The Rudolf Steiner Archive

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

IN PURSUANCE of the considerations I placed before you in the lectures of last week I should like today to prepare the ground for what I shall develop in detail tomorrow and the day after tomorrow. It will be a matter of calling back to your memory, in a way different from the one heretofore employed, of much that we shall need in order to pursue our present theme.

If we try to make clear to ourselves the way in which Earth evolution unfolded we can do so best by considering and arranging the various events in relation to the central point of Earth evolution; for through such an arrangement we arrive at a certain structure in man's own evolution. This central point, this center of gravity is, as you know, the Mystery of Golgotha through which the whole Earth evolution received its meaning, its true inner content.

If we go back in the evolution of occidental humanity which received the impulse of the Mystery of Golgotha from the orient, we must say: approximately in the fifth century before the occurrence of the Mystery of Golgotha there begins, out of Greek culture, a kind of preparation for this Mystery of Golgotha. This uniform trend is introduced through the figure of Socrates, finds its continuation in Greek culture in its entirety—also in art the same trend is discernible—it is continued by the mighty and outstanding personality of Plato and receives a more scholarly character, as it were, in Aristotle.

You know from various lectures I delivered before you that the Middle Ages, mainly in the time after St. Augustine, were especially bent on using the guidance that could be gained from the Aristotelian mode of thinking in order to comprehend what prepared the Mystery of Golgotha and what followed it. Greek thinking became of such great importance precisely for the Christian evolution of the occident up to the end of the Middle Ages through the fact that it was used for the comprehension of the real nature of the Mystery of Golgotha. It is well that we should realize what it was that took place in Greece during these last centuries prior to the event of the Mystery of Golgotha.

What took place in the thinking, feeling and willing of the Greek was the last echo of a primeval culture of mankind no longer appreciated today. Historical considerations can no longer see these things in their proper light, for our historical considerations do not reach back to those times in which a Mystery culture that extended over the civilized earth of that age permeated all human willing and feeling. We must go back into those millennia into which history does not reach, we must go back with the methods which you find indicated in my book, Occult Science, an Outline, (Anthroposophic Press, New York) in order to see what was the nature of this human primeval culture. It had its origin in the ancient Mysteries into which those human beings who were found to be objectively suited for direct initiation were admitted by great leading personalities. The knowledge which was thus imparted to those initiates in the Mysteries flowed, through them, out to other human beings. One cannot understand ancient culture in its entirety if one does not focus one's attention upon the maternal soil of the Mysteries. If one is willing to do so, this maternal soil of the Mysteries can be clearly discerned in the works of Aeschylos. It can be sensed in Plato's philosophy. But the revelations concerning the Divine which mankind received from the Mysteries have been lost historically. Only in the most primitive fashion are they still contained in that which has become historically demonstrable culture. We can best judge what has happened here if we make clear to ourselves what it is that has remained, in the post-Socratean age of Greek civilization, of the primeval Mystery culture in which Greek civilization was rooted. What has remained is a certain mode of thinking, a certain way of visualizing.

As you know, outer history relates how Socrates founded dialectics, how he was the great teacher of thinking, of that thinking which, later on, Aristotle developed in a more scientific way. But this Greek mode of thinking is only the last echo of the Mystery culture, for this culture of the Mysteries was rich in content. Spiritual facts which are the fundamental causes for our cosmic order were adopted into man's entire view of things. These sublime and mighty contents were gradually lost. But the way of thinking developed by the Mystery pupils has remained and has become historical, first, in Greek thinking, then, again, in Medieval thinking, in the thinking of the Christian theologians who acquired this Greek thinking in order to grasp with the thought forms, with the ideas and concepts which were a continuation of Greek thinking, that which has flowed into the world through the Mystery of Golgotha. Medieval philosophy, so-called scholasticism, is a confluence of the spiritual truths of the Mystery of Golgotha and Greek thinking. The elaboration, the thought-penetration of the Mystery of Golgotha has been carried out—if I may use the trivial expression—with the tool of Greek thinking, of Greek dialectics. Up to the Mystery of Golgotha, about four and one half centuries elapsed from the time when the content of the Mysteries was lost and the merely formal element, the mere thought element of the ancient Mysteries was retained. We may say, approximately, four and one half centuries. Thus we have to visualize the following: In a pre-historical age, the culture of the Mysteries extends over the civilized earth of that time. In the course of evolution only a distillate of it remains, namely, Greek dialectics, Greek thinking. Then the Mystery of Golgotha takes place. In the occident this is, at the outset, comprehended by means of this Greek dialectics. Anyone who wishes to familiarize himself with the science, let us say, even of the tenth, the eleventh, the twelfth, the thirteenth, the fourteenth century, which still comprises theology, must employ his thinking in a way that is quite different from the present-day natural-scientific mode of thought. Most human beings who today pass an opinion on scholasticism cannot do it justice because they only have a natural-scientific training, and scholasticism requires a training of thought that is different from modern natural-scientific training.

Now, my dear friends, today we live at a point of time in which again four and one half centuries have elapsed since this natural-scientific mode of thinking took hold of mankind. In the middle of the fourteenth century, human beings of the Occident begin to think in the way we find developed, already to the degree of brilliancy, in Galileo or in Giordana Bruno. This, then, is carried over into our age. Indeed, my dear friends, it is, seemingly, the same logic as that of the Greeks; yet, in reality, it is a completely different logic. It is a logic which is gradually derived from the nature processes in the way the Greek logic was derived from that which the Mystery pupils beheld in the Mysteries.

Let us now try to make clear to ourselves the difference that exists between the four and one half centuries prior to the event of the Mystery of Golgotha in the civilized world of that time, which was almost limited to Greece, and the four and one half centuries in which humanity was trained for natural-scientific thinking. It is easiest for me to describe this to you graphically. Visualize the culture of the Mysteries like a kind of mountain summit of human spiritual culture in very ancient times. This culture of the Mysteries—I shall proceed step by step—then becomes logic in Greece, up to the Mystery of Golgotha. This, then, finds its continuation in the Middle Ages through scholasticism.

During four and one half centuries prior to the Mystery of Golgotha we have the last ramification, the echo of the ancient Mystery culture. With the fifteenth century A.D. a new way of thinking begins which we might call thinking in the style of Galileo. The period of time that elapsed between this starting point and our present day is of the same length as that which elapsed between the appearance of the Greek way of thinking and the Mystery of Golgotha. But while the latter period is a final echo, an evening glow, as it were, the former is a prelude, something that has to be evolved, that has to be brought to a certain height. Greek culture stood at an end. We stand at a beginning.

We shall only gain a complete understanding of this placing, side by side, of an end and a beginning if we observe the evolution of mankind from a certain spiritual-scientific point of view.

I have repeatedly stated that it is not without reason that in the present age the attempt toward self-knowledge of mankind is made, the tools for which are offered by the anthroposophically-oriented spiritual science. For the large majority of mankind confronts a significant future possibility. In this connection it is important that we take seriously the fact that the evolving historical humanity is an organism that develops continuously. Just as in the case of the single organism we have puberty, and also later epochal transitions, so likewise, in human history, we have epochal transitions. Today, human beings still meet the doctrine of repeated earth lives with the objection that human beings do not remember their previous earth lives.

Anyone who, in a factual manner, conceives of the evolutionary history of mankind as of an organism, as I have just indicated, should not be surprised that human beings do not today, in their ordinary knowledge, remember their former earth lives. For I ask you: what does man remember in ordinary life? That which he first has thought. What he has not thought he cannot remember. Just think how many events of a day remain unobserved by you. You do not remember them because you did not think them in spite of their having taken place in your surroundings. You can only remember what you have thought.

Now, in the former centuries and millennia of mankind's evolution, human beings did not attain to any factual clarity about their own nature. To be sure, since the appearance of Greek thinking the “know thyself” exists like a longing, but this “know thyself” will only be fulfilled through real spiritual cognition. Only through the fact that human beings once employ one life in order to comprehend in thought their own self—and humanity has only become ripe for this in our age—is memory prepared for the next earth life. For we must first have thought about that which we are to remember later. Only those who, in earlier ages, through initiation (which need not have been acquired in the Mysteries) could look factually upon their own self are able in the present age to look back upon former earth lives. And there are not so few human beings who are able to do this. Nevertheless, the situation is such that man, also with respect to his purely bodily evolution, undergoes a transformation. These things cannot be observed externally in physiology, but they can be observed spiritual-scientifically. Mankind today does not have the same bodily constitution it had two thousand years ago, and in two thousand years from today it will again have a different constitution. I have talked to you about this subject repeatedly. Human beings live toward a time in the future in which their brains will be constructed in a way that is quite different from the way their brains are constructed today in an external sense. The brain will have the possibility of remembering former earth lives. But those who have not prepared themselves today through reflection upon their own self will sense this faculty—which will be theirs mechanically—merely as an inner nervousness, if I may use the current expression, as an inner deficiency. They will not find what they are lacking, because mankind in the meantime will have become ripe, in regard to its corporeality, to look back upon its previous earth lives, but if it has not prepared this retrospect, it cannot look back; it then will sense this faculty only as a deficiency. Therefore, proper knowledge of the present-day powers of transformation of mankind indicates by its very nature that human beings are brought to self-knowledge through the anthroposophically-oriented spiritual science. Now, it is possible, and today I shall only indicate this, it is possible to point out the nature of this special experience which will suggest to human beings to take into account previous earth lives.

Today we live in an age in which those shades of feeling which will become more and more prevalent are indicated only in a few human beings; but still, they are indicated in these few human beings. Not much attention is paid to them yet. I shall describe them to you in the way in which they will appear eventually. Human beings will be born into the world and they will say to themselves: by living with other human beings, I am educated, consciously or unconsciously, for a certain way of thinking. Thoughts arise in me. I am born into and educated for a certain way of thinking, of visualizing. But at the same time I look at my outer surroundings: my thinking, my visualizing does not properly fit this outer surrounding world.—this shade of feeling is already present today in individual human beings. They must think in a direction which makes it appear to them as if outer nature said something entirely different, as if outer nature demanded something completely different from them. Whenever such human beings appeared that have felt this discrepancy between what they must think and what external nature says, they have been ridiculed. Hegel, for instance, is a classical example for this. He has expressed certain thoughts about nature—and not all of Hegel's thoughts are foolish!—and has arranged them systematically. Then the philistines came and said: Well, these are your ideas concerning nature; but just look at this or that process in nature: it does not agree with your ideas. Then Hegel answered: Too bad for nature!

Naturally, this seems paradoxical; nevertheless, subjectively this feeling is well founded. It is absolutely possible that one surrenders, without prejudice, to one's innate thinking and says: if nature were really to correspond to this thinking, she would have to take on a different form. To be sure, after some time one will also become accustomed to that which nature teaches. Most people who find themselves in such a position do not notice that by having acquired nature observation they really bear two souls within themselves, two truths, as it were. Those who do notice it may suffer greatly from this discrepancy brought into their soul life. What I am describing to you here and which is present in some human beings today although they are not aware of it will become ever more present. Human beings will say to themselves more and more: through what I am by birth, my head really forces me to form a picture about nature. But this does not coincide with nature herself. Then, as I become more familiar with life, I also acquire in the course of time what nature herself teaches. I must find a way out of this.

These discordant sensations will arise in our souls when they return again to earth. A source of inner thoughts and sensations will arise in us which will cause us to say: you sense clearly how the world ought to be; it is, however, different. Then, again, we shall familiarize ourselves with this world; we shall learn to know a second kind of law, and we shall have to seek a balance between the two.

Let us assume the human being enters physical existence through birth. He brings with him in his thinking and feeling the result of his previous earth life. While he was not united with the life of the earth, this external earth life has actually undergone a change. He senses a discrepancy between his thinking, the effects of which he brings from his previous life, and the things as they have developed in the period during which he was absent from the earth. His thinking does not harmonize with them. And now gradually he adjusts himself to his new life, but he does by no means completely take up into this consciousness what he may learn from his surroundings. He only takes it up as though through a veil. He elaborates it only after death, and then, again, carries it into his next life. Man will constantly live in this duality of his soul life. He will always become aware of the following: You are bringing with you something in regard to which the world into which you have grown through birth is new. But through your physical being you now receive something from this world which does not completely penetrate your soul, which you will have to work over, however, after death.

The human being of the present day ought to become thoroughly acquainted with the way of experiencing life. For only by familiarizing himself with such a thing does he become aware of the forces which pulse through our existence and which otherwise remain entirely unnoticed. We are drawn into the web of these forces. But if we do not try to penetrate them with our consciousness, they make us to a certain degree sick in our soul. This falling apart the human being will perceive more and more: the falling apart of that which has stayed with him from the previous life and that which is prepared in the present life for the next one. And since man will sense this duality more and more, he will be in need of an inner mediation, a real inner mediation. And the great question will become ever more burning: Where must we look for this inner mediation? We can only find an answer to this question if we consider the following:

I have often told you that we human beings are completely awake only in our thinking in the period between awaking and falling asleep of ordinary life. The life of thought means complete wakefulness. We are not completely awake, even in waking life, in regard to our feelings. Our feelings are at the stage of dream consciousness, even though we are fully awake in our conceptions and thoughts. He who is able to make research in this field knows through direct perception that feelings have no greater vitality than have dreams; only, the conception through which feelings are represented makes it appear differently. But the life of feelings as such arises out of the depths of consciousness like the surging up of dreams. And the actual life of will is asleep in us, even in our waking life; in regard to the will we are asleep. Thus, also in waking life, we carry these three states of consciousness within us. During the day, we walk around with a waking life of thoughts; we deceive ourselves in believing that we are awake also in our will because we have thoughts about that which the will performs. Not the experience of the will itself, but only its mental image is what enters our consciousness. We dream our feelings, we sleep our willing. But if imaginative knowledge raises up what otherwise dreams in the feelings and makes it a matter of complete, clear world cognition, then we become aware of the fact that wisdom is contained not only in our thoughts—let us call it “wisdom” although with many human beings it is “un-wisdom”—but that wisdom is also contained in our feelings, and that it is also contained in our willing. In regard to present-day human existence we can only speak clearly about that which is contained in our thought life. In regard to the world of feelings mankind today entertains thoughts which hardly differ from those it entertains in regard to dream life; and yet, wisdom is also contained in the life of feeling.

My dear friends, the person who earnestly applies to his own soul the exercises which are described in my book, Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment (Anthroposophic Press, New York) will come closest to experiencing a certain inner soul-surging which takes its course in a dreamlike manner, as it were. For most human beings it will not contain more regularity than ordinary dreaming; but it is possible, at a comparatively early moment, to bring so much order into this inner experiencing that one becomes aware of the fact that, although this inner experience is not governed by ordinary logic—indeed, it is sometimes governed by a very grotesque logic, and the most varied fragments of thought arrange themselves and occur in a dreamlike fashion—one becomes aware of the fact that something real takes place there. This first inner experience, which is still very primitive, may be recognized by the one who applies, even to some degree, to his own soul life what has been described in my book, Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment. When the human being dives down into this surging of waking dreams, a new reality emerges in contrast to the ordinary reality of external life. Comparatively soon the human being may become aware of this arising of a new reality. And also comparatively soon may he become aware that wisdom is contained in all this, but a wisdom he cannot take hold of, for which he does not feel himself mature enough to become fully conscious of it. It escapes him time and again, and he does not understand it. But he becomes aware, or at least, may become aware of the fact that wisdom does not only flow through the upper stratum of his consciousness which permeates him in ordinary waking day-life, but that below this there lies another stratum of his consciousness which appear illogical to him for the simple reason that he himself calls it that since he cannot yet take hold of its wisdom. We may say: the moment we have completely acquired imaginative cognition, these waking dreams cease to be as grotesque as they appear to ordinary life; they then permeate themselves with a wisdom that points to another content of reality, to a world different from the sense world which we fathom with ordinary wisdom.

You see, my dear friends, in ordinary life only the world of feeling surges up into our every-day consciousness out of this substratum of our consciousness. And out of a still deeper stratum, which lies below the one just mentioned, there surges up the world of will which is also permeated by wisdom. We are connected with this wisdom, but we are not at all aware of it in ordinary consciousness. Thus we may say: We human beings are governed by three strata of consciousness. The first is our conceptual consciousness in which we live every day. The second is an imaginative consciousness. And the third is an inspired consciousness which remains very deeply hidden, which works in us, to be sure, but whose nature we do not recognize in ordinary life. If only modern philosophy were less perplexed in its concepts—I am not referring here to people who have nothing to do with philosophy, but philosophers should grasp such matters, yet they refuse to do so—if only modern philosophy were less confused it would have to notice the great difference that exists between truths that are arrived at purely upon the basis of external observation of nature and the truths that are found in the sciences, such as mathematics and geometry, which are employed in the endeavor to understand external nature.

We are in a sense justified in saying that in regard to the truths which man acquires through external observation—this has so often been stressed in the history of philosophy that a special reference to it ought to be superfluous for the philosopher—in regard to the truths of external observation we can never speak of actual certainty. Kant and Hume have elaborated this especially clearly by their grotesque assertion that, although it is true that we observe that the sun rises, we cannot, however, assert from this observation that the sun will rise again tomorrow; we only can conclude from the fact that the sun has risen up to now every day that is will also rise tomorrow. This is the way with all truths which we derive from external observation. But it is not so in the case of mathematical truths. If we have once grasped them we know they are valid for all future times. Whoever knows and is able to prove, out of inner reasons, that the square above the hypotenuse equals the sum of the square of the two other sides of the right-angled triangle knows that it would be impossible to draw a rectangular triangle for which this law does not hold good.

