these things, that it is not necessary to pursue the positive concrete details of spiritual facts. “What is this talk of the higher hierarchies which must first be known? What is this talk of Saturn, Sun, Moon, Earth, Jupiter, Venus, Vulcan etc.? All this is unnecessary.” They will tell you: “If you concentrate deeply, if your soul becomes quite mystical, you shall reach the God within you”. They will tell you these things, give general indications on the connection of the material and the super-sensible world. They nourish man's aversion to penetrate into the concrete spiritual world. Why do they do this? Because apparently, apparently they wish to spread a spiritual mentality, but in reality they aim at something else: Along this path, more than ever, they seek to produce materialism. For this reason the leaders of the monistic societies are less harmful. But the others who so often spread mysticism to-day, and who always speak of all kinds of mystical things, they are those who truly foster materialism, who foster it in a most refined way. They put into the heads of men that one or the other way leads into the spiritual world, and they avoid speaking about it concretely. They chiefly speak in general phrases and if they remain victorious they will undoubtedly succeed in making the third generation entirely materialistic. To-day, the more certain and also more refined way leading into materialism is to transmit mysticism traditionally, a mysticism which despises to penetrate into positive spiritual-scientific results. Many things which appear to form part of the spiritual literature of to-day foster materialism far more strongly than, for instance, the books of Ernst Häckel.

You see, these things are uncomfortable to hear, because in setting them before men we strongly appeal to their power of discernment, but men do not wish to listen to this appeal to their power of discernment. They are much more satisfied if every kind of mystical nonsense stimulates an inner lust of the soul. This is why there are so many opponents, particularly of those efforts which to-day honestly pursue spiritual life by disdaining to approach men with a shallow mysticism of a general nature. True spiritual science arouses opposition. In the present time there are numerous people and communities who do not in any way wish that a true spiritual regeneration and elevation should take hold of humanity, and who make use of the fact that materialism is undoubtedly festered if they speak to men of mysticism in general terms. They make use of this fact. For this reason they wage war to the knife where they encounter honest paths which are meant to lead into spiritual science.

I have thus characterized an extensive literature which exists to-day. In reality everyone who takes up a mystical book, no matter of what kind, should appeal strongly to his own judgment. This is strictly necessary. For this reason we should not be led astray by the fact that the many pseudo-mystical scribbles of our present time seem to be so easily accessible. Of course, people will easily understand us if we tell them, for instance: “You only need to penetrate deeply into your inner being and God will be within you; your God whom you only find by treading your own path; no one can show you this path because every other man speaks of another God”, or similar stuff. To-day you will find this in many books, and it is described in a most tempting and misleading manner.

I would like you to take to heart these things very deeply. For that which is to be reached through our anthroposophical movement can only be reached through the fact that you are at least a small number of people who strive to cultivate the characterized power of discernment; it would be fatal for humanity if no effort were made to develop this power of discernment. To-day we must try to stand firmly on our feet, if we do not wish to lose our foothold in the midst of the confusion and chaos of the present. We may often ask to-day after the cause of so much confusion in humanity. But we can almost touch these causes. We may find them in insignificant facts, but we must be able to judge these little facts on the right way.

It is uncomfortable to see this immediately, in the many forms in which it exists on all sides. Many grotesque paradoxes can be found not only in rather loathsome places, but also in the modern life of humanity. They undoubtedly exist also in the modern life of humanity. And it is necessary to-day to strive to obtain a clear understanding, an understanding as sharp as a blade, if we wish to gain a firm foothold. This is the essential thing.

You will have seen that the soul experiences of those who appear in The Souls' Awakening take place on the boundary between the physical sense world and the super-sensible spiritual worlds. It is of great significance to the science of the spirit to seize this border region with the inner eye, for it is only natural that at first everything of the super-sensible world that the human soul can experience is an unknown territory from the viewpoint of our faculties and soul experiences in the physical sense world.

