The Rudolf Steiner Archive

In yesterday's lecture, I took the liberty of pointing out how the struggle and striving of German intellectual development contains the seeds of a true spiritual science that the future is to bring us, that is to be born out of the present. And I tried to suggest that in that spiritual work, in that spiritual striving, which was necessary to lead to the ideas, to the conceptions and views that emerged in German intellectual life in the first half of the nineteenth century , that in this striving and wrestling lies the preparation for the recognition of what, admittedly, can still be recognized only to a limited extent in our present time – for understandable reasons that have, after all, been discussed here in these lectures on several occasions. The point is that one can only arrive at this spiritual science through a development of those powers of the human soul that are hidden in this soul, that one can only arrive at it if, through energetic inner thought work – through so-called concentration and meditation – those forces are brought out from the human inner being, which once, in more dim states of consciousness, led to the clairvoyance mentioned yesterday, which were present in the souls at the origin of humanity and of nations, and which can be brought out again through conscious thought work. But then they arise as conscious powers in the soul, so that these states of clairvoyance, revealing the conditions of the spiritual world, approach the soul fully consciously and while preserving human individuality, just as the conditions of the material world approach the human soul. The meditation, concentration and inner soul work in the life of thinking, feeling and will that are necessary for such a development of the soul have often been the subject of these lectures. Today, however, we will not speak of this. For today I would like to point out how the results of this spiritual knowledge, attained through spiritual work to increase our life energy, to strengthen and invigorate our human life in the serious and happy hours of life, can lead to this.

It is quite natural and self-evident that for the materialistic thinking of our time, it seems absurd, paradoxical, perhaps ridiculous, when spiritual research today speaks of the fact that man does not only consist of what external science - biology, physiology, etc. - recognizes about this man, and what so-called psychology recognizes; but when this spiritual research claims that man is in truth composed of a series of members, of which the physical material, the bodily part of man is only one, while the other members — perceptible only through the aforementioned spirit-knowledge — prevail in the invisible, supersensible and from there are active in man. As I said, it is quite natural that even today people may scoff at the idea, that they may polemicize against it, that man has not only a physical body, which serves him in the sense world for outer deeds and outer sense perception, but that he has finer members, more spiritual members of human nature. That man, in addition to the physical body, has, first of all, a so-called etheric body, a finer body, “finer” in contrast to the conditions of the coarse physical body; that these two members of the human being are the ones that remain with man in physical existence even remain when man sinks into the unconsciousness of sleep; but that higher, more spiritual members of human nature — those which we call the astral body and the human ego — pass from sleep to wakefulness into a spiritual world. Spiritual science has to recognize this, and furthermore that these members of human nature, which rest in the unconscious during sleep, are the actual actors, the actual activity that animates and permeates the physical and etheric bodies, that moves into them when the person wakes up from sleep.

If today an external scientific view cannot or does not want to speak of these higher aspects of human nature, does not want to recognize them, then such a non-recognition is similar to the non-recognition of air by someone who only wants to accept what is visible with the physical eyes and what can be grasped with the physical hands from what is visible. For just as we inhale and exhale the air as physical matter in short periods of time, so the physical and etheric human bodies inhale the astral body and the ego when we wake up; and when we fall asleep, they are exhaled again — if we understand the word “breathe” figuratively. With falling asleep the physical human body releases the astral body and the I into the spiritual world. This knowledge of the spirit becomes fruitful when it can be applied in life in an appropriate way, when the human soul can be permeated by it and can look at life in its light.

As human beings we are carried by the stream of life. We drift along in this stream of life between our birth and our death, as it were. I would like to start with a comparison that illustrates this drifting along in the stream of life. When we sit in a train and travel along, looking out the window, it seems to us, at least at first, especially if we are not yet accustomed to traveling by train, as if the trees and houses were passing by, moving past us. — This is roughly how a person lives, traveling the journey of life with their worldviews and perceptions of life, in relation to the luck and misfortune, successes and failures of life. For how do luck and misfortune, successes and failures affect human nature? Just as human nature is initially conditioned by what it can draw from the physical world, so do happiness and unhappiness, success and failure, work in such a way that they always carry with them, as it were, our sense of the world, our sense of existence, that the world itself seems to pass before us in our feelings and sensations, depending on whether we experience suffering or pain in it. And just as we must first get used to traveling in the physical world in order to have the right point of view during this journey with regard to what only seemingly moves past us outside, so it is up to the human being to gain the right point of view in order to that he may remain calm in his feeling for the world, in his sense of existence — calm in the spiritual world, when happiness and sorrow, when success or failure seek to show him the sense of the world, the feeling of existence, in motion, in seeming motion.

Now, we must indeed take into account that the development of humanity is in a state of constant progress, that epoch follows epoch in this development of humanity, that ever new and new experiences enter into this development of humanity, and that therefore the soul must also experience different things in the various epochs of the historical development of mankind – and after its experiences must also relate to life and its sense of existence in different ways. That is why the human being of the present time needs a different relationship to the world than that which the human soul could have in past times in order to find inner satisfaction, calm in the stream of existence. Now spiritual science shows us that in the human souls of the present time a certain sum, a kind of fund of powers of spiritualizing life rests, which want to emerge from this human soul, so that they do not remain hidden in remain hidden in the soul, but to step forth into human consciousness, so that man not only feels them as an inner urge, as an inner compulsion, but can place them in his world of ideas, in his world of concepts. For with what attitude does spiritual science actually speak to people? It does not speak as if it wanted to bring knowledge from foreign realms of existence, as if from unknown lands, but it speaks from the attitude that it basically only wants to say to each soul what lies in the depths of that soul itself. And the spiritual researcher is fundamentally convinced that in all, all people, there is that which he is only trying to put into words, to express in external concepts and ideas, that he has nothing else to say to people than what they already carry within themselves. The whole of spiritual science, when it is brought before humanity by the spiritual researcher with the right attitude, seeks to give nothing but what lies deep within every human soul. This spiritual science is an invitation to the human soul to draw forth from itself that which lies at the bottom of every soul.

Thus we can say: in these deep foundations of the human soul rests a whole sum of forces, which, when brought up into human consciousness, show for the first time what moves man inwardly, what inspires him inwardly. Truly, man is richer and more full of content than he often imagines.

Now there is a remarkable law regarding the relationship between man and his knowledge and perception of the world, a law that, when known, can provide deep insights into many of the mysteries of the human soul. To make this clear in the simplest possible way, I will once more refer to the fact that, through spiritual science, it can be investigated that every time a person falls asleep, his higher being — his I and his astral body — is sent into a spiritual world. In this spiritual world, he is initially unable to perceive anything. But what he sends into this spiritual world really contains at least a large part of what spiritual science wants to draw from the deep sources of existence for daily life from the deep sources of existence. Man is only so constituted in his everyday life that unconsciousness covers what rests in his soul when he is in a dormant state outside his physical and etheric bodies; and when he, upon awakening, carries his ego and his astral body into his physical body and ether body, then this I and this astral body are filled with impressions from external perception, with what the material world transmits to us. The soul is then surrendered to the outer world; and just as during the night unconsciousness dawns on what rests in the depths of the soul, so during the day it is what comes to us in the way of impressions from the material outer world. But does everything that spiritual science wants to bring to human consciousness really rest in the depths of the soul? There is now a law, an important, essential law, which will gradually be recognized as governing all of existence: that which can be beneficial in one state can have a destructive effect when it asserts itself in another state, as it were in another place.

In what remains hidden from man's material consciousness, invisible supersensible forces rest. They rest in what man releases into the spiritual world when he sleeps, stir in this inner being, and bring insecurity to man in his behavior, a lack of direction in life. When these forces are brought up into consciousness, when they are transformed into conscious knowledge, concepts and ideas, then they become beneficial, then they become healing, then they give the person direction and goal, peace and security in life. It is a peculiar law, and it must be admitted, it is a difficult law to understand. But it is true nevertheless: if what spiritual science gives can give the spiritual knower deep satisfaction when it enters his consciousness, it is an unsettling element, an unsettling force, if it only rests below, unconsciously, in the dark regions of the soul. If it rests unconsciously in these regions, which spiritual science wants to raise to clear knowledge, then it remains without influence on the human ego; then it surges and billows in the subconscious, then it cannot have any influence on what the person experiences in terms of happiness and pain, of successes and failures. Then man can bring only that part of his nature into successes and failures, into happiness and pain, which goes along with happiness and pain in such a way that the soul loses itself in happiness, that it sinks in pain, becomes numbed by its successes, filled with pain by its failures. Then the soul goes everywhere with us, then it rocks and floats in the stream of life. But when the soul's powers of knowledge about the spiritual world, which lie dormant down there in the dark regions, are brought up into the ego, so that this ego can take the spiritual knowledge with it when life smiles on us in happiness, when life suffering and pain, then the I no longer rocks and swims in happiness and unhappiness in the stream of life; then it carries a strengthened inner being into happiness and unhappiness, into pain and suffering, and happiness and pain are then experienced differently.

However, we need to gain some awareness of the nature of happiness and suffering, of success and failure, if we want to properly consider the application of what we have just characterized. What do happiness and misfortune actually bring to a person?

We cannot really understand inwardly what a person experiences in happiness, in success, in the cheerful hours of life or in the pain and sadness of the hours that failure brings him – we cannot really recognize this at all unless we take into account the fact that a person consists of a physical outer part and a spiritual-soul inner part. What is happiness, what is life in success?

What is joined together in the human being in terms of his or her essential parts takes on a different composition in terms of the finer relationships in happiness and in suffering. When we experience happiness, when the soul plunges into this happiness, or even when it submerges into its successes, what then happens to human nature? Then, as it were, what is otherwise dormant in human nature tears itself out of the inner being, pursuing what penetrates into us from the outside in the form of happiness and success; the human being becomes estranged from his inner self, he ceases to be merely in himself. The human being enters into a foreign place. This becoming alien to oneself, this coming out of oneself, is what presents itself to us, as it were, as the one pendulum swing of human inner experience in happiness. When a person experiences pain, when he has failures, then the soul-spiritual, fleeing the pain, the failures, withdraws deeper into the inner being than it would have to ; it is then as if the soul contracts, so that the person does not lose themselves in the outer world, as they would in happiness and success, but withdraws into themselves. And since man is so constituted that he can only find peace and satisfaction in harmonious connection with the world, his contracted inner being brings him just as much out of harmony with life as he is estranged from his nature by being absorbed in happiness and success. This is the other pendulum swing of the human inner life in relation to a life of happiness and success: the desire to live entirely within oneself, to flee from the world because it wants to pour failure and pain over us. However, it is necessary for the overall human experience that the person has these two pendulum swings; it is only a matter of how he experiences them. If he does not experience them, then he even seeks them out. And I want to show, in the context of this reflection, how he can seek out this alienation, which we experience in the natural course of happiness, where man is no longer within himself, where he wants to merge into an element that is alienated from his actual self. |

This is the case when a person does not want to admit to himself what is actually contained in this ego, when he does not want to allow the truth to arise in his consciousness about what is contained in this ego, but instead plunges into another element and numbs himself about the truth of the ego by resting in the external world. This numbing can be sought, and it is sought. And we see — let me insert this — especially in our time the saddest examples of such a search, of such alienation and of wanting to live in what does not belong to the ego, because one does not want to admit this ego in its true form. So it may be that whole crowds are seized by such a feeling of wanting to anesthetize themselves with something other than what the ego actually says. Let us assume that the ego of a number of people has been saying for decades: “We want revenge for what has been taken from us – revenge for our own sake,” and there comes a moment when they do not want to admit what lies in the actual self, when one seeks to get beyond it, then one seeks something to numb oneself – and then one does not say, “We want revenge,” but rather, “We want to fight for the freedom and rights of nations!” This is nothing more than the search for the extreme of the one pendulum swing: the stupor. Or one sings for decades or even longer: “Rule Britannia”, “Rule Britannia”, and as the continuation, which is well known, goes – and one does not want to admit this to oneself at a certain moment: one does not say what rests in the innermost form of the self, but one finds it necessary to go out of one's being by saying: One fights for freedom and justice for the peoples!

This compulsion can sweep across entire masses of people like an epidemic, numbing them in what is grasped from outside, because they do not want to remain within their own selves. But a person can only find direction and security in life if they are able not only to remain within their own self, but also to carry their self into all happiness, all suffering, all successes, and all failures. We achieve the strengthening of this ego, the inner securing and energizing of the ego, when we bring forth what makes the ego insecure. And what makes it uncertain is the knowledge of the spiritual world, which remains in the dark regions of the soul, which rests there and takes the form of a rocking boat, as long as it is down in the depths of the soul, but which gives security in life when it is brought up, as it were, to another place — into consciousness. And it is strange that when we are asked why we seek spiritual science, we cannot answer, “To satisfy ourselves with this spiritual science, to have the joy of the upliftment of this spiritual science”; but we have to bring this ability to recognize into consciousness because we already have it in our subconscious, but because it must not remain there. And the more we strive to have knowledge of the spiritual world within us, the more we will find that — whether this spiritual knowledge gives us joy or sorrow — something else is changing within us. For it is easy to imagine that while this unconscious inner being is otherwise filled with the forces that can emerge as spiritual science, this subconscious inner being becomes empty to the extent that we consciously imbue ourselves with what spiritual science can give us. It is truly justified to compare it to wanting to pump out the air from an air pump: we empty the space of the recipient, and other air can enter it. In this way, something else can enter our soul when we empty it of what we bring up into our consciousness.

And what can then enter the soul? Those forces can then enter our soul with which that soul is connected according to its actual character. For when we empty our soul of what wants to come up into consciousness, we then open the now empty soul to the interventions of the divine-spiritual impulses, which glow our will, which warm our feeling with the forces that the divine-spiritual impulses and give us security in life, so that we can say at the right moment: This is where you should turn, this is how you should perceive what comes to you in life as happiness and joy, as pain and suffering. Therefore, the human being will notice that it does not so much depend on what comes to us as spiritual science, but rather on what becomes of our soul through spiritual science. We can diligently observe our soul and will notice: As you make an effort to bring these insights into your soul, something quite different emerges from your soul than what it used to be. Moments occur that were not there before, in which the soul feels: “Now I have this to do — now I have that to do.” Impulses arise that bring us what gives us the balance of life, impulses that would not be there if they had not been repressed by the still unconscious knowledge that is brought up by spiritual science.

When we cultivate spiritual science, we behave in relation to our inner being as one behaves who wants to regulate a stream: he does not go directly to the water to direct it somewhere, because he would get little done that way; but he first goes to the earth, seeks to empty it in one place, seeks to make a fissure in the earth through which the stream can then pass. The same applies to our soul. What can bring us certainty of life, harmony of life, what can bring us a calm view of life in happiness and suffering — we cannot approach it as if we were approaching water directly; but just as water flows by itself into the space we have prepared for it in the earth, so spiritual forces flow by themselves into the will and into the mind when we prepare the bed for them. And we prepare the bed for them when we bring out of the depths of our soul what would otherwise prevent the penetration of the divine spiritual world – but which no longer prevents this penetration when we bring it up into our consciousness. That is why we not only recognize and experience something through the study of spiritual science, but we are transformed in the real sense of the word, because that which otherwise cannot enter our soul then flows into it and we feel, so to speak, an inner strengthening, an inner permeation of the soul as the result of our study of spiritual science.

Strengthened by what? We cannot feel it in every moment. But we can perceive it in such a way that when we encounter a happiness that could otherwise numb us, captivate us, we do experience this happiness, live through it fully, but then carry ourselves with the strengthened inner soul, with our inner being that has been permeated with strength, into this happiness; that we experience a pain just as sadly, but can immerse ourselves in this pain, carry our ego into it . and need not become estranged from the world by carrying our ego into this pain.

One must look a little deeper into spiritual science if one wants to recognize the full extent of what such a change in relation to happiness or suffering actually means for life. The state that occurs in the human soul as the — if the word is not misunderstood — awakening of the soul can be seen as a waking up, in that through this waking up one enters into a world of which one knew nothing, as long as one only had the views and judgments about the physical world. Now let us assume that a person would suddenly “wake up” like this while immersed in happiness and success. Let us imagine a person who has so far only been accustomed to looking at the physical world and letting it take effect on him, thus immersed in this physical world without the power that spiritual science can give him; and let us imagine that such a person would wake up in the midst of success, the spiritual world would be there. What would he see then?

Such a moment of awakening can be a deeply dark moment in an otherwise happy life. In such a moment, what has been characterized comes to mind: the alienation of the soul from itself. And what a person has enjoyed in happiness and success, what he has just gone through, he sees sinking, so to speak, and sinking so much that he cannot hold on to it because he does not have the strength to hold on to it. That we lose ourselves in life when we steer into happiness and success without spiritual knowledge can come to our soul in a very special way through such a waking up. For we recognize through spiritual science that the moments we achieve in happiness and success can only become truly strengthening forces for our eternal self, passing through the gate of death into eternity, if we do not lose ourselves but maintain ourselves in the experience of happiness. Spiritual science is not intended to sour or begrudge man happiness; spiritual science does not want to take away or weaken an ounce of happiness and joy. But what it does want to point out is that happiness that is experienced without the characterized connection with the world cannot connect with the deepest forces of our ego. For anyone who goes through the world without spiritual knowledge, unstrengthened in relation to his I, derives nothing from happiness but only a longing for new happiness, and from this in turn only a longing for further happiness. He does not derive from the one experience of happiness the strengthening forces for all subsequent life. But he who carries into happiness those powers that open up to him when he seeks spiritual knowledge draws from happiness sustaining, invigorating strength, which he carries into his ego because he has strengthened it through spiritual science; and he carries with him for all eternity what happiness and success can give him.

And it is similar with pain, suffering and failure. Again, we can start from the knowledge of the spirit, which gives us the answer to the question: what would present itself to a person if he were to suddenly awaken in the moment of greatest pain and suffering, if he were to see what is there as a spiritual world? He would then see the effect of shrinking back from the world, of convulsive contraction; he would see the darkness of what is around him. Man would perceive spiritual darkness if he were to wake up suddenly without spiritual knowledge. This darkness is transformed again for him who carries a soul strengthened by spiritual science into pain; waking up is different for him, it is light around such a soul. And thus living through the pain in spiritual awareness, the soul becomes victor over pain, over all failures, and the fruit of pain, of failure, emerges for the soul from such an experience. This fruit is an increase of knowledge, a permeation of knowledge with the consciousness of spiritual life.

Because this is so, I have often mentioned here in these lectures an experience that the spiritual researcher can undergo. After all, happiness and joy always — or at least mostly — come to our soul from outside. They are like something that comes from outside. When we become absorbed in our pain and suffering, we withdraw into ourselves. We would like to grasp happiness, we would like to flee pain; but we could only escape it by clenching ourselves up into ourselves. Now one could ask the one who has gathered some spiritual knowledge in his soul: What would you rather do without in your life: what you have experienced in terms of happiness and joy – or what you have experienced in terms of pain and suffering, even in terms of failures themselves? And the spirit-discerner will answer: I am grateful, very grateful to the spiritual worlds for sending me my happiness and joy; but if I have to choose what I would rather do without in my life – happiness or pain, I would rather do without happiness; because I can thank my luck for a lot, but the light I have gained about the world I owe to my lived-through failures; and what I have become with my knowledge, I have become through my experienced pains, and in the true sense of the word I must say: I have found myself through my pains, harmoniously ordered to the world through my pain experiences!

Man comes to understand pain and happiness so thoroughly when he has gained his relationship to spiritual knowledge. And when we ask ourselves: What, then, is it that, one might say, like an elixir of life, like a living force of life, flows into the soul in that man lets the spiritual-divine forces flow into the soul and fills it with spiritual knowledge? We can say that calmness, balance and security flow into the soul – such calmness, such balance, such security that happiness and suffering, success and failure now become something completely new for life.

What happens? — Well, because we have our connection with the outer world through happiness, happiness becomes a strengthening of our whole being; it flows into our feelings, our mind and our will impulses. We do not dull our happiness, we do not sour it; we do not disdain happiness. We accept it gratefully from the hands of the Powers of the Universe, but we pass through it in such a way that we pluck eternal fruits from the Tree of Happiness, fruits for our will, fruits for our mind. And anyone who is in a position to enjoy happiness in this way can experience that he truly experiences no less from this happiness than the person who experiences happiness in an unspiritual way. The experiences of happiness are more refined and intimate; more refined and intimate because they give us, as it were, windows into a spiritual world, because they become the means of mediating that strengthening of our soul that can come to us from the spiritual worlds.

And if we immerse ourselves in pain? Truly, spiritual science is not meant to be a sentimental consolation for the pains of life; spiritual science cannot make a person a shallow person. Whatever causes us pain must cause us pain, that is salutary; for pain hardens us for life, pain hardens our strength. Thus spiritual science does not seek to gloss over pain. On the contrary, one will penetrate even deeper into it, one will have to savor its essence to the full, especially when one has become spiritually enlightened. But just as we can gain strength of will and mind from happiness, so from pain there will come a strengthening of knowledge, the certainty of knowledge, and the strengthening and certainty of another part of the mind, more than can be gained from happiness. Just as the man who dies a martyr's death to the sorrows of life shows us, in a wonderfully moving way, the victory of the light over the darkness of life, so man, by bringing his spirit-conscious self into pain, perceives how the spiritually aware self rises above the pain, but, in rising above it, becomes ever more radiant and radiant and is filled with that light that is a beacon in the storm of life and in the struggle for existence.

Not only does spiritual science give us knowledge. What it gives us is initially only a cause. But the effect is an ego strengthened by life balance and calm, the acquisition of a resting pole in the flight of appearances. But the most important thing is the life energy that spiritual science gives us, and the consciousness through which we say to ourselves: Through your efforts in spiritual science, you not only attain that which ultimately presents itself to you as knowledge; you have striven for knowledge, but you have only brought it out of the depths of your soul because you wanted to empty your soul. Now you see that it has become full, that the divine spiritual life flows into the depths of your being by grace, making you secure and harmonious in life. This effect of spiritual science is characterized by a deep religious sentiment, a feeling for the divine that flows through the soul in this soul. And we are filled with a mood of thanksgiving, of a lasting mood of prayerfulness towards that which wells up through the world when we have freed the soul for that which can flow into it, when we recognize how the divine, when we have prepared the place for it, truly becomes one with our soul — entirely in accordance with the demands of a Meister Eckhart, a Johannes Tauler, Jacob Böhme, Angelus Silesius. And by placing ourselves in an expectant mood, as it were in the emptiness of our soul, we prepare the possibility that in the intuitions of life, in the inspirations of life, that which warms and pulses through our minds will warm and pulsate through us, which makes us do the right thing. We recognize ourselves as instruments of the spirits of the world, who want to enter into a relationship with us. But this gives life richness and security that cannot be lost.

What is it then that draws into our empty soul? What is it that connects the soul in its essence with what is its very essence? The Divine-Spiritual draws into it. Only then can the soul become aware of the Divine-Spiritual. For it remains unconscious in the depths of sleep, when I and the astral body have been exhaled, and it also remains unconscious in waking life, because it is then drowned out and illuminated by the external impressions of physical existence. But when we are imbued with spiritual knowledge, we become vividly aware of the eternal life in our soul, and then we find the way to grow together in the right way with that which carries us through life through the life stream.

But what carries us through the stream of life in our souls? One word indicates it to us, a word that is full of meaning: human destiny. How do we grasp destiny as long as we cling only to the externals of material existence, as long as we only want to combine these externals with the combining mind bound to the brain? How do we grasp destiny? We regard it as something that befalls us, that comes to us; we speak of the “fortuities” of life. In one of the last lectures it was already mentioned here how, without touching on spiritual science, these fortuities of life make a very different impression. If we examine ourselves at any moment in life, what we actually are, what we have become, and then look back in our lives to a certain point in time after our birth, we find that we have become what we are because certain coincidences of fate have befallen our ego. Perhaps we experienced real failures once during our youth: when we had to solve an ordinary school task, we could not solve it, or we solved it wrongly; but because we solved it wrongly, it had this or that consequence for us. But these consequences have become deeply ingrained in our soul; they still sit inside our soul in old age. But the fact that we can make a quick decision in a particular case in life is the consequence of what earlier brought us failure. In this way we have been able to strengthen our powers. What we are now, we owe to what fate has brought us.

If we pursue this realization, we can find the identification of life, of our self, with fate without touching on spiritual knowledge. We are our destiny; for our destiny has made us what we are. If we expand this realization to the spiritual-scientific realization that we carry our ego into the coincidences of fate in happiness and suffering, then we enter into the coincidences of fate. And whereas in happiness and suffering we find: we must, as it were, isolate ourselves from happiness and suffering, we must not be submerged by them, now, when we contemplate our fate, everything that befalls us in the course of our destiny, we find just the opposite: it has had to approach us and through ourselves! For everything that fate has done is intimately connected with our I. Gradually, our consciousness unites with fate: we grow together with fate, we carry our ego into the course of our destiny. We come loose from ourselves. We enter into our destiny, we go out into the course of the world. We become one with the course of the world, enter into the stream of life itself; we selflessly merge with what we otherwise only observe with sympathy and antipathy. While we have otherwise regarded a stroke of luck with sympathy and an accident with antipathy, from now on we will know towards fate: You are in there yourself, and if you were not in there, you would not have become what you are now!