These mathematical truths are different from the truths we arrive at through external observations; we know the facts, but with the means of present-day research we are unable to grasp the underlying reason. The reason is to be found in the fact that mathematical truths originate deep down in the inner being of man, that they arise on the third level of consciousness, in the lowest stratum and, without his being aware of it, shoot up into man's upper consciousness, where he then perceives them inwardly. We possess mathematical truths through the fact that we ourselves behave mathematically in the world. We walk, we stand, and so forth; we describe certain lines on the earth. Through this will relationship to the external world we actually receive the inner perception of mathematics. Mathematics arises below in the third consciousness and shoots up from there.

Conceptual life: Complete Wakefulness: Wisdom

Feeling: Dreaming: Wisdom

Will: Sleeping: Wisdom

I. Conceptual Life

II. Imaginations

III. Inspirations

Thus, although we are not conscious of its origin, we have very clear concepts of at least one part of this lowest stratum of consciousness: we are aware of the mathematical and geometrical concepts. The middle stratum is of a dreamlike and confused character. And here, “in the upper story,” where the day-waking conceptual life takes place, we are clear again. What plays up from the third stratum of consciousness is also clear in us. What lies between the two reaches most human beings like a confused waking dreaming. It is very significant that we should make this fact clear to ourselves. For, you see, the Greeks, during the four and one half centuries (number one), which they had retained as the remainder of the Mystery culture. And this is a purely Luciferic element. I have described it to you recently: it is the intellectualistic culture. Clarity rules in our head. It is permeated by wisdom, generally valid wisdom. But this is the Luciferic element in us.

And, again, that which exists here below and which is so much beloved by modern scientists and was so much beloved by Kant that he said: in regard to nature, science exists only in as far as it contains mathematics—this is the purely Ahrimanic element, which arises from below through our human nature. It is the Ahrimanic element.

It does not suffice, my dear friends, to know of something that it is correct. We know that the things we comprehend intellectually through our head are correct; but this is a gift of the Luciferic element. And we know that mathematics is correct; but this sovereign correctness of mathematics we owe to Ahriman who sits in us. The most uncertain element is in the middle. It consists of seemingly illogical, billowing dreams.

I will describe to you another symptom so that you may grasp the full significance of this matter. In reality, the whole mathematical conception of the world as it arose with Galileo and Giordano Bruno stems from this deepest stratum of consciousness. Four and one half centuries have elapsed since we have begun to acquire this world conception, since we have begun to introduce this Ahrimanic element into our human thinking and sensing. Whereas in Greek thinking the last echo of the Mystery culture shone into the clearest brightness of consciousness, there arises in our deepest, darkest strata of consciousness that which only in the future will reach its climax. This is beginning to arise down there.

I. Conceptual Life (Lucifer)

II. Imaginations (consciousness)

III. Inspirations (Ahriman)

Our soul life is like a scale beam which has to try to establish equilibrium, on one hand the Luciferic, on the other the Ahrimanic element. The Luciferic element lies in our clear head, the Ahrimanic element below in the wisdom which permeates our will. Between the two, we have to try to establish a state of balance in an element which at first does not seem to be permeated by anything.

How does wisdom enter this middle part of man? Man is placed in the world at present in such a way that his head is supported by Lucifer, his metabolic wisdom, his limb-wisdom by Ahriman. That which we have described as the middle state of consciousness is dependent upon our heart organization and the human rhythmical system (read what I saw concerning this fact in my book, Von Seelenraetseln). This sphere of our existence must gradually become just as ordered as the head wisdom became ordered through logic and the Ahrimanic wisdom through mathematics, geometry, through external rational nature observation. What will bring inner logic, inner wisdom, inner power of orientation into this middle part of our human nature? The Christ impulse, that which passed over into the earth culture through the Mystery of Golgotha.

Thus you see, we have a spiritual-scientific anatomy which shows us what is culture of the head, what is culture of metabolism, which also shows us the nature and needs of that sphere of our organism which lies between the two. That man permeates himself with the Christ impulse is a requisite part of his nature.

Let us for a moment hypothetically assume that the Mystery of Golgotha had not entered Earth evolution: the human being would have his head wisdom. He also would have what has arisen since the fifteenth century A.D. But in regard to his central being he would be desolate and void. He would feel more and more the disagreement between the two inner spheres mentioned above. He would be unable to bring about the state of equilibrium. We can only bring about this state of equilibrium by permeating ourselves more and more with the Christ impulse which calls forth the state of balance between the Luciferic and Ahrimanic element.

From this you will see that we may say: In the pre-Christian four and one half centuries there was bestowed upon the human being, like a preparation for the Mystery of Golgotha, the last ramification of the ancient Mystery culture, which has settled like a head-memory of this ancient culture. And in our modern age, the human being passed through four and one half centuries of preparation for a new spirit direction, for a new kind of Mystery culture. But in order that these two might be connected in the historical evolution of mankind, the Mystery of Golgotha had to take place as an objective fact in mankind's evolution. Internally, however, this evolution takes its course in such a way that human beings grow and develop until, beginning with the fifteenth century A.D. they receive the new impulse which I have characterized as an Ahrimanic impulse, and through which they will feel more and more: we need the possibility of building a bridge between the two periods.

In this way we may inwardly comprehend the threefold human being. And we shall comprehend him still more accurately if we join to what I have said today something which I have repeatedly mentioned. It was impossible for the ancient Greeks who retained the remnants of ancient Mystery culture to be an atheist—although it happened in a few abnormal cases, but not to the degree it occurs today. Atheism has only arisen in more recent times, at least in its radical form. For the Greek who was really imbued with dialectics felt the Divine holding sway in thinking, even in thinking void of content.

If we know this and then look upon the appearance of atheism, upon the complete denial of the Divine, we shall find the reason for this atheism. Only those human beings, my dear friends—naturally, we need the methods of spiritual science in order to recognize this—only those human beings are atheists in whose organism something is organically disturbed. To be sure, this may lie in very delicate structural conditions, but it is a fact that atheism is in reality a disease.

This is the first thing we have to hold fast: atheism is a disease. For, if our organism is completely healthy, the harmonious functioning of its various members will bring it about that we ourselves sense our origin from the Divine—ex deo nascimur.

The second point, to be sure, is something different. Man may sense the Divine but may have no possibility to sense the Christ. In this respect we do not differentiate carefully enough today. We are satisfied with words, also in other spheres. For, if we test today the actual spiritual content of the view of many human beings of the occident and are not influenced by their words—they say they agree with Christian precepts, they believe in the freedom of the will, and so forth—we shall find that the whole configuration of their thinking contradicts what they thus express. Only through their participation in cultural life have they become accustomed to speak of Christ, of freedom, and so forth. In reality, my dear friends, a great number of human beings living among us are nothing but Turks; for the content of their faith is the same as the fatalistic content of faith of the Mohammedans—although this fatalism is often described as a necessity of nature. Mohammedanism is much more prevalent than we think. If we do not focus our attention upon the words but upon the spirit-soul content, we shall find that many Christians are Turks. They call themselves “Christians” even though they cannot find the transition from the God they sense to the Christ.

I only need to draw your attention to the classical example of a modern theologian, Adolf Harnack, who wrote the book, Wesen des Christentums. (Essence of Christianity.) Please, make the following test: scratch out in this book the name of Christ wherever it occurs and replace it by the name of God, this will change nothing in the content of this book. There is no necessity that what this man states should refer to the Christ. What he states refers to the general Father god who lies at the foundation of the world. There is no need at all that he should refer to the Christ with what he states. Wherever he proves something it is externally and internally untrue as he borrows the various communications from the Gospels. In the way he elaborates these communications there can be seen no reason whatsoever for connecting them with the Christ. We must acquire the possibility of conceiving of the Christ in such a way that we do not identify Him with the Father god. Many of the modern evangelical theologians are no longer able to differentiate between the general concept of God and the concept of the Christ. To be unable to find the Christ in life is a different matter from being unable to find the Father God—You know that it is not here a matter of doubting the Divinity of the Christ. It is a matter of clear differentiation, in the sphere of the Divine, between the Father God and the Christ God. This comes to expression in the soul of man. Not to find God the Father is a disease; not to find the Christ is a misfortune. For the human being is so connected with the Christ as to be inwardly dependent upon this connection. He is, however, also dependent upon that which has taken place as a historical event. He must find a connection with the Christ here upon earth, in external life. If he does not find it is a misfortune. Not to find the Father god, to be an atheist, is an illness. Not to find the Son God, the Christ, is a misfortune.

And what does it mean if we do not find the Spirit? To be unable to take hold of one's own spirituality in order to find the connection of one's own spirituality with the spirituality of the world signifies mental debility; not to acknowledge the Spirit is a deficiency of mind, a psychic imbecility.

Please remember these three deficiencies of the human soul constitution. Then we shall be able to continue tomorrow in the right way. Remember what I have told you today about the three kinds of consciousness; remember that it is a disease if we are an atheist, if we do not find the God out of whom we are born and whom we must find if we possess a completely sound organism; that it is a misfortune if we do not find the Christ; that it is a psychic deficiency if we do not find the Spirit.

This is also the way in which the paths that lead man to the Trinity differ from one another. It will become more and more necessary for mankind to enter into these concrete facts of soul life and not to remain stuck in general, nebulous notions. People are specially inclined today toward these nebulous notions. To replace this inclination by the inclination to enter into concrete facts of soul life is an essential task of our age.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Automated Translation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It has often been said that when Spiritual Science will spread, it should play its part as a true force of life. And this assertion may be strengthened by the most varied considerations of life's relations. By the very fact that we become more and more acquainted with the characteristics of that invisible world which is the foundation of the visible world, do perceptions, concepts take hold of our soul which in their turn become impulses toward quite definite actions, toward a quite definite attitude in life. Of special importance will be the attitude which may be initiated in regard to the so-called dead, concerning those who during our life span go through the time between death and a new birth. Just as man here in the physical body is, through his soul and body, related in the most varied ways with the physical world, and the spiritual nature underlying it, so does he also stand between death and a new birth in the most varied relations to the facts, happenings, and beings of the supersensible world. And just as human beings have an occupation, an activity, in the physical world between birth and death, so they also have activities, occupations, if you please, between death and a new birth. What we may learn about human life and human activity between death and a new birth will lead more and more to what is called the removal of the abyss which, especially in our materialistic age, opens up between those living on earth and the dead. Between the living and the so-called dead, an increasing mutual intercourse will be established.

Let us today call attention to details in this intercourse between the living and the dead, as well as to the occupations and ways of living of the souls who live between death and a new birth. Those who die before others with whom they had relations here on earth must naturally often look back from the spiritual world on the beings they loved, or who have otherwise remained in the life on earth. Now, the question is whether such souls existing between death and a new birth can perceive human beings living here between birth and death. If we have developed the faculties which enable us to penetrate into the life between death and a new birth, we have quite special, one might say, deeply moving experiences. For instance, one may find souls of the dead who sometimes say the following in the language which is possible between the departed souls and the seer, and which can only be understood by the latter who is able to look from our world into the world of the dead. In the following way, for instance, a soul was able to make itself known to the seer after death (it was a soul embodied in its last incarnation in a male body): “All my thoughts and memories go back to that person who was my faithful wife when I was below in the life on earth; she was, so to speak, the sunshine of my life. When, my business completed, I came home in the evening, my soul was refreshed by what she was able to be for me, by what then came into my soul from hers. A true spiritual bread of life she was for me, and longing for her has stayed with me. My spiritual eye is directed toward the earth and I cannot find her, she is not there. From all I have learned, I know that this soul must be on earth as she was before in a physical body, but for me she is as though extinguished, as though she were not there.”

This deeply moving experience one may often have with reference to souls who think back about those left behind and who feel as though fettered, so that they cannot get through, cannot look down on these earthly souls. They are fettered, not by their own essential being, but rather by the other soul left behind. And if one investigates the reason why the soul from the beyond cannot perceive the soul remaining on earth, then one learns that the soul who has remained on earth has not, on account of the existing circumstances of our age, been able to be inspired by, to be imbued with, any thoughts which might become visible, be perceptible, to a soul having gone through the portals of death. We might make another comparison. Souls who have gone through the portals of death and long for the sight of those remaining in physical bodies, such souls have a dim idea of the existence of others on the physical plane, but are unable to manifest themselves to them. Just as one who is dumb is unable to call attention to himself by means of language, therefore is inaudible to others, so does the entire soul remain mute to the disembodied soul who longs for it; it is in its spiritual nature inaudible to the one who has already passed the portals of death.

There is a great difference between one soul and another here on earth, depending on whether these souls have one content or another. Let us consider a soul who lives here in the physical body and from the time of awaking to the time of going to sleep is only concerned with thoughts taken from the material world; such a soul, filled entirely with thoughts, concepts, ideas, and sensations taken solely from the material world, cannot be perceived at all from the other world. No trace of such a soul can be found. A soul that is filled with spiritual ideas, as for instance those which Spiritual Science gives, and which is aglow with and irradiated by spiritual ideas—such a soul is perceptible from the beyond. Therefore, souls who have remained behind, however good they may be as human beings, are without reality and imperceptible to the world beyond if they are immersed in materialism. These are deeply shocking, terrible impressions for the seer who certainly has attained serenity. But these experiences, possible with reference to the world beyond, especially in our era, are numerous. In our era it is just as though every contact were cut off between souls who here are often so closely linked. This is frequently the case when a soul has gone through the portals of death; while it can always be found that the souls who live beyond, who have gone through the portals of death and look down on human beings harbouring spiritual thoughts, even though only now and then, and letting them permeate their soul, can then perceive these, so that these earthly souls remain real souls for them. Even more significant: what is touched upon here can become of practical import. The spiritual thoughts which souls harbour here can not only be perceived, they can be understood by the souls beyond. And in this way something can be brought about which may become of great importance for the intercourse between souls here and souls beyond, namely, that which may be called “Reading to the Dead.” And such “Reading to the Dead” is often extraordinarily important.

Here, too, the seer can have the experience that human beings who have entirely disregarded spiritual wisdom, now have a strong longing for spiritual wisdom and wish to hear about it after having passed through the portals of death. Then, if the souls that have remained behind make a clear mental image of the dead person and, at the same time, bring to mind an anthroposophical train of thought or open an anthroposophical book and in thought, not aloud, read to the dead whose spiritual image stands before them, the dead will become aware of it. It is in the anthroposophical movement that we have had, in this regard, the most excellent results, when still living anthroposophists read of their departed relatives. One can often see how these dead long to hear what penetrates to them from here. One thing is of especial importance during the time immediately after death in order that one may enter into a relationship with a soul. It is not possible without further ado to enter into relation with any supersensible being. There is often much deception, much illusion in this respect, it is not as easy as it seems. It is a grave error to think that a human being need only to die in order, so to speak, to come into contact with the whole spiritual world. On one occasion I met a man who was otherwise not really very smart, but who, nevertheless, talked incessantly about Kant, Schopenhauer, and so forth who even gave lectures on Kant and Schopenhauer. This man, when I lectured about the nature of immortality, answered me in a rather smug way. He said: “Here on earth we cannot know anything about immortality, since we do not experience it until we die.” One might say that, with his present equipment, he will not differ in his soul very much after death from what he is now. It is deep prejudice that believes the souls become quite wise as soon as they have passed through the portals of death. On the contrary, we cannot after death establish so easily connections with human beings, if we have not already established them before death. Connections that have been already established here are effective for a long time. It does not occur readily that a soul be instructed immediately by souls in the beyond, because it cannot have a connection with them. But the departed human being has connections with people on the earth, and they can bring him the food for which he is starving, they can bring him spiritual wisdom by reading to him and thus bring about immensely meritorious effects. The dead would not be helped if we read them external, materialistic science, perhaps chemistry or physics; that is a language they do not understand because these sciences are of value only for life on earth. But what is said about the spiritual worlds in the language of anthroposophy remains comprehensible to the dead. During the time immediately following death, one thing, however, has to be considered; during that period the souls retain an understanding for things communicated in the languages they usually spoke here on earth. Only after a time do the dead become independent of language; then one may read to them in any language and they will understand the thought content. During the time immediately following death, the departed is also more connected with the language he has last spoken, if he has exclusively spoken only one language. We should really consider the fact that during the time immediately following death we have to send our thoughts to the dead,—we must send our thoughts to them—in the language they were accustomed to. Here we have come to a point in our considerations which can teach us how the abyss may be bridged over by the fact that anthroposophy flows into our spiritual life in this world and in the other world, in the world in which we live between death and a new birth. While materialism only allows us to bring into life an intercourse between souls confined to their earthly existence, anthroposophy will open the way for a free communication, an intercourse between the souls on earth and the souls dwelling beyond in the other world. The dead will live with us. And truly, what we may call the passing through the portals of death will often after a time be felt merely as a change in the form of existence. And the entire change in the life of spirit and of soul, which will take place when such things have become common knowledge, is going to be of great significance.