When a person has become familiar with the spiritual world by means of the various methods we have apprehended, that is, when the soul has learned to observe, explore and perceive outside the physical body, then such existence and perception in the spiritual world makes it necessary for the soul to develop quite special capacities, special strengths. When during its earth existence the soul is striving towards clairvoyant consciousness, whether already clairvoyant or wishing to become so, it should of course be able to stay outside the body in the spiritual world and then as an earth being come back again into the physical body, living as a human earth person, a normal sense-being within the sense world.

We may therefore say that the soul in becoming clairvoyant must be able to move in the spiritual world according to its laws, and it must ever and again be able to step back over the threshold into the physical sense world, behaving here—to put it in plain terms—correctly and sensibly. Since the faculties of the soul for the spiritual world must be and are different from those the soul employs for the physical senses and the rest of the physical body, the soul has definitely to acquire mobility, if it wants to become clairvoyant. Then it can perceive and take in the spiritual world with the necessary faculties for it, returning across the border and now experiencing the sense world with what is necessary here. The gaining of this adaptability, the capacity of transformation, is never easy. If we are to estimate correctly, however, the differences between the spiritual and physical sense world, we must keep clearly within our mind's eye precisely this border region between the two worlds and the threshold itself over which the soul must pass when it wants to leave one world and enter the other. We shall see in the course of these lectures how injurious it can be for the soul in many different ways to carry the habits of one world into the other, when—in one or the other direction—the threshold has to be crossed.

Our conduct when passing over this threshold is made especially difficult by the presence of beings within the world order that play a certain role in the happenings shown in The Souls' Awakening and the other dramas: the luciferic and the ahrimanic beings. Indeed, in order to gain the right relationship to the transition between one and the other world that we've been speaking about, it is necessary to know how to conduct ourselves in the right way towards both kinds of beings, the luciferic and the ahrimanic. Now it would certainly be convenient—and this solution is chosen at least theoretically by very many souls—to say: “Yes, indeed, Ahriman seems to be a dangerous fellow. If he has such an influence on the world and on human affairs, the simplest thing to do is to banish from the human soul all the impulses that come from him.” This might seem to be the most convenient solution, but to the spiritual world it would be about as sensible as if someone, in order to restore the balance to a pair of scales, were to take off whatever was weighing down the lower one. These beings we call Ahriman and Lucifer are right here in the world, they have their task in the universal order, and one cannot sweep them away. Besides, it is not a question of annihilating them, but—as in the case of the weights on both sides of the scales—the ahrimanic and luciferic forces must balance each other in their influence on human beings and on other beings. We do not bring about the true activity of any of the various forces by removing it but by placing ourselves in the right relationship to it. We have the wrong attitude to these luciferic and ahrimanic beings if we simply say that they are bad and harmful. Although these powers rebel in a certain sense against the general order of the universe—which had already been designed before they entered it—this does not stem from the fact that they invariably have to exercise a harmful activity, but rather that—like the others whom we have met as lawful members of the higher worlds—they have a definite sphere of activity in the sum total of the universe. Their opposition to and rebellion against the cosmic order consists in their going beyond their own sphere; they exert beyond this sphere the forces they should employ only within their lawful domain. From this standpoint let us consider Ahriman or the ahrimanic beings.