What I have just explained is easier said than done in life. But when a person brings their I into the course of fate, then the question of fate becomes something quite different from what it usually is in ordinary life. Then it becomes something alive in life, then it kindles forces in us. Just as knowledge empties our soul and divine spiritual forces can flow into us, so that we can feel empowered, so now — while the ego was otherwise empty for the events of fate — by we carry our ego out into destiny, into this ego flows that which passes through death and birth, which leads us back to earlier earthly lives and shows us how this present earthly life is the starting point for newer earthly lives. There is no other way by which man can become one with his eternal nature and being, which passes through births and deaths, than to become one with the current of fate, to become one through the realization that we have often prepared our fate in the past, and that we have prepared our fate for this existence in our previous lives. We become one with that which connects us inwardly with the soul and the spirit. While otherwise we are a person who, as it were, swims in a boat on an endless sea and knows nothing but what is going on in this boat or in its immediate vicinity, through spiritual knowledge the person experiences that in this sea there is not only one boat; but he sees many boats going in one direction, many boats going in the other direction, and he then knows that his life in this one boat – between birth and death – lasts for a certain period of time, but that he is then, released from the forces that bind him to life in this boat, going through a life in the spiritual world, but after some time he is in another boat again – as he knows that he was in another boat before. Just as one would be insecure if one felt tied only to the one boat, but becomes secure when one knows that one can flee from one boat to the other at a certain time, so life in the eternal stream of existence becomes secure when we place ourselves in the midst of fate in such a way that we identify ourselves with fate in our own selves. What we experience in life, what comes to us as our karma, as our destiny, becomes what we have become in life. We learn to recognize the question of fate as the question of our soul's perfection. We then say to ourselves: If you experience suffering, pain, failure, then these sufferings, pains, failures penetrate your soul, make it stronger in that part where the conscious forces are, and you go with the strengthened soul through the gate of death and enter another life with the strengthened forces. If the question of fate is otherwise one that spreads darkness over life for us, it becomes a question of perfection for our soul as soon as we permeate it with spiritual knowledge; and inner peace pours over life when we are thus able to approach the question of fate. One can say: Whatever can confront man in life, whatever life necessarily demands of man, all this appears in a new light, and man confronts all this with a new strength when he enables the entry of the divine spiritual powers into his soul by filling the conscious part of his soul with spiritual knowledge. Therefore, spiritual knowledge is not mere theoretical knowledge, not something we absorb only in concepts and ideas; but by absorbing them in concepts and ideas, we make our soul into something else. We do not “prove” the immortality of the soul through spiritual science, but by devoting ourselves to spiritual science, we prepare the soul in such a way that it experiences itself in its living nature and thus experiences its immortality. Spiritual science gives the human soul a new life, a resurrected life.

In a few brief strokes, I tried to show that spiritual science can become a real elixir of life for the soul. And anyone who follows the course of German intellectual life can recognize from the inner nature and essence of this intellectual life itself that this intellectual life is a preparation for the recognition of a real, living spiritual science. What was presented yesterday as the Germanic soulfulness, as the German spiritual life, is, so to speak, a tournament of spiritual forces, in order to arrive at that which can still be achieved — which can be achieved in particular by the whole national soul having strengthened itself by first striving to gain such knowledge, conceptions and ideas, as was spoken of yesterday. All this was a strengthening for a new life. But in life everything is in a living inner connection. Therefore, it may be regarded as justified to believe that what has emerged in German intellectual life as a preparatory, life-strengthening spiritual knowledge, what has been shown in the forces that have been developed by the soul, that it not only lives in German philosophy and literature, but that it lives in the innermost roots of the German national strength. That is the peculiar thing about the strength of the German people: that, wherever we follow German art, German literature, German philosophy, it never appears to us as if it were only a superficial phenomenon, but as if it were constantly emerging from the depths of life. We can look at the finest achievements of German intellectual life, as it appears to us, for example, in the refined way in which Novalis presents it, and we will always find: There is a stream flowing from this refined life down to the roots of the nation. Hegelian philosophy is certainly for most people a mental exercise that they flee because it is difficult to find their way into the crystal-clear, crystal-cold trains of thought; but as crystal-clear and crystal-cold as these trains of thought But however crystal clear and cold these trains of thought may be, there is a path leading from what appears to be so abstract down to the roots of the folklore from which those forces flow that, in the East and West, constitute our hope for a complete rescue of the German existence against the attacking enemies. In a living organism – and such a living organism is what we call the German spirit – everything belongs together. And when it is said that other nations are now united, it must always be emphasized, as has been emphasized here many times before: What often appears to us to be the same in different areas of existence is not always the same. In that in which we hope, in the German essence, what now unites and strengthens the German essence and calls for selfless action, there lives – even if still unconsciously – that power that is to bubble forth in the spirit-inspired recognition that awakens and furthers life; and because this power lives in it, unconsciously, it now breathes the magic breath of unity into the deed of the German people. Therefore, we may hope that this unity will indeed bring about in action what the German spirit wills in its germinal power. And it is nothing else that the German spirit wills but to recognize in unity the physical and spiritual world, to recognize in unity and to order in unity all life from the knowledge of the spirit, of the spiritual world as well as of the physical world.

To recognize unity – oh, it means a great deal! A great deal in the outer spheres of life as well. We live in difficult and serious times. There must come a time when we live under different conditions, when people live peacefully again, but devoted to the struggle for spiritual possessions, devoted to that which must ultimately fill the greater part of life. And there must be strength there, as strong as the present strength is, if the cultural sun is to warm properly, which must develop from that twilight that we are now living through. What kind of people can there be when humanity becomes a little imbued with spiritual knowledge, when it combines the spiritual with the physical a little?

We look at what is now so painfully approaching our souls, we look at so many who have gone through pain and suffering and death, whose souls we already know in those worlds to which we look up through spiritual knowledge. But we are learning to see into these spiritual worlds according to the demands of our time, according to the demands of the human soul in our time. This has already been hinted at in what is being considered here. When we turn our gaze to all those who, in the prime of their lives and in loyal love for their nationality, have passed through the portal of death, we see a sum of unconsumed forces, those unconsumed forces of mind and will that the persons concerned could still have applied in life had they not passed through the portal of death prematurely due to the events of our time of duty. Let us look at this sum total of unspent energy in the physical world, which could still have developed into the strengths of those who were carried away by the difficult events of the time. Is what these people could still have experienced if they had not gone through the gate of death prematurely is that no longer there? Is it lost?

If we were to look up into the spiritual worlds only with the means of our physical observation, we would not find an answer to this question. But when we know how to combine the worldviews of the spiritual and physical worlds into a single life force, then we look into the spiritual world, and then we know that these forces are not lost, that they flow through existence, and that for future times, for whole generations, for whole epochs, those who have now passed through the gate of death prematurely have given their powers. And united with these forces we will see the work on earth in the future, the spiritual world will unite with the physical world, we will gain a new understanding of how the forces that now seem to be lost flow into our souls, which have become empty through spiritual knowledge. The people of the future, strengthened by spiritual knowledge, will have the opportunity through this spiritual knowledge not to let the seemingly now lost forces be lost. But the lost forces will continue to have an effect in the course of time; and in what people will do in the days to come, the forces that have passed through the gate of death on the battlefields of the present time will live on, but consciously, not unconsciously as in earlier times. In earlier times, nations were unconscious of the existence of their dead, as long as the nations still had remnants of ancient clairvoyance. It can touch us strangely when we hear how in the year 378 the Goths went out to fight against the Romans: while at the beginning of the battle an inarticulate cry arose on the Roman side, the Goths struck up battle songs in which they sang for the glory and honor of their invisible dead. They consciously felt themselves led by their dead; they had an understanding of the eternal continuation of the invisible. Mankind will regain this understanding – but now in a conscious way; and through this understanding, security and fertility will also develop, spread throughout this great life. So when the souls of mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, all those left behind in the physical world, look up at those who have been snatched from them in their grief, they will look up at them as at the truly living , as those who, out of the confines of their physical existence, have poured out their strength into the general existence of humanity; and the dead will be not lost, because they will be felt to be alive and surviving in the general existence of humanity. Such will be the effect of spiritual science, even in the simplest human soul. For spiritual science is an elixir of life; spiritual science gives direction to life and harmonizes the soul; spiritual science is that which is able to sustain us, to carry us in joy and suffering, in success and failure, in luck and misfortune, because it is able to give us from the divine that for which we have emptied our souls. Souls that have emptied themselves through spiritual knowledge will also be empty for the inflow of what can stream into these human souls and human hearts from the spirits that have passed through the gate of death, the fallen. Only souls that have not emptied themselves in this way will have to lose themselves in the pain and suffering that the great events of the present must cause to so many individuals. But people who go through this strengthened by spiritual knowledge will find that their emptied soul will be given back by the gods what the earth has taken from them physically. They will understand the language of the spirit, which speaks to them vividly after death, when they have had to stop listening with the physical ear to the dear language of their loved one.

Thus strengthening heart and mind, life and being, spiritual science should not only go through human reason and human intellect, but it should go through human hearts, should go through everything that fills the human soul. And spiritual science in particular can do this for those who want to know themselves as the most enlightened of all. It can give us the certainty that we can have the hope of passing through everything that is now seriously surrounding us in a light-filled way. And everything that arises for us in serious reflection can be focused on the seriousness and great dignity of our time. We may also summarize today's reflection, as it were, in a feeling through which we would like to live with all those who are fighting today and who may have already passed through the gate of death – we may summarize it in a language that may be conscious to one and unconscious to the other – but may be conscious to all the dead. We can look hopefully to those times that must come to humanity for its progress, for its salvation – must come as fruits of this our present time. We can look forward to what will bring peaceful days to mankind again, peaceful days in which there will be a surge through the world, through human souls and human hearts, of all that can flow from the totality of the divine-spiritual power of blessing for human salvation, human progress and human strengthening. Men will act, inspired and permeated by these divine spiritual powers that surge and surge through the world. But we can look forward to this future with the uplifting feeling that spiritual science Science gives us the answer to the anxious question of the time: What will then live in all those who will work in a peaceful time in which the arts and knowledge and the power of peace will be cultivated? And we will be able to know that in all that people will do then, that which now so numerous in human strength, which still looked into the future as a youth, will pass through the gates of death in the fields of the east and the west!

Is this not also a lesson for bearing life's joys and sorrows, when we look at the death and suffering in our difficult times and may know that out of this death and suffering, forces, invisible forces, will arise that will prevail in the most peaceful times of the future for the good and progress of humanity? For forces will arise with which those who will then have to work on earth will connect, who will have to combine the visible and the invisible becoming in order to work among brothers not only in the visible but also in the supersensible world, and who in turn — spiritually — will have won the hearts that they have lost in our serious time.

That seems to me to be an elixir of life too! Invigorating and strengthening, it can flow in our power and in our veins, especially in our time, when we truly need such an elixir of life – very much so! And if we grasp the actual inner meaning of spiritual science, we know that this elixir of life must come. For whatever the outer life brings: this elixir of life is not connected with what the outer life brings, but with what we can become in our innermost being through our own strength. And what we have acquired through the deepest, innermost effort of our actual inner nature will not be lost to us as human beings, not in time, not in eternity. No suffering, no pain, and not even death can take that away from us.

This evening, too, I would like to take a look at the more general conditions of the German essence within this lecture cycle, because it seems to me that in our great, but also painful and sorrowful time, spiritual-scientific considerations have a kind of ethical obligation in a certain respect, and because, in addition, the truly human feeling is to illuminate the horizon of the fateful events within which we stand from a spiritual-scientific point of view. This evening, however, it will be more a matter of allowing the “light of feeling” given by spiritual science to fall, as it were, on certain processes in German intellectual life and on the understanding that is brought to bear on this intellectual life. Tomorrow I will again take the liberty of dealing with a more specific spiritual-scientific topic.

If we look at those phenomena in German intellectual life that can particularly express the whole character of this intellectual life to us, one of them is the one that has already been these lectures: Herman Grimm, the great German art historian, who viewed art from the deepest sources of what German intellectual life, with all its impulses, has poured into his soul. In one of the lectures this winter, I took the liberty of calling Herman Grimm, so to speak, “Goethe's governor in the second half of the nineteenth century.” In the way he lived with everything he produced, in what – concentrated in Goethe – was contained as German essence, as essence in the German folk soul, and what then poured into the stream of German intellectual life – in this way Herman Grimm is, in a certain respect, a representative personality of German intellectual life from the second half of the nineteenth century.

Not quite two years before Herman Grimm's death, essays from the last period of his life appeared, which he gave the collective title “Fragments”. In the preface to these fragments, he says something extraordinarily characteristic. He points out that these individual, sometimes very short essays on this or that question of German or foreign culture arise from a whole of his intellectual world view. And Herman Grimm mentions that he had intended to combine the lectures he had given on this subject over fifty years at the University of Berlin into a single book, which would present the growth and development of the German spirit. But at the same time, he points out how, each time he moved on to the next lecture, he found himself compelled to rework what he had already written. And now he says that this would have to be done for the last time if these lectures were to be combined into a book on German intellectual life as a whole; he does not know whether he will live to do so, because this reworking requires a lot of effort and time. But – and this is the characteristic thing – this whole of German intellectual life stands before his soul, and he wants the individual essays that he publishes to be understood as if they were individual parts, taken from the whole, that stands before his soul.

Herman Grimm did not live to write the book he had in mind. He died in 1901, not quite two years after publishing these “Fragments”. He had actually planned to write an entire spiritual history of the development of the European peoples during his youth. And if we now consider how he in turn – as he often emphasized – wanted the individual main parts that he had given to be understood from this overall presentation of European intellectual life – his great work on Homer, his biographies or monographs on Michelangelo and Raphael and finally his work on Goethe – if we take this into account, we are confronted with something extraordinarily characteristic. We are actually dealing with something that lived in Herman. . Grimm's soul, which was never really portrayed by him in the form in which it lived in his soul, but from which, one might say, every single line he wrote and every single word he spoke in his life emerged. And if we now consider the whole way in which Herman Grimm speaks about art and German cultural life, something else in addition to what has just been said emerges. Herman Grimm always endeavors to advocate with all his soul, with his entire undivided personality; and anyone who has the urge to have all things clearly “proven,” who loves a line of argument that advances from judgment to judgment in a demonstrative manner, will not find what he is looking for in Herman Grimm's presentation. One would like to say: everything he has written springs directly from his entire soul, and one has nothing as proof of the truth but the feeling that overcomes one: the man, this personality, has experienced a great deal in the broadest sense in the things he presents; and he presents his experience. Thus the individual thing he presents springs from a whole that is not really there at all.

What is it, then, that lives in Herman Grimm? What is it that teaches us the conviction that every single thing arises out of a whole? What do we sense, as it were, as a shadow of the spirit behind all the details that Herman Grimm presents, that he has given to the world?

I would like to describe what one senses and what permeates one as one turns the pages of his books: it is the sustaining power of the German spirit, that German spirit which, for those who truly understand it fully, is not just some abstraction that one categorizes with concepts , with ideas, that one expresses in images, but which is really felt like a living being through all of German history; like a being that one feels as if one were holding a dialogue in one's soul with this being and allowing oneself to be inspired by it for everything one has to say. So that basically, once you have such an experience, you need nothing more than the certainty that this spirit is behind it as an inspirer – and you have given something that has good “proven” reason. This being, which one can say is the living German spirit, is slowly and gradually approaching German development; but it is entering the consciousness of the best minds in the most definite way.

We can find this German spirit, this fundamental German spirit, particularly characteristic in one remarkable place. It is there where one of the best, one of the most brilliant Germans, Johann Gottfried Herder, has tried to depict the overall life of humanity in its development. Herder, this great predecessor of Goethe, basically set out early on to let his gaze wander over all the development of the peoples in order to get an overall picture of the forces, of the entities that live in this development of the peoples. And what he was then able to accomplish as a presentation of his ideas about this process of development, he summarized in his “Ideas for a Philosophy of the History of Humanity”. In these “Ideas” we encounter a tableau, a journey through the development of humanity in such a way that we sense that in all the individual phenomena and events, beings and forces live that all have a fully vital effect on Herder's soul. Already in his early youth, Herder turned against Voltaire's historical approach. He fully recognized that Voltaire was one of the most ingenious men; but what he found in his view of history was that this whole view ultimately culminated in a sum of ideas that prevail throughout history, as it were. In contrast to this, Herder objected that ideas only ever give rise to ideas. Herder did not want people to speak only of the “ideas” that are effective in history. He wanted to speak of something less abstract, something more alive and more concrete than the ideas of history. He wanted to speak of how invisible living beings are behind all historical events. He once said, for example: What the outer historical events are is actually only of value to the observer if one takes into account the spirits and spiritual forces at work behind them, from which what can be perceived through the senses first clearly emerges; for what takes place externally is only like a cloud that arises and passes away, but behind which lies the whole activity of the spirit that runs through human history, which one has to observe.

Slowly and gradually, German development rose to such a grandiose historical perspective. It can be said that such a historical perspective was already present in ancient Greece. We find there already echoes of it, longings to give such an overall picture of human development. But such efforts then receded again; and only later, as in Italy in the fifteenth century, do we find new attempts in this direction, as well as in the rest of Western Europe, in France and England. People began to seek connections in the historical development of humanity. But these connections were conceived in a certain materialistic sense. What happens in the course of history is made dependent on climate, geographical conditions and all sorts of other factors. It was only when the German mind took hold of this comprehensive view of history that it was truly brought to life, one might say. And in Herder's soul arose an image that synthesizes natural events and the crowning human events that take place upon them. Herder first turned his attention to how the beings of nature develop and how the spirit, which works in nature at a subordinate level, comes to be more characteristically expressed in man. This spirit, which Herder consciously lets emerge from the essence of the All-Divinity, works in nature, but it also interweaves the human soul. And what man accomplishes in history is not for him merely a sum of successive events, but it has significance in that man on earth himself continues the coherent plan of the divine spiritual entities through what he does.

There is greatness in Herder's calling man an “assistant of the deity” in his earthly work. In this there is again something of the ideas and intuitions and feelings of German mysticism, which seeks God directly in the human soul itself. Herder seeks God in history, as He manifests Himself in the deeds that take place in historical development. God Himself does what historical development is; and man, insofar as he is imbued with God, is God's assistant. For Herder, the whole of nature is built upon the next, then the human kingdom and on that the kingdom of higher spirits; and he makes the significant statement: Man is a middle creature between animal and angel. Herder thus places man in the overall development in such a way that man appears as a direct expression, as a revelation of divine spirituality. And when one examines how Herder, who was not a systematizing philosopher and was far from constructing any abstract ideas, came to sketch out an overall picture of development with inexpressible diligence and truly ingenious foresight, through which the deeds of man can be summarized with the deeds in nature, then one must say: It is a divine power that inspires Herder himself. He is aware that the divine powers that rule in history live in himself. It is the sustaining power of the German spirit in Herder that creates an overall picture of human development and also of natural development.

“Evolution” has become the magic word that seems so significant for the world view of our time. In the days when Herder lived and when Goethe spent his youth, he rose through Herder and others to the world view supported by the German spirit. The idea of evolution entered into German intellectual life. This idea of development was more profound and more profound than it is taken from the materialistic world view. For in what is regarded as “developing”, the German mind saw the mind at work; and in every single natural product, insofar as development is considered, he saw mind as the architect, the carrier, the accomplisher of development. Thus he was able to introduce the idea of the spirit as developing, shown in the becoming of man, fruitfully into the history of ideas, into the whole history of development.

And standing beside Herder as one of the great signposts in the spiritual life is Winckelmann, who first brought art history into that current which can be called: the world view based on the history of development and carried by the German spirit. Goethe says of Winckelmann, the first German art critic: “Winckelmann, a second Columbus, discovered the evolution and destiny of art as bound to the general laws of evolution, keeping pace with the rise and fall of civilization and the destinies of the people.

Thus we see how, through these minds – it has already happened through Lessing – mind is seen in all becoming as the actual bearer, as the actual substance of development. And this world view leads directly to a sense of being carried by the mind, to being carried by the mind. And this permeates the soul with confidence and inner strength. One is tempted to say that all this already contained an inkling that this German spirit, with all its idealism, contains the seeds of a truly scientific spiritual world view that humanity must move towards. For when we consider that spiritual science strives for knowledge of the world, which is attained through the soul developing its inner powers slumbering in its depths, so that it comes to see with the organs of the spirit or — to use Goethe's words — with the spiritual eyes and spiritual ears, to see what, as the invisible, works and lives behind the visible. If one considers this and then recalls a certain saying of Herder's, then a feeling of confidence comes over the soul: humanity will one day partake of spiritual world-view. For how beautifully Herder's saying resounds: “The human race will not pass away until the genius of enlightenment has passed through the earth.” Herder's gaze was always directed towards the intimate weaving and essence of the spiritual that prevails in all sensuality. Herder regards every human being – not just the great historical figures – as thoughts that are not merely thoughts grasped by our brain, but as something living, existing and weaving. And when they are suited to be seized by the spirit of the age and incorporated into the stream of events, then Herder speaks of those people who, through such thoughts, have a formative effect on an entire era: often these people – the geniuses – live and work in the greatest silence; but one of their thoughts, grasped by the spirit of the times, brings a whole chaos of things into good form and order.

When we consider these things, we can never say that they arose out of mere abstract philosophical reflection; for they do not stand in isolation as the impressions of a personality, but stand as if organically with the continuous stream of German intellectual life, and always in such a way that one must regard the personalities who express them, who thereby reveal their convictions, as inspired by the sustaining power of the German spirit. And this sustaining power of the German spirit is deeply felt even in the most recent times by those who have an inkling of it. What is felt as this sustaining power of the German spirit is not only taken up in an abstract philosophy; it is taken up in the deepest feeling of souls.

Thus, for example, when the late Paz! de Lagarde (who died in 1891) – another of the most German minds – once said the following, which is quite characteristic of his whole attitude to this fundamental force of the German spirit: “On one occasion I was requested by a relative of a friend whom I was accompanying to the grave to deliver the funeral oration, and to do so first at the cemetery.” Apparently, Lagarde then spoke of what connects the human soul with the eternal, with the spiritual, what passes through the gate of death as a living being, for now he continues: “Now I actually felt ashamed. What was I then actually? What am I then actually, that I dare to speak of that which is connected with the eternal-spiritual? I was ashamed, but I found that what I had said found fertile soil in the minds that had escorted the dead to the grave.” And now Lagarde says, drawing the conclusion, as it were: “That is how it is for the German when he speaks of love of country: he feels that this speaking of love of country is basically such an intimate, sacred thing that he feels ashamed to speak of it; but he also feels: if he speaks of it, it can fall on receptive minds.”

One need only recall this saying, which truly captures the essence of the German character in the most eminent sense, and one can see from it how the German, when he feels truly at home within the German national character, must to the spirit of his nation, in which he perceives the expression of the divine spirituality of the world in general, and how he feels it to be a living being, which he approaches — even with knowledge — only in reverence. Lagarde is one who, in the second half of the nineteenth century, out of deep learning but also out of deep, soulful feeling, spoke about Germanness in many ways, about the sources of Germanness, about the prospects of Germanness. He is one of those who never tire of pointing out again and again that the essence of Germanness resides in the spiritual, in that which, as the spirit common to all, permeates the entire German evolution. He who wishes to grasp the essence of Germanness at its root is not satisfied with what a materialistic view designates as “blood” or “race” in the nature of a people. Lagarde was not satisfied with this; for he felt that the essence of Germanness can only be expressed through spiritual ideas, through spiritual perceptions. Thus Lagarde says: “Germanness lies not in the blood but in the soul. Of our great men, Leibniz and Lessing are certainly Slavs, Handel, a son of a Halloren, is a Celt, Kant's father was a Scot: and yet, who would call these un-German?” — In which Lagarde, one of the most German of Germans, seeks the German essence, that is the supporting force of the German spirit, in which the one can immerse himself who understands German essence within himself and how to realize it. Time and again, the best Germans never tire of explaining how the essence of the German can only be expressed and revealed through the spiritual.

When one reflects in this way, the German spirit takes on an ever more concrete and real essence. One feels it flowing through the stream of German life, especially through the stream of German intellectual life; and one then understands how the German, in the course of his development, felt the need to enrich his own being in the present more and more with what the German spirit had already allowed to flow from its sources into the German nation in older times.

Thus we find, as the German Romantics, leaning on Goethe, as it were, renewing the old German essence, delving not only into the folk song but into the entire German spiritual being, in order to absorb it and revive it in their souls, so as to allow what is peculiar to Germanness as a whole to take effect in their own souls. And then we see again how the German development in the Brothers Grimm is inspired by what German essence produced in ancient times. We see how the Brothers Grimm descend to the people and have the old fairy tales told to them in order to collect them. And what lies in this collection of German fairy tales, which really convey such a hundredfold impression, taken directly from the people's minds? Nothing else lies in them but the fundamental power of the German spirit!

And how does this fundamental power of the German spirit continue to work?

We have been able to see it particularly in the achievements of the already mentioned Herman Grimm. Often, when one allows these fine, elegant, comprehensive artistic characteristics of Herman Grimm to take effect on the soul, when one especially visualizes some of the extremely intimate subtleties that lie in these writings, one must ask oneself: How did this personality manage to make the soul so elastic, so pliable that it could delve into the deepest secrets of artistic work and artistic creation? And I believe there can be no other answer than the one that follows from the clues as to how Herman Grimm, before he began to contemplate the art of humanity, expressed himself poetically and artistically. For this expression is particularly characteristic of the supporting force of the German spirit. I would like to point out only a few.

The first of the stories and poems collected in the volume Novellen is Herman Grimm's The Songstress. This is a story that, as is usually the case when presenting novellas, is used only to depict events that take place before the eyes of people, that can be grasped directly with the imagination that is tied to the body. Herman Grimm also masterfully presents what takes place in the external world: he presents a female personality that is deeply attracted to a male personality; but through her character and her whole being, this female personality rejects the male one. It would take too long to go into the details now. So it comes about that the male personality commits suicide. The female personality remains behind. And now, after the death of the man who loved her, she feels not only pain and suffering; no, something intervenes in her soul life that is directly supersensible. She spends a night at a friend's house, the friend at whose house the suicide of her lover had taken place. She feels disturbed. At first she does not know the reason for it. But then she says that she cannot sleep alone in the room; the friend should watch over her. And as he watches over her, it turns out that she has a vision, which the poet clearly shows that he wants to express more than a mere play of the imagination. At the door of the bedroom, the ghostly figure of the deceased enters. And if one investigates what Herman Grimm actually wants to express with this apparition, it is that he wants to say: with what is happening here before the eyes of man on earth, the event is not yet exhausted; but spiritual factors, spiritual entities intervene in physical events; and when death has occurred, what has passed through the gate of death is present there in the spiritual world and is effective for those who are receptive to it.

Herman Grimm is thus a novelist who allows the spiritual world to shine through his artistic portrayal. What actually appears to the bereaved lover has often been described in these lectures. It is what the etheric body of the deceased in question can be called, which can show itself in the form of the deceased to those who are receptive to it. But not all people are receptive to this.

Herman Grimm also wrote a novel, “Unüberwindliche Mächte” (Insurmountable Forces), which is of great importance as a cultural-historical novel and also otherwise in the spiritual history of humanity, but unfortunately it has been neglected. Here too, the lover dies. And when she seeks healing in a place in the south, she wastes away more and more in the memory of her lover and finally dies. Herman Grimm describes her death in a very unique way in the final chapter of 'Unüberwindliche Mächte'. He describes how a spiritual figure rises out of her body and rushes towards her lover. Again, Herman Grimm does not conclude the account with the events visible on earth, but brings together what is visible to the senses, what is visible to the mind, with the supersensible, which continues beyond death.