We have just dealt with an example of the effect of the living on the dead. We may also form a conception of the way the dead in their turn affect the living. Several times I have ventured to mention—please excuse the personal reference—that in the past I had to instruct many children. I had to instruct several children in a family where only the mother was living; their father was dead and I felt it to be my task—this must be the task of any educator—to discover the potentialities and talents of these children in order as educator to guide and instruct them. Regarding these children of whom I am speaking, something remained incomprehensible; no matter what was tried they showed a certain behaviour that was not a consequence of their inherent qualities or of their surroundings. One could not quite manage them. In such cases one must call on everything for help; and spiritual research resulted in the following: the father had died, and in consequence of special circumstances, which had occurred among the relatives, he was not in accord with the way in which the children were being treated by the relatives nor with the things which happened within the intimate family circle—and, because of special circumstances, his influence had an effect on the children. And it was not until the moment I could take into consideration that there was something special which neither derived from potentialities nor from surroundings, but which came out of the supersensible world from the departed father who directed his forces into the souls of his children—it was not until then that I could be guided by it. Now I had to take into consideration what the father really wanted. And the very moment I investigated the will of the father who had passed through the portals of death, and considered him as a real person, like the other persons in physical existence who had their joint effect on the children—it was then that I succeeded in my task.

This is a case in which it was clearly shown that spiritual knowledge can tell us, indicate to us, the effect of the forces from the supersensible, spiritual world on this physical world. But in order to perceive such a thing one needs the right moment. One must try, for instance, to develop a kind of force which makes it possible to perceive, as it were, the raying in of the supersensible force—in this case that of the father—into the souls of the children. This is oftentimes difficult. It might be easy, for instance, to try to recognize how the dead father wants to implant this or that thought into the children's souls. But that often proves incorrect and, especially, it cannot always be repeated. It may then prove to be a good device to procure a picture giving the father's form, the way he looked at the last; if a distinct picture of his handwriting is held in memory and is kept there before the mind's eye, and we thus prepare ourselves for the kind of instruction meant here by concentrating on handwriting or picture, then we take into our own work the views, the intentions, the aims of the dead person. The time will come when we are going to take into account what the dead want for those left behind. Today we can only take into account the will of those who are on the physical plane. There will be a mutual, one might say a free intercourse between the living and the dead. We shall learn to investigate what the dead want for the physical plane. Just imagine the great upheaval, one might also say of the external factors of physical life, when the dead shall play a part and through the living have an effect on the physical plane. Spiritual Science, if it is rightly understood, and it always must be rightly understood, will not be a mere theory. Spiritual Science will become more and more an elixir of life which pervades all existence, transforming it the more it spreads. And it will surely accomplish this, for its effect will not be that of an abstract ideal which is preached, or which is “sold” by societies. It will, slowly but surely, take hold of the souls on earth and transform them.

There will be an enrichment of our conceptions in many other respects. In our existence our life with the dead shall change because we shall understand what the dead are doing. Many things now remain quite incomprehensible regarding the relations between the world here on earth, the physical plane, and the world which we experience between death and a new birth; for much that happens here in the physical world remains incomprehensible. And since all that happens here corresponds to what happens beyond, the relation of the world and humanity to the supersensible world remains incomprehensible. But if anthroposophy is rightly understood, comprehension will increasingly take the place of non-comprehension in this realm.

Now a relationship will be established which may show what strangely devious ways are taken by the beings who, so to speak, carry out the further development of world wisdom. Strangely devious ways are taken by these beings, but nevertheless, if we follow them, they show themselves full of wisdom in every respect. Let us consider various conditions. Let us first consider souls whom the eye of the seer may perceive in their occupation between death and a new birth. There we see—and again that is for the seer something deeply affecting—we see many souls who are condemned for a certain time between death and a new birth to be the slaves of the spirits who send sickness and death into physical life. Thus we see there souls between death and a new birth who are under the dominion of beings whom we call the Ahrimanic spirits, or the spirits of hindrance, of those who work at death in life, and of those who bring obstacles into life. And a hard lot it is which the seer observes, in some souls, when they have to submit in this manner to the slave yoke. If one traces back such souls to the life they led before they passed the portals of death, one finds that the souls who for a certain time after death must serve the spirits of resistance have prepared this for themselves by self-indulgence during life. And the slaves of the spirits of sickness and death have prepared this fate for themselves by having been unscrupulous before death. So there we see a certain relation of the souls of men to the evil spirits of sickness and death, and to the evil spirits of resistance. But now let us take a further look at the following, let us look at the souls who here on earth are subjected to that which such souls must do. Let us look at the souls who perish here on earth in the flower of their youth without reaching the death of old age. Let us look upon the souls who here on earth are subjected to sickness, who are pursued by misfortune, as obstacle upon obstacle arises before them. What does the seer observe when he considers souls who die early or are pursued by misfortune and then pass into the spiritual world? What does the seer notice about such souls? One may have strange experiences concerning human destinies on earth. We shall point to at least one example, to one of the very moving destinies on earth, and which may certainly happen.

A child (a little girl) is born; the mother dies at the birth of the child; the child is orphaned at birth with regard to the mother. The father, on the day the child is born, learns that his whole fortune which was tied up in a ship on the high seas is lost; he learns that the ship has been wrecked; because of this he becomes melancholic; he, too, dies, leaving the child completely orphaned. The little girl is adopted by a wealthy woman; she is very fond of the child and wills her large fortune to her. The woman dies while the child is still comparatively young. The will is probated and a technical error is found—the child does not get a penny of what was willed to her. For the second time she is cast out into the world penniless and must hire out as a servant, must do menial work. She meets a man who falls in love with her, but they cannot be united on account of the prejudices governing the community: they belong to different denominations. But the man loves her so very much that he promises to adopt her faith as soon as his father, already very old, dies. He goes abroad; there he learns that his father has fallen ill. His father dies; he adopts the girl's faith, and as he hurries to her side, she falls ill and dies. When he returns, she is dead. He feels the deepest pain and will not be satisfied until the grave is opened so that he can see her once more. And from the position of the corpse, it can be seen that the girl was buried alive. This is a legend—Robert Hamerling, the Austrian poet, has retold it in his writings—it is a legend which is not reality, but it might occur in innumerable instances. We see that a human soul does not merely perish in the flower of her youth but we see her pursued by misfortune from the beginning of life in a certain way. In the working out of such conditions those souls cooperate who, on account of unscrupulousness, become the servants of the evil spirits of sickness, death and misfortune. Thus such unscrupulous souls must be active in the preparation of such hard fates; here is a relationship! To the seer this is especially evident in such happenings as, for instance, the catastrophe of the Titanic, by investigating the effect of the souls who for lack of conscience have become the servants of these spirits of sickness and misfortune. Karma must be carried out, these things are necessary; but it is an evil fate which engulfs the souls who, after death, are bowed down under such a yoke of slavery.

But let us ask further: What about the souls who here on earth suffer such a fate, who perish in the flower of their youth, who are destroyed early by epidemics? What about these souls, when they pass through the portal of death into the spiritual world before their time? We learn the fate of these souls when with the eye of the seer we penetrate, so to speak, into the occupation of the spirits who give a forward impulse to the evolution of the earth, or to all evolution. These beings of the Higher Hierarchies have certain forces, certain powers to further development; but they are in a certain way limited with regard to these forces and powers. Thus the following becomes manifest:

The completely materialistic souls, those who lose all sense of the supersensible world, are in fact already in this our era threatened by a kind of blight, a kind of cutting off from progressive development. And in a certain way already in our era the danger exists that a large portion of humanity may not be able to keep up with evolution, because they are, so to speak, bound to the earth by the heaviness of their own souls, being completely materialistic souls, so that they are not taken along for the next incarnation. But this danger is to be deflected according to the decision of the Higher Hierarchies. The truth is that the hour of decision for the souls who, having cut themselves off completely, are not carried along with the evolution, that the hour of decision does not come until the sixth period—actually, not until the Venus evolution. Souls must not fall prey to the downward pull of gravity to such an extent that they are compelled to remain behind. It is actually according to the decision of the Higher Hierarchies that this must not happen. But these beings of the Higher Hierarchies are in a certain way limited in their forces and capabilities. Nothing is unlimited, even among the beings of the Higher Hierarchies. And if it were only a question of the forces of these Higher Hierarchies, then completely materialistic souls, through themselves, would have to be already cut off in a certain way from progressive evolution. The beings of the Higher Hierarchies really cannot alone by themselves save these souls—so an expedient is used. Namely, the souls that die here an early death have, as souls, a possibility before them. Let us say they die through some catastrophe; for instance, they are run over by an express train—then indeed the bodily sheath is taken from such a soul; it is now free from its body, denuded of its body, but it still contains the forces which might be active in the body here on earth. By going into the spiritual world such souls carry up very special forces, which in fact still might have been effective here on earth, but which have been prematurely diverted. Forces, especially applicable in helping, are carried up by those who die early. And the beings of the Higher Hierarchies use these forces to save the souls whom they could not have saved by their own power.

Souls that are materialistically inclined are thus led away to better times and saved, since their strength is only sufficient for the regular course of mankind's evolution. Salvation is achieved by the fact that these beings of the Higher Hierarchies experience an increase of strength by such unused forces coming from the earth, which have still unused energy. These forces accrue to the beings of the Higher Hierarchies. Thus the souls who perish early help their fellowmen who otherwise would be submerged in the morass of materialism. Here we have what those souls must do who depart early. Strange interdependence, is it not, in the complicated ways of world wisdom! Thus the world wisdom permits, on one side, the sentencing of human souls for lack of conscience to cooperate in bringing sickness and early death into the world. The souls who suffer it are used by good beings of the Higher Hierarchies to help other men. In this manner happenings that seem evil outwardly in maya are often transformed into good, but in complicated ways. The ways of wisdom which are taken in the world are very complicated. It is only gradually that one learns to find one's way in these paths of wisdom. One might say: There, up above, the spirits of the Higher Hierarchies sit in council. Because men must be free, they are given the possibility of plunging into materialism, into evil. The Hierarchies give them so much freedom that these human souls, so to speak, escape them, these souls who could not, by their own strength, carry on up to a certain point of time. They need souls who develop on earth forces which retain their inner potential through the premature separation from the body when these souls have to return to the spiritual world in consequence of accident and an early death. This early death is brought about by the services of human souls who, in pursuance of their freedom, have fallen into unscrupulousness. A wonderful cyclic path is opened up here, we may say, a cyclic path of world wisdom. We should not believe at all that the so-called simple things are the universal ones. The world has become complicated. It really was a significant word of Nietzsche which was revealed to him as though by inspiration, when he said: “The world is deep, and deeper than the day had thought.” Those people are completely in error who think that everything may be grasped by the day-wisdom of the intellect. For the higher spiritual light is not that which shines into the wisdom of the day, but that which shines into the darkness. We must seek this light in order to find our way in the darkness in which, nevertheless, the world wisdom is at work.

If we accept such concepts, ideas and thoughts, my dear friends, then it may come about that we contemplate the world with other eyes than before. And it will become more and more necessary that we learn to contemplate the world with new eyes; for humanity has lost many things since ancient times. What it is we lost may be understood if we consider the following:

Still in the third post-Atlantean period there were intermediate states between sleeping and waking, in which souls looked up into the world of the stars and saw not merely physical stars, as is the case today, but the spiritual beings of the Higher Hierarchies; the directing and leading forces of stellar destiny and stellar movement were observed by them. And what existed as old stellar maps from immemorial times when all kinds of drawings were made of group souls, looking like animals without being animals, all this is not born out of fantasy, but is spiritually perceived. The souls perceived this in the realm of the spirit. They were able to carry this spiritual element through the portals of death. The soul has now lost this vision of the supersensible world. Today when the souls are born, they confront the physical world with the bodily sense organs and see nothing but the external physical world. They no longer can see that which surrounds the external physical world as the world of spirit and of soul, the world of the Higher Hierarchies, and so forth. But what is the nature of the souls who appear in the bodies of today? All the souls of persons sitting here were incarnated in former times, and the great majority were incarnated in Egypto-Chaldaic bodies and through those bodies they looked out into the world in which they also had spiritual perception. This spiritual experience they took into themselves, it exists in them today. Not in all the souls; but the souls who today no longer see anything but physical facts, they once lived in contemplation of the spiritual world, they lived a completely perceptive life of the spiritual world. How do these souls live now? They live exactly as though they had totally forgotten this spiritual world. They have forgotten the spiritual perceptions they once absorbed. But what we have forgotten is merely forgotten for our present consciousness; it still lives in the deepest recesses of our souls. Thus the peculiar situation exists: the souls living today have around them, consciously, nothing but a physical sense image of the world; but in their inner being the perceptions which once they received as true spiritual vision are still living unconsciously in the depths of their souls. Of these perceptions the souls know nothing; they only show peculiar conceptions which burrow in the depths of the soul, but which do not rise into consciousness; these conceptions have a paralyzing, deadening effect. And thus something actually arises in the human beings of today which exists in them as a deadening element.

If as a seer one contemplates the human being of today as he is anatomically constructed, one finds in this human being, especially in the nervous system, certain currents, certain forces which are forces of death and which stem from conceptions that were alive in former incarnations. These spiritual conceptions which he has now forgotten have a consuming quality. This would show itself more and more, the farther man advances toward the future, if there were not something present which counteracts it. What could this be? Nothing but bringing up into consciousness that which was forgotten. One must remind the souls of that which they have forgotten. That is what Spiritual Science does, fundamentally it does nothing but remind the souls of the conceptions they have absorbed. Spiritual Science lifts these conceptions into consciousness. In this way it gives again to men the possibility of enlivening what would otherwise be like a dead impulse in life.

Now note these two things which you received in the course of today's consideration. On the one hand the seer perceives human souls who have passed through the portal of death, who long for the souls left behind, whom they cannot perceive, because in these souls there exist only materialistic images of the world, though they may perhaps belong to quite good men. For the seer, though he may have achieved calmness of soul, it is deeply moving to perceive these starving souls. On the other hand, the seer looks into a future of humanity which will contain more and more dead matter, if it does not revivify the conceptions which it once received and which will kill it, if they are not raised into consciousness. The seer would have to look into a future when people, through all kinds of hereditary traits would show signs of old age much earlier than is the case today. Just as one may see today examples of infantile old age, even senility, so people would then show, soon after being born, wrinkles and other indications of old age, if through lack of spiritual knowledge forces did not appear which are memories of conceptions once received in a natural way. In order to provide the dying human race with a life-giving elixir, in order to give the dead the possibilities of coming into contact with the relatives they have left behind on earth—in order to accomplish this, the seer, conscious of this fact, searches for a language which is not only understood here on earth by the souls incarnated in a physical body, but which is spoken in common by the souls living here between birth and death and those souls living beyond between death and a new birth—a language common to the living and the dead.

And truly, it is not that one feels mere sympathy for what is a Spiritual Science—a theoretical sympathy as for other things—truly, this is not what should prompt us; but he who really understands, he who looks into the world, feels that this Spiritual Science has a world-mission. He says to himself: the necessity exists to find the common language, to find the elixir of life which keeps men from becoming arid regarding the various conceptions we mentioned. That is the mission of Spiritual Science for the spiritual worlds themselves. One feels this mission as a high and sacred duty, as something very serious and significant. And we must not merely find pleasure in the ideas which Spiritual Science can give us for our theoretical satisfaction, but we must feel the spiritual power which it must derive from the necessities of the development of humanity and of the world. Then we shall have the right feeling for the reason, for the existence of Spiritual Science, why it has to be implanted into the spiritual life of humanity. It is this feeling which we must actually achieve and we must be permeated by it. This feeling has a highly curative power, it is one which brings to the human soul a real harmony of its forces. This is a fact. The more we allow our souls to be permeated with that which belongs to the world of supersensible truths, the more our feelings will become inwardly able to direct us in our lives, the more essential will these feelings become. The man who is merely pleased with Spiritual Science, who embraces it out of curiosity, or for some similar reason, that man will perhaps make a very bad use of it in his life. But he who is permeated by the feeling we characterized above, by that sacred feeling that comes to us because we know that Spiritual Science must exist out of inner necessity, he will take his place in life with the right attitude toward this Science. He will be able to find his way through Spiritual Science, at least inwardly, even in the most difficult situations; he will perhaps find it especially when outwardly the greatest difficulties arise. For Spiritual Science is an affair of the future, it has entered into the world today because it must serve mankind in the most comprehensive sense, in the most comprehensive manner. But the result of this is that those who in a way have a fear of the spiritual worlds in the depths of their souls manifest this fear in their consciousness as hatred.

Many human feelings are related to each other; ambition and vanity, for instance, are related to fear. And in a complicated manner all kinds of feelings are related to each other. Why is man ambitious, vain? What does it mean to be ambitious, vain? To be ambitious, vain, means wanting to be valued in the opinion of one's environment, and to take pleasure in the value one gains in the opinion of one's environment, to take intense pleasure in that opinion. Why does one want that? One may want it for a number of reasons. But today is the time when men, if we look into the depths of their souls, reveal themselves as particular cowards. Some of them who appear to be quite robust in their outward consciousness are cowards in the depths of their soul. And they seek all kinds of narcotics when they have such fear of the supersensible worlds. That is, because some people are afraid of losing their foothold when they gain access to the spiritual worlds, fear overcomes them; but they want to stifle this fear, sometimes because they are afraid of the earnest and solemn strength which they must use in order to enter into the spiritual worlds. We have seen many a man who believed he could be in the spiritual world at the end of four weeks, but there are—oh, the most terrible of terrors—hindrances: it proves impossible for this man to become in this incarnation, on the basis of spiritual knowledge, that which he would like so much to be—a famous man. Many a man then loses his joy, that is what he is afraid of, and he wants to stifle this fear; and so he creates against this Spiritual Science an antipathy permeated by hatred and vanity.