We can best characterize Ahriman by saying: he is the Lord of Death, far and wide the ruler of all the powers that have to bring about in the physical sense world what this world has to have, the annihilation and death of its entities. Death in the sense world is a necessary part of its organization, for otherwise the beings in it would accumulate to excess, if destruction of life were not at hand. The task of regulating this in a lawful way fell to Ahriman from the spiritual world; he is the ruler of the ordering of death. His sovereign domain is the mineral world, a world that is utterly dead. One can say that death is poured out over the whole of the mineral world. Furthermore, because our earth world is constituted as it is, the mineral world and its laws pervade all the other kingdoms of nature. Plants, animals, human beings—all are permeated, as far as they belong to the earth, by the mineral; they absorb the mineral substances and, with them, all the forces and laws of the mineral kingdom; they are subject to these laws insofar as they are part of the being of the earth. Therefore whatever belongs justifiably to death extends also into the higher regions of the lawful rule of Ahriman. In what surrounds us as external nature, Ahriman is the rightful Lord of Death and should not be regarded as an evil power but as one whose influence in the general world order is fully legitimate. We will enter into a right relationship with the sense world only when we bring a creditable interest to bear upon it, when our interest in the sense world is so reasonable that we can see everything in it without greedily demanding eternal life for any of its physical forms; on the contrary, that we can do without them when they meet their natural death. To be able to rejoice rightly in the things of the sense world but not to be so dependent on them as to contradict the laws of death and decay—this is the right relationship of the human being to the sense world. To bring about this right relationship to growth and decay, the human being has the impulses of Ahriman within himself; for this reason they pulsate in him.

Ahriman, however, can overstep his bounds. In the first place, he can so far overdo that he sets to work on human thinking. A man who does not see into the spiritual world and has no understanding of it will not believe that Ahriman can put his fingers upon human thinking in a very real way—nevertheless, he does! Insofar as human thinking lives in the sense world, it is bound to the brain, which according to universal law is subject to decay. Ahriman has to regulate the passage of the human brain towards decay, but when he oversteps his territory, he develops the tendency to loosen this human thinking from its mortal instrument, the brain, in order to make it independent. He tries to detach the physical thinking directed to the sense world from the physical brain, into whose current of decay this thinking should merge when the human being passes through the gate of death. Ahriman has the tendency, when he admits man as a physical being into the stream of death, to snatch his thinking out of the current of decay. Throughout a man's whole life Ahriman is always fastening his claws into this thinking activity and working on the human being so that his thinking will tear itself away from destruction. Because Ahriman is active in this way in human thinking and because men bound to the sense world naturally perceive only the effects of the spiritual beings, those who are thus in the clutches of Ahriman feel the impulse to wrench their thinking out of its place in the great cosmic order. The result is the materialistic frame of mind; this is the reason men want to apply their thinking only to the sense world, and the people who refuse to believe in a spiritual world are the ones particularly obsessed by Ahriman: it is he who enters their thinking and prevails upon its remaining in the sense world. First of all, if a person has not become a practical occultist, the result for his inner attitude will be that he becomes a rank, coarse-grained materialist who wants to know nothing about spiritual matters. It is Ahriman who has enticed him into this, only he doesn't notice it. For Ahriman, however, the process is the following: when he succeeds in severing the physical thinking from its brain-bound foundation, he throws shadows and phantoms out into the world which swarm then through the physical world; with these, Ahriman is continually trying to establish a special ahrimanic kingdom.

Unremittingly he lies in wait when man's thinking is about to pass into the stream wherein man himself will journey through the gate of death; there Ahriman lurks, on the watch to snatch away and hold back as much of this thinking as possible, and to form out of it, to tear from its mother-soil, shadows and phantoms that will people the physical world. Occultly observed, these phantoms drift around in the physical world disturbing the universal order; they are creations that Ahriman brings about in the way just described. We will have the right feeling for Ahriman when we appreciate his lawful impulses, for when he lets them enter our souls, we have a correct relationship to the sense world. However, we must be watchful that he does not tempt us in the way I have indicated. Certainly the policy some people choose is more convenient when they say: “Very well, we shall push every ahrimanic impulse out of our souls.” But nothing will be accomplished with this dislodgment except that the other side of the scales will be brought right down—and whoever through mistaken theories succeeds in driving ahrimanic impulses out of his soul falls prey to those of Lucifer.