I would not cite such examples if they did not correspond entirely to what spiritual science has to say about these things. Of course one cannot cite artists as proof of spiritual science. But if one cites such examples as proof of what spiritual science has to offer humanity, it can be done to the extent that the nascent spiritual science lies in a spirit like Herman Grimm, who was artistically active in the second half of the nineteenth century. He is not yet able to express spiritual science as such, but artistically he presents things in such a way that one perceives: spiritual science wants to make its entry into the spiritual culture of humanity out of the supporting power of the German spirit.

Herman Grimm — this emerges from his entire literary work — never wanted to admit to himself what actually formed the basis for his giving such descriptions. He was somewhat shy about bringing these things, which he only wanted to approach in the most intimate, artistic and spiritual way, into ordinary concepts. But if he was not able to approach these things in the way that spiritual science can speak about them today, and yet these things are properly – one might say “expertly” – presented by him, then what lived in him? The inspiring force was the sustaining power of the German spirit! And so we find this sustaining power of the German spirit to be a very real entity, and we must turn our spiritual gaze towards it if we want to get to know the German character at all.

Now Goethe once spoke a very significant word, which should be taken into account when speaking of the relationship between the German spirit and the individual German, when speaking of how German essence lives directly in German lands – one might say – lives before the eyes of people when they have fixed their eyes on any personalities and any people within the German lands. In a confidential conversation in recent years, Goethe said to his secretary Eckermann: “My works cannot become popular; anyone who thinks and strives for that is mistaken. They are not written for the masses, but only for individual people who want and seek something similar and who are moving in similar directions.”

This is a significant statement. One would like to say: it is in the nature of Germanness — to use this word of Fichte's — to really feel the German spirit as a living thing and to still experience the totality of the German essence, the unity of the German spirit, as something special alongside what appears externally as German life. The totality of the German essence is no less real for that; it can at least be present for each individual. Hence the urge of the German to consider the individual phenomena of the world in connection with the whole development of the world and of humanity. In the second half of the nineteenth century, a poet living in the German-speaking districts of Austria went, one might say, around the whole world to understand the individual human being from the perspective of the overall spirit, despite the most diverse cultural influences. I refer to Robert Hamerling, who in his poem 'Aspasia' attempts to make the collective Greek spirit speak through an individual human being; who then attempts to portray the intensely personal German character in his 'King of Zion'; who further tries to express the actual spirit of the French revolutionary hearth in his drama “Danton and Robespierre” and finally wants to express the spirit of our time in his “Homunculus” in a grandiose, comprehensive way through poetry. Hamerling always feels the need to depict the individual in connection with what, as a spiritual weaving and becoming and as a sum of spiritual entities, animates and permeates the stream of human events. The view of the whole, of a living spiritual reality, interweaves the German intellectual work through the individual phenomena where it appears in its most intense manifestations.

Therefore, for someone who—one might say—does not look much further than a few meters beyond his own nose and considers something in a limited area of German life, it is extremely difficult to grasp the German character; for it can only be grasped by really considering the connection between the German soul and the spiritual entities that are weaving through the world and bringing themselves to revelation in the German spirit. And this is, in addition to much that has already been mentioned in these lectures, the reason why this German spirit, why this fundamental German spirit can be so misunderstood, why it is now so reviled and so insulted. One must ask oneself: How does this German spiritual life relate to the spiritual life of other nations?

I would like to discuss a characteristic example today, tying it in with a specific occasion when it became clear how difficult it is for a German who feels connected to the German spirit to make himself fully understood when the application of what he feels from the German spirit is to be applied to a single phenomenon. Recently, there has been much talk of the fact that the aging, somewhat decadent French intellectual life has undergone a kind of rejuvenation, that there are young French people who no longer go along with official Frenchness. And in many circles, which will hopefully have their eyes opened more by this war than they were previously open, people had begun to see something in this young Frenchness that would now understand the German mind much better than official Paris and official Frenchness. People had pointed to characteristic phenomena within young Frenchness. Indeed, there is much to be found there that one might say is quite significant. There are young French intellectuals who are not satisfied with official France itself – but that is the France that is currently at war with Germany.

What do such young Frenchmen say? – I would like to give just one brief example by quoting what Leon Bazalgette has said:

You can see how they swell with satisfaction when they utter the words: “French Renaissance” (three years of existence – they announce – the child is chubby-cheeked and already playing with little soldiers), “Awakening of national pride”,

These are the men who would divert the entire energy of a people to pour it into the enthusiasm of that still unknown virtue: hatred. In an age when the whole world trembles with activity, ambitious endeavors, dreams and new desires that cross borders, their only thought and aspiration, of which they are proud, is to settle an old neighborhood dispute with a fist fight. Oh, poor conceited people, who are incapable of conjuring up other forms of heroism than the “revenge”. Poor little fools of passion, who have no more appropriate desires to satisfy your hunger for action...

... In the name of what great idea – one of those ideas for which almost no one at all times has hesitated to give up his life – would we go to war with Germany? Is it about our freedom? Do we live under the yoke or are we threatened by it? Is it about countries that need to be civilized by being annexed, or about peoples that need to be snatched from slavery? No, it is solely about trying to reconquer territories that belonged to us and that we lost in a war, territories of which a good half are no more French than German...; and even less is it about reconquering these territories as such as it is about satisfying an old desire for revenge. That is the “idea in the name of which this country, which likes to give itself the title of ‘fighting for noble causes,’ would start a war.

One was — one would like to say — somewhat touched by the charity in certain circles at the sound of some voices that came from the young Frenchmen, those young Frenchmen of whom it was said that they wanted to found a new France. And one of those who, especially before the war, was also counted among these young Frenchmen by certain Germans who would create a new France, is Romain Rolland, who wrote a great novel, “great” in the sense of spatial expansion, because it has very many volumes. It is interesting to note how certain circles here, albeit perhaps smaller ones, viewed this particular novel by Romain Rolland.

One critic could not refrain from saying that this novel “Jean Christophe” — the German name is Johann Christof Kraft — is the most significant act that has been done since 1871 to reconcile Germany and France. In fact, there were quite a number of those who said: This novel 'Jean Christophe' shows how one of those young Frenchmen looks at Germany with love, with intimate love, and how he is one of those who will make it impossible for these two nations to live in discord in the future.

Not only has this proved to be a deceptive hope, but something else has emerged: Romain Rolland is one of those who, with Maeterlinck, Verhaeren and so on, immediately expressed themselves in a rather unmodest way about Germany and the German character when the war began. But now it is interesting to see a little how this man, Romain Rolland, of whom so many of us said that he could understand the German character so well, that he really grasped from the innermost core of the German national soul and the German spirit what is the supporting force of the German spirit – how this man understood the German character. I am well aware that I am not offending any true aesthetic sensibilities by saying what I must say, uninfluenced by the many judgments that have been passed on this novel, especially in the direction I have indicated.

What particularly excited people is that the Frenchman portrays a German, Johann Christof Kraft, who has outgrown the German way of being — we will see in a moment how — and who, after spending his youth in Germany, goes to France to find his further development there. In this, one sees a very special bridging of the contrast between the German and French way of being. Now, in order to fully understand what is to be said, we must first visualize the basic structure of this Jean Christophe.

I know how highly the critics regard this novel, and they have expressed their opinions as follows: the character of Jean Christophe is one that has been taken directly from life; no trait—so they feel—could be different in this drawing. But I must say: this Jean Christophe seems to me to be a rather indigestible ragout, his character welded together rather disharmoniously from the traits of the young Beethoven, Wagner, Richard Strauss and Karl Marx. The admirers of Jean Christophe may forgive me, but that is the impression. This Jean Christophe grows up – he is simply transported to the present – in much the same way as Beethoven grew up. One recognizes all the traits of the young Beethoven – but distorted into caricature – down to the last detail, but in such a way that the life of the young Beethoven appears everywhere as a grandiose work of art, while the life of Jean Christophe appears as a caricature. Now, it is not the poet's task, when he alludes to history, to be faithful to that history. I can make all the objections that critics make in this regard myself; nevertheless, I must say this: Jean Christophe grows up in an environment that, in the opinion of many people, provides a picture of the German character. His grandfather, grandmother, uncle and other friends are presented. He grows up in such a way that the German character, which he outgrows, is perceived as the greatest obstacle to his developing genius. German character, for example, is presented as follows. Like Beethoven, young Jean Christophe is a kind of early composer; he makes compositions at a young age. His father, who is a drunkard, feels compelled to show off this precocious talent to the world. This father is a secretary, servant to a small German prince. The particular Germanic nature of this father is presented in cultural-historical terms when, while planning a concert with the young, seven- to eight-year-old Jean Christophe, at which the prince is also to be present, he reflects on how he should dress the boy. In the end, he comes up with a very clever idea, which is described as “a culturally historical idea of genuine, true Germanism”: he has him put on long trousers and a tailcoat, along with a white bandage, so that the boy looks like an eight-year-old little man. I will not recount how this German undertaking later unfolds, because that would take us too far afield. I will also not describe in detail how he feels disgust for everything that the entire German environment offers, this environment that is marked with “love” — according to some people — and that is supposed to give a true picture of the German character. But when he can no longer stand this environment, he feels compelled — as it says in the book — to be inspired by the Latin spirit. So he goes to Paris. There he finds a friend who is a clear reflection of Romain Rolland himself in many ways. This is the person who expresses what the young, newly emerging French identity promises for the future; it is he who teaches this confused mind, this doll welded together from the young Beethoven, Wagner, Richard Strauss and others, some order of mind. That is the “love” with which, according to certain people, a German character, Jean Christophe, is drawn. Jean Christophe then also goes through various experiences in Paris – we now notice some traits of Richard Wagner. And when he loses his friend, he turns further south, undergoes many experiences that border on the criminal, which even lead him to suicide, which then only fails. And now, after Jean Christophe, who has not been able to flourish in his German surroundings, has gone through Latin ways, he comes to himself, as it were, in a lonely old village; he conquers his own spirit. Eternity opens up for him.

Now let us just take in a few examples of the truly loving immersion in the German character, taken from the novel. For example, the father, who is portrayed as Beethoven's father, Melchior, is characterized. Of course I know that someone might say: You are taking words out of a novel that may not actually reflect the author's opinion. But the artistic composition of this novel is entirely in line with what Schiller demanded in the beautiful words he wrote about “Wilhelm Meister” and what really belongs in the artistic composition of a novel. When Goethe was criticized for the fact that certain traits of the personalities in his novel did not appear entirely morally, Schiller said: “If people can prove to you that the immorality comes from your own soul, then you have made an aesthetic mistake; but if it comes from the characters, then you are justified in every respect.” This golden rule of art is also something that was later incorporated into the sustaining power of the German spirit. The best works of art that we find in Germany were truly written under the influence of this Schiller-Goethe attitude. But in Romain Rolland's work, one constantly encounters, almost on every third page, statements that clearly show that it is the author speaking and not the characters. Therefore, it is only an excuse in this case if one objects that one should not find what the author says on occasion – one cannot even say that it is the characters who express it – but what the author says on occasion of the characterizations characteristic of the way in which the author has immersed himself in the German essence. For example, Father Melchior is described in the following way:

“He was a smooth-talker, well built, if a little plump, and the type of what is considered classical beauty in Germany: a broad, expressionless forehead, strong regular features and a curly beard: a Jupiter from the banks of the Rhine.”

Then, to characterize Melchior's friends, how they gathered at the father's house and played and sang there together:

“Occasionally they would sing together in a four-part male choir one of those German songs that, one like the other, move along with solemn simplicity and in flat harmonies, ponderously, as it were, on all fours.”

What a loving description of the German character! I will only quote it as a characterization. Then there is an Uncle Theodor in the novel who is actually the grandfather's stepson; he is described in the following way. I have nothing to say against the fact that individual persons are presented in this way, but I do object to the fact that this description is supposed to be a cultural image of the German character; for one notices that Romain Rolland continually mixes in what itches him so that he can say it about the German character. Of this Uncle Theodor it is said:

What a loving description! Then Jean Christophe falls in love with a young noblewoman, who is portrayed as the epitome of a young German girl. Her name is Minna:

“Minna, for all her sentimentality and romanticism, was calm and cool. Despite her aristocratic name and the pride that the little word ‘von’ instilled in her, she had the mind of a little German housewife –” and then it continues:

“Minna, this naively sensual German little girl, knew some strange games.”

And now, to explain in cultural-historical terms what is supposed to be particularly characteristic of the German character, it is stated that she also understood how to spread flour on the table and put certain objects in it, which one then had to search for with one's mouth.

Now it will be shown why the German character becomes so unpleasant for Christof; and again, one can only say that the author is itching to express how he himself feels about the Germans. He wants to describe the dishonesty and hypocrisy in German idealism, the idealism that Romain Rolland believes was invented because people find the truth uncomfortable and therefore look to the ideal. They lie about the truth and call it idealism. Thus the Germans have the characteristic of not looking at people calmly, but of “idealizing” them, of lying to themselves about their true characteristics. Christof had also appropriated this characteristic, but it had become increasingly distasteful to him:

“Once he had convinced himself that they” — certain people — “were excellent and that he should like them, he, as a true German, tried hard to believe that he really liked them. But he didn't succeed at all: he lacked that compliant Germanic idealism that doesn't want to see and doesn't see what it would be embarrassing to discover for fear of disturbing the comfortable calm of their judgment and the comfort of their lives.” ‘German idealism’ invented for the sole reason of not disturbing the comfort of life! Now, once again, a young girl is described, with whom Jean Christophe naturally falls in love, an archetype of ugliness, “little Rosa.” One can literally feel from the novel how her nose is hardly in the right place on her face, and much more; but from a loving cultural description of her, it is said:

"The Germans are very indulgent when it comes to physical imperfections: they manage not to see them; they can even come to embellish them with a benevolent imagination, finding unexpected relationships between the face they want to see and the most magnificent examples of human beauty. It would not have taken much persuasion to get old Euler – Rosa's grandfather – to declare that his granddaughter had the nose of Juno Ludovisi.

But after he had tested the mendacity of German idealism on his own person – we have experienced this again and again with well-known “geniuses”; but we did not believe that it should be characteristic of the German character, that it should be a special characteristic of the Germans, that they 'idealize' people, was not believed earlier – he now also comes to the conclusion that basically all German musicians have a catch, something is wrong somewhere; this is also connected with German idealism! And now he comes to the conclusion that he must be more significant than all the rest. As a characteristic example, a few words about Schumann:

Now that he is only a: returned Beethoven – who of course lives according to Wagner – and is supposed to become a genius the like of which has never been seen, he must also vent his anger on Wagner. And so all kinds of affectionate things are then put into his mouth – you really can't say, “Johann Christof,” which would be forgivable; instead, they are always expressed in such a way that they are separate from the person of Johann Christof and become something that the author himself gives the absolute coloration to. So, with reference to Lohengrin and Siegfried, it is said about Richard Wagner:

“Germany revelled in this art of childish maturity, this art of wild beasts and mystically quacking maidens.”

Well, I would like to say that the German character is characterized even more profoundly in such a loving way. Here is another example:

"Especially since the German victories, they did everything to make compromises, to bring about a disgusting mishmash of new power and old principles. They did not want to renounce the old idealism: that would have been an act of courage that they were not capable of; in order to make it subservient to German interests, they contented themselves with falsifying it. They followed the example of Hegel, the cheerfully duplicitous Swabian, who had waited for Leipzig and Waterloo to adapt the basic idea of his philosophy to the Prussian state,” – it may perhaps be said that Hegel's fundamental work, ‘The Phenomenology of Spirit’ – but Romain Rolland probably knows very little about this when he says that Hegel's philosophy was created after Leipzig and Waterloo – was written during the cannonade of the Battle of Jena, that is, in 1806, and already contains Hegel's entire philosophy –

"And now, after the interests had changed, the principles were also changed. When they were defeated, they said that Germany's ideal was humanity. Now that they were beating the others, they said that Germany was the ideal of humanity. As long as the other countries were the more powerful, they said with Lessing that patriotism was a heroic weakness that could very well be dispensed with, and they called themselves citizens of the world. Now that victory had been achieved, there was no lack of contempt for “French” utopian dreams: world peace, brotherhood, peaceful progress, human rights, natural equality; it was said that the strongest nation had an absolute right over the others, while the others, as the weaker ones, had no rights over it. It seemed to be the living God and the incarnate spirit, whose progress was achieved by war, violence and oppression. Now that it was on their side, might was canonized. Might was now the epitome of all idealism and all reason. To give honor to the truth, it must be said that Germany for centuries...

perhaps the only thing people seek in Germany, to do honor to the truth! — “had suffered so much from having idealism without power that after so much trial it was well justified in now making the sad confession that it needed power above all, however it might be constituted. But how much hidden bitterness lay in such a confession of the people of a Herder and a Goethe! And what renunciation, what humiliation of the German ideal lay in this German victory! — And, alas, this renunciation found only too much compliance in the lamentable tendency of all the best Germans to subordinate themselves.

“What characterizes the German,” said Möser more than a century ago, “is obedience.”

And Frau von Stael:

"They obey well. They use philosophical reason to explain the most unphilosophical thing in the world: respect for power and the habituation to fear that transforms respect into admiration.” Christof found this feeling in Germany at all levels, from the greatest to the smallest – from Wilhelm Tell, the deliberate, small-minded bourgeois with the muscles of a porter, who, as the free Jew Börne says, in order to reconcile honor and fear, walks past the post of “dear Mr. Geßler” with his eyes downcast, so that he could appeal to the fact that he who did not see the hat was not disobeying – “up to the honorable seventy-year-old Professor Weiße, one of the most respected scholars in the city, who, when a lieutenant passed by, quickly left the footpath to him and went down to the road.”

And further it says:

“Moreover, Germany did indeed bear the heaviest burden of sins in Europe. When one has won the victory, one is responsible for it; one has become the debtor of the vanquished. One tacitly assumes the obligation to lead the way for them, to show them the way. The victorious Louis XIV brought the splendor of French reason to Europe. What light did the Germany of Sedan bring to the world?”

This is the loving description. But I must not forget anything, and in order not to be unjust, I must not conceal the fact that at one point something of the loving description of the German character from this novel shines through clearly and distinctly. It is where a German professor in a small town – his name is, of course, Schulz – is enthusiastic about the early works of Johann Christof, which are misunderstood by everyone else. Johann Christof is once able to visit the old professor. Two other acquaintances turn up, and then there is – in addition to Johann Christof demonstrating his works to the delight of the three people – a feast, a huge midday feast. Salome (!), the old professor's cook, who has been a widow for a long time, takes particular pleasure in how everyone can eat. And now a piece of German character is described in a truly “historically accurate and loving” way.

Salome, to see how they were enjoying a piece of German culture inside, looked through the crack in the door; and what she saw is described as:

It is not surprising that Johann Christof, after having gone through all that, wants to get out of this environment, because his genius cannot flourish in this environment. But he doesn't really know anything about France, this Johann Christof. He is completely uneducated, just a great musician. But since he knows nothing, his going to France is characterized in the following way:

“Instinctively (since he didn't know France!) his eyes looked towards the Latin south. And first of all towards France. Towards France, the eternal refuge from German confusion.”

In France, he meets his friend Olivier, who enlightens him about the young French. And perhaps it is what these young French say about the Germans that is so appealing on this side of the Rhine. Olivier tells Johann Christof about the young French's particular view of the nature of official Paris and about what he used to polemicize against like the others:

"The best among us are shut out, imprisoned on our own soil... Never will they know what we have suffered, we who cling to the genius of our race, who, like a sacred trust, guard the light we have received from it and desperately defend it against the hostile breath that would extinguish it; and yet we stand alone, feeling the polluted air of those metics all around us, who, like a swarm of mosquitoes, have attacked our thinking and whose disgusting larvae gnaw at our reason and defile our hearts; we are betrayed by those whose mission it would be to defend us, our superiors, our stupid or cowardly critics; they flatter the enemy to obtain forgiveness for being of our generation; we are abandoned by our people, who do not care about us, who do not even know us... What means do we have to make ourselves understood? We cannot reach them... And that is the hardest part. We know that there are thousands of us in France who think the same; we know that we speak on their behalf, and there is nothing we can do to be heard! The enemy occupies everything: newspapers, magazines, theaters... The press shuns every thought or only allows it if it is an instrument of pleasure or a party weapon. Intrigues and literary cliques only leave room for those who throw themselves away. Misery and overwork crush us to the ground. The politicians, who are only concerned with enriching themselves, are only interested in the corruptible proletariat. The indifferent and self-interested citizens watch our dying. Our people do not know us; even those who fight with us, who are shrouded in silence like us, know nothing of our existence, and we know nothing of theirs... Unhappy Paris! It is true that it has also done good by organizing all the forces of French thought into groups. But the evil it has created is at least equal to the good; and in an epoch like ours, good itself turns into evil. It is enough for a pseudo-elite to usurp Paris and ring the immense bell of the public to stifle the voice of the rest of France. Far more than that: France confuses itself; it remains silent in dismay and fearfully pushes its thoughts back into itself... I used to suffer greatly from all this. But now, Christof, I am calm. I have understood my strength, the strength of my people. We just have to wait until the flood has passed. It will not gnaw away at France's fine granite. I will let you feel it under the mud it carries with it. And already, here and there, tall peaks are emerging...

You don't really need more than that to characterize the French character that is now waging war against Germany. But now, I would like to say, there is something even more beautiful. So this novel was published. It has also been translated into German. I would now like to read you a few words from a German critic of this novel, addressed to Romain Rolland in the form of a letter printed in a Berlin newspaper.

"For me, the completion of your 'Jean Christo is even more of an ethical event than a literary one... Gobineau, Maeterlinck, Verhaeren and even Verlaine have had their greatest impact and achieved their greatest fame in Germany rather than in France, and it would be only fair if you too were appreciated earlier in our country than in your homeland, because your book belongs in Germany, in the land of music, more than any other book. In many ways it is a German book, a coming-of-age novel like Green Henry or Wilhelm Meisten. German music, which Germany has given the world, has also made you its advocate. It was music that led you to the German language and made you love Goethe, whom you have memorialized many times in your work with love and admiration.

I find myself at a loss as to how many times I should actually thank you. The human being, the connoisseur, the artist, the German, the world-joyful in me, each of them wants to come forward and say a word to you. But another time the artist will say a word about this novel, another time the connoisseur, and the human being will wait until he can shake your hand again. Today only the German should thank; because I have the feeling that French youth has become closer to us through this book, which has done more than all the diplomats, banquets and associations."

This is a prime example of how the sustaining power of the German spirit can be misunderstood, and how the painfully great events we are having to live through must have an eye-opening effect in many respects, truly: must have an eye-opening effect. And please forgive me if I bring up something at the very end that seems personal, but which only ties in with personal matters because I have only just learned about it today.

The spiritual science movement to which we belong was for many years connected with a theosophical movement based in England and India. This movement gradually became so absurd that anyone with a sense of truth could no longer have any connection with much of this Anglo-Indian theosophical movement. Therefore, many years before this war, we completely separated from it. At that time we were reviled enough, even by German followers of that movement; perhaps stronger words could be used. But one would have thought that the matter was now over and that there would be no reason to return to it now. But the president of this Anglo-Indian movement has found it necessary to refer to this matter again and to characterize us Germans. And she does so with the following words, which are not mentioned here out of personal considerations, but to show how, from a certain point of view, one is capable of characterizing in such a way what we as Germans had to do out of our sense of truth:

”... Now, looking back, in the light of German methods as revealed by the war, I realize that the long-standing efforts to capture the Theosophical Society and place a German at its head, the anger against me when I frustrated those efforts, the complaint that I had spoken about the late King Edward VII as the protector of European peace, instead of giving the honor to the Kaiser – that all this was part of the widespread campaign against England, and that the missionaries were tools, skillfully used by German agents here – in India – to push through their plans. If they could have turned the Theosophical Society in India, with its large number of officials, into a weapon against the British government and trained it to look to Germany as its spiritual leader – instead of standing, as it has always done, for the equal alliance of two free nations – then it could gradually have become a channel for poison in India.

So that is what we are, seen through English-Theosophical eyes, in our spiritual scientific movement. But I may say – forgive this remark; you know that I do not like to make personal remarks – I can give the assurance that I had no intention of doing all this, and especially had no intention of leaving the German spiritual scientific movement. For such a thing did not live in me and, I believe, did not live in many others either, who know that they are connected with the German spirit and its sustaining power – something that lived in Johann Christoph Arnold, who was driven out of Germany by his instinct. For even if it is difficult to find the immediate manifestations of the sustaining power of the German spirit in the immediate phenomena that Rolland, the traveler, with his uncomprehending eye, has focused on, it must be said that the truthfulness of the German spirit will make it more and more possible, especially through the experiences of our fateful time, to build a bridge between what we experience in everyday life and what is the fundamental force of the German spirit. And when we are presented with all the figures in Johann Christian's environment, from which his “genius” drives him out, then perhaps, in conclusion, and without arrogance, something may be said.

I don't want to quote a foreigner now. But I may quote someone who has been dead for a long time, who died in 1230 and who, for his part, also expressed an opinion on whether a German genius must necessarily be driven out of all that lives in it by its environment, out of all the Minnas and Rosas with crooked noses, which German idealism knows as the nose of Juno Ludovisi. Perhaps not with a genius like Johann Christoph, but with one of whom we know from the context with the supporting power of the German spirit that he was a German genius. With such a German genius we may perhaps, without arrogance, think for a moment: with Walther von der Vogelweide. And we may admit to ourselves: it is not with Johann Christof, the hero that Romain Rolland has drawn, that we judge how German men and German women affect a genius, but rather with a spirit like Walther von der Vogelweide. With his words, then, let these reflections be closed, to be followed tomorrow by a special lecture on the humanities.

Walther von der Vogelweide is not driven out of Germany by his instinct; he must think differently about those among whom he lives. I don't know how they would be described if they were to fall under Romain Rolland's fingers; but Walther von der Vogelweide says of them – and this seems to me to indicate a better understanding than Romain Rolland reveals –:

German men are well-bred,
their women are as pure as angels.
He who scolds them is deceived,
I could never understand it otherwise.
Virtue and pure love,
Whoever seeks them
Shall come to our land, where there is much bliss.
Long may I live in it!

I would like to address the question of the mortal and the immortal in man in two reflections, of which this evening, the first, is to be devoted mainly to man's mortality, and next week's second lecture will deal with man's immortal essence. We live in a time in which materialism, even though it is now more or less in decline, has nevertheless taken hold in wide circles. And even if one wants to deceive oneself about this fact by the fact that the word materialism is often frowned upon, the way of thinking and attitude, the nuance of world view, is nevertheless in a state of continuous increase, which must be correctly designated by the word materialism.