This mood will spread farther and farther in the present, for the inwardly cowardly, outwardly vain souls will become more and more prevalent in the world. And it may well come to pass that much more hatred, many more attacks will be launched against Spiritual Science than has been the case so far. Thus, there is certainly sufficient reason to see quite clearly, to feel quite clearly in all these things; in spite of the characterized feelings, we should have harmony, even though outwardly it may often seem that everything may go awry. To see clearly and distinctly, that will be necessary if one wants to stand firm on the ground of spiritual knowledge. For in our times those who most intensely believe they are qualified to criticize often do not know at all what they are talking about. There are people who, let us say, begin to write articles about Spiritual Science, who criticize terribly the “fantasies” of the spiritual researcher. Then, in the second half of the article there appears all kind of information about the author, which is entirely false, which is not true. A wild fantasy governs these descriptions. No one who ascends to the supersensible worlds could think up such fantasies as the person who in the first part of his article has criticized the “fantastic” Spiritual Science. Thus things are turned around in the human soul. Those who think they can tell the truth very clearly and who are gifted with a certain impure imagination about the facts of the physical plane partially stupefy themselves by holding forth against that which is supersensibly perceived. Thus humanity seeks oblivion not merely by means of alcohol, but by all kinds of other means. In many things we must see clearly, and the spiritual conception of life will give us the guidance to clear seeing. The most varied narcotics are sought and also found, and they are found for the reason that demonic beings are increasingly active in the hidden depths of the souls of men. These demonic beings will certainly be released by degrees against that which is to fructify humanity from the spiritual side.

This is something, my dear friends, which I wanted to paint before your souls just at this time as a kind of picture of the future, because it is well that we remind ourselves in our time of the way we shall have to take a firm and secure stand on the ground of this Spiritual Science by creating the right feelings toward it and its mission, if we really recognize this Science and its mission. From this ground we can tranquilly watch in our innermost being the development into the future, even though perhaps we may be brought outwardly more and more into disharmony, even though we may more and more be put in the wrong.

We have often spoken of that period of human evolution that has passed since the Atlantean catastrophe. We have dealt with the various epochs of this evolution—the original Indian, original Persian, Egypto-Chaldean and Greco-Latin—and then with our own, the fifth epoch of post-Atlantean civilisation. We have also shown that two further epochs will pass, before the coming of another great catastrophe, so that we have to reckon in all seven such epochs of earthly humanity.

It is comprehensible that these epochs should be described differently. For as men of the present day we desire to find how we stand as regards our own mission, we can only gain some idea of what lies before us in the future when we know how far we have participated in these different epochs in the past.

I have often explained how we can distinguish between the separate human being, the little world, or microcosm, and the great world, or macrocosm; I have shown how man, the little cosmos, is a copy of the great world or macrocosm. Though this is a truth, yet it is a very abstract truth, and as generally stated does not mean very much. You will therefore find it helpful if we go into particulars regarding this, and show how certain things met with in mankind have really to be accepted as a little world, and can be compared with another, a greater world.

The man of the present day really belongs to all seven ages of the post-Atlantean epoch. We have passed through all the earlier ages in former incarnations, and will pass through all the later ages in later ones. In each incarnation we receive what the age in question has to give. Because we receive this we bear within us, in a certain sense, the fruits of former evolutions, and the most intimate things within us are really those we have acquired during the ages mentioned. What each of us has acquired in the course of these ages is more or less within human consciousness to-day; while what we acquired generally in our Atlantean incarnations, when the state of consciousness was very different, has sunk more or less into our sub-consciousness, and no longer reverberates within us as that does which we have acquired in post-Atlantean times. In Atlantean times man was more shielded from having his evolution injured in one way or another, because his consciousness was not then so awake as it was in post-Atlantean times. For this reason all we bear within us as the fruits of our Atlantean evolution is more in accordance with the ordering of the world than is that which had its origin in an age when we were already capable of bringing certain things in us into disorder. Ahrimanic and Luciferic Beings certainly influenced man in Atlantean times, but they then worked quite differently, for man was not then capable of shielding himself from them.

That men grew ever more and more conscious is the most important fact of post-Atlantean culture. In this respect human evolution from the Atlantean catastrophe until the next great catastrophe is macrocosmic. Humanity evolves like one great man throughout the seven post-Atlantean periods; and the most important things that were to arise in human consciousness during these seven periods resemble what a single individual experiences in the seven periods of his individual life.

The different ages in the life of a man have been described as follows:—The first seven years, from birth to the change of teeth, is described as the first age. In it man's physical body receives its form, is endowed with it as a gift. With the coming of the second teeth this form, in all its essentials, is fixed. The man then continues to grow within this form, which has received its essential direction. What is accomplished during the first seven years is the construction of the form. This period has to be understood from all sides. We must, for instance, distinguish the first teeth which the child develops early and which fall out, from the second teeth which replace them. These two kinds of teeth, with respect to the laws of the body, are quite different—the first are inherited, they appear as the fruits of the organisms of the man's ancestors, but the second teeth appear as the outcome of the laws of the man's own physical Being! This has to be realised. It is only when we go into such particulars that we observe this difference. We receive our first teeth, because our ancestors pass them on to us with our organism, we acquire our second teeth because our own physical organism is so constituted that we acquire them through it. In the first period the teeth are directly bequeathed, in the second the physical organism is bequeathed, and it produces the second teeth.

After this we distinguish a second period of life, that from the change of teeth until puberty, to about the 14th or 15th year. What is significant in it is the development of the etheric body. The third period, to about the 21st year, represents the development of the astral body. Then follows the development of the ego, and this progresses from the development of the sentient soul to that of the rational soul and on to the consciousness soul. It is thus we distinguish the different ages in the life of a man. In this life, as you know well, only that period is really ordered and regulated, which falls within the first seven years. This is, and must be so, as regards the man of the present day. Such regular differentiations as we find in the first three periods of a man's life do not occur later; neither is the time they last so clearly defined. If we enquire into the causes of this we have to understand that in the evolution of the world a middle period always comes after the first three of any seven periods.

We are living at present in the post-Atlantean age, we have already within us the fruits of the first three periods, and of the fourth, for we are now in the fifth post-Atlantean age, and are living on towards the sixth.

We are entirely justified in finding a resemblance between the evolution of the various post-Atlantean periods and that of the ages in the life of separate individuals, so that here also it is possible to distinguish between what is macrocosmic and what is microcosmic.

Let us take that which is most characteristic of the first post-Atlantean period, the one we call the Old-Indian; for in this the character of the post-Atlantean evolution was most strongly expressed. In this first period an exalted and most clearly differentiated wisdom existed, a primeval wisdom. What was taught in India by the Seven Holy Rischis was in principle the same as was actually beheld in the spiritual world by natural seers, and also by a large part of the people at that time. This ancient wisdom was present in the first Indian period as an inheritance. It was experienced clairvoyantly in Atlantean times, but now it had become more of an inherited primeval wisdom, preserved and given out again by those who, like the Rischis, had risen to spiritual worlds by initiation. What had entered thus into human consciousness was essentially and absolutely an inheritance. It was therefore entirely different in character from present day wisdom. People make a great mistake when they try to express the important matters given out by the Holy Rischis in the first post-Atlantean period in forms similar to those employed by the science of to-day. This is hardly possible. The scientific forms in use to-day appeared first in the course of post-Atlantean culture. The knowledge of the Ancient Rischis was of a very different kind. Those who communicated it, felt how it worked in them, how it rose within them on the instant. If we are to understand what knowledge was at that time, we must realise that its most marked characteristic was that it did not spring in any way from memory. Memory played no part as yet in knowledge. I pray you to keep this in mind. To-day memory plays a main part in the passing on of knowledge. When a university professor mounts the platform, or a public speaker addresses an audience, he must be careful to consider beforehand what he is to speak about, and retain it in his memory. Certainly, there are people who say they do not require to do this, they follow their genius; but this does not take them very far. At the present day the passing on of knowledge depends really very largely on memory.

We gain a correct perception of how knowledge was communicated in the ancient Indian epoch if we grant that knowledge first rose in the head of him who communicated it at the moment he passed it on to others. In former times knowledge was not prepared before-hand as it is to-day. The Rischis did not prepare what they had to say, so that their memory might retain it. They prepared themselves by attuning themselves to what they were about to communicate. They said:—“This knowledge (Wissen) is not built on memory in any way. Memory has no part in it, my soul must first enter into a holy atmosphere, it must be attuned to piety!” They prepared this atmosphere, this feeling, but not what they were to say. At the moment of communication it resembled rather a reading aloud from an invisible script. Listeners who took down in writing what was said would have been unthinkable at that time. This would have been an impossibility, anything preserved by such means would have been regarded at that time as worthless. Only those things were considered of value which a man preserved within his soul, and which his soul then moved him to reproduce and impart to others in the same way as he had received them. It would have been regarded as desecration to write down these communications. Why? Because in the opinion of that day it was thought that what was written on paper could not be the same as what was communicated by word of mouth.

This tradition endured for a long time, for such things are retained far longer in the feelings than in the understanding of men, and when in the middle ages the art of printing was added to that of writing many people regarded it for long as a black art. The old feeling survived, that what passed in a living way from one soul to another should not be preserved in such a grotesquely profane way as was the case when black printer's ink traced spoken words on a white page, thus changing them into something lifeless, in order that later they might be revived in a way perhaps that was far from edifying. We must therefore regard the direct outpouring (Strömung) from soul to soul as a characteristic feature of the time we are considering. This was an outstanding tendency of the first post-Atlantean epoch, and must be realised if we are to understand, for instance, the old Grecian and Germanic rhapsodists, who moved from place to place reciting their very long poems. If they had employed memory they could never have recited these poems again and again in the same way. It was a soul-force, a soul-attribute far more living than memory, that lay behind these long recitations. To-day if anyone recites a poem he must have learnt it beforehand, but these people experienced what they recited, it was as if newly created at the moment. This was strengthened by the fact that in quite other ways than is the case to-day, the soul-element was then more in evidence. In our day, with some justification, everything of a soul nature is more suppressed. When recitations or lectures are given to-day what matters is the meaning; care is taken as to the meaning of the words. This was not the case when in the middle ages a minstrel recited the Nibelungenlied for example. He had still a certain feeling for the inner rhythm, he even stamped with his foot as he marked its rise and fall. These things were but the echoes of what existed in more ancient times. But you would form no true picture of the Rischis of India and their pupils if you thought they did not communicate the ancient knowledge of Atlantis faithfully. The high school pupil of to-day, even if he wrote out the whole lecture, would not have reproduced what had been said as faithfully as the Indian Rischis reproduced the ancient knowledge in their day.

The characteristic feature of the ages that followed is that Atlantean knowledge had ceased to affect them. Up to the decline of the first period, that of ancient Indian culture, the legacy of knowledge man had received continued. Knowledge continued to increase. This came to an end, however, with the first post-Atlantean period, and afterwards hardly anything new came forth from human nature. Increase in knowledge was therefore only possible in the first period, the early Indian, after that it ceased. In the Persian period among those who were influenced by the teaching of Zarathustra, what we can compare with the second age of development in the life of a man began, and it is best understood when so compared. The first period of Indian culture can well he likened to the first part of the life of a man—that from birth to the seventh year—when everything of the nature of form receives its shape, later there is only growth within the established form. Thus it was with the spirit in the first post-Atlantean epoch. What follows later, how man develops the teaching that comes to him in the second part of his life, can be likened to the first period of ancient Persian development and with the instruction then received, only we must be clear as to who the scholars were and who the teachers. I would like to point out something here. Does it not strike you as strange how very differently Zarathustra, the leader of the second post-Atlantean epoch, comes before us to the way, for instance, the Indian Rischis do? While the Rischis appear like holy initiated persons of a far distant age, into whom all the knowledge of ancient Atlantis had poured, Zarathustra comes before us as the first initiate of post-Atlantean times. Something new enters with him. Zarathustra is actually the first historical personality of post-Atlantean times to be initiated into that form of Mystery-knowledge (truly post-Atlantean) in which knowledge was presented in such a way that it was actually comprehensible to the rational understanding of man. What pupils received in those early days in the schools of Zarathustra was pre-eminently a super-sensible knowledge, but it dawned in them so that for the first time it took the form of human conceptions. While it is not possible to reproduce the knowledge of the ancient Rischis in the forms of modern science, this is possible with the knowledge of Zarathustra. Certainly this is a purely super-sensible knowledge, dealing as it does with the super-sensible worlds, but it is clothed in conceptions similar to the conceptions and ideas of post-Atlantean times. Among the followers of Zarathustra a teaching arose of which we can say:—“It was constructed systematically in accordance with the rational conceptions of man.” This means it sprang from the ancient holy treasures of wisdom which evolved up to the end of the Indian period, and continued from generation to generation; no new thing was later added to this, but the old was elaborated further. The mission of the mysteries of the second post-Atlantean period can be realised through a comparison; we can compare it with the publishing of some occult hook. Any book that is the result of investigations into higher world can be clothed in a logical arrangement, thus bringing it down to the physical plane. It is possible to do this. But if my “Outline of Occult Science” had been treated in this way a hook of fifty volumes would have resulted, each as large as the hook itself. If this had been done, each section would have been presented in strictly logical form, this is in the book, and it might have been treated in this way. But it is also possible to proceed otherwise. One can, for instance, leave something to the reader; leave him to think matters out for himself. People must try to do this to-day otherwise the work of occultism could not progress.

Now, in the fifth post-Atlantean period, with his acquired powers of forming conceptions, it is possible for man to approach occult knowledge and to increase it, but at the time of Zarathustra, thoughts had first to be discovered capable of dealing with these facts. At that time knowledge such as we have to-day did not exist. Something there was that had remained over like an echo from the time of the Rischis, and to this was added what was capable of being clothed in human thoughts. But human conceptions had first to be found, and into them super-sensible facts had to be poured. Different degrees in power to grasp what was super-sensible then first made its appearance. We may say:—The Rischis still spoke absolutely in the way men had always spoken, in a pictorial language, an imaginative language. They passed on the knowledge they possessed from soul to soul when speaking in this vital picture-language which came whenever they had any kind of super-sensible knowledge to transmit. With “cause and effect” and the other ideas we have to-day with logic in any form—men did not concern themselves in the least. All that arose later. Then in the second post-Atlantean period they began to be interested in super-sensible knowledge. They then felt for the first time the opposition, as it were, of the physical plane; they felt the necessity of giving expression to what was super-sensible so that it might assume forms that thought could grasp on the physical plane. This was the essential mission of the first period of Persian civilisation.

Then followed the third period, the period of Egyptian culture. People now had super-sensible ideas. This is difficult for the men of to-day. Try and picture conditions as they were at that time; there was as yet no physical science, but people had ideas that had been gained concerning super-sensible worlds, and they could speak of them in the thought-forms of the physical plane.

In the third epoch people began to direct what they had learnt from super-sensible worlds to the physical world. This can again be compared with the third life-period of a man. While in the second life-period he learns; he then goes on to employ what he has learnt. In the third period of their lives most people feel constrained to direct their learning to the physical plane.

The pupils of the heavenly knowledge were those who, in the second epoch, had been pupils of Zarathustra, but they now began to direct what they had learnt to the physical plane. Put into modern language we can say—men now learnt that all they beheld through super-sensible vision could only be understood if expressed by a triangle; if they used the triangle as an image to express the super-sensible, they learnt that the super-sensible part of human nature which permeates the physical part can be grasped as a triad. Other conceptions had come to man so that he now applied physical things to what was non-physical. Geometry, for example, was first learnt so that it was accepted as symbolic of ideas. Men had this and made use of it—the Egyptians in the art of surveying and agriculture, the Chaldeans in the study of the stars and the founding of astrology and astronomy. What formerly was held to be only super-sensible was now applied to things seen physically. People began to use what had been born in them as super-sensible wisdom on the physical plane. This was first done in the third cultural period.

In the fourth period, the Greco-Latin, this became a fact of outstanding importance. Up to that time men possessed super-sensible knowledge, but did not use it as described. It was not necessary for the Holy Rischis to use it in this way, for knowledge flowed into them directly from the spiritual world. In the time of Zarathustra people had only to ponder over spiritual knowledge, and they knew exactly the form this knowledge would take.

In the Egypto-Chaldean age they clothed conceptions from spiritual worlds in what they had gained in physical existence, and in the fourth period they said:—Is it right that what is acquired from the spiritual world should be applied to physical things? Are the things gained in this way really suited to physical conditions?

These questions were only put by man to himself in the fourth period after he had used this knowledge innocently, and applied it to his physical requirements for a long time. He then became more self-conscious and asked:—“What right have I to apply spiritual knowledge to physical uses?”