This shows itself particularly when people, shying away from the right relationship to the ahrimanic powers, despise the sense world and root out their joy in it. Then they reject their former good relationship and in order not to become attached to it, they crush all their interest in the physical world. With this comes a false asceticism, which in its turn offers the most powerful handle to the entrance of the unlawful luciferic impulses. The history of asceticism could very well be written by presenting it as a continuous allurement of Lucifer. In false asceticism a person exposes himself to this kind of seduction because instead of rightly balancing the scales, using thus the polarity of forces, he does away with one side altogether.

However, when the human being makes a correct estimate of the physical sense world, Ahriman is fully justified. The mineral world is his very own kingdom, the kingdom over which death is poured out continuously. In the higher kingdoms of nature Ahriman is the regulator of death insofar as he affects the course of events and the creatures lawfully. What we can trace as super-sensible in the external world, we call for certain reasons spiritual; what is more active inwardly within the human being, we assign to the soul. Ahriman is a more spiritual being; Lucifer is more soul nature. Ahriman can be called the lord of all that takes place in external nature; Lucifer penetrates with his impulses into the inner nature of man.

Now there is also a lawful task belonging to Lucifer, one quite in accordance with the universal cosmic order. In a certain way Lucifer's task is to tear man and everything in the world pertaining to the soul away from living and being absorbed in the physical-sensory alone. If there were no luciferic power in the world, we would dream along in the perceptions streaming into us from the external world and in what comes to us from that world through the intellect. That would be a kind of dreaming away of human soul existence within the sense world. There are indeed impulses which will not tear our souls away from the sense world as long as they are bound temporarily to it but which raise our souls to a different sort of living, feeling and rejoicing from the kind the sense world can offer. We need merely to think of what humanity has been seeking as artistic development. Wherever the human being creates something through his imagination and his soul life of feeling, no longer clinging dully to the sense world but rising above it, Lucifer is the power that tears him out of that world. A large part of what is uplifting and liberating in the artistic development of mankind is inspired by Lucifer. We can designate something else as the inspiration of Lucifer: the human being has the chance through luciferic powers to free his thinking from a mere photograph-like copying of the sense world; he can raise himself above this in freedom, which he does, for instance, in his philosophy. From this point of view, all philosophizing is the inspiration of Lucifer. One could even write a history of the philosophical development of mankind, insofar as this is not pure positivism—that is, does not keep to the external materialistic—and could say: the history of the development of philosophy is a continual testimony to the inspiration of Lucifer. All creative work, in fact, that rises above the sense world we owe to Lucifer's rightful activities and powers.

However, Lucifer too can overstep his domain, and the rebellion of the luciferic beings against the cosmic order is due to their overstepping their place. Lucifer has the tendency continually to do this by contaminating the feeling life of the soul. Ahriman has more to do with our thinking, Lucifer with the feelings, with the life of the emotions, passions, impulses and desires. Lucifer is lord over everything of soul feeling in the physical sense world. He has the tendency to detach and separate this feeling life of the soul from the physical world, to spiritualize it, and to set up, one can say, on a specially isolated island of spiritual existence a luciferic kingdom composed of all the soul feeling he can seize and carry off from the sense world. Whereas Ahriman wants to hold back thinking to the physical sense world and make shadows and phantoms of it, visible to elementary clairvoyance as floating, wafting shadows, Lucifer does the opposite: he takes what is soul feeling in the physical sense world, tears it out and puts it in a special luciferic kingdom set up as an isolated kingdom similar to his own nature, in opposition to the general cosmic order.

We can form an idea about how Lucifer can get at human beings in this way by considering with all our heart and soul a phenomenon in human life that we will speak about later in more detail: the phenomenon of love in the widest sense of the word, the foundation of a true moral life in the world order of humanity. Concerning love in its widest sense, the following has to be said: when love appears in the physical sense world and has its effect on human life, it is absolutely protected from every unlawful luciferic attack if the love is for another person and for that other person's own sake. When we are met by some other human being or by one belonging to another kingdom of nature in the physical world, that being meets us with certain qualities. If we are freely receptive to these qualities, if we are capable of being moved by them, they then command our love and we cannot help loving that other being. We are moved by the other being to love it.