Now materialism has a very, very simple answer to the question “What is mortal about the human being?” It has the answer: everything about the human being is mortal. One need only refer to the bible of the newer materialistic times, to David Friedrich Strauß' “Old and New Belief”, to substantiate this. It is true that David Friedrich Strauß's “The Old and the New Faith” is no longer read to the same extent as it was a few decades ago. But this is not so much because people have withdrawn from the innermost impulses that dominate David Friedrich Strauß's materialism, but rather because in our fast-moving times a book is hardly able to survive for a few decades.

We can and must ask ourselves the question in view of everything that has come to light and been discussed within today's materialistic world view: Can materialism provide any answers to man's legitimate spiritual questions, or can materialism provide proof that the questions that a spiritual scientific world view must raise are unjustified, that they, so to speak, refer to nothing? If one, esteemed attendees, is aware of how deeply rooted the materialistic world view is in what many people today consider to be the only truly scientific view, then one must raise these questions with particular intensity. For within today's science, or rather within the view that results from today's science for many, there are strong impulses that take a stand against the science of the spirit. In today's science there are many instruments of power that can be brought into play against many of the objections that one or the other side may have to the materialistic world view. Anyone who can really see what has emerged from the so-called scientific world view, which claims to be based solely on true and real facts, must say to themselves: Only then can a spiritual-scientific world can be developed that is able to meet the demands of modern natural science, if it is able to deal with this natural science in such a way that this natural science comes into its own.

It must be fully admitted that natural science can easily deal with the objections that are still being raised from many sides today; at least insofar as it can easily penetrate with its arguments against the immortality of the human soul in those who, from the outset, have an inclination to deny the free activity of the spirit, independently of the material.

It has often been emphasized that spiritual science seeks to engage with the spiritual cultural process of our time, and it seeks to do so on the basis of – it may well be said – a complete transformation, a complete renewal of people's habitual ways of thinking and imagining. Precisely for this reason, because spiritual science must appeal to something that is unknown in the broadest circles today, really unknown, even in those circles that usually oppose it, that is why it is so difficult to make this spiritual science of the time formation really somewhat understandable.

Spiritual science differs fundamentally from what is usually called a philosophical way of thinking today. Philosophical thinking, which seeks above all to arrive at its results through considerations of reason, through mere combinations of concepts, through conclusions and the like, — philosophical thinking, as it is often understood today, is not capable of grasping that in human nature which really passes through the gate of death, which is truly capable of living independently of corporeality, of physicality.

For spiritual science, however, this purely philosophical approach, based on concepts and ideas of the external world, is from the outset something — forgive the somewhat trivial comparison — it is this philosophy, based purely on rational arguments, as one often says, is something that can just as little arrive at real results about the spiritual life, just as little get the spirit into human knowledge, as man can nourish himself by eating himself. Just as the process of nutrition must take hold of something that is outside its structure if it is to serve the human or animal organism, so human cognition must take hold of something that lies outside the mere connection and concatenation of concepts and ideas if the true cognitive needs of the human being are to be satisfied. In the second half of the nineteenth century, we have an example of how materialism, in its strict logic, is able to proceed from conclusion to conclusion, but because it is unable to really engage with a spiritual reality, it nevertheless becomes entangled in contradictions, which are not noticed by this materialistic world. conclusion to conclusion, but because it is impossible for it to really engage with a spiritual reality, it nevertheless becomes entangled in contradictions, which are not noticed by this materialistic world view itself, but which are noticed by those who have trained themselves to a certain universality of thought. In his book 'Old and New Faith', David Friedrich Strauß also presents Goethe's idea of immortality among the various proofs of human immortality that he wants to refute. He takes up this idea and behaves very strangely in doing so. David Friedrich Strauß does admit that there is something heroic about Goethe's idea of immortality, but then he belittles this heroism – one would like to use the word that Nietzsche coined for David Friedrich Strauß – like a real philistine. Goethe made not one but many statements about human immortality. For Strauß, only the one that I will mention now comes into consideration.

The thought occurs to Goethe that when the human soul tries to grasp itself, it becomes aware within itself of having abilities and talents that it cannot fully develop and unfold in one human life; and now, from the depths of his being and at the same time from what I yesterday called “the sustaining power of the German spirit,” the word comes forth: If nature has given me such aptitudes that cannot be satisfied in this life, then it is obliged to assign me another life after death, where these various aptitudes can really come to fruition.

Now, first of all, Strauss makes a kind of joke, as it were, by saying: Perhaps nature is indeed obliged to do so; but who can tell us that nature will keep this obligation? But he objects to something else as well. He says: Does not the whole of natural science contradict the view that all the tendencies that appear within the series of nature's beings are actually developed? Could it not be that tendencies develop in human nature that do not reach ultimate perfection, that do not come to fruition? And now it certainly looks very logical when David Friedrich Strauß says: that not all tendencies come to development, that can be seen very clearly in the germs of fish, how thousands of fish-germs arise and how few of them develop. But it can be clear to anyone who has once walked across fields or through gardens and has seen how many apples have fallen and decayed without coming to their development.

Now one can say: that is all certainly correct and it looks as if it could be convincing. But then, if one forms one's thinking somewhat more universally, the objection arises: yes, do all apples perish? Do they all fall from the tree before they are developed? Or do no fish germs come to fruition at all? Does not nature itself show that it is fundamentally concerned with the actual final development of all germs? If man then notices in himself that there are certain tendencies in him that do not come to fruition within his lifetime, then, according to Strauß's logic, the development of such tendencies in every human being should not be achieved. But life does not show us that at all. But David Friedrich Strauß shows us that he cannot think things through to the end. However, that is not enough for him, so he finds something else. You don't even have to read between the lines, it's pretty bluntly stated, and I will just translate it into slightly different words. David Friedrich Strauß says something like this: Basically, Goethe's saying is not even correct. Because if you look at old Goethe, you can clearly see that Goethe was actually able to develop all his abilities. Then he points out to us that, if you look at it properly, every person will actually find that their abilities are being developed. If Strauss had been just a little more modest, he might have realized that perhaps Goethe was more justified in speaking of the unfinished potential in human nature, which is only seeking to develop, than Strauss was.

Thus we can see from this example – and hundreds and thousands of such examples could be cited – how, as it were, a general course of mere philosophical speculation, even if it has a materialistic coloring, does not come to anything other than that it runs into an easily refutable contradiction that destroys itself before the universally observing soul.

If one asks oneself how it is that people have such a difficult time talking about the immortal part of their soul, the answer must be: between birth and death, people do live entirely in what is mortal in them, what is transitory in their nature, as we shall see in a moment. And one would like to say: only quietly and intimately does that which is immortal in the human being come to light, does the immortal part come to light. Indeed, one can say that this immortal element appears so quietly and intimately that in ordinary life the human soul does not have enough strength, enough endurance, but above all, does not have enough attention developed in a higher sense to observe what is quietly and intimately announcing itself in it as the immortal.

When we observe the human soul in its life and how it expresses itself, we encounter it, so to speak, in three ways of expression: as a thinking soul, as a feeling soul, and as a willing soul. Now, as has often been discussed in these lectures, the path of spiritual science into the spiritual worlds consists in bringing forth the powers lying in the depths of the soul in order to develop thinking, feeling and willing to a high level, to a sharper and more intense than those in which they usually are, so that through this training, through this activity, they can become organs that not only enable the human being to grasp the physical, but also enable him to grasp the spiritual that is all around us. Now, however, the usual consideration, which seeks to become clear about the mortal and the immortal in the human being, usually assumes that it is considering this mortal and immortal part of the soul and now asks itself: Is there anything to be found in this thinking, feeling and willing that betrays that the human being is able to carry something over from the mortal into the immortal?

Here I must take up what I said in one of my lectures this winter about the development of the human faculties for spiritual scientific research, in order to show how it is possible to find, and not find, in thinking, feeling and willing that which distinguishes the mortal in man from the immortal. One of the paths into the spiritual world that has often been mentioned here is that which is called the concentration of thought life, of thinking. I will only briefly point out what this concentration consists of and what it leads to. If we place some thought, preferably one that we have formed ourselves, not one that the external world stimulates in us, if we place such a thought formed by ourselves into the horizon of our consciousness, if we forget everything that lives around us and otherwise in us, and become only one with this one thought, when we can live completely in this one thought for a certain time, then we can throw all the soul forces that we would otherwise apply to the entire activity of the human being onto this one thought, then it is made stronger and stronger; then our whole being flows together with this thought, we concentrate on this thought. This experience occurs as a result of spiritual-scientific experience, but it is brought about by not growing tired of repeatedly and repeatedly placing a thought at the center of one's consciousness and identifying completely with it. For one must often apply this inner energy and perseverance, this concentrated attention to a thought for years. Even if one says, as a precaution, that one must not overdo this, a short time must still be devoted daily to such practice. But once one has devoted oneself to such practice, depending on one's abilities, depending on the structure of the soul after the experience of the human being, one gains a certain experience, one enters into a certain experience. Up to a certain point this inwardly concentrated thought intensifies; it becomes ever brighter and brighter; the one thought takes hold of us more and more, absorbs us more and more, and we feel, as we are concentrating, that we can forget the world, we feel more and more and more within this thought. But just when we feel strong in this thought, we feel at the same time how this thought, as it were, disappears from us, and how with this thought the power to apply our thinking in this way, as it were, dies away. We feel with this thought as if the thought and with it we ourselves were taken up by powers that live around us; as if our thinking darkened from a certain moment on. All this must, of course, remain a purely spiritual process, only then is it a healthy process. Today is not the time to mention that all the objections raised by pathology and psychopathology are quite wrong when they say that in this way the human being would work himself into illusions and self-suggestions, that he must arrive at ideas that are pathological in nature. One has only to read the relevant chapters of my book “How to Know Higher Worlds” to see that the path described here is precisely the healthiest path for the soul, provided it is followed correctly. When the moment has come, one feels how a spiritual power that surrounds us, as it were, snatches the thought from us and allows it to die away in us; one then feels what the soul must go through in order to find the way into the spiritual. One feels as if one were losing one's spiritual footing, and this too has already been hinted at here. One feels as if one had in a certain way become acquainted with the Nothing. And a state can easily overtake a person that can be compared to a boundless fear. But it is precisely such a state that is suitable for bringing certain powers out of the soul that would otherwise remain undeveloped in man. For in overcoming such conditions, which I have now compared to fear, and many others that are part of the experiences of the spiritual researcher, deep powers of the soul that would otherwise remain undeveloped are unfolded, and therein lies that strengthening of the inner life of the soul, through which alone man can find his way into the spiritual worlds.

When one has gone through an experience such as that indicated here, one has yet another feeling. And all these experiences, which lead to one's actual entry into the spiritual world, are of an intimate nature, are fine, quiet processes of the human soul. When one has come to the point indicated, one feels as if that which one has hitherto addressed as the human faculty of thought, that which thinks in us, that which has the power to think, — as if that were to go out of us and go to the world, as if one were to lose it for the time being and as if one were to be transported with it into the objective world. One must have such experiences; one must have them in such a way that one really comes to know them in their reality, in their reality for the human being, otherwise one cannot speak about them in a true sense. But so that the human being does not remain stuck with this experience, as if only what had previously lived in him as thought had been snatched from him and he had been carried out into the world with this thought, so that he does not remain stuck with this experience - because this process of knowledge would simply leave him falling into a nothing - another must come to it. I have often described it here under the name meditation.

Meditation has also been hinted at here – meditation on something that we usually speak of as being outside of man, but which, if we look at the individual human life, we can see how intimately it is connected with man. When we look at what we have gone through in this life between birth and our present point in life and what we summarize as our destiny, then we are accustomed to saying: this or that stroke of fate has hit us here or there. But on closer reflection, it can show up even for ordinary life how one-sided such a saying is. If you ask yourself: What are you today? What can you do today? What abilities does your soul possess? — then we have to look at what we have gone through. We usually do not look for the context; but if we do, it enlightens us about what we actually are at the present moment. It enlightens us about how we would not have these or those abilities if we had not been struck by this or that stroke of fate, this or that twist of fate, twenty or thirty years ago or more, and guided us to acquire these abilities. But if we did not have them, our self would be something quite different in the concrete. We do, after all, consist of our abilities, our powers. But these are brought to us through our destiny. If you think this thought through to the end, you say to yourself: We are much more intimately connected with our destiny than is usually believed. We grow into our destiny with our innermost being, with our I. And we finally come to the thought: Basically, your self has become you through the fact that these or those strokes of fate, good or bad, have happened to you; but you have become you out of them. That which you are now lay in your destiny. Our self goes out of us, goes into our destiny. When we really learn to feel through what we usually call destiny in this way, when we really connect with it completely, we come to extend not our thinking but our will to our entire destiny and say to ourselves: If you want to know yourself as you are now, you have to develop your will. In relation to your entire destiny, you must say to yourself: You are what you are now because your ego has become what it is now. We are fully immersed in destiny. That is to say, we understand that if we want ourselves now, we must want ourselves in our destiny; in other words, that it is I myself who, in destiny, rules, lives and exists.

We learn to say about what has happened to us in our destiny: we have done it to ourselves; we were in it in every single blow of our destiny. Man's will — and here again only experience can show us — becomes, by grasping his fate as being fully identical with his own nature, by will-ing his fate, is thereby greatly strengthened. Man's will, by becoming so strengthened, becomes that which, in a different way from what has been characterized in thinking, is now, as it were, detached from man as he stands before others. While we have driven thinking out of us through concentration, we succeed in such a strengthening of the will, as it has been described in the grasping of the fate thought, that we enter into something that lies outside of us, which, as we say, falls to us. We enter into something with our will that we otherwise ascribe to the outside world. When we steel our will in this way, strengthening and intensifying it, we then have a second spiritual experience. The intensifying of the will now in its turn becomes independent of our being and follows the thinking that has gone out of us. And so we are able to strengthen this thinking, which threatens to die due to the first experience, from the will.

What happens to the thinking that has become shadowy at a certain point and has almost ceased? It is filled with content, it acquires substance, in that we send the will after the thinking, in a sense send ourselves after the thinking with the second part of our being. When thinking and willing are thus removed from our being, then we come to achieve what today, however, can hardly be admitted for the contemporary world view — we come to be outside of that in which we otherwise live in the waking state. We have gone out ourselves with our thinking and willing; we stand really outside ourselves. And that in which we are otherwise always becomes for us an object, something that is outside of us, like the table or any object outside of the sensory body. We look back at the sensory body, at the life circumstances that this body has gone through. We look back at the spatial and temporal aspects of our human nature. We become acquainted with that in us which has separated itself from that which is mortal.

Thus the spiritual researcher answers the question: What is mortal in the human being? — so that he must say: That which remains when he unites the will, strengthened by this grasp of the facts of fate, with the thinking that has been dispersed in the universe through concentration of thought, and marries and feels outside of himself in his being thus grasped in spirit, beholds then that which is otherwise too quiet in us, the eternal, the immortal, is so greatly intensified that we experience it, we know ourselves in it, we know ourselves in it, but outside of our body. And only then do we begin to notice it. But we also begin to notice what ordinary thinking, feeling and willing, in short, the ordinary life of the soul actually is.

When we consider ordinary thinking, how it is stimulated by the external-sensual nature, how it proceeds bound to the process of our brain, then for someone who is able to look at the world spiritually in the sense just indicated, it is something that does not belong to our immortality at all, as it presents itself to us in the mortal body. You realize this when you stand outside of the mortal body in your true essence. Because then you realize: everything that this mortal, this physical body actually is – I would like to use a comparison that is not just a comparison, but that points to the truth – you recognize: this physical body is a mirror that is able to reflect that that a person in ordinary life knows nothing about, that he can only know when he, as it were, peels it out of the physical, that he only knows something when he stands in his immortal self opposite the body. He knows that the body is only a mirror and that thoughts have the same relationship to the body as the mirror images have to the observer. Just as if one had a number of mirrors on the wall and passed by the mirrors and saw one's own figure as long as one was there, but no longer saw oneself when one was not there and saw oneself again when one was there again, so man sees that of which he lives, but of which he knows nothing, when he is in the body and the body reflects its own nature back to him. And thoughts are present in the form in which we have them in ordinary life only as long as the mortal body reflects them. But something else is that which thinks; something else is that which exercises the immediate activity that reflects itself as a thought in the mortal body.

When examining human thinking, one cannot say that one can find anything in this thinking that could provide any insight into immortality, because these thoughts are reflections that are evoked by the mortal body. And that which is immortal is not standing in front of the mirror now, but is reflected in the thought forms. What is it that lives in front of the mirror, in our case in the mirror? Is there any way to express this at all in human words? Yes, there is a way. But what is to be expressed here at this point is not observed by man; for he is satisfied when he can take hold of his thoughts for orientation in the outer world, when he can live in his thoughts. That something lives in this thought, which one has to describe as the will within the thoughts, as the will that is active there, - man is usually not aware of this at all, or when he becomes aware of it, he draws a conclusion, as Schopenhauer did. Then he has no direct vision, then he does not grasp himself in this volitional thinking, in the thinking volition, in what he is, but in what this thinking volition gives him, namely in the thoughts, which are only mirror images. Only when man has brought about the marriage between thinking and willing as I have described it, only then are the soul powers so strong that all thinking appears permeated by a supersensible human entity, which is of a will-like nature, but in such a way that it shows its true, will-like nature, mirrored as thoughts. As truly as it is really our countenance when we see ourselves in the mirror, so truly do we mirror ourselves in our thoughts; but it is not what we are in this mirror image. That which we are is mirrored in such a way that we can never grasp in life, in strength, in thinking, what stands behind thinking and of which thinking is only a reflection. Just as the reflection lasts no longer than the time we stand before the mirror, so too this thinking in the material body lasts no longer than it is stimulated by the actual immortal in us, which is reflected in the thought.

Another thing becomes apparent to us in the ordinary process of willing, in the process by which we commit our actions, move our limbs. While we do not notice in thinking that what is essentially mirrored in it stands behind thinking, we do not notice in acting, in the actions we perform, that behind the human will there is something everywhere that is quite unlike our world of thoughts, quite unlike that which is mirrored in thoughts. The reason there has been so much controversy in philosophy about the freedom of the will is because man does not get to know the will as it really is. He only gets to know the power of the will, but not the living entity that is really inherent in the power. And in the will, the living entity is of a mental nature. You see, that which is the actual immortal in man is so quiet, so intimate, so hidden in the external sensual world that in the thought process the thought is hidden, that in the will process it is not even noticed that every smallest will process depends on what is reflected in the thought, but which cannot be noticed at all. One only notices this when one observes the course of fate in the manner described; when one strengthens the will so that it is united, standing outside us, outside mortal man, as I have described, with the thought. Then one notices how the will is united with the thought, then one notices the two sides, which always confront us separately in life as thought and will, united; for one has only brought them to marriage. One then lives in a thought-will process. But then one has only grasped that which goes beyond death, which goes through the gate of death. And then one realizes what mistake, what tremendous mistake those have made who have often thought about the immortality of the human soul in a purely philosophical way. Those who have thought about this immortality of the human soul have always wanted to hold on to something that is, after all, in a certain way similar to that which lives in sensuality or in sensual thinking. People have spoken of a substance of the soul, have searched for something that, like a fine materiality, passes through the gate of death. That one must grasp the eternal in man outside of the body and that one needs completely new concepts and ideas for this, which no external perception, no thinking bound to the brain, can give, will become clear to mankind through spiritual science. That, as it were, the immortal consists precisely in that which has nothing in common with the sensual, that is what will gradually have to be grasped.

Such things have always been sensed; scientifically substantiated from the present into the future, they will be. Schiller says:

Do not talk so much to me about nebulae and suns.
Is nature only great because it gives you things to count?
Your subject is the most exalted in space,
But, friends, the exalted does not dwell in space.

So he pointed out that one must go beyond the spatial in order to arrive at what is actually spiritual. Now, however, for the one who thinks in materialistic terms, reality ends precisely where the immortal begins; and since for him reality ends where the immortal begins, he cannot arrive at any concept of this immortality. We see again in David Friedrich Strauß, the representative of materialism in modern times, how strangely these things are thought of. David Friedrich Strauß has a very low opinion of the church fathers. For him, they are dismissed people; but he does remember one of these dismissed people, one of these church fathers, who he liked. He expresses himself somewhat strangely about him, somewhat coarsely, but in a certain sense, cleverly. David Friedrich Strauß gives this characterization mainly because the church father said, “Only that which is not is incorporeal.” — That is also David Friedrich Strauß's conviction: Only that which is not is incorporeal. One might just as well say: what is non-spatial; but “the spiritual — the sublime — does not dwell in space”.

This is what still causes particular difficulties for the world view of our time. This world view of our time assumes that in order to understand something that can be grasped at all, it is absolutely necessary that it be linked to familiar concepts. The thinking habits of our time demand that when we speak of spiritual realities we use concepts with which they are already familiar. They do not want to be led to unfamiliar concepts, but want to have something they already know. One should point to something that they already know. This is what all philosophers have done who have spoken of a soul 'substance'. They say: the soul must simply have a substance; this then passes through the gate of death. But one can say: natural science in particular could prepare people for what spiritual science will actually have to address these things bit by bit. You all know the very simple way in which one elastic billiard ball can be steered towards another; then the other takes on any direction. And the direction that the second ball gets depends on the direction and movement of the first ball. Physics is clear about the fact that the state of motion of the second ball has emerged from the state of motion of the first and that everything that can be found in the state of motion of the second ball can be found in the motion of the first. There is a transition of the motion of the first ball to the motion of the second. But anyone who would think something completely absurd would say: I cannot imagine that the movement of the second ball depends on the movement of the first ball. But just as absurd is the thought of the soul for someone who cannot imagine that the soul-spiritual is something different than what reminds of the physical in its essence. Just as it would be if one were to demand that the first sphere send some of its substance into the second so that something would be present in the second, — so it would be if one were to demand that in the life which the soul enters into after death there should be that which can already be found in the experiences which the soul undergoes while it is in the body, only through this body.

But it is also necessary to recognize the difficulty that stands in the way of spiritual science, namely that this spiritual science must not only speak of things that go beyond the sense world, but must also expect people to accept new, different concepts than those they have in order to grasp this spiritual; that the concepts must be enriched, that one must not merely talk around with the same concepts and ideas. Therefore, what spiritual science has is often incomprehensible to those who stand on the standpoint of today's habits of thought, because they actually only hear words that sound fantastic, that appear to be coined together, and because they do not engage with what the spiritual researcher takes from his experiences. For when the spiritual scientist has brought these things alive from the spiritual world, they are comprehensible to the power of judgment. One can understand with sound judgment what the spiritual researcher has brought from the spiritual world. To do so, not everyone needs to be a spiritual researcher; one need only examine without prejudice what the spiritual researcher is able to give, and one will be able to understand it. He who says that no one can possibly admit that what the spiritual researcher says is true without becoming a spiritual researcher himself, should also claim that no one can prove by any kind of reasoning that someone is a thief if he has not carried out the theft himself. Such things seem absurd when they are expressed, but they are all the more correct in the light of a universal logic. Above all, however, one thing will become completely clear to humanity when the spiritual-scientific results of this humanity become comprehensible, when people begin to think about things without prejudice. One thing will become clear: that there is something in human nature that is a weaving and living only in the spiritual, even in everyday life. There it is, but it can only be interpreted in the right way with the help of spiritual science. Something in our daily life from waking up to falling asleep is spiritual in nature; but the materialistically thinking person will not accept it: it is the process we go through in our memory. When we remember something, when we look back on an experience we had in the past, then this remembering, this directing of our soul forces to something that no longer takes place, is an entirely spiritual process; the soul performs it only in the soul-spiritual.

One will only admit this if one has already grasped the nature of the spiritual. For, of course, from the present state of natural science, one can easily say: Yes, movement transforms into warmth, as physical research shows us; why shouldn't external processes transform into sensation and thought within us? Of course they do. They do it by evoking processes that are the mirror in which our being is reflected. One can say: natural science is quite right. Only by fully embracing natural science and not fighting it, but then also asserting spiritual experiences, can one make progress. So someone might say: So the spiritual processes are a transformation of the external processes. Just as movement is transformed into warmth, so that which is outside in the world is transformed into that which is within us. But this was only valid as long as it could not be proven that when we transform movement into warmth, something always remains that is there, always there. That has remained warmth, is never anything but warmth. This is apparent to someone who really follows the bodily process from outside his body, who follows what the body can actually do. It is apparent to him that although, when we perceive in the external world, the process that is built up by the senses and continues in the brain is a continuation of the external process, this is not correct in relation to what we remember. And it is precisely at this point that the ever-advancing science will show that, by focusing attention on the physical processes, the process of memory, which is a purely spiritual process, could never somehow arise from the physical processes. It will be possible to show, in a strictly scientific way, that what happens physically in us when we remember is not the mental process, or has more to do with it than the strokes of a pen on paper have to do with what I read. When I have a word consisting of certain lines in front of me, I do not read by looking at the word and tracing my thoughts, but by connecting a meaning with this sign through something in me that has nothing to do with what is on the paper. Thus one will come to realize that the memory process that takes place in the body has as little to do with physical processes as my reading process has to do with the forms on the paper. Memory will present itself as a spiritual process that intervenes in physical life. But then one will also recognize that already in our ordinary physical life between birth and death we are surrounded by the essence that we must grasp in a higher, more intense sense if we want to look towards the immortal. When materialism asks: What is mortal in man? and answers: Everything that man experiences here in the sense world! — then spiritual science can also say to him: Yes, you are right; everything that a person experiences here in the world of the senses is mortal in the human being. But just as an event passes by in our physical life and we remember it at a later point in time purely through the spiritual essence of our soul, so too is it with our soul. As long as we are searching for a “soul substance,” we are incapable of even approaching that which is immortal in the human being. As soon as we know that what is not even noticed in our ordinary mortal existence because it is as if a person stands before a mirror and sees only his reflection, only knows himself in the image, — as soon as we know that what what is ignored in ordinary life, what we know nothing about in ordinary life, what we only know as in an image, - that precisely this is what is retained after our death and lives in the memory of earthly life, we can also understand: What we are here, it goes as a fact, as that, as what it lives here, perishable in the human being. That which remains for the soul, the soul that does not know itself in life, that is the memory that will be incorporated into the experiences that the human being then undergoes in the purely spiritual world after death.