Now it always happens that, in an age when any important task has to be carried out, some person appears who can fulfil this task. It was such a person to whom it first occurred to ask the question:—“Have I the right to apply my super-sensible ideas to physical facts?” You can see how what I am trying to indicate developed. You can see, for example, how vital Plato's link still was with the ancient world, how he still used ideas in the ancient form, applying them to physical conditions. It was his pupil, Aristotle, who asked the question—“Ought one to do this?” For this reason he is regarded as the founder of logic.

Those who do not concern themselves in any way with spiritual science might ask:—Why did logic arise first in the fourth epoch? Was there not some reason, seeing that evolution had gone on indefinitely, for man to ask himself this question at a specified time?

When conditions are really studied, important turning points in evolution are seen to occur at certain times. One such important turning point in evolution occurred between the time of Plato and Aristotle. In this age there was still, in a certain sense, something of the old connection with the spiritual world, as this existed in Atlantean times. Living knowledge certainly died in the Indian epoch; but it was replaced by something new that came from above. Man now became critical and asked:—How can I apply what is super-sensible to physical things? This means: he was then first aware that he could himself accomplish something; observing the world around him he realised that he could bring something down into this world. This was a most important age.

We divine (spüren) that conceptions and ideas are super-sensible things when from their nature we begin to perceive in them a guarantee for the super-sensible world. But very few people do perceive this. For most people the fabric of conceptions and ideas is worn very thin and threadbare. Although they may divine that something lives in these which can give them proof of human immortality, conviction is not reached, because the conceptions and ideas concerning the solid reality for which man craves are of such a thin-spun consistency. For most people the fabric they have spun from conceptions and ideas is very thin and worn; though something lives in it which can give them consciousness of immortality, they are incapable of full conviction. But at a time when humanity had sunk to the final—hardly any longer believed in—shreds of that fabric of ideas which it had spun from higher worlds, a mighty new impulse came from the spiritual world and entered into it—this was the Christ-Impulse. The greatest spiritual Reality entered humanity in our post-Atlantean age at a time when man was least spiritually gifted, when all that remained to him was the spiritual gift of ideas.

For anyone who studies human development in a wide sense, it is a most interesting consideration, apart from the fact that it affects the soul so overwhelmingly, it is most interesting (even scientifically), to compare the infinite spirituality of that essence which entered human evolution with the Christ Principle, with that which, like a last thin-spun thread from spiritual realms, caused man to ask shortly before: in what way this thread connected him with spirituality. In other words: when we place Aristotelean logic, this weaving of abstract conceptions to which mankind had at last attained, along-side that great Spiritual Outpouring. We can think of no greater disparity than between the spirituality that came down to the physical plane in the Being of Christ, and that which man had preserved for himself. You can therefore understand that in the early Christian centuries it was quite impossible for men to grasp the spiritual nature of Christ with the thin thread of ideas spun from Aristotelean philosophy. Gradually the endeavour arose to grasp the facts of human and world-events in a way conformable to Aristotelean logic. This was the task that faced the philosophy of the middle ages.

It is important for us now to compare the fourth post-Atlantean epoch with the fourth period in the life of a man—that period in which the ego develops—to see how the “I am” of all humanity entered human evolution at a time when humanity as a whole was really furthest withdrawn from the spiritual world. This is why man was at first quite incapable of comprehending Christ except through faith; why Christianity had at first to be a matter of faith; only later, and by degrees, was it to become a matter of knowledge. It will become a matter of knowledge; but we have only now begun to enter with understanding into the study of the Gospels. For hundreds and hundreds of years Christianity was only a matter of faith, and had to be so, because than had descended furthest from the spiritual world.

As this was man's position in the fourth post-Atlantean period, it was necessary after so deep a descent that he should begin to rise once more. The fourth period brought him furthest on the downward path, but also gave him the first great impulse upwards. Naturally this spiritual impulse could not be understood at first, only in the periods that follow will it be possible for him to understand it. But now we can at least recognise the task before us:—We have to refill our ideas with spirit from within.

The evolution of the world is not simple. When, for instance, a ball starts rolling in one direction its momentum tends to make it continue rolling in the same direction. If this is to be changed another impulse must come to give the thrust necessary to a change of direction.

Pre-Christian culture had the tendency to continue the downward plunge into the physical world, and has continued to do so to our day. The upward tendency is only beginning, hence the need of a constant incentive to this upward direction. We can see this downward tendency more especially in men's thoughts. The greater part of what is called philosophy to-day is nothing more than the continued downward roll of the ball. Aristotle divined something of this; he grasped the fact that there was a spiritual reality in the fabric of human thoughts. But a couple of centuries after his day, men were no longer capable of realising that the content of the human head was connected with reality. The driest, most desiccated ideas of the old philosophy are those of Kant and everything associated with Kantism. Kant's philosophy puts the main question in such a way that he cuts every link between what man evolves as ideas, between perceptions as an inner life, and that which ideas really are. All this is old and dead, and is therefore not fitted to give any vital uplift for the future. You will now no longer wonder that the conclusion of my lectures on psychology had a theosophical background. I explained that in all we strive for, more especially as regards knowledge of the soul, our task must be to allow ourselves to be so stimulated by this knowledge, given to us formerly by the Gods and brought down by us to earth, that we can offer it up again on the altars of the Gods.: We have only to make the ideas that come to us froth the spiritual world, once more our own.

It is not from any want of modesty that I say:—Teaching regarding the soul must of necessity be a scientific teaching, that it must rise again from the frozen state into which it has fallen. There have been many psychologists in the past and there are many still to-day, but the ideas they use are void of spiritual life. It is a significant sign that a man like Franz Brentano be allowed the first volume of his book on Psychology to appear in 1874. Though much it contains is distorted, it is on the whole correct. The second volume was ready, and was to have been published that year, but he was unable to complete it, he stuck in it. He still could give an outline of his teaching, but the spiritual impulse necessary if the work was to be brought to a conclusion was wanting.

Such psychologists as we have to-day, Von Wundt and Lipps for example, are not really psychologists for they work only with preconceived ideas; from the first they were incapable of producing anything. Brentano's psychology was fitted to do this, but it remained incomplete. This is the fate of all knowledge that is dying. Death does not enter the domain of natural science so quickly. Here people can work with ideas, for the facts they have accumulated speak for themselves. In the Science of Spirit this does not happen so easily. The whole substratum is immediately lost if people employ ordinary ideas. The muscles of the heart do not immediately cease to beat even if analysed like a mineral product without any recognition of their true nature; but the soul cannot be analysed in this way.

Thus science dies from above downwards, and men will gradually reach a point where they will certainly be able to appreciate natural laws, but in a way entirely independent of science. The construction of machines, instruments, telephones and the like, is something very different from understanding science in the right way or carrying it a step further. Anyone can make use of an electric apparatus without necessarily understanding it. True science is gradually dying. We have now reached a point where external science must receive new life from spiritual science. Our fifth period of culture is that in which the ball of science rolls slowly downhill.

When it can roll no further its activity will cease, as in the case of Brentano. At the same time the upward progress of humanity must receive ever more life. And it will receive it. This can only happen when efforts are made by which knowledge, even if this has been gained outwardly, becomes fruitful through what occult investigation has to give. Our age, the fifth period, will increasingly assume a character which will show that the ancient Egypto-Chaldean epoch is repeated in it; as yet we have not gone very far with this repetition, it is only beginning. That this is the case can be gathered from what occurred at our annual general meeting. On that occasion Herr Seiler spoke about “Astrology” showing, that as spiritual scientists you were in a position to connect certain conceptions with astrological ideas, whereas this was not possible with the ideas of modern astronomy. Modern astronomy would consider these ideas to be nonsense. This is not because of what astronomical science is in itself, for this science has a better opportunity than any other of being led back to what is spiritual; but because men's thoughts are far removed from any return to spirituality. There is a means, through what astronomy has to offer, by which such a return might easily be made to the fundamental truths of Astrology so undervalued to-day. But some time must elapse before a bridge can he formed between these two. During this time all kinds of theories will be devised, theories by which the movements of the planets, for instance, will be explained in a purely materialistic way. Things will be still more difficult in the domain of chemistry, and in everything connected with life. Here it will he still more difficult to build the bridge. It will he done most easily in the domain of soul-knowledge. To do so it is necessary that people should understand what was stated at the conclusion of my lecture on “Psychology.” There I showed that the stream of soul-life does not only flow from the past towards the future, but also from the future into the past; that we have two time-streams—the etheric part of the life of the soul goes towards the future, the astral part of us on the other hand flows back towards the past. (There is probably no one on the earth to-day who is conscious of this unless he has an impulse towards what is spiritual.) We are first able to form a conception of the life of the soul, when we realise that something comes continually to meet us out of the future. Otherwise this is quite impossible. We must be able to form such a conception, and for this, when speaking of cause and effect, we must break with those ordinary methods of thought which deal mainly with the past. We must not only reckon with the past in such connections, but must speak of the future as something real; something that comes towards us in just as real a way as the past slips from us. But it will be a long time yet before such ideas become prevalent, and till they do there will be no psychology.

The nineteenth century produced a smart idea—“Psychology without souls.” People were very proud of this idea, and with it they declared:—“We simply study the revelations of the human soul, but do not concern ourselves with the soul that is the cause of these!”

A Soul-teaching without Souls! This can be carried further; but what results (to use a common comparison), is nothing else than a meal time without food. Such is psychology! Now people are of course not satisfied when dinner time comes and the plates are empty; but the science of the nineteenth century was strangely satisfied with the psychology put before it, which was in no way concerned with the soul. This began comparatively early, but into every part of it spiritual life must flow.

Therefore we have to record the beginning among us of an entirely new life. The old in a certain sense is finished and a new life must begin. We must feel this. We must feel that a primeval wisdom came to us from ancient Atlantean times, that this gradually declined, and we are now faced with the task of beginning in our present incarnation to gather more and more new wisdom which will be the wisdom of the men of a later day. The coming of the Christ-Impulse made this possible. It will continually develop a living activity, and from it men will perhaps be able best to evolve towards the real, historic Christ, when all tradition concerning Him and all that is outwardly connected with these traditions has died away.

From what has been said you can see how the post-Atlantean evolution can actually be compared with the life of a single man; how it is indeed a kind of macrocosm facing man—the microcosm. But the individual man is in a very strange position. What is left to him for the second half of his life of all he acquired in the first half, which when used up is followed by death?

The spirit alone can conquer death and carry on to a new incarnation that which gradually begins to decay when we have passed the first half of our life. Our evolution advances until our thirty-fifth year, then it begins to decline. But the spirit then first begins truly to rise! What it is unable to develop further in the second half of life within the body, it brings to completion in a succeeding incarnation. Thus we see the body gradually decline, but the spirit blossom more and more.

The macrocosm reveals a picture similar to that of man:—Up to the fourth post-Atlantean epoch we have a youthful upward striving cultural development; from then onwards a real decline; death everywhere as regards the development of human consciousness; but at the same time the dawn of a new spiritual life. The spiritual life of man will be born again in the age following our present one. But he will have to work with full consciousness on what is to be reincarnated. When this happens the other must die, truly die. We gaze prophetically into the future; many sciences have arisen and will arise for the benefit of post-Atlantean civilisation, they, however, belong to what is dying. The life that streamed directly into human life along with the Impulse of Christ will in future rise (ausleben) in man in the same way as Atlantean knowledge rose within the holy Rischis.

What ordinary science knows of Copernicus to-day is but the external part of his knowledge, the part belonging to decline. That which will live on, that will be fruitful, not only the part through which he has already worked for four centuries, this part man must win for himself. The teaching of Copernicus as given to-day is not so very true, its truth will first be revealed by spiritual science.

So it is as regards much that is held to be most true in astronomy, and so it will be with everything else which men value as knowledge to-day. Certainly, what science discovers to-day is profitable. Therein lies its usefulness. In so far as the science of to-day is technical it is justified; but in so far as it has something to con-tribute to human knowledge, it is a dead product. It is useful for trade, but for that no spiritual content is required. In so far as it seeks to discover anything concerning the mysteries of the universe, it belongs to declining civilisation. In order to enrich our knowledge of the secrets of the universe, external science must super-impose on all it has to offer, the wisdom derived from spiritual science.

What I have said to-day can form an introduction to our studies on the Gospel of Mark, which are about to begin. But first I had to speak of the necessity for the entrance into humanity of the greatest Spiritual Impulse of all time at a moment when only the last faint shreds of spirituality remained to it.

At the conclusion of what was said yesterday on the subject of the deeper mystical path, it was necessary to speak of the chief danger encountered on this path by anyone who attempted to tread it without a leader in times before the methods of Initiation now available, were in existence. In order to indicate still more explicitly how great these difficulties were, I want to add the following.-

We have heard that the difficulties are mainly due to the fact that on descending into his inner being, a man becomes almost entirely filled by his egoistic impulses. The Ego awakens with a strength that would place everything in its service; everything would be viewed in accordance with the colouring given it by this reinforced Ego. For this reason it was essential in the process of the ancient Initiation that the strength of the, Ego-feeling, the Ego-consciousness, should be subdued. The Ego had as it were to be given over to the spiritual leader or teacher. This subjugation of the Ego was effected in such a way that through the power emanating from the spiritual leader, the Ego-consciousness of the candidate for Initiation was reduced, to begin with, to one-third of its ordinary strength. That is a very considerable reduction, for it can be said, broadly speaking, that with the exception of the very deepest stage of all, our consciousness in sleep is reduced to about one-third. But in the ancient Mysteries the process was carried further than that; the consciousness was reduced to a quarter of a third (that is, to one-twelfth), so that finally the candidate was actually in a condition resembling death. To outer observation he was exactly like a dead man.

But I must emphasise that this Ego-consciousness did not fade away into nothingness. That was not the case. On the contrary, only then was it possible to realise through spiritual perception the intense strength of human egoism; for even when Ego-consciousness was reduced to one-twelfth, a powerful force of egoism still came forth spiritually from the individual. And strange as it may sound, in order to hold in check this outpouring egoism, to keep a spiritual hold on the man whose Ego was thus subdued, twelve helpers were needed for the teacher or leader.—That is one of the so-called secrets of higher Initiation in certain ancient Mysteries. It has been mentioned here only in order that a man may know what is found when he descends into his own inner being. Left to his own resources he would develop traits twelve times worse than those he possessed in ordinary life. These traits were held in check in the ancient Mysteries by the twelve helpers of the priest of Hermes.—This is said merely to supplement the references made at the end of the lecture yesterday.

Today we will turn our minds to the other path that a man may take, not by descending into his inner self at the moment of waking, but by consciously experiencing the moment of going to sleep, consciously experiencing the condition during which he is given over to sleep. We have heard how man has then expanded as it were into the Macrocosm, whereas in his waking state he has plunged into his own being, into the Microcosm. We also heard that what a man would experience if his Ego were to pour consciously into the Macrocosm, would be so dazzling, so shattering, that it must be regarded as a wise dispensation that at the moment of going to sleep man forgets his existence altogether and consciousness ceases.

What man can experience in the Macrocosm opening out before him, provided he retains a certain degree of consciousness, was described as a state of ecstasy. But it was said at the same time that in ecstasy the Ego is like a tiny drop mingling in a large volume of water and disappearing in it. Man is in the state of being outside himself, outside his ordinary nature; he lets his Ego flow out of him. Ecstasy, therefore, can by no means be considered a desirable way of passing into the Macrocosm, for a man would lose hold of himself and the Ego would cease to control him. Nevertheless in bygone times, particularly in certain parts of Europe, a candidate who was to be initiated into the mysteries of the Macrocosm was put into a condition comparable with ecstasy. This is no longer part of the modern methods for attaining Initiation, but in olden times, especially in the Northern and Western regions of Europe, including our own, it was entirely in keeping with the development of the peoples living there that they should be led to the secrets of the Macrocosm through a form of ecstasy. Thereby they were also exposed to what might be described as the loss of the Ego, but this condition was less perilous in those times because men were still imbued with a certain healthy, elemental strength; unlike people today their soul-forces had not been enfeebled by the effects of highly developed intellectuality. They were able to experience with far greater intensity all the hopefulness connected with Spring, the exultation of Summer, the melancholy of Autumn, the death-shudder of Winter, while still retaining something of their Ego—although not for long. In the case of those who were to become initiates and teachers of men, provision had to be made for this introduction to the Macrocosm to take place in a different way. The reason for this will be evident when it is remembered that the main feature in this process was the loss of the Ego. The Ego became progressively weaker, until finally man reached the state when he lost himself as a human being.

How could this be prevented? The force that became weaker in the candidate's own soul, the Ego-force, had to be brought to him from outside. In the Northern Mysteries this was achieved by the candidate being given the support of helpers who in their turn supported the officiating initiator. The presence of a spiritual initiator was essential, but helpers were necessary as well. These helpers were prepared in the following way.—

Through a special kind of training, one individual underwent with particular intensity the experiences arising from inner surrender, for example to the budding life of nature in Spring. Certainly, any human being can have something of the same feeling, but not with the necessary intensity. Therefore individuals were specially trained to place all their forces of soul in the service of the Northern Mysteries, to forgo all the experiences connected with Summer, Autumn and Winter, and to concentrate their whole life of feeling on the budding life of Spring. Others again were trained to experience the exuberant life of Summer, others the life characteristic of Autumn, others that of Winter. The experiences which a single human being can have through the course of the year were distributed among a number, so that individuals were available who in very different ways had strengthened one aspect of their Ego. Because they had cultivated one force in particular to the exclusion of all the rest, they had within them a superfluity of Ego-force, and now, in accordance with certain rules, they were brought into contact with the candidate for Initiation in such a way that their superfluity of Ego-force was transmitted to him. His own Ego-force would otherwise have become progressively weaker. Thus the one who in the process of Initiation was to experience the whole cycle of the year, lived through all the seasons with equal intensity; the Ego-force of these helpers of the initiating priest streamed into him so effectively that he was led on to a stage where certain higher truths connected with the Macrocosm were revealed to him. What the others were able to impart poured into the soul of the candidate for Initiation.