Where the cause of love lies not in the one who loves but in the object of love, this form and kind of love in the sense world is absolute proof against every luciferic influence. But now if you observe human life, you will soon see that another kind of love is playing its part, in which a person loves because he himself has certain qualities that feel satisfied, or charmed, or delighted, when he can love this or that other being. Here he loves for his own sake; he loves because his disposition is thus or so, and this particular disposition finds its satisfaction in loving someone else.

This love, which one can call egoistic love, must also exist. It really has to be present in mankind. Everything we can love in the spiritual world, all the spiritual facts, everything that love can cause to live in us as a longing for and an impulse upwards into the spiritual world, to comprehend the beings of the spiritual world, to perceive the spiritual world: all this springs naturally from a sentient love for that world. This love for the spiritual, however, must—not may but must—come about necessarily for our own sake. We are beings whose roots are in the spiritual world. It is our duty to make ourselves as perfect as we can. For our own sake we must love the spiritual world in order to draw as many forces as possible out of it into our own being. In spiritual love a personal, individual element—we can call it egoistic—is fully justified, for it detaches man from the sense world; it leads him upwards into the spiritual world; it leads him on to fulfill the necessary duty of continually bringing himself further and further towards perfection.

Now Lucifer has the tendency to interchange the two worlds with each other. In human love whenever a person loves in the physical sense world for himself with a trace of egoism, it occurs because Lucifer wants to make physical love similar to spiritual love. He can then root it out of the physical sense world and lead it into his own special kingdom. This means that all love that can be called egoistic and is not there for the sake of the beloved but for the sake of the one who loves, is exposed to Lucifer's impulses.

If we consider what has been said, we will see that in this modern materialistic culture there is every reason to point out these luciferic allurements in regard to love, for a great part of our present-day outlook and literature, especially that of medicine, is permeated by the luciferic conception of love. We would have to touch on a rather offensive subject if we were to treat this in greater detail. The luciferic element in love is actually cherished by a large section of our medical science; men are told again and again—for it is the male world especially pandered to in this—that they must cultivate a certain sphere of love as necessary for their health, that is, necessary for their own sake. A great deal of advice is given in this direction and certain experiences in love recommended that do not spring from a love for the other being but because they are presumed indispensable in the life of the male. Such arguments—even when they are clothed in the robes of science—are nothing but inspirations of the luciferic element in the world; a large portion of science is penetrated simply by luciferic points of view. Lucifer finds the best recruits for his kingdom among those who allow such advice to be given to them and who believe that it is imperative for the well-being of their person. It is absolutely necessary for us to know such things. Those words I quoted yesterday must be emphasized again and again: People never notice the devil, either in luciferic or ahrimanic form, even when he has them by the collar! People do not see that the materialistic scientist who gives the advice just mentioned is under the yoke of Lucifer. They deny Lucifer because they deny all the spiritual worlds.

We see therefore that what is great and sublime on the one hand, what carries and uplifts the evolution of humanity depends on Lucifer. Mankind must understand how to keep the impulses that come from him in their rightful place. Wherever Lucifer makes his appearance as the guardian of beauty and glory, as the patron of artistic impulses, there arises in humanity from his activity great and sublime power. But there is also a shadow-side to Lucifer's activity. He tries everywhere to tear the emotional side of the soul away from the sense organism and make it independent, permeated with egoism and egotism. Thus there enters into the emotional soul nature the element of self-will and other such tendencies. A person can then form for himself in freewheeling activity—with a generous hand, one can say—all sorts of ideas about the universe. How many people indulge in philosophizing, shake it out of their sleeves, without troubling themselves in the least as to whether their speculations are in accord with the general course of universal order! These eccentric philosophers are actually found in great numbers all over the world. In love with their own ideas, they fail to counterbalance the luciferic element with the ahrimanic one that always asks whether everything man acquires by his thinking in the physical sense world actually squares with the laws of the physical world. So we see these people running around with their opinions, which are just a lot of fanatic enthusiasms incompatible with the cosmic order. It is from the shadow side of the luciferic impulse that all these fanatic enthusiasms, the egoistic and confused opinions, the eccentric ideas and false, extravagant idealism arise. Most significantly, however, it is on the borderland or threshold between the sensible and the super-sensible that these luciferic and ahrimanic elements confront us, when we look with the eyes of clairvoyant consciousness.