Only when one begins to understand what a purely soul-spiritual process memory is, only then does one point to that which continues beyond death. Here, the power of memory already lives in the formation of thought and will and reveals itself here as spiritual. In the memory that lives in us, we do not carry across the threshold of death as soul substance, but as power, that which we are in the time between birth and death. For anyone who does not aspire to spiritual science, the possibility of imagining anything in what has been said disappears immediately, for the reason that he has nothing left to remember according to his ideas. For in everything he can think of, he has in mind that he must have something substantial that he already knows. He does not want to come to the realization that he has something only as a gift of memory that he does not know.

Thus, in our memory, we are actually given something that leads us to the otherwise unknown concepts of the spiritual process by which an immortal separates from the mortal, so that we have to recognize it. And so it appears to us in something else in the spiritual research process that we must, as it were, take hold of ourselves more strongly, so that the powers of comprehension expand beyond that which would otherwise receive no attention, in order to enter the spiritual world. For example, we can hold up an ideal to ourselves that is yet to be achieved, that is just as absent in the present as a past experience. Then we also stand in a purely spiritual process to this ideal. The materialist will indeed lose himself with a kind of voluptuousness in a certain impasse; he will want the soul to have a physical relationship to an ideal. But the real relationship to an ideal is a purely spiritual one. Only those who know that memory is also a purely spiritual process can understand this.

Now, however, a person usually does not experience the ideal in such a way that he can become fully warm, let alone fiery, towards the ideal. It remains somewhat cold, even if he admires it. At most, he becomes warm when he is directly involved in a process in which the ideal lives in some way in the outside world, where he can go along with the ideal. But when the ideal is raised in his soul purely as a thought and he can then connect feelings and volitional impulses only with the ideal, so that he also directs his will towards it, and when he does this more often, when he adds these volitional exercises to the concentration, — then gradually a feeling develops in the soul that we not only have a power of intuition and memory, but that we also have something that, although it is of a volitional nature, can be described as a foreknowledge of future events. There is something prophetic in the human soul. This is not just some kind of superstition. Spiritual science shows that this prophetic gift is extremely difficult to manifest in man only because man in the physical body must use the powers that would otherwise allow him to perceive what is approaching him; he must use this power to build up the physical body; it flows into it and is transformed. Because we have already gone through the past life process, we are able to apply the growth forces that we have retained from it, in terms of soul and spirit, as a power of remembrance. As we live in the physical body towards the future, we have to apply the strength we need to maintain the body in the physical body. So it is very difficult to get to know certain forces, though not in the way people imagine, but in a much more intimate and quiet way. They are present in the human being. Spiritual research can get to know them in such a way that it learns to understand that in what is immortal in the human soul, there is something that really carries this soul's rich content through death and into the future. Through this spiritual science, man really becomes aware of the power itself that carries him through the gateway of death.

Thus spiritual science cannot answer the question, “What is mortal about the human being?” as easily as one might think. But it shows the way to find out what is mortal in the human being, by showing what lives in man as the immortal, unnoticed by ordinary attention, and how this immortal can, as it were, objectively survey one's own ordinary life between birth and death. But this can only be the case when a person comes to recognize that his being is a self-contained entity, outside of the physical, and that this self-contained entity actually has an effect on the body from outside of the body. Just as a person standing in front of a mirror affects his reflection, so the true essence of the soul affects the physical, reflecting back what it is for this earthly life. Because in earthly life we have only a reflection of our true nature, and this can only be present as long as what is reflected stands before the mirror, what we actually experience as present in earthly life is fundamentally the mortal part. Man gets to know that which underlies it as mortal, as that in which his immortal part dwells, as in his tool – I do not say in his shell, but in his tool.

In this way, the question, “What is mortal in the human being?” can be answered in full accordance with current natural science. And this will be of tremendous importance for the future of spiritual development. It will be of tremendous importance because the natural scientist can always point out when one speaks of an independent soul, of soul substance, and can always say: Yes, just look at this soul; it grows with the growth of the body, of the brain, it grows with aging. When the body falls ill and dies, the soul is no longer there. Merely inferring the soul from external appearances does not make it possible to object to facts. The soul must be recognized in a field that lies outside of facts. One must be able to say yes to all legitimate objections, not no. And spiritual science can do that. Therefore, when those who believe they are standing on the firm ground of natural science come and say, “We know that! We know that! We know that!” You must not come to us with spiritual science! then the spiritual scientist stands before them and says: Nothing, absolutely nothing, to the very last thing you say, is denied by spiritual science; for what you know, what natural science knows, that is mortal in the human being. Nothing is denied to you by spiritual science, it only shows that there is a path of human knowledge to something other than what you know. Then the natural scientist is no longer able to argue with logical reasons, but he must forbid that one knows something other than he knows. Then he has only this single objection. And that is really the only objection that can come from natural science. One cannot refute the spiritual scientific world view, because the objections that one makes, the spiritual researcher admits them all. It must be asserted: I alone have the right to decide where research may be carried out; and if you assert anything other than what may be asserted according to my will, then you are a fantasist. — From that side, spiritual science cannot be refuted with reasons, but only and solely by fiat. Spiritual science can only be eliminated if people agree to suppress spiritual scientific research by majority vote. Spiritual science cannot be refuted by logic, but only by brutality; but it will only be able to stand up to natural science if it is on a par with natural science, if it does not come up with amateurish things and wants to refute natural science with them. It must be able to show that it is capable of conquering a field in which even the old philosophical concepts of the soul's substance can no longer be applied, but for which new concepts must be created. That is why so much of what appears in the literature of spiritual science still seems absurd. But the absurdity only exists because we have never been accustomed to such concepts; that is why we reject them. Spiritual science is producing something completely new. It is not by fighting natural science, but by opposing something, that we can pave the way for spiritual science. Even in terms of its way of thinking, spiritual science can fully meet the justified demands of natural science. For if someone were to say: I stand on the firm ground of natural science; anyone who has their five senses and relies on them and on what the mind can grasp on the basis of these five senses cannot agree with the fantasies of spiritual science, — then the spiritual researcher replies: Just take a little look at yourself! You admit that for a long time people lived as those who relied on the healthy five senses. Then came Copernicus. He established a world view in relation to the outer world that flies in the face of the five senses. Indeed, it took many people a long time, right up to the present day, to recognize or acknowledge the truth of Copernicus' world view. But just as human truth found a way to go beyond the five senses in relation to the external science of the world in those days, so spiritual science will lead beyond that which is to be established by the fiat of the five senses with regard to the supersensible. For this supersensible allows even less that one should rely only on one's “healthy five senses”.

Now we see that the path of development that a person must take if he wants to become a spiritual researcher is not something that everyone needs to take. If there were only a few spiritual researchers and they established truths that the intellect could grasp, then everyone would be able to understand them. We see that the path that the spiritual researcher is led along consists of taking hold of one's own soul in order to guide it further. Just as the child must develop by being led from the time when it cannot yet say 'I' to itself, to a time when it can say it, so the soul, when the spiritual researcher has a hold on it, can develop to become a companion of the spiritual world. But here the soul must take hold of itself. This is a purely spiritual-soul process. Humanity has been on the path to this process for a long time. One of the spirits of Central European spiritual development, of whom I spoke here recently, coined a beautiful phrase that could be said to point the way for human feeling, human thinking, human will — the path that ultimately leads to the human becoming a spiritual researcher themselves. The German mystic Meister Eckhart, who died in 1327, coined a beautiful phrase. A word, so to speak, that, when meditated upon, has the power to point the soul to the path that leads into the spiritual world. You cannot just let such a word sink in once or a few times, but you have to let it sink in day after day. For behind such a saying lies a deep spiritual experience, which the one who brought it forth out of the innermost structure of his soul has already gone through. Master Eckhart says:

"He who wishes to attain the highest perfection of his being and to see God, the highest good, must have a knowledge of himself and of that which is above him, to the very bottom. Only in this way will he attain the highest sincerity.

Therefore, dear man, know yourself; this is better for you than if you knew the powers of all creatures.

Know Thyself! — the saying that already stood on the Apollonian sanctuary. But self-knowledge, which is most intimately connected with the path into the spiritual worlds, is, so to speak, the most, most difficult! Even the most external self-knowledge is something difficult for man. The philosopher Ernst Mach gives a curious example of this. In his “Analysis of Sensations” he reveals how he fared with regard to self-knowledge even in the most superficial area. He recounts how he was once crossing the street and saw his own image in a tilted mirror. He was shocked by the ugly, repulsive face that looked back at him, and lo and behold: it was his own. And when he was already a professor, something similar happened to him. He came tired from a trip and boarded a bus. On the other side, he saw a man get on, and he thought: What kind of dried-up schoolmaster gets on there! And again, the person who got on the bus opposite him turned out to be himself; he had seen himself in a mirror. And he says: So I knew the profession of Habirus better than my own. We see from this case that one can even be a famous professor and have all the qualities and powers of a famous professor and yet not have come very far in terms of the most external self-knowledge.

But much more difficult is that which can be attained of self-knowledge of the soul. And it must be said that what is often defined as self-knowledge is nothing more than an egoistic feeling about an inner experience. Truly, real self-knowledge can only be acquired through spiritual science.

But – and perhaps it does not seem far-fetched; for not far-fetched is also everything to which not only logic, but also feelings, which are caused by much of what occurs in the present is caused — this path, which must lead to spiritual science, is indicated particularly by such impulses as those just mentioned by Meister Eckhart, but which can be enumerated in many other ways. For humanity is on this path. And if we want to point to someone in more recent times who, in terms of working out the spiritual from the material, was also on the path to spiritual science, we can point to Goethe. Goethe, to mention just one example, wanted to show in his Metamorphosis of Plants how, in the leaf, in the individual leaf, there is that which can transform itself and, in transforming itself, presents itself as a different organ. But he also endeavored to implement the idea of transformation in other fields. This proved fruitful for him and led him to remarkable scientific results, some of which are still rejected out of hand by science today. And yet, many seeds for the future spiritual-scientific world view lie in Goethe's way of thinking. When one builds up one's own structure of ideas and transforms it into a living spiritual experience, one realizes how fruitful Goethe's world view is, which is so vividly contained, for example, in the small work 'Metamorphosis of Plants'. One then realizes that the highest spiritual powers, for which one must first seek words, concepts and ideas, those processes that the soul undergoes when it leaves the mortal body, already have a metamorphosis in the ordinary memory process. One needs only to have enough universality of mind to follow this process in metamorphoses, to recognize it as a life process of the soul freed from the mortal body. Then one notices that what is mortal in the human being passes away just as the flower that remains, which withers, is understood to be separate from the germ, which continues into a new plant. But it was only logical that Goethe should apply this way of thinking to the physical world as well. It is only that he is not yet understood. It must appear comprehensible that the physicist, who believes himself to be on the ground of truth when he is on the ground of physical hypotheses, rejects Goethe's theory of colors. The deeper reason for this rejection is none other than that Goethe's Theory of Colors is grasped and set forth by a human being who has allowed the inner driving force to take effect in him, which lives in the human being's spirit, and that today one seeks a theory of colors in physics that is based only on those cognitive abilities of the human being that are mediated by the body.

As spiritual science develops as a fruit of human spiritual striving, something like the Goethean theory of colours will also be recognized along with spiritual science itself. Then people will understand why another spirit, who also felt the impulse of the eternal spiritual in his soul, who, motivated by the same impulse, also wanted to comprehend the outer world, why this spirit stood up for the theory of colours, and indeed for something else — Hegel, Hegel was also one of those who were deeply connected with the sustaining power of the German spirit, which has already been described here yesterday. With all the power of eloquence that was his, he opposed the belittling of his fellow countryman Kepler, the great Kepler, who is known to anyone who has even slightly looked into a physics book as the one who found the so-called Kepler's laws. Hegel showed that these laws already contain what Newton had merely formulated in mathematical formulas. The world has otherwise noticed this only a little. Hegel has shown: Newton puts mathematical letters where Kepler has expressed his laws; he only changes a little the formulas. Newton has done nothing but expressed in mathematical terms and formulas the Kepler laws. But Hegel was concerned with the reality and not with the form of expression.

I already said that I would like to mention something that only belongs here in a subjective way. I would like to draw attention to the fact that this has happened to us several times recently, as it did there, that the person who only found the form of expression is presented as the great physicist, instead of the person who actually found the essence of the matter – Goethe. In accordance with a spiritual world view, Goethe discovered everything that is connected with the developmental theory of organisms. However, one must be borne by the spiritual, as he himself was, if one wants to see this spiritual world view as the natural developmental theory. For the spirit behind all sensuality, Goethe was strengthened, not weakened, by his natural developmental theory. But in many cases it was too difficult for humanity to understand the transformation of organisms in the Goethean way. People grasped it more easily when it was presented to them in a way that did not place such great demands on the intellect as in Darwin's account. And these things could still be applied to many, many more things.

The second half of the 19th century is the time when people fell victim to shallower thinking in many fields. In German intellectual life, the deeper impulses and germs of thought lie everywhere for that which a shallower way of thinking has stood for. It will certainly be a matter of reflecting on what the “supporting forces of German intellectual life” are; of reflecting on how the true theory of evolution must be presented not in the Darwinian sense, but in the Goethean sense. But this leads to the thoughts that, as I explained yesterday, can bring about a change of heart in many areas in our difficult times, that we have to achieve victories in other respects as well, perhaps more than we think: the victory of German intellectual life, the victory of the deeper principles of a world view, as they are prepared in German intellectual life, – in contrast to what has come over from England so often as the shallower things. This is not said in a nationalistically chauvinistic spirit but simply and historically. The German mind must realize that much that is English must be sent back to its source. And one can say: in this respect, German intellectual life can hope that the germs within it will come more and more to fruition in the future. But then that which is the German soul, the German spirit, must be defended in the same way as it is defended by our self-sacrificing contemporaries. For what is being defended here is the most sacred possession of mankind. Not only are German territory and German people surrounded on all sides by enemies as if in a fortress, but the noblest German spiritual heritage is also surrounded and besieged as if in a fortress and must be defended. Truth is the same everywhere; but it is also true that the capacity for truth is not developed in the same way everywhere. As regards German intellectual life, it may be said that the clarity and religious nature with which German idealism approached the spiritual is a beginning from which there is a gradual ascent to a truly spiritual Weltanschauung. Hence we may cherish the hope, based on truthful knowledge and not on mere feelings, that the German spirit will be given the opportunity to develop that which those who are familiar with the German spirit are familiar with in this German spirit, those who are familiar with the connection between the German spirit and the path to the spiritual worlds. And there is a word of Goethe's that the Alsatian poet Lienhard refers to in his remarkable brochure “Germany's European Mission” — a word of Goethe's that he uttered in 1813 in a conversation with Luden. He says:

“The destiny of the Germans is... not yet fulfilled. If they had had no other task to fulfill than to break up the Roman Empire and create and order a new world, they would have perished long ago. But since they have continued to exist, and in such strength and efficiency, I believe they must still have a great future, a destiny...”

In many other areas, too, there are still many German determinations to be found. But there is no doubt that the determination to lead German idealism to spiritualism, to a completely spiritual world view, also still lies within the German development. For, whatever may happen, only one thing can happen: that what has emerged from such a deeply inner experience as a word of Goethe's, which he has just placed at the end of the poem where he presents the deepest human struggle with the world spirit, will be a fruitful part of this process. It is not without reason that the German world-view has given rise to Faust, this portrayal of the struggle with the world spirit for a way into the spiritual world. Just at the time when Germany allowed itself to be overcome spiritually, to a certain extent, by a foreign world-view, the strange dictum was repeatedly expressed that Germany was Hamlet. Germany is not Hamlet. It is only a misunderstanding to believe that. In the innermost forces of German development lies something that can never be uttered by Hamlet – “To be or not to be, that is the question” is a saying of Hamlet – but the German spirit says: the spirit is the source of all being, and the soul finds its true destiny, its true essence; and “only on spiritual ground, only by looking beyond the material, can the soul unfold its full power.” That is the German development, considered in the right style, connected with the spiritual essence of humanity in general, that one must say: May the present painful events bring much more, - but that lies in the German development itself as a deepest justification, that one will have to say:

Such a victory of the German spirit must emerge from these painful times, in the face of the onslaught of all enemies of the German spirit, that, by virtue of the other purposes of the German people, it can also fulfill what springs from the words with which the most German, but at the same time the most profound poetry of mankind concludes – which sounds like a victory cry against all materialism, like the herald's call before every spiritual world view: “The transitory is not the permanent”. At the end of “Faust” we are met with what sounds like a true motto of a truly spiritual world view: “All that is transitory is only a parable”.

And the German spirit still has much to contribute to making this the goal of human endeavor. And we hope that the present difficult times will help it to fully fulfill its destiny in this direction.

In this winter series of lectures, I have taken the liberty of alternating purely spiritual lectures with those inspired by the great and significant events of the present. Today's reflections on the nature of the German national soul and its relationship to other national souls in Europe are also intended to be inspired by the feelings evoked by our time. Tomorrow, another reflection will follow, which is purely spiritual scientific. In the introduction to today's reflection, I will take the liberty of pointing out some things that have already been discussed from a different point of view in one of the previous lectures, which also dealt with the nature of the folk soul.

If one speaks of folk souls today, one encounters many misunderstandings if one takes the point of view that is to be adopted here. One is often reproached for thinking something purely fantastic. And that is basically quite in order; because our present-day world view cannot help but see a fantasy in what must be addressed as the folk soul, in addition to other real, concrete spiritual beings. It is therefore only natural that, when the folk soul, among other spiritual beings, was spoken of as a real being in my book 'Theosophy', this chapter in particular was found to be particularly strange. That is precisely what a purely externalistic world view will never admit: that alongside those entities that can be perceived by the senses, that can be grasped by the intellect and are connected with the brain, there are also other supersensible, invisible entities beings that can only be seen with what Goethe called the spiritual eyes and spiritual ears. These beings have a reality, however, just as the beings of the mineral, animal and plant kingdoms around us have reality. And so spiritual science also speaks of the German national soul as a real, actual entity. It speaks of this entity as conducting the dialogue — subconscious, unconscious dialogues with the individual human soul — already mentioned in the previous lecture on the supporting forces of the German spirit. It is impossible to give an indication of the nature of the real, true national soul without saying at least a few words about what spiritual research will eventually have to say to mankind about the nature of the individual human soul. The present official science of the soul, or psychology, approaches the human soul in such a way that it sees in it, I might say, a more or less chaotic but ordering unity, in which will, feeling and thinking act in confusion.

But now spiritual science must speak of this human soul in a sense that physics speaks of color and color nuances that arise from light. Physics is aware that it can only study the essence of light if it seeks out this light in its effects, which appear as the different color nuances of the rainbow, the spectrum. On the one hand, we have the reddish-yellow color nuances, in the middle the greenish ones, and on the other hand the violet-bluish color nuances. Just as physics now already admits that the nature of light can be fathomed by studying the effect of light through matter in the various color nuances, so the spiritual science of the future will most certainly have to distinguish in the human soul as a whole that which one could call the revelation of the human soul light, that this is lived in the human soul in three parts, as it were in the three distinct nuances, one of which must be called the nuance of the sentient soul, corresponding to the reddish-yellowish band of colors of the rainbow or the color spectrum; thus, one must speak of the soul of understanding or feeling, corresponding to the middle green color nuances of the rainbow; and thus one must speak of the soul of consciousness, corresponding to the bluish-violet color nuances of the rainbow. And it is not a matter of an arbitrary classification of the soul activities, but rather of something that has to do with the reality of the human soul, just as the colors have to do with the reality of light. For spiritual science shows that what on the one side of the spectrum of the soul must be recognized as the sentient soul reveals primarily those powers of the soul that stream out of the impulses of will and feeling and express themselves in a certain instinctive way in man ; but at the same time it shows, and this is the remarkable thing, that precisely in this instinctive nature of the soul, in this nuance of feeling of the human soul, is contained that which we shall show tomorrow to pass through births and deaths as the eternal of the human soul. It is mainly in this part of the human soul that the eternal essence of the soul is contained.

Then we have, as it were, the middle color nuance of the human soul, the intellectual soul. In this, soul expressions directed equally to the eternal and to the sensual-real, the transitory, can be found; instinctive tendencies and those which rise above them and look at the senses in order to spiritually comprehend the world of the senses.

Thirdly, we have the consciousness soul, which, in the present stage of human development, elevates man to his self-awareness, which makes it possible for man to stand in his soul in such a way that he can say: “Within me, even within my physicality, between birth and death, there dwells an I.” But at the same time, it is that which is in these powers, that which, for the present development of humanity, contains the feelings of the human soul life that are turned towards the transitory, the external, obvious reality. Just as light reveals itself in the different color nuances, so what is the unity of the human soul reveals itself in these different members of the human soul. And one can say: just as light lives in red, green and blue, so the human ego lives in all three aspects of the life of the human soul.

Now, for spiritual science, what is to be regarded as the folk soul is a real supersensible entity, not merely what a more materialistic world view sees, a totality of characteristics that climate, education or otherwise are peculiar to a nation, but for spiritual science the folk soul is a spiritual entity that works from the supersensible worlds into what are the functions of the human soul.

And now, according to the way in which the folk soul works in what is the work of the human soul, the basic character of the folk soul life can be seen through different European peoples. These are things that spiritual science has to say, so that one day it will form a science, just as the physics of color within natural science forms a real scientific discipline.

I would also like to make it clear this time that what I am going to say about the interaction of the national soul with the individual soul elements in the various European nations has not been caused or provoked by the current war events and the existing conditions of the European nations. Rather, many of the listeners here can confirm that I have been saying for years, based on spiritual science, that We are dealing, for example, when we consider the more southern peoples, when we consider the soul of the Italian people, with an interaction of this national soul with the individual human being in such a way that what the national soul does, what it has to accomplish in a dialogue with the individual soul, flows directly into the sentient soul. So that one can say: insofar as a member of the Italian nation is Italian, he expresses himself from the character of his nation in such a way that the forces of his national spirit tremble and have an effect in his sentient soul. It is with this sentient soul that the national spirit, the national soul, holds its dialogue. Of course, it must always be emphasized that the individual soul can rise and take on the general human character in every nation. What has been said here about the relationship between the national soul and nationality applies to the extent that the individual is connected to the national soul through the expressions of his life. And everything that the Italian national soul arouses in the individual sentient soul of the Italian is, in essence, Italian culture. Hence the Italian culture, which emerges directly from the passions, can be traced from the individual impulses of the people to the mighty painting that Dante created of the world. That is why what is called humanism was also imprinted on European culture from Italy. The connection of the whole human being with the sentient soul through what one feels, what one has in one's emotional impulses, insofar as that comes into its own, flows through the whole of Italian culture. Spanish culture is similar and related to this.

When we consider French popular culture, we have to say that it is the result of the direct interaction of the folk soul with what is called the rational soul. Hence the peculiarity of the French national character, which seeks to bring everything into a certain system, even if it is the system of feeling and art. A certain mathematical character is inherent in everything that belongs to this culture. You only have to surrender to the flow of a French poem or the course of a French drama to feel this result of the relationship between the soul of the people and the soul of the mind everywhere. If you look at it from a spiritual scientific point of view, this mathematical disposition of the French character becomes highly understandable.

And again, when we look at the English national character, we must bear in mind those relationships that develop between the national soul and the consciousness soul. That is to say, the English national character is primarily shaped as follows: through the consciousness soul, the English national character is directed outwards to the struggles and congruities of physical reality, to that which is transitory in life. Hence the empirical character, the outward-looking character of English culture, which can be traced right back to Shakespeare, despite the greatness of Shakespeare.

And if we then go to the center of Europe, preferably to German culture, we must point to a relationship to the folk soul, a relationship of the individual to the folk soul that can be expressed directly as a connection of the folk soul not with a single soul element, but directly with the self, with the I. Therefore, the impulses that the national soul has to stimulate flow directly into the individual Germans. And it can then express itself as the ego struggles to reveal itself not only in one direction, but through the various members of the soul life, alternately or cohesively. Hence what I had to say eight days ago about the supporting forces of the German spirit, the direct influence of the spiritual world on the individual human personality. Therefore, it is not the human passions, the human passions wrestling with something transcendental, nor the ratio, the intellect wrestling with the transcendental, nor the consciousness soul being active, but always the direct confrontation of the individual human being with his divinity, of the individual human being with the spirits of the transcendental world. But this brings about the peculiar thing in the whole German development, that the individual German must always take up the highest impulses of spiritual life. We have a German development in which we see individual great characters appear. Again and again, the individual great character has to start anew, so to speak, without being able to tie in with what is historically given, because he has to let what the soul of the people has to give him shine in his deepest inner being.

But there is another aspect to this: since the German is always compelled to establish a direct, elementary relationship with the folk soul, this folk soul must also have an ever-present effect on him with its elemental power, and he always again impelled to go back to the purest sources of popular life; and he feels strengthened and refreshed when he can sense his connection with this popular life.

That is what the German feels impelled to express when he wants to consider his relationship to the supersensible world. This is also what gives the German world poem, Faust, its special magic. We see Faust living in the midst of a culture that has grown old, as it were; we see how he has allowed the individual expressions of this culture to take effect in him, and how he now strives to go directly to the sources of all knowledge, to enter into a relationship with individual spirits, with the spirit of the earth, the world spirit. We see how he strives to achieve what could be called a rejuvenation of the whole human soul. There has even been mockery, at least contemptuous talk about what stands as a kind of rejuvenation scene at the beginning of the second part of “Faust”, where Faust is in a kind of sleep state and the spirits of the cosmos permeate him, in epochs, as the night passes, with what they have to give him. But anyone who knows that such things can only be depicted in images will not be able to succumb to such a misunderstanding. After Faust has first tried to rejuvenate what has grown old in him through sensory life and the world of external science, a relationship is established in him between the elemental forces of his soul life and the supersensible world, and through this he is rejuvenated so that he can then accomplish all that is presented to us in the second part of Faust: that he can enter the great world in order to work there as an active force; that he can take the path to the mothers, where he has to discover the primal forces of being in that sphere, of which the materialist will always say it is a nothing, of which the one who knows something about the spirit must always use Faust's words: “In your nothingness I hope to find the All.”