To understand such a process we must be able to form an idea of the intense devotion and self-sacrifice with which men worked in the Mysteries in those olden times. The exoteric world today has very little conception of such fervent self-sacrifice. In earlier times there were individuals who willingly developed one side of their Ego with the object of placing it at the service of the candidate for Initiation and thus being able eventually to hear from him a description of what he had experienced in a condition that was not ecstasy in the usual sense, but—because extraneous Ego-force had poured into him—a conscious ascent into the Macrocosm.

Twelve individuals-three Spring-helpers, three Summer-helpers, three Autumn helpers and three Winter-helpers were necessary; they transmitted their specialised Ego-forces to the candidate for Initiation and he, when he had risen into higher worlds, was able to give information about those worlds from his own experience. A team or ‘college’ of twelve men worked together in the Mysteries in order to help a candidate for Initiation to rise into the Macrocosm. A reminiscence of this has been preserved in certain societies existing today, but in an entirely decadent form. As a rule in such societies special functions are also carried out by twelve members; but this is only a last and moreover entirely misunderstood echo of acts once performed in the Northern Mysteries for the purposes of Initiation.

If, then, a man endowed with an Ego-force artificially maintained in him, penetrated into the Macrocosm, he actually ascended through worlds. [* See Note on terminology (at the end of this work) with reference to the different terminology employed for these worlds.] The first world through which he passed was the one that would be revealed to him if he did not lose consciousness on going to sleep. We will therefore now turn our attention to this moment of going to sleep as we did previously to that of waking.

The process of going to sleep is in very truth an ascent into the Macrocosm. Even in normal human consciousness it is sometimes possible, through particularly abnormal conditions, to become conscious to a certain extent of the processes connected with going to sleep. This happens in the following way.—The man feels a kind of bliss and can distinguish this consciousness of bliss quite clearly from the ordinary waking consciousness. It is as though he became lighter, as though he were growing out beyond himself. Then this experience is connected with a certain feeling of being tortured by remembrance of the personal faults inhering in the character during life. What arises here as a painful remembrance of personal faults is a very faint reflection of the feeling a man has when he passes the Lesser Guardian of the Threshold and can perceive how imperfect he is and how trivial in face of the great realities and Beings of the Macrocosm. This experience is followed by a kind of convulsion—indicating that the inner man is passing out into the Macrocosm. Such experiences are unusual but known to many people when they were more or less conscious at the moment of going to sleep. But a person who has only the ordinary, normal consciousness loses it at the moment of going to sleep. All the impressions of the day—colours, light, sounds, and so on—vanish, and the man is surrounded by dense darkness instead of the colours and other impressions of daily life. If he were able to maintain his consciousness—as the trained Initiate can do—at the moment when the impressions of the day vanish, he would perceive what is called in spiritual science the Elementary or Elemental World, the World of the Elements.

This World of the Elements is, to begin with, hidden from man while he is in process of going to sleep. Just as man's inner being is hidden on waking through his attention being diverted to the impressions of the outer world, so, when he goes to sleep, the nearest world to which he belongs, the first stage of the Macrocosm, the Elementary World, is hidden from his perception. He can learn to gaze into it when he actually ascends into the Macrocosm in the way indicated. To begin with, this Elementary World makes him conscious that everything in his environment, all sense-perceptions and impressions, are an emanation, a manifestation of the spiritual, that the spiritual lies behind everything material. When a man on the way to Initiation—not, therefore, losing consciousness while passing into sleep—perceives this world, no doubt any longer exists for him that spiritual Beings and spiritual realities lie behind the physical world. Only as long as he is aware of nothing except the physical world does he imagine that behind this world there exist all kinds of conjectured material phenomena—such as atoms and the like. For the man who penetrates into the Elementary World there can no longer be any question of whirling, clustering atoms of matter. He knows that what lies behind colours, sounds and so forth is not material but the spiritual. Certainly, at this first stage of the World of the Elements the spiritual does not yet reveal itself in its true form as spirit. Man has before him impressions which, although in a different form from those known in waking consciousness, are not yet the spiritual facts themselves. It is not yet anything that could be called a true spiritual manifestation but to a considerable degree it is something that might be described as a kind of new veil over the spiritual Beings and facts.

The form in which this world reveals itself is such that the designations, the names, which since olden times have been used for the Elements are applicable to it. We can describe what is there seen by choosing words used for qualities otherwise perceived in the physical world: solid, liquid or fluid, airy or aeriform, or warmth; or: earth, water, air, fire. These expressions are taken from the physical world for which they are coined. Our language is after all a means of expression for the physical world. If therefore the spiritual scientist has to describe the higher worlds, he must borrow the words from the language that was coined for the things of ordinary life. He can speak only in similes, endeavouring so to choose the words that little by little an idea is evoked of what is perceived by spiritual vision. In depicting the Elementary World we must not take the terms and expressions that are used for circumscribed objects in the physical world but those used for certain qualities common to a category of objects. Otherwise we shall lose our bearings. Things in the physical world reveal themselves to us in certain states which we call solid, liquid, aeriform; and in addition there is also what we become aware of when we touch the surfaces of objects or feel a current of air which we call warmth.

Things in the everyday world are revealed to us in these states or conditions: solid, liquid, aecriform or gaseous, or as warmth. These, however, are always qualities of some external body, for an external body may be solid in the form of ice or also be liquid or gaseous when the ice melts. Warmth permeates all three states. So it is in the case of everything existing in the outer world of the senses.

The fact is there are not objects in the Elementary World such as are found in the physical world, but in the Elementary World we find as realities what in the physical world are merely qualities. We perceive something there that we feel we cannot approach. The feeling might be described as follows: I have before me something—either an entity or an object of the Elementary World—which I can observe only by going round it; it has an inner and an outer side. Such an entity of the Elementary World is called ‘earth’. Then too there are things and entities which may be described as ‘liquid’ or ‘fluid’. In the Elementary World we can see through them, we can penetrate into them, we have a sensation similar to the sensation in the physical world of dipping the hand into water. We can plunge into them, whereas what is called ‘earth’ is something that offers resistance, like a hard object. The second state is described in the Elementary World as ‘water’. Whenever mention is made of ‘earth’ and ‘water’ in books on spiritual science, this is what is meant; physical water is only an external simile for what is seen at this stage of development. ‘Water’ is something that pours through the Elementary World, not, of course, perceptible to the physical senses, but intelligible to the higher senses, to the faculty of spiritual perception, of the Initiate.

Then there is something in the Elementary World comparable with what we call ‘airy’ or ‘aeriform’ in the physical world. This is designated as ‘air’ in the Elementary World. Then, further, there is ‘fire’ or ‘warmth’, but it must be realised that what is called ‘fire’ in the physical world is only a simile. ‘Fire’ as it is in the Elementary World is easier to describe than the other three states for these can really only be described by saying that water, air and earth are similes of them. The ‘fire’ of the Elementary World is easier to describe because everyone has a conception of warmth of soul as it is called, of the warmth that is felt, for example, when we are together with someone we love. What then suffuses the soul and is called warmth, or fire of excitement, must naturally be distinguished from ordinary physical fire which will burn the fingers if they come into contact with it. In daily life, too, man feels that physical fire is a kind of symbol of the fire of soul which, when it lays hold of us, kindles enthusiasm. By thinking of something midway between an outer, physical fire that burns our fingers, and fire of soul, we reach an approximate idea of what is called ‘elemental fire’. When in the process of Initiation a man rises into the Elementary World, he feels as if from certain places something were flowing towards him that pervades him inwardly with warmth, while at another place this is less the case. An added complication is that he feels as if he were within the being who is transmitting the warmth to him. He is united with this elementary being and accordingly feels its fire. Such a man is entering a higher world which gives him impressions hitherto unknown to him in the world of the senses.

When a man with normal consciousness goes to sleep his whole being flows out into the Elementary World. He is within everything in that world; but he takes his own nature, what he is as man, into it. He loses his Ego as it pours forth, but what is not Ego—his astral qualities, his desires and passions, his sense of truth or the reverse—all this is carried into the Elementary World. He loses his Ego which in everyday life keeps him in check, which brings order and harmony into the astral body. When he loses the Ego, disorder prevails among the impulses and cravings in his soul and they make their way into the Elementary World together with him; he carries into that world everything that is in his soul. If he has some bad quality, he transmits it to a being in the Elementary World who feels drawn towards this bad quality. Thus with the loss of his Ego he would, on penetrating into the Macrocosm, transmit his whole astral nature to evil beings who pervade the Elementary World. Because he contacts these beings who have strong Egos, while he himself, having lost his Ego, is weaker than they, the consequence is that they will reward him in the negative sense for the sustenance with which he supplies them from his astral nature. When he returns into the physical world they transmit to him, for his Ego, qualities they have received from him and made particularly their own; in other words they strengthen his propensity for evil.

So we see that it is a wise dispensation for man to lose consciousness when he enters the Elementary World and to be safeguarded from passing with his Ego into that world. Therefore one who in the ancient Mysteries was to be led into the Elementary World had to be carefully prepared before forces were poured into him by the helpers of the Initiator. This preparation consisted in the imposition of rigorous tests whereby the candidate acquired a stronger moral power of self-conquest. Special value was attached to this attribute. In the case of a mystic, different attributes—humility, for example—were considered particularly valuable.

Accordingly upon a man who was to be admitted to an Initiation in these Mysteries, tests were imposed which helped him to rise above disasters of every kind even in physical existence. Formidable dangers were laid along his path. But by overcoming these dangers his soul was to be so strengthened that he was duly prepared when beings confronted him in the Elementary World; he was then strong enough not to succumb to any of their temptations, not to let them get the better of him but to repel them. Those who were to be admitted into the Mysteries were trained in fearlessness and in the power of self-conquest.

Once again let it be said at this point that no one need feel alarmed by the description of these Mysteries, for nowadays such tests are no longer imposed, nor are they necessary, because other paths are available. But we shall understand the import of the modern method of Initiation better if we study the experiences undergone in the past by very many human beings in order to achieve Initiation into the secrets of the Mysteries.

When the candidate in those ancient Mysteries, after long experiences connected with the Elementary World, had become capable of realizing that ‘earth’, ‘water’, ‘air’, ‘fire’—everything he perceives in the material world—are the revelations of spiritual beings, when he had learned to discriminate between them and to find his bearings in the Elementary World, he could be led a stage further to what is called the World of Spirit behind the Elementary World. Those who were initiates—and this can only be described as a communication of what they experienced—now realised that in very truth there are beings behind the Physical and the Elementary Worlds. But these beings have no resemblance at all to men. Whereas men on the Earth live together in a social order, in certain forms of society, under definite social conditions, whether satisfactory or the reverse, the candidate for Initiation passes into a world in which there are spiritual beings—beings who naturally have no external body but who are related to each other in such a way that order and harmony prevail. It is now revealed to him that he can understand the order and harmony he perceives in that world only by realising that what these spiritual beings do is an external expression of the heavenly bodies in the solar system, of the relationship between the Sun and the planets in their movements and positions. Thereby these heavenly bodies give expression to what the beings of the spiritual world are doing.

It has already been said that our solar system may be conceived as a great cosmic clock or timepiece. Just as we infer from the position of the hands of a clock that something is happening, we can do the same from the relative positions of the heavenly bodies. Anyone looking at a clock is naturally not interested in the hands or their position per se, but in what this indicates in the outer world. The hands of a clock indicate, for example, what is happening here in Vienna or somewhere in the world at this moment. A man who has to go to his daily work looks at the clock to see if it is time to start. The position of the hands is therefore the expression of something lying behind. And so it is in the case of the solar system. This great cosmic clock can be regarded as the expression of spiritual happenings and of the activity of spiritual beings behind it.

At this stage the candidate for the Initiation we have been describing comes to know the spiritual beings and facts. He comes to know the World of Spirit and realises that this World of Spirit can best be understood by applying to it the designations used in connection with our solar system; for there we have an outer symbol of this World of Spirit. For the Elementary World the similes are taken from the qualities of earthly things—solid, liquid, airy, fiery. But for the World of Spirit other similes must be used, similes drawn from the starry heavens.

And now we can realise that the comparison with a clock is by no means far fetched. We relate the heavenly bodies of our solar system to the twelve constellations of the Zodiac, and we can find our bearings in the World of Spirit only by viewing it in such a way as to be able to assert that spiritual Beings and events are realities; we compare the facts with the courses of the planets but the spiritual Beings with the twelve constellations of the Zodiac. If we contemplate the planets in space and the zodiacal constellations, if we conceive the movements and relative positions of the planets in front of the various constellations to be manifestations of the activities of the spiritual Beings and the twelve constellations of the Zodiac as the spiritual Beings themselves, then it is possible to express by such an analogy what is happening in the World of Spirit.

We distinguish seven planets moving and performing deeds, and twelve zodiacal constellations at rest behind them. We conceive that the spiritual facts—the courses of the planets—are brought about by twelve Beings. Only in this way is it possible to speak truly of the World of Spirit lying behind the Elementary World. We must picture not merely twelve zodiacal constellations, but Beings, actually categories of Beings, and not merely seven planets, but spiritual facts.

Twelve Beings are acting, are entering into relationship with one another and if we describe their actions this will show what is coming to pass in the World of Spirit. Accordingly, whatever has reference to the Beings must be related in some way to the number twelve; whatever hag reference to the facts must be related to the number seven. Only instead of the names of the zodiacal constellations we need to have the names of the corresponding Beings. In Spiritual Science these names have always been known. At the beginning of the Christian era there was an esoteric School which adopted the following names for the Spiritual Beings corresponding to the zodiacal constellations: Seraphim, Cherubim, Thrones, Kyriotetes, Dynameis, Exusiai, then Archai (Primal Beginnings or Spirits of Personality), then Archangels and Angels. The tenth category is Man himself at his present stage of evolution. These names denote ten ranks. Man, however, develops onwards and subsequently reaches stages already attained by other Beings. Therefore one day he will also be instrumental in forming an eleventh and a twelfth category. In this sense we must think of twelve spiritual Beings.

If we wanted to describe the World of Spirit we should have to attribute the origin of the spiritual universe to the co-operation among these twelve categories of Beings. Any description of what they do would have to deal with the planetary bodies and their movements. Let us assume that the Spirits of Will (the Thrones) co-operate with the Spirits of Personality (Archai) or with other Beings—and Old Saturn comes into existence. Through the co-operation of other Spirits the planetary bodies we call Old Sun and Old Moon come into existence.

We are speaking here of the deeds of these spiritual Beings. A description of the World of Spirit must include the Elementary World, for that is the last manifestation before the physical world; fire, air, water, earth, must also be considered. On Old Saturn, everything was fire or warmth; during the Old Sun evolution, air was added; during the Old Moon evolution, water. In describing the World of Spirit we must begin with the Beings. We call them the Hierarchies and pass on to their deeds which come to expression through the planets in their courses. And to have a picture of how all this manifests in the Elementary World we must describe it by using terms derived from this world. Only in this way is it possible to give a picture of the World of Spirit lying behind the Elementary World and our physical world of sense.

The Beings, the spiritual Hierarchies, their correspondences with the zodiacal constellations, the planetary embodiments of our Earth described by using expressions connected with the Elementary World-all this is presented in detail in the chapter on the evolution of the world in the book Occult Science—an Outline,¹ and we can now understand the deeper reasons for that chapter having been written in the way it has. It describes the Macrocosm as it should be described. Any real description must go back to the spiritual Beings. I tried in the book Occult Science to give guiding lines for the right kind of description of the World of Spirit—the world entered when there has been an actual ascent into the Macrocosm.

This ascent into the Macrocosm can of course proceed to still higher stages, for the Macrocosm has by no means been exhaustively portrayed by what has here been said. Man can ascend into even higher worlds; but it becomes more and more difficult to convey any idea of these worlds. The higher the ascent, the more difficult this becomes. If we want to give an idea of a still higher world it must be done rather differently. An impression of the world that is reached after passing beyond the World of Spirit may be obtained in the following way.—In describing man as he stands before us we may say that his existence was only made possible through the existence of these higher worlds. Man has become the being he is because he has evolved out of the physical world but above all out of the higher, spiritual worlds. Only a fantasy-ridden, materialistic mind can believe that it would be possible for a man to originate from the nebula described by the Kant-Laplace theory. Such a nebula could have produced only an automaton—never a man!