When the human soul takes on the task of making itself capable of looking into the spiritual world and gaining insight there, it takes on itself, more than anything else, a task that otherwise is carried out by the subconscious guidance of soul life. Nature and its laws take care that in everyday life man does not often transfer the customs and regulations of one kingdom into another; the natural order would be entirely out of control if the separate worlds were to get mixed up together. We emphasized a moment ago that love for the spiritual world must evolve in such a way that the human being develops in himself first and foremost an all-pervasive inner strength, as well as a craving for self-improvement. He has to fix his eye on himself when he nurtures his love for the spiritual world. If, however, he transfers to the senses the kind of ardour that can guide him in the spiritual world to what is most sublime, it will lead him into what is most detestable. There are people who have in their outward physical experience and in their everyday activities no special interest in the spiritual world. It is said such people today are not uncommon. But nature does not permit us to use the ostrich strategy in her affairs. The ostrich strategy, as you know, consists in the bird sticking his head in the sand and believing that the things he doesn't see are not there. Materialistic minds believe that the spiritual world is not there; they do not see it. They are true ostriches.

Nevertheless, in the depths of their souls, the craving for the spiritual world does not cease to exist merely because they deaden themselves and deny its reality. It is actually there. In every human soul, however materialistic, the desire and love for the spiritual world is alive, but people who deaden their soul nature are unconscious of the craving.

There is a law that something repressed and deadened at one point will break out at another. The consequence of the repression of the egoistic impulse towards the spiritual world is that it thrusts itself into the sensual desires. The kind of love due the spiritual world hurls itself away from there into the sensual impulses, passions and desires, and these impulses become perverse. The perversity of the sensual impulses and their repellent abnormalities are the mirror image of what could be noble virtues in the spiritual world, were human beings to use for the spiritual world all the forces poured out into the physical world. We must consider this seriously: what finds expression in the sense world as loathsome impulses could—if they were used in the spiritual world—accomplish there something of the most sublime character. This is immensely significant.

You see how in this regard the sublime is changed into the horrible when the boundary between the physical sense world and the super-sensible world is not observed or valued in the right way. Clairvoyant consciousness should develop so that the clairvoyant soul can live in the super-sensible worlds according to the laws of those worlds; then it must be able to return to its life in the body without letting itself be led astray in the everyday physical sense world by the laws of the super-sensible worlds.

Suppose a soul could not do this—then the following would take place. We shall see that the soul in passing the boundary region between one world and the other learns most of all how to conduct itself in the right way through meeting the Guardian of the Threshold. But suppose a soul, having made itself clairvoyant (this can very well happen) had through various circumstances become clairvoyant without rightfully meeting with the Guardian of the Threshold. Such a soul could see into the super-sensible worlds clairvoyantly and have perceptions there, but it would return then to the physical sense world after entering wrongfully the spiritual world and merely nibbling at dainties there. Such eaters of sweet things in the spiritual world are numerous and it can truly be said that nibbling there is far more serious than it is in the sense world. After nibbling at the spiritual world, it happens very often that a person takes back into the sense world what he has experienced, but the experience shrinks and condenses. A clairvoyant of this kind, one who does not conduct himself according to the laws of the universal order, returns to the physical sense world bringing with him the condensed pictures and impressions of the super-sensible worlds. He will no longer merely look out and ponder the physical world but while he lives within his physical body he will have before him the after-effects of the spiritual world in pictures quite similar to those of sense except that they have no relation to reality, are only illusions, hallucinations, dream pictures.