But we also see in Faust how the rejuvenating powers of spiritual life work in him through the fact that he is portrayed as a German spirit. These rejuvenating powers work in him in such a way that in the end, when he goes blind, everything that could be called his connection to the physical-sensual world dies. And while it grows dark around him, a bright light shines within him. That is to say, he has come to the forces that Goethe really drew from the essence of the German national soul and that are awakened in him in such a way that he has sensed the rejuvenating power of true German life in the external culture that has grown old. These rejuvenating forces work in the soul in such a way that what his soul thinks and feels and does is seen directly in his inner being as the thoughts, feelings and will of the divine-spiritual beings themselves. spiritual beings themselves and feels connected to the spiritual world itself, which works in him as a rejuvenating force that does not allow his culture to grow old; which always gives him hope that, if any branch of culture has become spiritually dry, so to speak, the rejuvenating forces can bring about a new germ. This direct proximity of the national spirit to the individual soul of the human being, in turn, distinguishes the soul of the Central European from that of the Eastern European.

In a remarkable way, Russian Slavdom presents itself to spiritual science. The Russian has his national spirit as a ruling power, so that this national spirit does not, as with the Italian, for example, directly into the sentient soul or as with the Frenchman into the intellectual soul or as with the British into the consciousness soul nor does it dips into the ego; but that the folk soul, as a spiritual, hovers over the individual, to which it is looked up like to a cloud, while below, with their soul forces, the individual works, into whose soul forces the folk soul does not reach. Hence we see among these Eastern peoples that the individual soul powers, which have not yet been grasped in the stage of development, work together in an anarchic way. Because the national soul-life does not bring about their inner harmony, these three soul-forces work as if in anarchic confusion; they cannot find the possibility of being in harmony with each other. This is the peculiarity that seems strange to the Western European when he turns to the spiritual culture of the East. This lack of togetherness of the national soul in relation to the togetherness of the national soul with the individual human soul is what distinguishes the German from the Russian. And this distinction becomes particularly apparent when we turn our spiritual attention to the actual forces of the German national soul.

How does the development of German culture enter into the whole evolution of the world? After the Germans had had their encounters with the Romans and the southern peoples, German culture presents people who are directly seized by the power of the human in their being here in the world. To mention just one figure, we see Siegfried before us; we see the other figures of the Nibelungen before us. They carry the forces through which they are called to work in the world directly in their souls, and they feel that which they have there in their soul as that which guides, rules and sustains the world in general. What has been preserved in the popular mind, in the spiritual life, of this relationship between the soul of the people and the individual soul, as it already appears at the beginning of Central European culture, what has been preserved there, we can find it characteristically in a similar way to how the relationship to the spiritual world appears to us in mysticism. The mystic feels that which courses through him as the same that courses through the entire cosmos. He feels himself to be part of what he calls the Divine, the spiritual. One need only compare what pulses through Siegfried or the other figures, which are echoes of the oldest coexistence of the German folk soul with the individual soul, with the figure that has maintained great popularity within Russian folk life, the figure of Ilya Muromets. There we see how he, as a human being, feels the divine-spiritual in the distance, how he looks up to it, how it is something for him that is not directly in his soul, for which he can at most sacrifice himself and give as a champion. The courage, the strength in the Siegfried nature, the humility, the direct sacrifice in the Muromez nature.

And we can say: That which we see in the early days of the German flowering is like something that then disappears in the turmoil of the later times, succumbing to foreign influences. And then, in a wonderful way, from the twelfth, especially the thirteenth century onwards, we see a renewed effort of the German spirit shining through the rejuvenating forces of the German folk soul.

Take figures such as Walther von der Vogelweide and Wolfram von Eschenbach. We see how figures and poetic subjects are indeed taken from the West, but how what is taken from the West is only the scaffolding and how an immediate connection with the most elementary forces of the supersensible world, for example, inspires Wolfram von Eschenbach to to make out of his Parzifal one who undergoes his journey to the Grail through the powers of his own soul; in that he seeks in the outer world, he wants to expand his soul powers with every step and to the same extent bring about a spiritualization in his soul. In this period, to which Wolfram von Eschenbach belongs, we see a deepening and at the same time a rejuvenation of the German character.

And then we see again how foreign influences gradually assert themselves; how, as it were, the German character ages. But we see the rejuvenating forces of the German folk soul at work throughout all this aging. And we see these rejuvenating forces of the German national soul emerge in a remarkable way after Germany was made like a cultural desert by the enemies all around it in the Thirty Years' War; we see these forces glowing, we see a working out of the national forces, which in turn undergo a complete rejuvenation. Where do these rejuvenating forces come from? Here we must refer to Lessing, who in his works, in what is his spiritual testament, points to the immortal, the eternal in human nature – in that testament, however, in which the very clever do not want to believe. But at the end of his testament, he also pointed out how he sought knowledge, not the knowledge of the learned, who think they are at the pinnacle of education, but the knowledge of the simplest, most elementary forces of the people in primeval times. A rejuvenation, a refreshment of knowledge is what Lessing means when he says: Must every single person have traveled the path by which the human race achieves perfection in the same lifetime? Why could not every individual have existed more than once in this world? Is this hypothesis ridiculous because it is the oldest? Because the human mind, before it was dispersed and weakened by the sophistry of the school, immediately fell into it?

And so we have this deliberate immersion in the popular in order to arrive at the highest wisdom. Anyone who considers his connection with the development of the German people can only say: in Lessing we see an influx of the rejuvenating forces of the German national soul.

And again, in Herder and in Goethe, we see how they, the one supported by the other, delve into the German folk song, into German antiquity, and how they, stimulated by the rejuvenating forces of the German folk soul, achieve an elevation of the poetic and cognitive potential within them. And we see how Goethe created his Faust out of what had arisen in the midst of the people – the Faust figure, which he first knew only through the puppet theater, that is, through what lived within the people. Goethe and Herder experienced a rejuvenation of their lives through their penetration into the impulses of the folk soul. It was Lessing who also placed the Faust problem in its time, who pointed out that what was fundamentally present in drama in his time – figures such as those that lived in the people in old plays – should be brought to the stage again. And he gave a scene that draws on an old folk tradition, that draws on the connection with the spiritual world.

And if we visualize the trend of the Romantics, who sought a connection with the spirit through immersion in German folklore and mysticism, we see, for example, in Novalis, a deep immersion into the spiritual world.

When we consider all these circumstances, many things can be explained that have certainly already been emphasized, that have been accepted as something that has been recognized through observation, but that have not been understood in their context. The extraordinarily brilliant Karl Hillebrand has beautifully juxtaposed the characteristics of Western and Central European peoples. What he has to say in his very beautiful treatise on the Western world view finds complete confirmation, but also a thorough illumination, through what spiritual science has to say. Hillebrand emphasizes that the Italians brought European culture, the Spaniards mathematism, the English empiricism. And now he ponders: What is it, then, that the German spirit has to contribute to the general spiritual process of humanity? And in his answer he really does come up with an excellent, precise characterization of what the German spirit has to bring to humanity: “The German spirit is the first to have found the idea of the organism.” For those who think only in a British way, the organism does not exist. The essential is viewed from the outside, but the direct organic life and weaving does not appear to the eye. The rationalist of the West seeks to understand reality through historical ideas; but to immerse oneself in the real so that life is grasped in the real — Hillebrand also knows that this is the peculiarity of the German mind. And so it is precisely through spiritual science that the misunderstandings prevailing among European nations with regard to Germanness will come to light more and more.

It must truly be said: It is understandable how the German spirit, in its struggle for an inner, elementary, direct connection with the soul of the people, can be so difficult to understand. That which characterizes him, that which is in his own nature, and that which exists within his nature, is something that is organically connected with the spirit, that he must experience directly in the objective connection with his soul, and that is so difficult for the spirit, for example, which in his soul life grasps the folk soul only with the consciousness soul. Herman Grimm, who had such a thorough and beautiful understanding of the workings of the German national soul, says a beautiful word about the Englishman Lewes' biography of Goethe, which is indeed outstanding in certain respects: “When one reads the biography, then, if one, as a German, experiences Goethe's nature directly, one must say: Yes, this Mr. Lewes, he writes about a person who was born in August born in Frankfurt in August 1749, who experienced a youth so similar to Goethe's, a person to whom Goethe's life events are attributed, to whom Goethe's works are ascribed, who dies in March 1832, but from whom nothing is noticeable that the German observer feels and strives to prove in his Goethe.

And it is, after all, very understandable that the most intimate German conception of the world, the comprehension of the organic-living, seems improbable to the Western people. And so it could come about that, in a grotesque misunderstanding, the French philosopher Bergson was able to give a lecture around Christmas time in which he said that the German essence lacked a living grasp of the organic-living in the present, that the whole German essence had become a mechanism.

One has the feeling that this French philosopher, Bergson, who certainly has many depths in his nature, which he owes precisely to German idealism – Schelling – and which he then expresses in his own way, is lacking in depth when it comes to the German nature.

One may find it strange that this philosopher views the German nature as mechanistic because he believes that the old idealistic life has vanished. He judges the German people by the fact that German cannons are now facing his people. It is just as if Bergson had expected the French to be met, not by rifles and cannons, but by Germans reciting Goethe or Schiller poems to them. Since they do not do this, people, including philosophers, notice nothing of the German spirit, but only see the German mechanism, which confronts them in rifles and cannons.

But in many other respects, too, what is most intimate in the German spirit is difficult for those to understand who do not want to get involved in the most intimate peculiarity of German intellectual life, in which the soul of the people and the soul of the individual interact. Because this seems to me to be quite characteristic, I would like to share three sentences that were born, so to speak, out of the deepest, most intimate peculiarities of German development; these sentences are formulated as if the German wanted to express the essence of his soul in them, as he has overheard it in his national spirit.

The first sentence: “In the mind lives the spark in which the world soul reveals itself in the human soul.” This sentence was spoken by Eckhart, the German mystic. It may well be said that it is truly spoken from the essence of the interaction of the folk soul with the individual soul. Now try to translate this sentence into any Western European language in such a way that it is really translated. You will not be able to do so because the folk spirit of another language does not produce what the translation of this sentence would be, which so correctly expresses the content of the sentence in the sense of German mysticism.

The second sentence: “The German does not want to remain in a closed state of being, he always wants to become.” The German thus regards his nationality as something that he sees as an ideal to strive for. Fichte says: One is Italian, one is French, but one becomes German by feeling one's Germanness intensively and effectively within oneself; just as Faust feels that which he “always strives for”. “The German becomes, he does not want to remain in a closed state of being.” Try to translate that again so that it conveys this intimate sense. You will see that you cannot.

The third sentence is one in which Hegel expresses what appears to him to be the connection between the supersensible and the individual human soul. Hegel says that in the transition from being to non-being, from non-being to being, lies the living becoming, in which Fichte also grasped the essence of man in the ego. Not in the rigid state of being, but in that which is always creating, which always has within it the potential for transition from non-being to being, from being to non-being. This third sentence is eminently German: “Being and non-being unite in becoming to form a higher unity.” Try to translate this sentence into a Western European language, and you will not be able to.

What is German in the sense indicated will be particularly difficult for Eastern Europeans and Russians to understand. And it must be right to focus on the nature of the Russian people in our present day. For it is precisely the infinite vilifications that come to us from all sides, including from the east, that show the greatest lack of understanding of the German character. For decades, the eastern European character has been preparing to erect a barrier, a chasm, to the central European character.

Of course, in Western Europe, people are trying to capture in strict logic what the German seeks in a variety of ways, including in a variety of back and forth ways, because he must always remain in living unity with the supersensible if he is a German in the truest sense of the word. But this logic is, after all, a strange logic. And it is especially apparent to us now, when, out of such strange logic, it is still being said, despite everything that has happened: Who wanted the war? and then the strange implication is made that the people of Central Europe wanted this war. These logical arguments are on the same logical level as the sentence: “It is your fault, Germans, that the present wars can be waged at all, because you invented gunpowder.” The reasons that sound out to us from the immediate events of the present are more or less the same. We can even be blamed for the fact that the war in the newspapers is being waged against us, because the Germans also invented the art of printing. If this had not happened in Central Europe, the invective and abuse of the West could not now befalling us.

Many currents must be emphasized, which, when viewed in their entirety, compose everything that comes to us like a spiritual atmosphere from the East. There we see how, after the first half of the last century, something arose in Russia that was called Slavophilism. If we consider Slavophilism as it has now developed, we can discern three aspects in present-day Pan-Slavism. The first aspect, which arose radically, is that Slavophilism believes that Western culture is corrupt, that it is ripe for decline, and that Russian culture must save European culture. That is the first aspect. The second is: in the West, individualism reigns. This is not entirely incorrect if one understands it correctly, because one can call that coexistence of the individual soul with the folk soul an individualism; the individual wants to experience his divine-spiritual directly with his own soul powers. But Slavophilism considers this individualism to be something harmful.

And as a third reason is given: that the Western European and the Central European live out their religious feelings out of the enthusiasm of their soul, not out of mere humble devotion to a spiritual element that hovers like a cloud above the people and above the individual. This is why Dostoyevsky, for example, said: “We Russians must form the synthesis; that is, we must synthesize, we must form the confluence of all European cultures. For just as we speak all languages and understand all civilizations, so we also understand everything that has influenced all cultures and can express it in all freedom. We also understand human life in such a way that man stands by his God as the one who humbly bows before what he recognizes as the God hovering above the individual. Therefore we do not let ourselves be bound by a legal system; that contradicts what the individual directly experiences in his childlike humility. Thirdly, Dostoyevsky cites the Orthodox religion, of which he says that it never appeared as a militant church like the Western European one.

What these three statements of Slavophilism express is basically what has inspired many, at least the important minds of the East, what has filled their souls and then also become popular, what has been passed down from leading personalities to the people, and what has an enormous effect. We can distinguish different phases in this Slavophilism. Take, for example, Khomyakov. He still approaches the matter from the standpoint of spiritual knowledge. Orest Miller, a thoroughly noble man who was deeply immersed in Russian folklore, turns away from the dark side of Slavophilism and takes up what Khomyakov also emphasized: that the Russian ideal is not yet alive in every individual Russian. Thus we read in this Slavophile: “Our fatherland condemns the yoke of bondage, godless flattery and servility, nauseating falsehood, soulless and disgraceful apathy, black lawlessness in the courts and all manner of shameful deeds.” Or: “We will be the democrats among the other nations of Europe and the heralds of humanitarian principles that promote the free and independent development of each tribe.”

Orest Miller, who is well known in Russian folklore, was also enthusiastic about such a national ideal. However, when Khomyakov increasingly began to deify the Russian people instead of seeking the divine in the heavens, Orest Miller dared to voice a few objections. The result was that he was dismissed. But we see how what has been smouldering in the East for a long time is now haunting the West and is taking shape entirely out of the Russian character.

Thus we see how perhaps the most outstanding Russian, Soloviev, takes it up in his own way, but idealizes it, one might say spiritualizes it, elevating it to the spiritual, how he ties in with Slavophilism. But not in the way that a German would say: If the power that lives in the folk soul is to take effect, it must take hold of the individual human being, it must work through the soul forces of the ego; the individual human being must be the channel of what the folk soul has to say to the world. Thus Solowjew does not stand by the forces of the national soul, but he stands so that he also points upwards to that cloud-like spiritual image which stands above the individual in a spiritual height, in a spiritual distance. And then he says to himself: This Divine-Spiritual will work on the national soul. This Divine-Spiritual has set itself the task of carrying out a certain mission through the Russian people. And it does not matter what the Russian people are like. Whatever the case may be, what has to happen will happen by a miracle. Sinful or not sinful, vicious or not vicious, foolish or wise – that can do nothing to help it; but that which is at work there, it works through a cosmic miracle, simply through people, however they are. These are Solovyev's own words:

“That power which will give a new and complete content to the history of mankind can only be a revelation of that higher, divine world; but the people in whom that power will reveal itself must become the mediator between the human race and the superhuman reality, the free, self-conscious instrument of the latter.”

The human race, by which he means his people, is to become the instrument for the divine miracle that will take place, without the national soul allowing the individual souls to receive the powers for what the Russian people will accomplish in the development of humanity.

When we see that one of the most significant and best seers is far removed from what constitutes the character of the German being, we understand that a man like Boris Chicherin, who died in 1904, was unable to penetrate very far when he wanted to place himself on the peculiar basis of German thinking, when he wanted to tie in with Hegel. In his great work 'Science and Religion', Boris Chicherin attempts above all to develop the idea of how the human soul, through the ideas and thoughts it can develop within itself, gradually finds its way up to a point where it can mystically grasp the great divine rule. He tried to carry out this idea in jurisprudence and political science. But he fell from favor and was dismissed as Mayor of Moscow after Alexander III came to power, when he gave a speech that was completely imbued with the idea that what man can grasp in his soul can truly merge with the Russian essence.

More and more, we see how Slavophilism takes hold of that which those who could see through it a little had to say: it is no longer about some ideal, about something conceptual, but about something quite different. It is about asserting not some supernatural, not some conceptual, but simply the immediate physical powers of a race. And I believe it is good if a Western European does not choose a star witness who is a Western European, but someone who could have known. And someone who could know, as we shall see in a moment, says of Slavophilism, after it had passed through the minds of Katkov and Aksakov and others: “Slavophilism had become a fairground commodity, filling with wild, animalistic shouting all the dirty streets, squares and back alleys of Russian life.”

But the man who said this, and who also said another telling word about what Slavophilism had gradually become, he knew! The other word he said, directing it against Danilevsky, was: “The Russian writer lacks the strength to rise above the gloomy present; he content himself with the task of summarizing the contradictions prevailing among humanity into a well-rounded system and to draw from this system some practical postulates for his own fraction of humanity to which he himself belongs.”

All this can be seen as a consequence of what has been said: that the individual soul forces work chaotically, inharmoniously, at the moment when the divine life hovering over the individual is not grasped, not grasped in the soul of the individual himself. And this is particularly emphasized by this knowledgeable spirit in these words. And who is the knowledgeable spirit? It is the same one about whom a well-known Russian speaks the following words:

The man of whom the Russian prince Trzbeizkos says these words spoke, as I have quoted it, in turn of Slavophilism, from which he himself also started, even if he idealized it; for it is Solowjew himself who speaks about Slavophilism in this way. What is important is that we hear from an informed source what has been brewing in the East and is now coming towards us.

But, you see, even at the highest level of Soloviev's thinking, there is still something anarchic in the soul of the Eastern man. For whereas Solowjew, as early as 1880, in his “Criticism of Abstract Principles,” expressed himself as I have quoted, he comes, at the end of the eighties, to realize how far what is reality, what surrounds him as reality, is removed from what he has dreamed. Then the demand arises in him that politics should become moral. In “Morality and Politics,” Solowjew says the following: “We must not delude ourselves: the politics of selfish interest, which in international and social relations has hatred in its train, is transformed into the politics of anthropophagy (he means man-eating), which in the end destroys all morality, even in private and family life. For man is a logical being and cannot long remain in the monstrous discord between the principles of private and political activity. We are preached about our special sublimity and mission, but let us remember that the resulting and mutually exclusive claims must ultimately, in the name of cultural sublimity, lead to a fight to the death and the right of violence."

Thus Solowjew himself, who must gradually look away from reality in order to live in peace, one might say in peace of mind, with what he has dreamed up as an ideal, a spiritual Slavophilism: “The Russian people are not only an ethnographic unit with its innate characteristics and material interests, but a people that feels that above these characteristics and interests the cause of God hovers; a people ready to sacrifice itself for this cause; a theocratic people by vocation and duty.

But Solowjew also sees that what he dreams of and sees has not yet become a duty, not even an awareness, in his people. And one may use his words when answering the question he raises: why Europe cannot love what is really going on in the East. Solowjew himself raises the question: Why does Europe not love us? And he gives the answer. It is at the same time the answer for much that comes to us from the East like a spiritual aura in our immediate present. He asks this question: Why does Europe not love us? And he answers it in 1888: “Europe looks at us with disgust, because it sees the decisive thing not in the power and mission of Russia, but in its sin.” So Solowjew. But there were also very hard realities that had to be faced by this soul in order for it to arrive at such a conviction. It was especially hard for him when he had to see what Slavophilism had gradually become, which he himself had to say had become a fairground commodity. And finally, he finds it only logical that this Slavophilism should have come about in the end, because the Russian people, without looking at what they themselves first wanted to make of themselves, were to give Europe directly what they are. Solowjew finds it consistent that the Moscow University professor Yarosh should have praised Ivan the Terrible as “the perfect model of the qualities of a Russian in general and of an Orthodox and a tsar in particular”. This was said not in jest but in complete earnest, and Solowjew finds it consistent. For, he argues, if you look at what the Slavophiles actually have in mind when they speak of the Russian people, then it basically comes out typically in Ivan the Terrible. Nothing else could have come out as the ultimate consequence, Solowjew argues. But now he asks himself the question: how does Slavophilism come to such strange forms? Solowjew saw before him how the Slavophiles gradually said: the West is rotten, we can't use anything from it; new, young life must flow from the West to the East, and this new, young life is to be found with us. Solowjew saw all this. But in a certain respect he is thoroughly a genuinely Russian man, such a Russian man that he had something left over, one would like to say, for those who at least had the courage to carry this last consequence through. Of Katkov he said: “He had the courage to strip rational religion of all ideal embellishment and to present the Russian people themselves as the object of religious worship, not in the framework of the supposed virtues of the people, but in the name of factual power, of which the state is the living word or the embodiment of the deified people.”

That is what Solowjew says. But he asks himself: Yes, but where does the Russian, who is full of humility, get it all from? That was a question for Solowjew. He wanted to examine where it actually is in the Russian that is shown by those who threw the provocative Slavophilism into the people as a firebrand. And lo and behold, he found a strange answer. He examined the works of Danilevsky, the successor of Katkov and Aksakov. And he found that the people who hurl and have hurled fiery torches against the West had initially borrowed them in the thought-forms, in the whole logic, from the French Jesuit pupil Joseph de Ma istre, Solowjew could prove that the whole stamp of thought of the Slavophiles is borrowed from the one who is a Western European spirit; that Western European spirit who at the beginning of the 19th century established the doctrine: People cannot come into the spiritual through what is within themselves, but only and alone through authority, and he means the papal authority. That which she decrees can lead people to the spiritual world. If you want to read about de Maistre, you need only read the beautifully written article that Georg Brandes, the all-rounder, wrote in his “Geistesströmungen des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts” (Spiritual Currents of the Nineteenth Century) – the same Brandes who who is, of course, less a gardener of intellectual culture, who does not like to plant, but who knows how to cut the flowers everywhere and put together fantasy bouquets that may seem very ingenious to people. But if you want to get an idea from these bouquets, you can easily get everything from Brandes.

Thus Solowjew had made a strange discovery, which was illuminating for him, though. That with which Europe is to be invaded and overcome from the east comes from the— as Solowjew says—Jesuit pupil, that is, from his thoughts into the thoughts of the Slavophiles. And so Soloviev has no choice but to say the characteristic words at the end: “A tiny morsel from the intellectual banquet of the West proved sufficient to nourish our national and political consciousness for half a century, and a single one of the countless twigs from the Western European tree of knowledge of good and evil were not only proudly contrasted with the whole tree from which they had been plucked, but even contrasted with it as the Russian tree of life, which should grow and embrace the whole world.

That was indeed a remarkable discovery. But Solowjew pursued the matter further. And finally he discovered a remarkable book by Bergeret: 'Principes de politique.' And he found that this reactionary spirit Bergeret also reappears with his thought forms in the Russian Slavophiles. And finally he discovered a German book written in 1857 by a 'strange fellow', Heinrich Rückert. I do not believe that there is a person here in this hall who knows anything about this book. I also do not believe that there is anyone in Berlin who knows anything about it, except perhaps scholars in this specialized field. The book is entitled: 'Textbook of World History in Organic Development'. But Solowjew says: Russian patriots have also copied from this book. Now he had it together. Now he knew the forces that had come together to be effective, to be led into the field against the West. Now he knew what had seduced even such fine minds as Orest Miller and others. And Solowjew spoke the words:

“Our patriots condemn various views because they are Masonic. In this case, their own view of Russia and patriotism is doubly condemnable, from our point of view and from theirs, because it is alien, un-Russian, slavishly transplanted from foreign soil.”

That was certainly an important revelation. And after this revelation, Solowjew did not find many friends among those who had been his friends before. But this Solowjew was really a strange person. After his first Slavophile period, after Alexander II had been murdered, he gave a fiery speech in which he advised the successor to prove himself to be truly Russian. Solowjew saw this “genuinely Russian” in the fact that Alexander II naturally had to pardon the murderers of his predecessor; the idea of the sublime must first be expressed in this. And they “behaved Russian” in response to this speech. Solowjew was chased away, he was chased out of his position. He had already had the fate of seeing that some of the things he had seen in his idealism were different in reality than he had dreamed them up.

Now, when you bring in such an impeccable star witness as this great philosopher is, you can see how, little by little over decades, a current bordering on megalomania has arisen in the East that must necessarily lead to arson in the end.

I have chosen to invoke Soloviev as a characterizer of the Russian character and the Russian national soul in contrast to the German national soul because we are particularly accused by Russia of not being able to understand the Russian character. Well, I think we can help ourselves by not characterizing it ourselves, but by having it characterized by someone who lived in such a way that he was interwoven with Slavophilism, albeit an ideal Slavophilism; that we call upon such a one, upon whom we may indeed call.

And if we now add this to what has been said about the relationship of Germans and Central Europeans to the outside world, then much of what has happened becomes understandable from its intellectual underpinnings. What is said about Germany in our times often coincides with nonsense and futility.

What the German feels to be his essential nature must be particularly offensive to him in this time; offensive for the very reason that from such a consideration what has been said from other points of view can also be derived: the great hope for the future of German activity and of the German spirit. This German spirit, when we consider its relation to the soul of the German people, appears as a spirit that tends to deepen the spiritual life of the whole cultural development of mankind.

If only those who so glibly speak of the German character from abroad would observe in detail the struggles of those souls who are truly gripped by the German national spirit. Then they would not, as I stated last time, depict something like Romain Rolland's “Schultze”, but they would see something different; because in many places something different can be seen, as I have only given a few examples of.

In this lecture, I wanted to point out how German idealism itself is still a germ, how it must develop into a flower, into fruit, into a complete grasp of the spiritual world, which is grasped in its true, concrete vitality, precisely because the German national soul is connected with the individual souls.

A personality comes to mind, a man who died as a grammar school headmaster in Bromberg in 1867. He is a very different kind of spirit in German intellectual life from this 'Schultze' of Romain Rolland. He is Johann Heinrich Deinhardt. His treatises are written from a thoroughly German way of thinking. They contain a remarkable passage. His treatises were published by his friend Schmidt, including a treatise on the immortality of the soul, which was written in a simple style to his friend, who was then his editor. In it, he wants to show how it occurred to him that man, even while he is here in life, is working on an immortal body; that everything he accomplishes serves to organize an immortal body that passes through the gate of death. — Thus we see this simple school teacher on the path of spiritual science.