Around us, we have, firstly, the physical world. The physical body of man belongs to the world we perceive with our senses. With ordinary consciousness we perceive it only from outside. To what world do the more deeply lying, invisible members of man's nature belong? They all belong to the higher worlds. Just as with physical eyes we see only the material aspect of man, so too we see of the great outer world only what the senses perceive; we do not see those super-sensible worlds of which two—the Elementary World and the World of Spirit—have been described. But man, with his inner constitution, has issued from these higher worlds. The whole of man's being, his external, bodily nature too, has become possible only because certain invisible spiritual Beings have worked on him. If the etheric body alone had worked on man, he would be like a plant, for a plant has a physical and an etheric body. Man has in addition the astral body; but so too has the animal. If man had only these three members (physical body, etheric body, astral body) he would be an animal. It is because man has his Ego as well that he towers above these lower creatures of the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms of nature. All the higher members of man work on his physical body; the physical body could not be what it is unless man also possessed these higher members. A plant would be a mineral if it had no etheric body. Man would have no nervous system if he had no astral body; he would not have his present structure, his upright gait, his over-arching brow, if he had not an Ego. If he had not his invisible members in higher worlds, he could not confront us as the figure he is.

Now these different members of man's organism and constitution have been formed out of different spiritual worlds. To understand this we shall do well to remind ourselves of a beautiful, profoundly wise saying of Goethe: “The eye is formed by the light for the light.” [* See Goethe's Studies in Natural Science. (Kürschner, Nationalliteratur, Vol. 35, p. 88). “The eye owes its existence to the light. Out of indifferent animal organs the light produces an organ to correspond to itself; and so the eye is formed by the light for the light so that the inner light may meet the outer.”] Schopenhauer, and Kant too, want to present the whole world as man's idea; this philosophy seeks to emphasise that without an eye we should perceive no light, that without an eye there would be darkness around us. That, of course, is true, but the point is that it is a one-sided truth. Unless the other side is added a one-sided truth is being regarded as the whole truth—than which there is nothing more pernicious. To say something that is incorrect is not the worst thing that can happen, for the world itself will soon put one right about it; but it is really serious to regard a one-sided truth as the absolute truth and to persist in so regarding it. That without the eye we could see no light is a one-sided truth. But if the world had remained forever filled with darkness, we should have had no eyes. When animals have lived for long ages in dark caves they lose their sight and their eyes go to ruin. On the one side it is true that without eyes we could gee no light, but on the other side it is equally true that the eyes have been formed by the light, for the light. It is always essential to look at truths not only from the one side but also from the other. The fault of most philosophers is not that they say what is false—in many cases their assertions cannot be refuted because they do state truths—but that they make statements which are due to things having been viewed from one side only. If you take in the right sense the saying that “the eye is formed by the light, for the light”, you will be able to say to yourselves that there must be something in the light that admittedly we do not see with our eyes but that has developed the eyes out of an organism which at first had no eyes. Behind the light there is something hidden. Let us say here: The eye-forming power is contained in every ray of sunlight. From this we can realise that everything round about us contains the forces which have created us. Just as our eyes are created by something within the light, all our organs have been formed by something that underlies everything we see in the world outside as external surfaces only.

Now man also has intellect, intelligence. In physical life he is able to use his intelligence because he has an instrument for it. Remember, we are speaking now of the physical world, not of what becomes of our thinking when we are free of the body after death, but of how we think through the instrument of the brain when we have wakened from sleep in the morning; after waking we see light through the eyes. In the light there is something that has formed the eye. We think through the instrument of the brain; thus there must be something in the world that has formed the brain in such a way that it could become an instrument of thinking suitable for the physical world. The brain has been made into an organ of thinking for the physical world by the power which manifests externally in our intelligence. Just as the light we perceive with the eye is an eye-forming power, our brain is the surface manifestation of a brain-forming power or force. Our brain is formed from out of the World of Spirit.

One who has attained Initiation recognises that if only the Elementary World and the World of Spirit existed, man's organ of intelligence could never have come into being. The World of the Spirit is indeed a lofty world but the forces which have formed the physical organ of thinking must have streamed into man from a yet higher world in order that intelligence might manifest outwardly, in the physical world.

Spiritual science has not without reason figuratively expressed this frontier of the world we have described as the world of the Hierarchies, by the word “Zodiac.” Man would be at the level of the animal if only the two worlds that have been described were in existence. In order that man could become a being able to walk upright, to think by means of the brain and to develop intelligence, an in-streaming of even higher forces was necessary, forces from a world above the World of Spirit. Here we come to a world designated by a word that is totally misused today because of the prevailing materialism. But in a past by no means very distant the word still conveyed its original meaning. The faculty man unfolds here in the physical world when he thinks, was called ‘Intelligence’ in the spiritual science of that earlier period. It is from a world lying beyond both the World of Spirit and the Elementary World that forces stream down through these two worlds to build our brain. Spiritual Science has also called it the World of Reason (Vernunftwelt). It is the world in which there are spiritual Beings who are able to send down their power into the physical world in order that a shadow-image of the Spiritual may be produced in the physical world in man's intellectual activity. Before the age of materialism no one would have used the word “reason” for thinking; thinking would have been called intellect, intelligence. “Reason” (Vernunft) would have been spoken of when those who were initiates had risen into a world even higher than the World of Spirit and had direct perception there. In the German language “reason” is connected with perception (Vernehmen), with what is directly apprehended, perceived as coming from a world still higher than the one denoted as the World of Spirit. A faint image of this world exists in the shadowy human intellect. The architects and builders of our organ of intellect must be sought in the World of Reason.

It is only possible to describe a still higher world by developing a spiritual faculty transcending the physical intellect. There is a higher form of consciousness, namely, clairvoyant consciousness. If we ask: how is the organ evolved which enables us to have clairvoyant consciousness?—the answer is that there must be worlds from which emanate the forces necessary for the development of this clairvoyant consciousness. Like everything else, it must be formed from a higher world. The first kind of clairvoyant consciousness to develop is a picture-consciousness, Imaginative Consciousness. This Imaginative Consciousness remains mere phantasy only for as long as the organ for it is not formed by forces from a world lying beyond even the World of Reason. As soon as we admit the existence of clairvoyant consciousness we must also admit the existence of a world from which emanate the forces enabling the organ for it to develop. This is the World of Archetypal Images (Urbilderwelt). Whatever can arise as true Imagination is a reflection of the World of Archetypal Images.

Thus we rise into the Macrocosm through four higher worlds: the Elementary World, the World of Spirit, the World of Reason and the World of Archetypal Images. In the next lectures I will deal with the World of Reason and the World of Archetypal Images and then describe the methods by which, in line with modern culture, the forces from the World of Archetypal Images can be brought down in order to make possible the development of clairvoyant consciousness.

• 1. Chapter IV, Man and the Evolution of the World, pp. 102-221 in the 1962-3 edition.

From our last lectures you will have seen how man comes to a kind of illusory idea of the outer world; but as a matter of fact, what are usually understood as the connections of nature are inwardly dependent on humanity itself; and we can only gain a true view of the world when we consider the earth and indeed the universe, in its entirety—which means when we regard man as being part of the world—and visualise the interchange, the inter-relation between man and the world. Otherwise we always come to an unreal, a mere abstract grasp of the mineral kingdom; at most understanding something of the plant and animal worlds, which no longer play any strong part in the present concept of nature.

When one speaks of the connections of nature, it is, as a rule, merely the mineral connections in nature to which one refers. To these, if one so desires, that short episode which one calls History, is added; but as a truth of quite a different nature.

From this view, which does not extend to man in his real being, humanity in our present age has to come right away. From diverse points of view we have brought forward the reason why humanity must abandon this view of things, a view which, as you know, has in a sense been necessarily developed in the last three or four centuries.

To-day I will only mention that human beings, with reference to their external knowledge, their external cognition, will become more and more dependent on the physical body with its necessities, unless they can rise in their own evolution to the production of a higher knowledge, through the very effort of their own Will. And in the future it is a question of this:- either humanity will simply succumb to a view of the world gained by remaining just as one was at birth, acquiring no other concepts than those one has already through being placed on the earth through birth, and by means of the ordinary education customary to-day.

That is the one possibility. The other is this: That humanity will cease to believe that, simply from being Born as human beings on earth, they can judge of everything real; and they will then be able to build up a real evolution of man, such as is indicated by Spiritual Science. That is the other path; humanity will have to traverse this latter path, otherwise the earth simply faces its downfall.

What I have just said, can also be observed geographically, when it acquires a quite special significance for the present.

If we only go far enough back in the evolution of the earth, we find man is not rooted in earthly existence itself; for before the evolution of the earth, he had already undergone a long previous development. You find this evolution described In my Outline of Occult Science. You know that man was, in a sense taken back again into a pure Spiritual existence, and from this pure Spiritual existence, he has descended to earthly existence. Now it is a fact that, because of this descent of man into earthly existence, there has been taken away from humanity, a comprehensive, one might call it—an inherited Wisdom—a primeval Wisdom, which was of such a nature that it was one and the same, uniform, for the whole of humanity. You will find such things described in more detail in those lectures which I have called The Folk-Souls, a course given in Christiania. So this inherited Wisdom was a uniform thing. When I naw speak of knowledge, I mean not merely that which is usually called knowledge in Science to-day, but everything which man can absorb in his soul life as a view of his cosmic environment and of his own life.

Now this primeval knowledge specialised itself in such a way that it became different according to the different territories of the earth. You will see this better if you go into those chapters in Occult Science dealing with this matter. But even externally, if you just look at what we call the civilisation of the different earthly races, you may say: That what the human beings of the different races upon earth have known, differed from the beginning. One can distinguish an Indian civilisation, a Chinese civilisation, a Japanese civilisation, a European civilisation. And again, in this European civilisation there is a special culture of its own for each of the various European territories. Then we have an American civilisation and so on. But if we ask: How it it that this primeval or inherited wisdom became specialised, how did it become ever more and more differentiated? We must answer: The inner relationships, the inner dispositions of these races were to blame for this. Indeed we find that there is always an adaptation of the inner relationship of the different races to the external conditions of the earth. We can to some extent get an idea of this differentiation if we try to find out the connection between, let us say, what forms the Indian civilisation and the climatic geographical conditions of the land of India. In the same way we can get an idea of the special nature of the Russian culture, if we consider the relationship between the Russian and his earth. Now we must say, in reference to these relationships, that humanity to-day—as indeed in many other connections—has arrived at a kind of crisis. This dependence of man on his territory gradually, in the course of the 19th century, increased to the utmost conceivable extent. Of course, it is true that human beings have emancipated themselves from their territories. That is true. they consciously have emancipated themselves from their territories; but they are nevertheless dependent in a certain way upon these territories. Te can see that if we compare, let us say, the attitude of a Greek to ancient Greece, and say that of a modern Englishman or German to their countries. The Greeks still had much of the ancient wisdom in their civilisation and education, they were perhaps more physically dependent upon their land of Greece than the modern human being on his country. But this stronger dependence was modified, because the Greeks were inwardly filled with this ancient wisdom. This wisdom has however gradually faded away from humanity, and we can point almost exactly to the time in the middle of the 15th century when the direct understanding for certain treasures of wisdom ceases, and how even the traditions of such treasures gradually faded away in the 19th century. Artificially, as I might say, like plants in a forcing house, certain of these treasures were still preserved in all sorts of secret societies, which sometimes pursued very evil practices with them. But such societies still preserved a primeval wisdom even in the 19th century. (In the 19th century it was somewhat different), but in the 19th century they still preserved some things of which one can say: They are like plants in a forcing house. What have the symbols of the Freemasons to do with the ancient wisdom from which they originated? They are like plants raised in the forcing house, compared with plants growing freely in nature. Not even so much likeness still remains between the masonic symbols and that ancient wisdom!

Just because humanity is losing that inner permeation with this old wisdom, men are really becoming all the more dependent upon their territories and unless they can again acquire a treasure of Spiritual Science which can develop freely, they will be differentiated all over the earth according to their territories.

As a matter of fact, we can distinguish three types which we have studied already from other points of view. To-day we can say that unless the impulses of Spiritual Science are spread abroad in the world, from the West there will come none but economic truths, which can indeed produce many other things out of their bosom; none but economic thought and ideas would prevail in the West. From the East there would come over what once were essentially Spiritual truths; Asia,, even if in very decadent ways, would confine itself more and more to Spiritual truths.

Central Europe would cultivate the more intellectual sphere; and this would make itself specially felt in the uniting of something of the traditions of ancient times with what streams over from the West as economic truths, and with what streams over from the East as Spiritual truths. Human beings living in these three main types of earthly division, would specialise more and more in this direction.

The tendency of our present age tends absolutely towards making this specialisation of humanity a really dominant principle. We can say, my dear friends—and I beg you to take this very seriously, that unless a Spiritual Scientific impulse permeates the world, the East will gradually become absolutely incapable of managing its own Economic Life, of developing its own economic thinking. The East would come into a position of being able to produce only; that means, of actually cultivating the soil, of working upon the immediate products of nature with the instruments transmitted from the West. But all that has to be administered by human reason, would develop in the West.

From this point of view the catastrophe of the World War which has just run its course, is nothing but the beginning of the tendency: (I will express it in popular phraseology)—to permeate the East by the West in an economic way. That means making the East a sphere in which people work, and the West a sphere in which economic use is made of what is derived from nature in the East. The boundary between the East and the West need not be a fixed one; it is moveable.

If this tendency which is dominant to-day, goes further, if it is not permeated Spiritually, then without any doubt at all the following would have to arise. One need simply utter it hypothetically. The entire East would economically be an object of booty for the West; and man would regard this course of development as the proper course laid down for earthly humanity. It would be regarded as quite justifiable and obvious. There exists no other means of introducing into this tendency that which does not make half of humanity slaves and the other half employers of these slaves, than by permeating the earth with a common Spirituality which man must acquire once more.

If one utters these things to-day most people prefer to reject them. The man of to-day is only too inclined to wave these things aside with a movement of his hand, for the simple reason that it is externally uncomfortable for him to face the true reality. He says to himself: “Well, even if this economic permeation of the East does come about, it will not take place yet awhile, not in my lifetime.” Certainly those who have children, do think a little more earnestly, because of their children; but then they like to fog themselves a little in the hope that better times may come, and so forth.

But to realise in their inner being that there exists no other means of fashioning the future of humanity into a form worthy of human beings, than by not permeating merely the earth economically, but also Spiritually is a thought very few people pursue for themselves to-day, because of a certain love of ease.

We may say that humanity has received the present configuration of its life of civilisation from three sides, and it is extremely interesting to fix one's mind on these three sides of this earthly life of civilisation, especially for the task we have set ourselves in these lectures.

If one surveys the whole earth-sphere from East to West, one must say: “Everything which man possesses in the way of ethical truths, of moral truths, has come from the East”. One can say that the form in which the East, with its general view of the Cosmos, has developed its ethical truths, the form of its general cosmology, and so on, has now been lost; but certain Ethics have remained over as relics of oriental thought and feeling.

It is infinitely interesting from this point of view to read the speeches which Rabindranath Tagore held, which are collected under the title of Nationalism. You will see if you read these speeches that there is hardly anything now to be found in them of that great Cosmic Wisdom teaching, which at one time, lived in the feelings of men in the East. But one who can read with understanding these speeches of Tagore collected under the title Nationalism will say: the moral pathos which lives in them and which indeed is the chief essence of these speeches, the ethical will which lives in them, that bitter moral criticism which exercised against the individual mechanism of the West, and against all the still more evil political mechanism of the West, lives as Ethos in these speeches of Tagore, could not have been uttered unless there stood behind them the ancient primeval wisdom of Asia; even though it no longer lives externally in men's consciousness. With that wisdom, created out of the stars, the moral truths were permeated which resound from out of the East, and this comes to us when such people as Rabindranath Tagore speak.

If, without prejudice, one investigates everything which has developed in this way of culture in the West, in Central Europe, one must say: What lives there, whether it be in philosophers or non-philosophers, in the simple or most educated—that which ethically and morally permeates the humanity of the West has all trickled over from the East, from Asia. The East is the real home of Ethos, of ethics.

If we now Look towards the West, the civilisation of which has transpired before the eye of history, we see how muck enters into the consideration of the reasoning, intellectual working-man, of world phenomena. There what rests an the principle of utility comes into consideration.

There is a great contrast, of which humanity should become aware, between what lives as pathos in the speeches of Tagore, and everything which develops in the West as the stand-point of utility.

To speak radically, one might say, that the sort of thing we meet with in philosophers such as John Stuart Mill, or in national economists such as Adam Smith or intellectual philosophers such as Bergson, anything of this nature remains for the Asiatic, even if he tries to understand it, something which lies completely outside his being. He can grasp as an interesting fact that such things are said by human beings, but he will never be tempted to produce things which relate simply to external human utility, from out of his own nature.

The Asiatic thoroughly despises the European and American nature, because it always refers him to the standpoint of utility, which can only be dominated with the intellect, with the understanding. So it has come about that this way of thinking, which is connected with the idea of utility, is above all the product of the West.

As I have previously drawn your attention to the fact that over the earth the ancient wisdom, has specialised itself according to Races, so we can now distinguish these great types. The ethical type in the Orient, in the East; the intellectual utilitarian type in the West, the Occident, while in between there is, always trying to press forward, what I want to call the third type, the Aesthetic, which is just as much characteristic of Central Europe, as the ethical type is of the East and the utilitarian type of the West.