A person who is able to look in the right way into the spiritual world will never again confuse reality and the fantastic. In this the philosophy of Schopenhauer, in so far as it is erroneous, refutes itself. In the case of its greatest mistake—that our whole environment is nothing but our mental picture—it refutes itself even in the sense world. If you press Schopenhauer's statement, it will show itself up as a fallacy, for you will be guided by life itself to distinguish between iron heated to 900 degrees that is actually perceptible and the imagined iron of 900 degrees that will cause no pain. Life itself reveals the difference between reality and fancy when one lives in the real world with the capacities belonging to it. Even Kant's statement by which he formulated his so-called proof of God, that is, that a hundred imagined dollars are just as valuable as a hundred real ones—that, too, will be contradicted by life. Certainly a hundred imagined dollars contain just as many pennies as a hundred real ones, but for all that there is a difference that comes strongly to the fore in real life. I would recommend anyone who considers Kant's statement to be correct to try to pay a hundred dollar debt with imagined currency; he will notice the difference at once.

If this is the case in the physical sense world when one really stands firmly in it and observes its laws, it is the same for the super-sensible worlds. If one only nibbles at the latter, one will have no protection against mistaking illusion for truth; when the pictures shrink and condense, one takes what should be merely picture for reality. The sweets, too, that such a person carries within himself out of the spiritual world are a special booty for Ahriman to pounce on. From what he can pull out of ordinary human thinking he gets only airy shadows, but—to put it plainly—he gets well padded shadows and plump phantoms when he presses out of human body-individualities (as well as he can) the false illusory pictures created by nibbling on the sly in the spiritual world. In this ahrimanic fashion the physical sense world is populated by spiritual shades and phantoms that offer serious resistance to the general cosmic order.

From all this, we see how the ahrimanic influence can encroach most strongly when it oversteps its boundaries and works against the general cosmic order; it turns to evil, especially in the perversion of its lawful activity.

There is no essential evil. Everything evil arises from this, something that is good in one direction is put to use in the world in another direction and thereby turned into evil. In a somewhat similar way the luciferic influence, the inducement to so much that is noble and sublime, may become dangerous, exceedingly dangerous, particularly to the soul that has become clairvoyant. This happens in just the opposite situation. We looked before at what happens when a soul nibbles at the spiritual world, that is, perceives something there, but then on returning to the physical sense world does not tell itself: “Here you may not use the same kind of thought pictures that are right for the spiritual world.” In this case the soul is exposed in the physical world to the influence of Ahriman. But the opposite can take place. The human soul can carry into the spiritual world what should belong only to the physical sense world, namely the kinds of perception, feeling, and passion that the soul must necessarily develop to a certain degree for the physical world. None of the emotions cultivated here, however, should be carried into the spiritual world if the soul is not to fall victim to the temptations and allurements of Lucifer to an unusual degree.