And so much more might be cited. In such instances the co-working of the German national soul is fulfilled through what the individual strives for. In such matters it is revealed how this German national soul provides the individual soul with the impulses to work towards the very first sources of knowledge and to link the individual soul life of the human being to the eternal in the soul life. But we will continue this discussion tomorrow.

Today, however, I would like to summarize what I had to say about the supporting forces that are contained in Germanness and that are shown precisely in this ever-renewed connection to the very first sources of human knowledge and human experience; I would like to conclude the consideration that I have given to the German national soul in relation to other national souls, with the words of a little-known Austrian poet, who, from a truly German soul, one might say, from a dialogue with the German national soul, published his “German Sounds from Austria” in 1881. In these “German Sounds from Austria” by Fercher von Steinwand, we find a poem that shows so well how vividly the individual German can feel in it, in what lives and moves, always rejuvenating the German essence, as the German folk soul. It presents itself to us as in a vision. As if all those who are interested in it come to the Kyffhäuser mountain to see as guests the mystery of the Kyffhäuser, the mystery of Emperor Barbarossa resting within, who keeps the power of the German essence hidden like a mystery. And for Fercher von Steinwand, one of the guests who come here represents the German spirit: the spirit, as already mentioned, that Fercher von Steinwand, the poet of “Deutsche Klänge aus Österreich” (German Sounds from Austria), also feels as the spirit that constantly rejuvenates the soul of each individual because it always allows that which speaks from the world of the stars, from suns and moons, to shine within; the spirit that speaks to the heart in the most intimate sense, because it speaks of the vastness of the universe; this German spirit, this rejuvenating German spirit, is what the German poet from Austria, Fercher von Steinwand, lets speak with words, in which I would like to summarize what I have tried to hint at today in terms of my feelings about the German spirit, especially in comparison with other European national spirits:

What springs from the riddles of this earth,
What finds hearts, what masters minds,
What flows eternally speaking from the stars
And reveals an inimitable God,
What seemingly gets lost in time and the world
And yet shoots around us in a thousand streams:
That is the primal power of the German spirit,
And to speak it clearly is the oath it has sworn!

If it must always be close to the human soul and the human mind, and must be one of its most intimate concerns, to raise the question that is to be the subject of today's reflection, — in our time, when so many, many have to go through the gateway of death at a young age, it must be even more important for the soul to direct one's feelings and thoughts to that which is immortal in the human being. Admittedly, in our time, a consideration such as the following is met with prejudice after prejudice, especially those prejudices that come from those who, from their firm ground, as they say, of the scientific world view, regarding this question, either considering it as something that transcends the limits of human knowledge, or regarding it as something about which anything that is said must be in clear contradiction to the achievements of the scientific way of thinking. If there were to be a sentence tonight that could not stand up to the strictest criticism of the scientific world view, I would prefer to leave this consideration unsaid. For what natural science has to say about this question from its point of view must, from the point of view of the spiritual-scientific world view, from which this is spoken, - it must not only be anticipated by him, but, insofar as it proves to be justified in our time from the point of view of current science, it must also be recognized as fully justified. But those who raise objections to expositions of the following kind from a standpoint that appears to be a natural-scientific world view, always proceed from the assumption that even in our time one can still make do with the thoughts and ideas, or, better said, the thought habits of a world view that is drawing to a close, in the face of advanced spiritual science. And it is still extraordinarily difficult for people today to understand that anyone who wants to talk about such questions of spiritual world view must appeal to insights into the human heart, the human soul, the human spirit, that go beyond what natural science is able to produce, that, so to speak, enter the terrain of a completely different field of knowledge, but that, alongside and above natural science, can exist as fully as natural science. The spiritual-scientific world view wants to let that which it has to say flow into the spiritual development of humanity, just as that which we today call the natural-scientific world view flowed into this process of development three to four centuries ago. And just as this natural scientific world view was at that time contrary to the thinking and prejudices of a wide circle and yet found its way to the human sense of truth, so spiritual science will take this way to the human sense of truth, even if today, quite understandably — I say it explicitly — it must still meet objection after objection; and if something like what has to be said today must, quite understandably, be seen by many as a flight of fancy, as a fantasy.

Because that which can answer the question: What is immortal about the human being? can be answered, must first be drawn from the hidden depths of the human soul. A research method is needed that is based on intimate inner soul work, that rests deep within the human soul, that reaches for nothing but what is present in every human soul, but what eludes observation and the attention of this human soul in the everyday life of this human soul. What a person carries through the gateway of death, what they carry up into a spiritual world in which they find themselves when they have laid down their bodies, cannot be grasped with everyday powers, cannot be grasped with the powers of knowledge that one has for everyday life as a way of observing the world. A more intimate inner work of the soul is necessary for this. Already on repeated occasions have I been allowed to speak here in this city about this intimate inner path, the purely spiritual-soul path that man has to go through if he wants to enter the field of spiritual entities and spiritual realities. From a particular point of view, this path of the soul to the spiritual will be illuminated again this evening.

We cannot recognize from the everyday life of the person standing before us what belongs to the spiritual world about this person. Nor can we recognize this as we can see from the water that the hydrogen, which is quite different from water, is contained in this water. First chemistry must come and separate hydrogen from water by its laboratory method; then one obtains something that can come out of water and which shows quite different properties from those of water. While water is liquid, hydrogen is gaseous; while water extinguishes fire, hydrogen burns. But no one who only has water in front of him can know what the properties, the peculiarities, the essence of hydrogen are. Chemistry must first come and separate hydrogen from water. Just as little can one recognize in the human being who stands before us in everyday life what lives in him for eternity, for immortality. One would like to say that the spiritual-scientific method must come like a spiritual chemistry and separate from the body that which cannot appear in connection with the body. And however fantastic and dreamy, perhaps even foolish it may still appear to some today, there will be a science of the future that is clear about the fact that there are spiritual-soul methods that bring the spiritual-soul of man, the immortal part of man, out of its connection with the body, so that man can really know: “I now live with my soul outside my body; I experience myself in the soul outside the body!” And only through this research, which leads to a knowledge whereby the soul experiences itself cognitively outside the body, can one enter the realm in which the soul has its immortal members. But it is not external methods, not tangible methods, such as those used by external natural science, that can serve to, so to speak, chemically separate the soul from the mortal body, if the crude expression may be used, but rather intimate soul methods, inner soul experiences. Of these soul methods, these inner soul experiences, we want to present two in particular today.

The first method is called, I would say, using a technical term from spiritual science: the concentration of the life of thought, of feeling, of the life of will impulses. When described in this way, this concentration of the life of thought, of feeling, of the life of will impulses seems easy; but, to quote Goethe's Faust, “Yet the easy is difficult!” And what I have to describe concerns the soul's experiences of tremendous inner impact, experiences in the face of which we stand in recognition of a much greater inner tragedy, I would say, than one can ever stand in the face of physical death. That is why those who have been close to spiritual science at all times have always emphasized that the path into the spiritual worlds, the path into spiritual knowledge, leads to the gate of death. It seems simple — but this simplicity must be grasped with all intensity, with all energy — what one has to do to free the soul from the experience with the body. A thought, a feeling or a series of thoughts, a series of feelings, must first be fully grasped with the soul, making them fully present in the soul, then placing them at the center of consciousness, so that nothing but these thoughts and feelings, placed at the center of our consciousness at will by our soul, stand in this consciousness; that, as it were, the whole world around us, with all sensory impressions, with all other sensations and thoughts; and only that which we place at the center of our consciousness through our free will must merge completely with the soul and its powers, the soul must know itself to be completely one with that which it thus places at the center of consciousness.

This is a task for a long, long time. Depending on the person's aptitude for it, it may take weeks, months, years; even if he only devotes a few minutes to it during the day, it will take a long time to evoke in the soul that inner faculty capable of rejecting all other thoughts and perceptions, all other feelings and volitions, and of placing only a certain kind of thought at the center of consciousness. It does not matter so much what the content of the thoughts is, but it does matter that they place a clearly perceived sensation or thought at the center of our consciousness in such a way that we actually live only in what we are thinking or feeling, that we forget ourselves in doing so, that we know ourselves to be completely one with it. In this way we concentrate all the powers of the soul on this single sensation, this single thought. At first, however, a person must be clear about the fact that, as already mentioned, this seems easy; but the easy is difficult. Various things are important when practising the concentration of thought. Above all, it is important that we place such a thought at the center of our consciousness that we can fully comprehend it. With most of the thoughts we have, all kinds of inner sympathies and antipathies, all kinds of feelings, memories, play a role; they color our thoughts, so that we usually do not even know what is going on in our soul when we have a thought in everyday life and concentrate on it. Anyone who is grounded in psychiatry or psychology or modern science today naturally has a cheap objection to all this. He will say: When the spiritual researcher concentrates on a thought, he cannot know what is playing out in this thought from the subconscious depths of his soul and how he then lives in self-suggestion and fantasies. It is certainly quite understandable that such objections are raised from a scientific point of view; they are seemingly fully justified in a certain way, and the spiritual researcher can well see that they have to be made. However, what usually has to be observed in all these things is not taken into account. You will find a detailed and careful compilation in the two books: “How to Know Higher Worlds?” and in my “Occult Science”. But often one passes by what should be fully observed. It is important to place a thought or feeling at the center of one's entire soul life that can be easily surveyed, that cannot remind us of anything, that cannot evoke anything from the subconscious depths of the soul. Therefore, it is even better not to place in the center of one's consciousness an idea that is taken from some external reality, an idea that depicts something, but rather an idea that is purely allegorical, purely symbolic , in which it is only important that we concentrate the soul forces, that we focus all the work of the soul forces on detaching ourselves from everything else in order to concentrate purely on this one point. I will give a very simple example. Someone can immerse themselves in the idea:

And one would not be able to follow, one would feel how the soul, as it were taken out of the body, unites with the general spirit that blows and works through the world. One would feel estranged from oneself. Therefore, the exercise that is implied by this must be modified by another, which must proceed simultaneously with it. And anyone who takes the path to spiritual research as I have described it in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds” will thereby receive the individual rules by which he can really modify what I have just described, so that it does not happen that we feel, as it were, wrenched from the best part of ourselves. Something else must therefore be added. The first thing that separates the soul from the body was the concentration of thought, the intensification of the life of thought. Through this intensification of the life of thought, we are, as it were, snatched from ourselves.

The second contradicts the first, so to speak; it is something opposite, the other pole; but life proceeds in polar fashion, passing through opposites. Therefore, if one has a realization that is not to be a realization in abstract terms, but a realization of the laws of nature, of life, one must move through opposites. The second is what one might call a complete surrender of the will to the ruling, present, and active world powers. Just as, in the first case, we bring our sensory perception, our intellect, which otherwise plays according to the guidance of external sensory perception, to a standstill, so in the second case we must bring to a standstill every inner stubborn will, in a sense, everything in us that is will. Now there is a certain means by which one can develop the strength within oneself to make one's own will truly subservient to the general weaving of the world: this is when one acquires a completely new attitude towards what we call our destiny. How do we experience our destiny in our ordinary existence? Well, we experience our destiny in such a way that we regard what befalls us as fate in good and evil as something that befalls us; that we encounter it with sympathy or antipathy, so that we regard what is, so to speak, what befalls us, what happens to us, as something that comes to us, so that we stand outside of it, we see ourselves as the I-, the self-being, on which fate has an effect, to which it comes.

Even in ordinary life, it can be seen through truly rational reflection that we basically cannot relate to fate at all. If you look at yourself at a particular point in time in your later experience, you will say to yourself: what you are then, what you experience in your inner being, what you can do and achieve, is inconceivable without the ordinary destiny of life between birth and death. Just think about it carefully. Everything we can do in the present moment – if we trace it back to our ordinary life between birth and death, we have to say to ourselves: it is connected to something we went through earlier. The fact that I can do something now may be connected to the fact that the person who was responsible for my education once brought me into this or that sphere. What happened to me then united with me, became strength in me; now it is my ability. Whenever you really think deeply, “What am I actually, what is there in me?” you will see that what is in you or in other people at the present moment is woven together out of fate. And if one pursues this thought properly, one might say in one's soul, one comes to understand how one must, as it were, grow ever more together with one's destiny, how one must recognize that which one calls one's self as a weave of destiny. What one otherwise speaks of as a coincidence is now found within oneself, interwoven within oneself; one finds oneself as the result of fate. One grows so close to fate that one identifies with it. Just as in the earlier way of spiritual research one identified with a thought or a feeling, so now one must recognize oneself as identical with one's destiny through the circumstances themselves. What I am saying now must not remain merely theoretical, it must not be just an abstract consideration, but it must be lived through inwardly, felt in one's innermost being. Then we feel how we gradually see our will streaming out into our destiny, and we see how we say to ourselves: “You have so far regarded something as a twist of fate, but it was you yourself. That which is in you has brought this twist of fate upon you, otherwise you would not be this being, this I!

In essence, when one meditates on one's destiny for weeks, months or years, depending on one's disposition, one experiences an emotional surrender to fate. One learns to recognize that one must go out of oneself from the little room in which one has previously felt locked up. One learns to flow with the stream of one's destiny. When one thus recognizes how the self, the I, actually lives outside, how in what we call “happens” to us, in truth our will rests, how the I flows along in destiny, then this will is torn out of us again with us, as we surrender ourselves to our destiny. And that is the second. But it must be achieved, must be achieved in inner emotional and mental experience. It must fill the whole person, that is, it must be surrendered emotionally to fate. Then one feels how one grows together with fate and with spiritually effective world forces that permeate and interweave the external world. What seems to flee from us in the concentration of thought, what seems to take away our selfhood, is then followed — that is, the thought is followed — by an element of will, an emotional element of will. While we feel the thought flowing out of our head in the way indicated earlier, we now draw something out of our whole being. We sacrifice the will to the thought. And then the soul, the thinking, the feeling, the sensing, the willing steps out with the thought and we go with it.

What I have described is a real process, an actual stepping out of the soul from the body. It is something that can be experienced just as truly and intensely and really — one might say experimentally — as the hydrogen leaving the water, the hydrogen detaching from the water. It is like the soul detaching from the body, which then remains behind so that this body, with all its outer experiences, becomes an external object; the soul has stepped out of the body. As one otherwise regards the table or the chair in the sense world, so the soul regards its body, which it has left. And what is most important, it does not just experience itself in the abstract, but as truly as it develops an inner experience in the body, so truly it develops an inner experience outside of the body, of which it knows it is a spiritual-soul experience. Fully in the inner experience, so the soul experiences itself. And truly, just as people did not know for a long time that oxygen could be separated from hydrogen and had to learn it first, so the spiritual culture of humanity will learn that the spiritual-soul can be separated from the physical, however baroque, foolish, and absurd this may still appear to present-day humanity. A real spiritual science is that which the future will have - and through which the future of the human soul will bring that knowledge which the human soul needs when the forces that have been there from time immemorial have matured in it for such things. We await such a time. Only he can deny it who misjudges the signs of the time, who does not know the deepest longing that lives today in numerous souls, consciously in some, unconsciously in others, and that will take hold of all mankind: the longing to know about the spiritual. But when the soul seizes itself in the actual experience free of the body, then it becomes acquainted with powers within itself, which one does not have in everyday life, which one cannot unfold in the body. One power becomes known to us, which may be described in the following way:

When we live through our everyday life, in which the soul develops the power of imagination, feeling and will, we come to what is ultimately called memory. And anyone who reflects a little on memory knows what this memory means for the whole cohesive being of the human being. We could not develop a sense of self if we did not remember the experiences we have gone through since a certain point in time after birth. It is only because the stream of memories does not break off, because we know that it was we who have lived through this stream, that we are a self, a self. Even world views can only work with memories that the soul stores and can then bring these memories into a harmonious or logical context. We can therefore understand what the soul has before it in everyday life as its final experience, as memory. What is the basis of remembering, of memory? Well, from an external point of view, we can say that when we go through experiences, we form ideas, we feel this or that about the experiences. Then we have a picture stored in our soul, and when we have long since moved beyond the experience, we know that we can look back on the picture in our inner experience; the experience itself is not there, but only the inner picture is there, something is there that our soul is just weaving. In order to approach this image, to approach the essence of memory in general, we can now consider the following – I can only sketch it out in broad strokes, as it were, with charcoal lines, which you can then follow in detail in the literature of spiritual science.

If we want to approach this memory, we find that in the first period of life after birth, after entering the world, this memory is not yet alive. This memory only occurs in the earliest childhood; up to a certain point in early childhood, we remember back later. What happened before that must be reported to us by our environment, but we do not remember back. What is the basis for remembering back? It is based on certain powers that the soul can use to retain images, powers that enable the soul to store these images within itself. These powers were already there before the memory was there, they were already present immediately after birth, but they had a different task then. They had the task of still working on the delicate organs of the human being, on the nervous system and the brain of the human being; on the nervous system and brain they have to work plastically. They were still formative forces of the human organism, of that which is still soft, so to speak – roughly speaking, but it means a reality – that which must first be formed so that the human being is this particular human being. As formative forces, these still run into the physical organization in the earliest childhood. And when this organization has hardened — again, this is a figure of speech — so much so that these formative forces no longer flow into it, then they are reflected back from the physical into the soul. The physical works like a mirror. And what we then experience in our soul, especially what is stored up in our memories, are mirror images reflected back from our physical life. In truth, we remember because our body is a mirroring apparatus. Science will fully understand this when it continues on its path. Then it will also see through the contradictions that it still raises when such things are presented. It is as if one mirror were hanging on the wall after the other and we were passing by, we would only see ourselves as long as we were standing in front of the mirrors. The mirror reflects our own image. It is the same with our inner spiritual experience. The body is a mirroring apparatus; it reflects what the soul experiences. Through this, the soul itself experiences what were previously formative forces in the most tender childhood, what was used, so to speak, to build the mirror in the first place.

A further stage is this: Imagine the following – I present it to you as a comparison, but it means something very real – imagine standing in front of a mirror that gives you the opportunity to see yourself, to see what you yourself send to the mirror as a ray of light. You see yourself because the mirror reflects your physical image. In the same way, your body reflects that which is in the soul. But now imagine, if — in the soul — you were to acquire the strength to dispense with the mirror altogether, you would develop such great strength that you would, as it were, look into space at that which the mirror otherwise reflects as your own image. But this happens through the soul exercises that I mentioned: concentration of thought, immersion in the will - surrender to the order of the world, you could also say. In this way the soul powers are so strengthened that what would otherwise be reflected back from the body, which is only like a mirror image, emerges as one's own inner, soul experience, that it becomes inwardly alive through the soul's own power. Therefore, what the spiritual researcher experiences inwardly when he has separated his soul from his body is a higher developed, active memory work. While in ordinary life we only go as far as memory, for which we depend on the reflection of the body, the exercises suggested here now give us the ability to develop inner soul forces and to make our soul's inner life actively engaged, so that it radiates an inner reality.

When the soul reaches the point where it creates its inner forces, as it were, but in truth draws them from the deepest inner being, then it will notice that it not only unfolds these forces, but that with the unfolding of these forces, with the creation of the inner mirror image, so to speak, something else takes place that we can call: perception, direct grasping of a spiritual world. However, this perception is quite different from the perception of external sensory reality. When we perceive external sensory reality, we look at objects with our eyes, we listen to sounds with our ears, and we touch external objects with our hands. In this case, it is the object that we approach that has an effect on us from the outside. But when we develop what I have described as the inner powers of the soul, which really come to life so that the soul knows itself outside the body in a system of inner forces, then what is spiritual essence, spiritual reality, flows into these forces. I will use another comparison: When I touch this corner here with my hand, perceive it through the senses, the corner is outside of me; the corner touches my hand from the outside. It is not the same in spiritual perception, but rather, if this were a soul power, which the hand now represents, and if I do not let it work, then the spiritual flows into the hand from the rear, as it were. While the physical touches things from the outside, the spiritual does not touch from the outside; the spiritual flows into the soul forces, so that we have to acquire completely new concepts if we want to speak of this spiritual recognition and perception. We perceive external things; in order to enter into a relationship with the spiritual, it is necessary that we develop powers into which this spiritual world flows. That means that we must say: through soul development we experience the great and powerful that the spiritual world perceives us, that we become something like a thought, like a will impulse of higher spiritual beings that invisibly and supersensibly stand above us. The spiritual researcher must speak of these spiritual beings, which are invisible and supersensible in relation to the cognitive powers of the soul just discussed, in the same way that the natural scientist speaks of the mineral, plant, and animal kingdoms, and the physical human kingdom, as the four natural kingdoms that are outside of us. And just as we, when we stand before these beings of the four kingdoms, say: We perceive, we reflect on these entities - they are outside, and we make sensory images of them - so we must say: as we go out of our body with our soul we ourselves become — but in a much higher, in an inner liveliness and essentiality — we ourselves become thoughts, feelings, and volitional impulses of the higher spiritual beings. We are perceived, we experience ourselves being perceived by the higher spiritual beings.

From this you can see that anyone approaching the question, “What is immortal about the human being?” cannot ask themselves the question in the way that people still so often do today. They approach such a question and say: Well, I have acquired this or that concept. How can I be proved the immortality of the soul? Yes, with these concepts, which one has acquired in the outer life and in science, one cannot prove it; because these concepts relate to what the soul experiences in everyday life and what is only an inner reflection. Just as a mirror image does not remain when the mirror is no longer there, what the soul thinks, feels and wills in everyday life does not remain either, because it is only a mirror image of the body; even the memory in which it is stored is a mirror image of the soul. He who would prove the immortality of the soul by thinking, feeling and willing is on the same path as he who would prove the permanence of the mirror image from the picture in the mirror. Everything that is a mirror image must be admitted to the natural scientist — and nothing else is presented to him. All that which in ordinary life we call the soul does not pass through the portal of death. But the soul contains something — for what spiritual science brings up is contained in the soul — that passes through the gate of death, and passes through the gate of death in such a way that it can only be grasped in concepts and ideas that one does not have at all unless one first develops them. While for ordinary experience one must say that the human soul perceives, for spiritual experience one must say: the soul is perceived by higher beings. While in sensory experience one perceives oneself, for spiritual experience one must say: after death, the human being is received by the higher spiritual beings. When man incorporates his thoughts from external natural things into his soul, then the entity that rules over him supersensibly incorporates itself into him; he is remembered, he is carried away into the spiritual world. That is why it is so difficult to answer the question: What is immortal about the human being if you want to answer it with the ordinary concepts of the day, which do not apply to it at all.

And all philosophers who have tried to approach the immortality of the human soul, to answer the question of the immortality of the soul, have always come back to saying: there must be something fine and substantial that goes beyond death. We have seen that nothing of the substantial remains, but that the soul's powers are themselves a highly developed memory life, that it is a being perceived, a being born in the spiritual world. They all know that such processes in the life of the senses even have their symbols, their analogies. When one billiard ball strikes another, the physicist says: the state of motion of the first ball passes into the second. What has passed from one ball to the other? It is not the substance of the first that has passed into the second, but only the force passes.

Those who have thought about the immortality of the soul have always thought of it as something that is in ordinary life and passes through the gate of death; while what passes through the gate of death must first be sought, because it lies so deeply hidden in the soul that it is not noticed at all, that attention is not focused on it in ordinary life; but it is there after all. And when someone who has so truly, chemically, as it were, separated the soul and spirit from the body, then experiences this soul and spirit as it is sheltered in a supersensible world of spiritual beings that stands above it, then he also knows that in this of the soul — just as hydrogen is hidden in water —, that in this he has something that works very secretly, so to speak between the lines of life; which absorbs the finest powers of the soul, of experience, of the moral abilities of the human being, just as the small plant germ absorbs the forces from the whole plant in order to concentrate them. And just as, after withering, after the leaves wither and the blossom dies, the plant carries over into the following plant as a small germ what lived in the previous plant, what the plant has saved as a germ — so it is in the human soul. If you distill it out in this way, you realize that, in every moment of life, waking and sleeping, this human soul works in the depths of everyday life, working out everything we acquire in terms of abilities acquires is permeated, deeply permeated, by what it has done in the way of right and wrong, beauty and ugliness. And then one knows that what lives hidden in the soul goes through a life between death and a new birth – and then returns to earthly life. In the life between death and a new birth, man gathers strength from a spiritual world, but these become formative forces so that through a new birth he can unite with what he has received from his father and mother and from his line of ancestors. Thus the human soul does not live through one earth life, but successive earth lives.

The complete life on earth therefore consists of a succession of lives that take place between birth and death, and of the life between death and a new birth, which are longer than the lives on earth where the soul dwells in purely spiritual spheres, where it is active and occupied there – where it has grown together with the spiritual world just as it has here with the physical world. That the human soul experiences repeated lives in its universal, that each subsequent life on earth is the effect of previous lives on earth, is what spiritual science will gradually incorporate into the spiritual culture of humanity, just as the Copernican worldview has been incorporated into external culture. It is certainly still the case today that people often say: Yes, what you are telling me, contradicts what the five senses consider to be true! Well, people have even had to experience quite different things that contradict their five senses. For thousands of years, people believed according to their five senses that the sun and the starry sky moved around the earth. That it is the other way around, that the earth moves around the sun, he had to believe despite the contradiction of the five senses. Thus, what must now contradict the five senses, that man goes through repeated earth lives, will also enter into the thinking habits of men. But then man will speak out of a real science about what is immortal in the human being. He will seek this immortal, as it were, between the lines of ordinary experiences, will know within himself an inwardly working being, which is sheltered in a spiritual world, just as the thinking being is sheltered in the sensual outer world in our ideas and thoughts and sensations.

Then the human being will know himself connected with his eternal, his immortal, connected with the spiritual world. This is the destiny of the evolution of humanity. And we may truly remember this in our time, in the time of difficult but also glorious trials; we may remember how precisely German spiritual life — you will not find it incongruous if I mention this in the last part of my discussion — how precisely German spiritual life has been working for a long time to gain such a science. We need only recall Lessing, the great standard-bearer of modern German intellectual life, and consider the store of enlightened ideas for him and for humanity that he gathered in his soul. He summarized them, as if in a testament, in his beautiful essay 'The Education of the Human Race'. Of course, many people today, especially the very clever ones, say: Well, Lessing! He wrote and said many things throughout his life, then he grew old, his mental powers weakened, and then he also wrote such complicated stuff, in which he advocated something like the doctrine of repeated lives on earth, of intermediate lives between death and a new birth in the spiritual world! People consider it a crazy idea, and they forgive the great minds if they also come up with such complicated ideas, which are not seen as such in ordinary life, which can be grasped with the five senses. But Lessing said something very significant at the end of the work: 'There have always been people in the most ancient times who, through ancient clairvoyance, through ancient abilities of the human soul that were still closer to the spiritual forces of the world, knew something about repeated earthly lives. And Lessing says: “Is it to be denied that the soul of man has achieved something through original powers, before it was corrupted by the sophistry of school?”