We need merely remind ourselves of a certain phenomenon, in order to be able to bring forward a proof drawn from external facts: how it is that just in Central Europe this Aesthetic type seeks to make itself felt. While in the West the French Revolution partially raged and partially bore its consequences, and the East was still immersed in Spiritual dreams, we see e.g. Schiller writing his letters concerning the aesthetic education of man. These are directly concerned with the French Revolution, but they seek to solve the problem thrown up politically by the French Revolution, they seek to solve it humanistically, in a purely human way. They seek to make man inwardly a free human being. It is interesting to note that the whole method of observation of Schiller in those Aesthetic letters rests an this: that on the one side he rejects the pure utilitarian intellectual standpoint, and an the other he rejects the merely ethical standpoint. You see, this ethical standpoint had once already been rationalised, intellectualised. Everything in the world goes through different metamorphosis and then reappears in another form. And so although this ethical standpoint of the East is certainly not intellectual, yet one can grasp it with one's intellect, one can intellectualise it, one can (Königsbergerise) it, and it then becomes Kantian. That happened; and from Kant there comes this beautiful saying: “Duty, thou mighty, exalted name, thou hast nothing within thee of an attractive or insinuating nature, but requirest solely and simply the subjection of man to morality”.

Schiller an the other hand, said, “I gladly serve my friends, yet unfortunately I do so with inclination. Therefore I reproach myself that I am not virtuous”. Schiller as a real Central-European man, could not take into himself this Kantian, this Königsbergian intellectualising of ethics. For him no man was a complete human being who had first to subject himself to duty in order to fulfil his duty. For Schiller a man was only a complete human being who felt in himself the desire to do what was of moral value. Therefore Schiller rejected the ethical rigourism of a Kant. But he also rejected the purely intellectual principle of authority, and he saw in the production and enjoyment of Beauty, (thus in the Aesthetic behavior of man), the highest, free expression of human nature. He wrote his Aesthetic letters, one might say, as a personal description of Goethe. Schiller had only with difficulty struggled to acquire an appreciation of Goethe. He had started with jealousy, with inner antipathy to Goethe; and one may say that there was a time in Schiller's youth when any talk of Goethe left a bitter taste in his mouth. Then they became acquainted; and they learnt not only to honour each other, but to understand each other. Then Schiller wrote one might say as a kind of Spiritual biography, a Spiritual description of Goethe, his letters upon the Aesthetic education of man. Nothing which stands in these Aesthetic letters could have been written unless Goethe had previously lived a life which was to Schiller an example of what stands in them. Schiller wrote a letter to Goethe at the beginning of their friendship which I have often quoted: “For a long time I have followed the path of your life, although from a far distance.” And now he described Goethe, according to his spirit, which was really that of a reincarnated Greek; and we see how the first dawn of the Aesthetic spirit of Central Europe is united with Greece.

And now as regards Goethe, we see how he works his way up from an intellectual element, to a recognition of truth, which can be just as well understood through art as through science. If you follow how Goethe with Herder studied the Ethics of Spinoza, how Goethe then went to Italy and wrote home that, in the works of art which he sees proceeding out of the Greek spirit, he sees Necessity, he sees God.—then one must say, the intellectualism of Spinoza becomes Aesthetic in Goethe, on his Italian journey, in the contemplation of those works of art. Goethe bears testimony that the Greeks created their works of art according to the same laws which nature herself follows, laws which Goethe believed he was now on the track of. That means, Goethe is not of the opinion that when a man creates a work of art he is merely creating a thing of phantasy. Science is strictly true. No, Goethe was of the opinion that what lies in a true work of art absolutely gives the deeper, true, content of the life of Nature. Now that is an Aesthetic view of the world, and so we must say: Occident, West—intellectualistic utilitarian; Central earth-regions—Aesthetic; the East—ethical, moral. It is absolutely true, my dear friends, that wherever it be, whether in the past or in the Centre or in the lest, wherever ethical truths have appeared—they have originally sprung up from the East. It is no matter whether utilitarian truths spring up in the Centre, or in the East they all originally spring from the West. Beauty arises from the Central region.

One can follow everywhere the path of these three elements in the life of man in this way, down to the very details.

You see, my dear friends, when through one's karma one is destined to found Anthroposophy in Central Europe, then in this Anthroposophy something must live of that Goethe-faith, which is after all, the same element that lives in art; that is, the element of truth. That same element which is expressed in painting, in sculpture, and even in architecture must live also in the thought structure of truth. One must come to say, what I attempted to say in the first chapter of my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity—that the philosopher, the man who founds a World-conception, must be an artist in ideas. One usually rejects the concepts of an artist of ideas. In that book I had to accept it; it all sprang from one and the same spirit.

When one produces something of this kind, all the ideas one expresses have a definite character, which bear the colourings of what I have just described. Books are written, form instance, much as that bit Aime Blech, which recently appeared as a Pamphlet, containing all kinds of evil, consciously evil calumnies. Books are written in which, for instance, it is stated that in what is brought forward from this side as Anthroposophy, there are, of course many beautiful things, but they are opposed to the clarity of the French mind!

Certainly Anthroposophy contradicts intellectuality, the barren, rhetorical grasp of ideas; such minds would much prefer the coarse, material ideas which can be grasped in sharp outlines, so as one can follow these things down to the minutest details. I could bring forward many an example, entering into details which would make clear what I have shown you in general outline; but I will rest content with the example I have already given you, which is a very interesting one.

Now the point in question is that we should clearly realise that e.g. in the West morality, art and intellectualism are simply not being produced. No! Art, is taken over from the Central regions, and Ethics, from the East; and they are then inserted into the intellectual-utility-element, just as in the Centre a kind of ethical element is cultivated, and everything which has been taken up, especially in the 19th century into the Aesthetic element has come over from the West. It would be interesting to follow for once the path of biology from this point of view. If you read Goethe's Theory of Metamorphosis to-day, you can find in that a grand theory of evolution, but the West would always consider that theory spoilt by its Aestheticism. In the 19th century, over the entire earth which is dependent an the West, the Darwinistic element penetrated into the theory of evolution, and brought in the Utilitarian-standpoint, the doctrine of purpose, of aim. You find that doctrine of “purpose” entirely excluded in Goethe, because he is everywhere permeated by Aestheticism.

It must not be the case in the future, that men are thus economically differentiated, as it were, to such an extreme degree that they will not learn from each other. Because that would mean that there would gradually spread over Asia a certain Ethos, such as one finds advocated in the fire-sounding words of Rabindranath Tagore. In Central Europe there would sp read in another form—that which certain Nietzsche-fops have already advocated—a certain “Beyond-ness” of good and evil, a certain Aestheticism, even in moral ideas. We see here the triumphant march of this Aestheticising making itself felt, especially towards the end of the 19th century. And then the merely utilitarian standpoint would pour out over the West, cleverness in the utilitarian standpoint, a caricature of the Spiritual element from the utilitarian standpoint, etc., etc.

The permeation of humanity by a real Spiritual element can alone help mankind. We assume, of course, that this Spiritual element shall be taken in full earnestness—that men shall develop the will to regard things as they present themselves to-day to one who is really prepared to be unprejudiced. This War-Catastrophe has brought many extraordinary things to the surface, amongst which are phenomena, which are in part uncomfortable to the highest degree, but which can teach us much, I will mention one such phenomenon.

In the German literature of the day there appear—one simply cannot keep pace with what comes out in this way—but almost every week there appear slimy excretions, as I must call them—the explanations of different men concerning their share in the course of the War and of political events—and we can read what such heads—I say expressly such heads—as Iagow Bethmann (Michaelis has, I think, still spared us), Tirpitz, Ludendorf, and a whole row of others which one can name. It is unpleasant, in one way,to read this stuff, but from another point of view, it is interesting to the highest degree.

You see, one can read such books as those written by Bethmann or Tirpitz, from quite opposite points of view. But their points of view depend very often an whether the author has been treated with the toe or the heel of the boot for a certain time. Bethmann was favoured for a time by the “All Highest”, whereas Tirpitz was treated with the heel of the boot. Hence their different points of view!

And so we will enter further into the view-point; it is not so much a question of that, but of seeing what spirit lives in the writings.

Now one can experience the following: I once made the following experiment. After allowing myself to be saturated with the dreamy writings of Bethmann and Tirpitz, I turned back to certain utterances (very dear to me;, of Herman Grimm, which indeed have been found chauvinistic by non-Germans. But again that is just a point of view. It is simply a question with me of the spirit which lives in them.

At the first view one can put this question: How does the spirit, the way of thinking, the inner soul-constitution of the Bethmann and Tirpitz writings compare with what lives in Herman Grimm's political observations? Here we must say: Herman Grimm felt that Goethe had lived and had not lived in vain; to him he was a living presence. To, Bethmann and Tirpitz Goethe was not there. I will not say they had not read him, it might have been better if they had left him unread; but as far as they were concerned he was not there. And at first I had to say to myself; what stands in these books sounds as if it were written by a medieval serf—with the logic of a medieval Serf.

Especially interesting, for instance, is the logic of Ludendorf. He is the one who was so greatly praised for the idea of having Lenin transported in a sealed wagon, through Germany to Russia! Ludendorf is the real importer of Bolehevism into Russia! Now he simply had not the cheek to deny that in his book, although he had cheek enough for many things. So he says, that to send Lenin to Russia was a military necessity, and that the political government should have avoided the evil consequences, but did not do so. Such is the logic of these gentlemen. But I do not wish to assert that Clemenceau has better logic; and I beg you not to think that I take sides with any Party. Neither Lloyd George nor Wilson have any better logic. This, however, is not so easy to substantiate.

One may say that at first sight, but the matter goes further. One finds on comparing things that one must go further back still. An extraordinary similarity exists between the Tirpitz and Ludendorf way of thinking, and those human beings who guided the so-called civilisation of Rome in the 1st and 2nd pre-Christian centuries. And if we wish to establish an intimate community of soul between these, we may say that it is as if the old method of thought of the ancient pre-Christian Rome again appeared, and as if everything which has happened since then, including Christianity itself, (even if these gentlemen externally speak of Christ, and so on), had never taken place.

You see, it is often supposed, when one says of the Luciferic that it remained behind in humanity—that one means something only external to the world. But this principle of remaining behind, expresses itself quite strongly within the world. One can say the pre-Caesar greatness of old Rome has re-arisen in such people, and everything which has happened in Europe since that time is really non-existent for them.

My dear friends, this phenomenon must be observed in an unprejudiced way to-day. It must be kept in mind; because only by so doing can one win a strong standpoint for judging the present. This present age makes great demands on man's capacity for judgment. All this must be said, if one speaks of how necessary it is that the present age should be permeated by Spiritual impulses. Superficially considered it is easy to say the present age must be permeated Spiritually; but, my dear friends, the matter is not quite so simple as this. You need only investigate where Spiritual Impulses found their way to some extent into humanity to see whether they have always borne the right fruit. One must in conclusion also say the following. Let us consider certain brochures, certain pamphlets which have been written, some written indeed by members of long standing. There are such written, wherein what figures here as Spiritual Science, is really placed before the world, but inverted, turned upside down, as it were. These are plants which have grown on the soil on which we attempt to give Spiritual treasure to humanity to-day. And anyone who thinks that this process, has run its course—of our so-called followers into its opposite what is transmitted as Spiritual Science to-day, must be a simpleton. For it most certainly is not yet finished. It is by no means so easy to reckon with this fact, that Spiritual truths must be brought to humanity, because as humanity is to-day it tends above all to differentiate into the three types which I have characterised: the Ethical, the Aesthetic, the intellectual; and further differentiations again within these.

Now Spiritual truths are not adapted to be taken up in their purity by human beings who approach them with such differentiations. Just think how on all sides to-day human beings tend to shut themselves off in their national chauvinism, and if you try to take up generally human and spiritual truths with national chauvinism, you transform them thereby into the opposite. It is impossible simply to impart what is now desirable from a certain point of view, for human beings tend to such differentiations as I have described. Therefore it is necessary above all that the interest of man should be awakened from the side which already exists. It is necessary that, in a certain sense, one should link on to what is already there, continually bearing in mind the tendency men have to turn away from that ancient treasure of wisdom and put nothing else in its place except the territorial differentiation on this earth. It does not do to spread Spiritual truths among humanity, without also spreading a certain Ethos.

Many people have read How to Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds. These books have been read considerably for some time. They have objected that the first counsels given there are ethical, and that they must be in ethical agreement with them. They are right. right The first counsels given must be ethical and form an extract of the best Ethos of earthly civilisation. But, on the other hand, it is also necessary to cultivate a certain artistic element, and that has made quite special difficulties in the Anthroposophical Movement; for without the Anthroposophical Movement there existed a certain disinclination at first towards artistic things. An abstract, Aesthetically indifferent, symbolism was striven for. There still exists to-day, movements which call themselves Theosophical which rejects everything artistic. Therefore it was a good fate, a good Karma, of our Movement that we were able to make artistic experiments here in Dornach, and that we could work them out away from the abstract symbolic element. Perhaps if things had gone according to the desires of many, we should see many a black cross with red roses or something like roses, as the deep symbol of our building. We have of course, to beware of this symbolism, and strive to create from out of the artistic element. That had to be linked an to the best traditions, of human civilisation—if I may call impulses traditions. Above all one thing must be considered, that these are deep and earnest truths, and they must run somewhat as follows: whoever wishes to attain true knowledge must cultivate in himself a sense for truth! When one speaks radically about this question, my dear friends, one comes in touch with something which sounds repellent to many to-day, because this rigorous striving everywhere for the truth is something which is extraordinarily unpleasant to many people to-day, truth being something which they want at least to touch-up in life. But untruth, even if untrue from sentimentality, does not go with that strong sense for truth, demanded e.g. by a real devotion to these truths which Anthroposophy wishes
to place in the world.

My dear friends, in this connection the religious confessions have sinned especially, because they have inserted something which can no longer be united with a pure sense for truth. Certain kinds of piety are carried out into the world which satisfy human egoism far more than human feeling for truth. Therefore it is quite specially necessary that real attention should be paid to the cultivation of inner truthfulness, as is so often pointed out in our Anthroposophical writings. As you know, life itself demands from human beings to-day many untrue things, and we may say there exists to-day two distinct tendencies, which evoke in man a certain disinclination to look at facts in their true light. To-day the tendency exists to characterise things from personal preference and not according to the facts. To-day a man is called practical who is in a certain sense a man of routine; one who with a certain brute force works within his own sphere regardless of any consideration, and puts aside everything which does not serve to promote his own particular objects. From this standpoint one distinguishes “practical” men and “visionaries”; and with a certain world-historic untruth, the consequences of these things have shown themselves in a terrible way, in the course of the 19th century, and up to our own day. Indeed it was difficult before this great testing came over humanity through the catastrophe of the World War, to say something of what ruthlessly characterises these things. I am shortly publishing a collection of a few of my more important early writings—articles written in the eighties and nineties, in order to show how, as it were through small slits, I even then attempted to utter many truths. Among these articles there is one on Bismarck, the Man of Political Successes, in which I attempted to show that the success of this personality depended upon the fact that he could never see much further than his nose! But, as you know, it is no use to cast these things in the face of the world if no one is there who can take them up. Now, however, we must start from this basis, that the World-War Catastrophe can teach us many things. Of course, for most men, nothing is to be learnt from these facts. They have a certain fund of opinions, and do not alter them. They are not able to understand what underlies the statement that we must learn from the facts.

I always tell each person whom I conduct round the Goetheanum, that if I had to design such a building a second time, I would do so quite differently. I would certainly never make it in the same way again. There is nothing, of course, against the present building, but I myself would not make it in the same way again, because obviously, one has learnt something from what one has made, and which stands there as an accomplished fact.

To-day I read with astonishment that Field-Marshal Hindenburg said, if he had to conduct the World-War over again he would do it in exactly the same way.

Indeed these things are read, but they are read carelessly; and people do not notice that one must gain an understanding of the age from the teachings which are given in such a bitter way through this world catastrophe. Whatever one reads and what constantly resounds in one's ears from the world to-day, should be taken with the corresponding background, and one should always be able to say: In important things a revision of judgment is essentially and constantly necessary. It was right as far as could be seen externally, to call Bismarck a practical man, until the World-Catastrophe came. Hermann Grimm regarded Bismarck as a tower of practical excellence. But the World War catastrophe has taught us that Bismarck was a visionary, and the opinions of his judgment have had to be altered; for his idea of the creation of an Empire was naturally only a phantasy.

You see, I just want to make you see clearly that it is life itself, and must be life, which teaches us to discover illusions, even in the sphere of moral history. I have shown you how one must substantiate these illusions in the sphere of natural connections, noting how in nature things stand side by side, and that is how natural investigators describe them. Thus we must say that humanity shares in the occurrences of nature, and that what natural science says about this is simply a web of illusions.

To-day I wanted to make comprehensible to you how we must learn the very facts of history and of life to correct things; because, often for long periods, they only show themselves outwardly as illusion. Men who were naturally regarded by many as practical, must now of necessity be regarded as visionaries. One must accustom oneself to-day to revise one's judgment in this manner. At each step in life, there is not only opportunity enough but also a necessity for revising one's judgment. And one is only in the right mood, the mood the Anthroposophical Movement seeks to acquire, when one says to oneself: “I must revise my opinions, perhaps even about the most important things in life.” Opinions about natural connections, can as a rule, be revised through the study of Spiritual Science. Judgments about life one can only revise when one really develops in oneself the mood necessary for the Anthroposophical Movement.