This is what was attempted to some extent in Scene Nine of The Souls' Awakening in presenting Maria's inmost soul attitude. It would be quite wrong for anyone to require in this scene something as dramatically tumultuous and exciting as what one likes to have in superficial physical drama. If Maria's inner nature were such that at the moment of receiving the memories of the devachanic world and of the Egyptian period, her soul had experienced disturbing passions, disturbing desires, it would have been hurtled back and forth by these waves of emotion. A soul that cannot receive the impulses of the spiritual world with inner calm, in absolute tranquillity, rising above all outward physical drama, will suffer in the spiritual world a fate that I can only render in the following picture: Imagine to yourselves a being made of rubber flying in all directions in a space enclosed on all sides, flying against a wall and thrown back from it, flying against another wall, thrown back again, flying back and forth like this in turbulent movement on the waves of the emotional life. This actually happens to a soul that carries into the spiritual world the kind of perception, feeling and passion belonging to the sense world. Something further happens. It is not pleasant to be thrown back and forth like a rubber ball as if one were in a cosmic prison. Therefore in such a case the soul that is clairvoyant follows chiefly the special policy of the ostrich; as a matter of fact, the soul stupefies itself in regard to this being thrown back and forth; it dulls its consciousness so that it is no longer aware of it. It therefore believes that it is not being thrown back and forth. Lucifer can then come all the closer, because the consciousness is dulled. He lures the soul out and leads it to his isolated kingdom. There the soul can receive its spiritual impressions but, received in this island kingdom, they are completely luciferic.

Because self-knowledge is hard to come by and the soul has the greatest difficulty in becoming clear about certain of its qualities, because, too, people are bent on getting as quickly as possible into the spiritual world, it is not at all to be wondered at that they say to themselves: I am already mature enough; I will of course be able to control my passions. As a matter of fact, it is more easily said than done. There are certain qualities that particularly challenge our control. Vanity, ambition, and similar things sit so deeply entrenched in human souls that it is not easy to admit to oneself: You are vain and ambitious! You want power! When we look into ourselves, we are usually deceived about just those emotions that are the very worst ones. To carry them into the spiritual world means that a person will most easily become the prey of Lucifer. And when he notices how he is thrown hither and thither, he does not willingly say: This comes from ambition or from vanity—but he looks for the way to deaden the soul. Then Lucifer carries him off into his kingdom. There, of course, a person may receive insights but these do not correspond to the cosmic order, which had already been designed before Lucifer began his meddling.⁸ They are spiritual insights of a thoroughly luciferic nature. He may receive the most extraordinary impressions and judge them to be absolute truths. He may tell people about all sorts of incarnations of this person or that, but these will simply be purely luciferic inspirations.

In order that the right relationship should come about at her “Awakening,” Maria had to be presented, at the moment when the spiritual world was to rush in on her with such vehemence, as a person who could well appear absurd to someone like one of our fine young theater critics. A dainty little modern critic might well say: “After finishing the Egyptian scene, there sat Maria as if she had just had breakfast, experiencing these things without a bit of lively drama.” And yet anything else would be untrue at this stage of her development. Only Maria's quiet calmness can represent the truth of her development, as the rays of spiritual light fall upon the scene. We see from this how much depends on the soul mood, mastering within itself all the emotions and passions that are significant only for the physical sense world, if the soul is to cross the threshold of the spiritual world in the right way; otherwise it will experience there the necessary consequence of what remains of sensual feeling. Ahriman is the more spiritual being; what he carries out in the way of unlawful activity, of the unlawful activity he can create, flows more or less into the general world of the senses. Lucifer is more a being of soul; he tries to draw emotional soul elements out of the sense world and embody them in his special luciferic kingdom, where for every human being—according to the egoism rooted in his nature—Lucifer wants to ensure the greatest possibility of segregated independence.

We see from this that when we want to form a judgment of such beings as Ahriman and Lucifer, it cannot be a question of simply calling them good or bad. Instead we have to understand what is the lawful activity, what is the right domain of these beings and where their unlawful activity, the overstepping of their limits, begins. For through the fact that they go beyond their limits, they entice human beings to an unlawful overstepping of the boundary into the other world, taking with them the faculties and laws of this world. The scenes of The Souls' Awakening deal particularly with what is experienced in passing back and forth across the boundary between the physical sense world and the super-sensible world. In this lecture today I wanted to make a beginning by describing some of the things that must be carefully watched in the borderland between the two worlds. Tomorrow we will go further into this.

• 8. See Rudolf Steiner, The Guardian of the Threshold, Scene 7. Contained in The Four Mystery Dramas.