Lessing was right. Spiritual science will show humanity that what was effectively there at a primitive stage of development will come at the highest level of truly developed scientific knowledge, when science has progressed to the point where it not only chooses as its tools not only external, tangible methods that can be grasped with the five senses, but when it allows spiritual-soul experiments as such methods — which has just been described as a kind of spiritual chemistry. And it is precisely German spiritual life that has always pointed to this intimacy of the soul life, through which the soul comes beyond itself into a higher life of feeling, which is not a mere life of memory but an immersion into spiritual reality. A higher life of thought, a higher life of feeling, a higher life of will. To achieve this, to strengthen the soul's powers so that it can leave the body, has always been the aim of German spiritual life; and this is one of the germs of German spiritual life to which I referred yesterday, which has yet to come to fruition as the blossoms and fruits of this German spiritual life.

We see, of course, how very remarkably inward-looking minds, such as the wonderful Novaks, how these German minds always and again, through the inner living contemplation, through the contemplative experience of their soul, arrive in direct contemplation at the knowledge that this as an immortal soul through the portal of death; and how they then arrive at concepts that seem foolish to ordinary experience, but which, because they do not fit ordinary experience, are precisely suited to an experience that goes beyond ordinary experience. He who in spiritual science wants to find only the ordinary concepts cannot come to it. This spiritual science requires an inner mobility, an elasticity of mind, so that one can come to new concepts. Most people would like to spare themselves this out of inner laziness. They believe that the spiritual world must be something like a finer copy of the sensual world; they imagine the spiritual world to be material and substantial again. But when you experience the world spiritually, nothing of what you are accustomed to remains in it; instead, something completely new awakens that you have not yet known, but with which you must enrich your soul in order to experience within yourself what is immortal in the human soul.

So when such people speak of the spiritual world, to which the soul belongs in the immortal, they must first form the words, the concepts. That is why I have to apologize to you, so to speak, for today's lecture. In a lecture like this, where one speaks of the spiritual world but in words that are coined for ordinary life, one has to struggle with the words. One has to demand that one's formulations use words that are uncomfortable for those who want to stick to the familiar. Time and again, critics come along and say: What you have said does not even exist! I know that. Of course, these gentlemen know an infinite amount, but when they apply their old concepts to something that must have completely new concepts, then their criticism does not apply to what they want to characterize. But in German intellectual life we have minds – Novalis is one of them – who know how to speak in a language that is indeed the German language, but which seems like a wonderfully living essence distilled from the German language to show something that is as real as the sensory world, that is the reality into which the soul passes when it walks through the gate of death. What such people say can have an effect on those who are receptive to it.

And now I will give you a remarkable example; it is too beautiful for me to withhold from you, because it shows how Novalis has worked. I will purposely relate to you his effect on a Belgian-French poet-philosopher who studied Novalis, who, as he claims, immersed himself completely in Novalis, and who received an impression that he describes in the following way.

Before I present this, I must say that another Franco-Belgian poet and philosopher, Maurice Maeterlinck, immediately after the outbreak of the war and repeatedly, found particularly harsh words about the German barbarians and launched a most outrageous attack on this barbaric culture. That is Maurice Maeterlinck, for whose fame in the world German intellectual life has done more than French. But gratitude is not something that needs to be demanded in this day and age. He really did insult and revile these German barbarians, much as the others I mentioned yesterday.

In contrast to this, there is another Belgian-French poet-philosopher, Novalis, who has allowed himself to be influenced by one of the most German of German poet-philosophers, with all that he has to say about what is immortal in the human being, and he then talks about this influence. He cannot but say: When one reads Sophocles and Shakespeare in this way, when one sees what Sophocles' figures, what Shakespeare's characters experience, what Hamlet even experiences, then what these people do and suffer is entirely earthly; it only interests the earthly human being. But if – so the Belgian-French poet-philosopher believes – a spirit were to descend from another planet, it would not be able to take an interest in what the characters of Sophocles and Shakespeare experience; these are only earthly matters. But in Novalis, this Belgian-French poet-philosopher finds a soul that has something to say that would interest even spirits who would descend from the universe to pay a visit to Earth; because Novalis speaks of the eternal of the human soul, which not only interests the human souls insofar as they live in the body, but must interest all beings that belong to the extra-terrestrial world. And with beautiful words, this Belgian-French poet-philosopher speaks of what he has experienced in Novalis, the German poet-philosopher:

“But if other proofs were needed, they would lead him among those whose works almost touch silence” – he means, the ordinary language of the day is for what is transitory; but what is immortal, one should actually remain silent about it or find another language for it —, “she would open the gate of the realm where some loved her for her own sake, without caring about the little gestures of their bodies. They would climb together to the lonely plateaus where consciousness is heightened by a degree, and where all those who are plagued by restlessness about themselves attentively circle the immense ring that connects the world of appearances with our higher worlds. It would go with him to the borders of humanity; for at the point where man seems to end, he probably begins, and his most essential and inexhaustible parts are in the invisible, where he must be on his guard unceasingly. Only at this level are there thoughts that the soul can approve of, and ideas that resemble it and are as compelling as itself. There, humanity has ruled for a moment; and these dimly illuminated peaks are perhaps the only lights that announce the earth to the spiritual realm. Their reflection truly has the color of our soul. We feel that the passions of the mind and body would resemble the tolling of bells in the eyes of a foreign reason; but the people I am talking about have come out of the little village of passions in their works and said things that are also of value to those who do not belong to the earthly community!"

Such are the words of the Belgian-French poet-philosopher. If he were to hear Maurice Maeterlinck railing against the barbarians, the same barbarians who gave rise to the subject of the Belgian-French poet-philosopher's words, would he not call him a useless brawler? Yes, but there is a catch, because the words were written by Maurice Maeterlinck himself – before the outbreak of the war, though!

These are the things we experience today; that is why I said yesterday: what we are experiencing in the world today is a characteristic chapter of psychiatry. For what follows from the incredibly paradoxical fact that the same Maurice Maeterlinck utters these words about the German Novalis – and then goes on to revile and curse the entire German people as barbarians? What follows from the fact that what he said years ago and what I have read to you is deeply untrue and false? It is indeed a peculiarity of our present culture that because it is so full of what has been accumulated through language and external influences, the soul can also produce very beautiful words, words that sound beautiful but which may be false on the inside. But it is precisely one of the soul's paths that lead to the spirit in the way I have described, that everything the soul produces and experiences is profoundly true, truly true, shockingly true. If only a single phrase, only a single lie is in the soul on the way into the spiritual world, then one cannot find this way into the spiritual world. This path of truth is a following of the one who said, “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life!” — that is, the connection of the three. Such a path of imitating the one who said this is this path of truth. And if he is only a phrase, however beautiful a phrase may sound, he will not find the truth; he will only find the great deception, which can also penetrate into the soul where the soul wants to find that with which it is connected as with its immortal part. Inner truth alone connects the soul with what, as the Divine, permeates and permeates the world.

And when, again, the German spiritual life gives voice to the beautiful and profound words of Meister Eckhart, the philosopher, that there is a spark in the mind that ignites that which of the divine in the individual can live of the Divine in the individual human soul, one must say that the human soul can only experience authentically what is to be kindled like a spark in the mind if it is deeply inwardly true.

This, however, requires self-knowledge. But this self-knowledge is difficult to achieve in life. When a person, as I have explained, manages to rise out of the physical with his soul and spirit, then he has his ordinary earthly self before him, as he otherwise has external things before him. But he must be able to see his earthly self and, before he begins this spiritual path, must be able to acquire self-knowledge as an inner habit. But how difficult it is, a comparative example to illustrate: a rather famous contemporary professor, the Viennese philosopher Dr. Ernst Mach, who wrote various books that are highly esteemed today, gave a sample on the third page of his book 'Analysis of Sensations' of how difficult it is to come to self-knowledge, even in terms of one's physical form. He recounts: “As a young man, I once saw a face in profile in a shop window where two mirrors faced each other as I was walking down the street. I thought: what a person with a repulsive, even revolting face do I encounter here; and I was not a little surprised when I discovered that I had my own image in front of me, which was shown to me by the fact that the mirrors were arranged in this way.” And as a second example, the same professor tells the following story on the third page of his book: “Once, when I arrived quite tired from a journey, I got into a bus. I saw a man getting in from the other side, and I thought” — he says, he admits it, he is completely honest — “what a run-down, unpleasant schoolmaster is getting in there. And again I saw: it was myself.” And he adds: ‘So I knew the habitus of the species better than my own.’ A lady who had heard this, after I had said it in other lectures, related an example of such a lack of self-knowledge with regard to appearance, which she had observed in a relative. This relative went into a restaurant in a strange city. She did not know her way around. Then, as she walked towards the wall, she saw a lady coming towards her from the other side. “Well, what kind of ugly country girl is that?” she thought. She was a very elegant city woman. It was only when she spoke to the lady and the lady did not answer that she recognized herself.

These are examples that I would say are taken from the coarsest external sensuality. But if a person has so little insight into his external physical sensuality, he has even less insight into the soul in ordinary life. But this possibility of looking at oneself, of knowing oneself as an external object, is part of the real grasp of what is immortal in the human being. And anyone who really immerses themselves in the spiritual world and can then also follow what is real in this spiritual world, who can therefore follow the human being not only in their life between birth and death, but beyond death, knows that when he communes with the soul, the soul looks back at death, precisely in that it looks back at itself in self-knowledge, at what one has experienced between birth and death. Self-knowledge is, as it were, the eye of the immortal spirit. Through self-knowledge we must see the whole spiritual world in the time that we live through spiritually between death and a new birth. All this is really so that we can say: the seeds that must come to further development and evolution are contained in German intellectual life, and these must be grasped vividly in the course of time. Then real insight and real spiritual comprehension will emerge from this German intellectual life in the future.

If you take a brief look at the intellectual cultural history of modern times, you will also be led to recognize how the German spirit, in particular, is called upon to develop its idealism, which it has developed in its great philosophers, into spiritualism, into spirit-cognition, into spirit-experience, into scientific knowledge. One is tempted to say that the German spirit was pressed, suppressed and suppressed by the foreign spirit. We see how Goethe, who is rooted entirely in the German spirit, sighs under what is coming from France, especially in his time. While the German mind is actually geared to recognize more and more intimately the spirit that pervades and interweaves the world, the French mind is more geared to grasp everything that can be grasped by the intellect, to rationalize. This can even be seen in the peculiarity of French poetry. Reason, however, being bound to the brain, is basically only capable of developing materialism. Therefore, materialism is basically a genuine French product. Materialism is not inherent in the German character when it comprehends itself in its deepest intimate interior. This inner Frenchness, this inner materialism, must also be defeated by the German spirit in the course of time.

And if we follow a characteristic phenomenon of the development of world views in the British Isles, precisely in terms of the leading philosophy that comes from there, we can summarize it as follows: The British philosopher – and this can be proved in detail everywhere – starts from the same point as Locke, Hobbes and so on: only to accept what the senses perceive and what is combined from them, and to make the intellect only a servant of sense perception. This leads to external empiricism or to skepticism, to a search for doubt. But this has also deeply influenced the German mind, and that is also something from which it must free itself. After all, we are experiencing many things in our time, just below the surface of our soul. While England, with its world-view, was called upon to swear by mere sensory appearances, and France was called upon to cultivate man from out of rationalism, out of the intellect, to the point of the sentence 'Man as a machine', the German spirit, after it had emancipated itself from France, cultivated idealism, which is the predecessor of spiritualism, of the actual spiritual science. Idealism does not seek to stop at materialism, which is tied only to the intellect; it does not seek to stop at the empiricism of Englishness, which wants to hold only to the senses, nor at the rationalism of Frenchness, but seeks to grasp what lives in the soul. But by liberating himself from foreign influences, by the German fully relying on himself spiritually, German idealism will incorporate the living spiritual knowledge of the culture of the future.

If you try to do something for this living spiritual knowledge today, you will, however, initially encounter a great deal of resistance. If I may mention this here in a personal capacity: since the 1980s, I have been striving to establish Goethe's theory of colours and its depth against the materialistic English Newtonian physics. It is easy to understand why physics objects to Goethe's theory of colours; one can easily list all the objections. But the Goethean Theory of Colors is itself a living penetration into the physical reality of colors as a scientific product; and as spiritual knowledge will take hold of human culture, it will be realized how infinitely higher this Goethean Theory of Colors stands than the English one. Today, however, one is still talking to deaf ears; the corresponding writings are not yet being read – or only by a small circle. But it is always like that.

As the ancestor of true spiritual science, Goethe established a naturalistic world view of the development of living beings. I have been writing about this since the 1880s in an effort to show how this Goethean theory of development is a spiritual view. It is based on the fact that Goethe was able to make true what he was able to emphasize to Schiller, that he already sees the idea in reality. But here too, one still preaches to deaf ears; for the other is more comfortable. This Goethean teaching was inconvenient for humanity to accept. And when Darwin came along and presented all of this in a way that was more comfortable for the senses, in an outwardly sensual way of looking at things, in a way that the English mind so relishes, it was accepted, it flooded the world; and the difficult, uncomfortable, but spiritual Goethean teaching was ignored by people. When Darwin conveniently brought the theory of evolution, it was accepted.

And the great philosopher Hegel, who also has a lot to do with this city, has shown another example. He has shown how the German astronomical philosopher, philosophical astronomer, to whom science owes so much, Johann Kepler, has achieved great things in terms of understanding the world's context. Yes, it was indeed the case that Kepler was affected by Kästner's famous epigram, because he saw through the course of the stars, because he saw through all of this and expressed it in wonderful formulas, he had to lead a life of which the epigrammist Kästner says:

No mortal had ever risen higher
than Kepler rose – and died of starvation.
He knew only how to amuse the minds,
so the bodies left him without bread!

But Hegel goes even further and shows that Newton's famous theory of gravitation, on which, as every physicist says, modern physics is based, is nothing more than what the Swabian Kepler achieved, expressed in mathematical formulas. The real thing is Kepler's. One is faced with a historical lie when one speaks of the justification of Newtonism.

The German spirit will have to stand on its own. This will stand out from the many sad but also glorious events of our time as a marker of the historical development of humanity. However, what has worked so thoroughly from the west and northwest has worked on human souls in such a way as to make the path I have described, the path into the spiritual world, more difficult.

I will now say something, forgive me, that many will consider very stupid; but I know that it is a truth. Perhaps the time will come when this truth can be shown in detail. All that is needed is time. I can only state the fact that the opportunity for the free development of the powers of the soul, as indicated, to pave the way to the spiritual world, has been thoroughly lost to souls from childhood on. As a result, for example, the path has been lost – I am not speaking out of national chauvinism, I am speaking out of psychological, cultural-historical knowledge – the path has been lost because the poison of Robinson by Defoe still poisons and contaminates the lives of many boys and girls; and in this lies that which takes root in the soul in order to imbue it with the empiricism of Englishness.

Many internal victories, which are in the interest of German culture, will still have to be fought. But what is happening now is the great, bloody, but also glorious harbinger. And those who now go through the gate of death as heroic souls – especially the spiritual scientist must point this out, because he knows how souls go through death as realities and how those who are dead only live on in a different form – they will be among us in a high sense with their unspent powers. For in their soul-spiritual there is something that could have supplied the body with formative forces for decades to come — after all, these are young, flourishing human lives that are leaving the earth in our time —, that could have supplied the body with formative forces for a whole long life. But this will still weave and live in its immortal soul; it will be there in the spiritual sphere; it will be there and will help when humanity approaches it with understanding in the creation of a truly spiritual worldview, a worldview that is spiritual through and through, that is scientific in the fullest sense, in the strictest sense of the word. Spiritual science will thus be able to be something very much alive and real. For the spiritual scientist knows that when what he has to give as the result of research comes to life in souls, then these souls will become so immersed in earthly life that the great gulf, which today gapes as a materialistic world-view between the physical and the supersensible, will be bridged. In a much more real sense than one suspects today, people will live into a world view that, in addition to the directly present earth citizens, will also show them people in their effectiveness who have passed through the gate of death. But this is a world view that at the same time admonishes us for the large number of deaths that our fateful time has brought upon us. Much blood, much death, much adversity, much suffering and pain, much courage, much willingness to make sacrifices, tremendous greatness rushes and weaves through that which surrounds us in our fateful, momentous, and historically significant present. But it is particularly appropriate in this present time to point to that which points beyond all death, beyond all mere temporal life, to the hidden, to that which is immortal in the human being.

Not everyone will be able to become a spiritual researcher, just as not everyone can become a chemist. But times will come when just as what the few chemists have to give will be made fruitful for all, so too what the individual spiritual researchers have to give will benefit all of humanity and its coexistence. One need not be a spiritual researcher oneself to find the truth of what spiritual researchers discover; one need only be free of the prejudices that today's habits of thought put in one's way, and the things that have been hinted at today, spiritual science, can be understood. In order to discover the facts for oneself, to give just one example of what formed the main subject of today's discussion, one must follow the path of spiritual research oneself. In order to penetrate into the spiritual world, where divine spiritual beings, just as real as the things and beings of the physical world, dwell, in order to speak of these worlds appropriately, in order to really bring messages from this world and these beings, one must go the way of spiritual research oneself. To understand what is brought from the spiritual worlds, one really needs only to approach the matter with an unprejudiced sense of truth. People who are unable to believe this sense today, combined with what spiritual research says, do not realize that it is not the sense of truth, but the habits of thinking caused by prejudice. But when these habits of thinking have been done away with, as the old habits of thinking were done away with in the face of the Copernican world-picture, then spiritual science will bring something infinitely more fruitful for the soul and spiritual life than natural science has brought for the outer life. For what natural science brings relates to what surrounds us, to what we build for ourselves, to many things by means of which we make our life comfortable and pleasant, what is useful to us. But what spiritual science has to give is something that every soul desires, if only it becomes aware of the powers of this desire in the spiritual and soul; that which gives people the opportunity to develop in such a way that desolation, loneliness, disharmony of life, but what strengthens the soul so that the soul can also face life strongly, and that will demand more and more of the soul in the future. Spiritual science will incorporate something of the spiritual development that will evoke a living consciousness in the soul of what is immortal in the human being. And in this coexistence with the immortal part of the soul, man will become more aware that the world is more comprehensive than what the senses see, than what one experiences in time. The knowledge, which will not remain abstract or theoretical, will be concentrated in certain feelings that will inwardly gladden and uplift the soul, but will also make it industrious, strong and capable.

In conclusion, I would like to summarize in a few words what can be awakened in the soul through spiritual science. These words may fade away what I, as I said, could only say in brief strokes, like a charcoal drawing, about the question today: What is immortal in the human being? This may fade away into the words that are, so to speak, the residue of feeling of spiritual scientific knowledge and of the spiritual scientific confession in relation to the question of today's contemplation:

The senses of man speak:
The things in the vastness of space;
They change with the course of time.
Awakening itself, the human soul awakens
From the vastness of space
And unperturbed by the course of time
In the stream of becoming in eternity!

then the wonderful words in it:

“She has thought and continues to think; but not as a
human being, but as nature.”

That is to say, Goethe is clear about one thing: spinning a mechanical web of concepts about nature does not provide an understanding of nature. Only such a deeper search in the existence of nature creates knowledge of nature, through which the human soul finds in the depths of this natural existence that which is related to what it can seek out in the depths of its own being when it penetrates into them.

We may now ask: Is such striving, as it can be characterized by Kant, can be characterized by the ideal figure of Goethe's Faust, - is this striving a solitary, a merely individual one, or does it have anything to do with the overall striving of the German national spirit, the German national soul? Even if we consider Kant, the abstract philosopher, who hardly ventured a few miles beyond Königsberg and spent his whole life in abstract thought, we clearly see, especially in the way he worked his way from his earlier world view to his later one, how he, despite his reclusiveness, developed out of everything all that in the German national spirit aspired after certainty, and how, owing to this national spirit, he did not come to a narrowing of the human soul to the sphere of mere human thinking, but was led up to the horizon on which the whole range of ideas and ideals appeared to him, which give man impulses in the course of his human development.

One might say that what was later expressed by the most German of German philosophers, Fichte, already lives in Kant; what has become so dear to the German worldview, especially from the eighteenth century onward, already lives in Kant. This German world view came to value having a view of the world that does not need to be disconcerted by what presents itself to the senses, for the absolute validity of that which is man's duty, love, divine devotion, moral world. overlooks the world and looks at the way in which he is placed in the world, he sees himself surrounded by the field of vision of sensual impressions and what he can divine behind them; but he also sees himself placed in such a way that he world without this second aspect of the world; he sees himself so placed that behind him, in his soul, the divine ideals are at work, which become his duty and deed, and these ideals do not bear the coarse sensual character that the world of external movement and external revelation has. One might say that when the German mind looks at the stiffness and smoothness of natural existence, to speak symbolically, at the mechanical movement in the unfolding of natural processes, it feels the need to recognize: How can we become immersed in that which is so indifferent in nature, that which appears in ideals as a demand, as a duty, as a moral life? How can we become immersed in that which appears as the highest value of life, as a moral ideal? How does the reality of moral ideals relate to the reality of external nature? This is a question that cannot be answered lightly, but which can also be found in tremendous depth, heart-wrenching. And so it was felt in the best German minds at the time when Kant's world view was forming. Sensuality had to be presented in such a way that it was no obstacle to the moral world flowing into the world through human beings. Morality could not be a reality that presents itself indifferently, and against which moral ideas must rebound. When moral ideas from the spiritual world are put into action through human beings, they must not be repelled by the rigid materialistic barrier of the sensory world. This must be taken as a profound insight, then one understands why Kant wants to dethrone ordinary knowledge so that a real source can be thought for the moral idea. Then one understands Johann Gottlieb Fichte, who coined the paradoxical , but which arose from deep German striving: “All sensuality, everything we can see and feel outside and think about the external world, is only the sensualized material of our duty.” The true world is the world of the ruling spirit, which lives itself out as man perceives it in ideas and ideals, and these are the true reality, they are what pulses through the world as a current, what only needs something to which it can apply itself, to illustrate it. Sensuality has no independent existence for Fichte, but is the sensitized material for human fulfillment of duty.

From a philosophy that seeks to validate everything spiritual, that must be sought from a natural disposition towards idealism, such words emerged; and one may find such words one-sided, but that does not matter when such words are made into dogma. But to take them as symptoms of a striving that lives in a people, that is the significant thing; and to recognize that such minds, which create in the sense of such a word, precisely because of the idealistic character of the German national soul, elevate Germanness to the arena of thought. In order to give thought its vitality, human knowledge and striving must go beyond what Cartesius could merely find. And Goethe's Faust, this image of the highest human endeavor, this image that one must first struggle to understand by allowing many German cultural elements to take effect, from what did it emerge? — It is truly not invented, did not come about in such a way that a single person created it out of themselves; rather, it emerged from the legends, from the poetry of the people themselves. Faust lived in the people, and Goethe was still familiar with the “puppet show of Dr. Faust”; and in the simple folk character, he already saw the traits that he only elevated to the arena of thoughts. Nothing is more vivid than Goethe's “Faust” to show how something supreme can emerge from what lives most deeply, most elementarily, most intimately in the simple folk being. One would like to say: not Goethe and Goethe's nature alone created Faust, but that Goethe brought Faust forth like a germ that lay within the German national organism, and gave it its essence, embodied it in such a way that this embodiment corresponds at the same time to the highest striving of the German spirit for the arena of thought. Not the striving of isolated personalities out of their own nature, but precisely when it confronts us in its greatness from the whole nation, it is the result of German idealism.

And how does thought work within this German idealism? One comes to an understanding of how it works precisely by comparing this German idealistic striving of thought with what is also a striving of thought, let us say, for example, in Descartes. In Descartes, thought confines man within the narrowest limits; it works as a mere thought and remains as such confined to the world in which man lives directly with his senses and his mind. Within German idealism, the personality does not merely encounter the thought as it enters the soul, but the thought becomes a mirror image of that which is alive outside the soul, that which vibrates and permeates the universe, that which is spiritual outside of man, that which is above and below the spirit of man, of which nature is the outer revelation and the life of the soul is the inner revelation. Thus, thought becomes an image of the spirit itself; and by rising to the level of thought, the German wants to rise through thought to the living spirit, wants to penetrate into that world that lives behind the veil of nature in such a way that by penetrating this veil, man not only visualizes something, but penetrates with his own life into a life that is related to him. And again, since man is not satisfied with what he can experience in his soul, he seeks to penetrate into what lies behind thinking, feeling and willing, for which these three are outer shells, for which even the thought is only an inner revelation, in which man lives and works, in which he knows himself as in a living being that creates the scene of thoughts within him. And so we can see how, especially in those times when the German mind, seemingly so detached from external reality, from external experience, strove for a world view, this German mind felt itself entirely dominant and weaving within the arena of thought. And there is first of all Johann Gottlieb Fichte, who regards external nature only as an external stimulus to that which he actually wants to seek, to whom, as already mentioned, the whole of the external sense world has become only the sensitized material of our duty; who wants to live only in that which can penetrate from the depths of the world in a mental way and can be directly realized before the human soul. That is the essence of his world view, that only what emerges in a contemplative way from the deepest depths of the soul and announces itself as emerging from the deepest depths of the world is valid for him.

For his successor Schelling, the urge for nature, the Faustian urge, becomes so vivid within him that he considers the knowledge of nature, which only wants to express itself in concepts about nature, as nothing. Only when the human soul comes to regard all of nature as the physiognomy of man, only when nature is regarded in such a way that nature is the physiognomy of the spirit that rules it, only then does one live in true knowledge of nature; but then, by penetrating through the bark, one feels creative in nature. And again, a paradoxical but appropriate word for the essence of Germanness comes from Schelling: To recognize nature is actually to create nature! Admittedly, this is at first a one-sided saying; but a saying that represents a one-sidedness need not remain so; rather, if it is rightly recognized, this creative knowledge of nature will lead the spirit to reflect inwardly, to awaken slumbering powers within itself, which penetrate to the spiritual sources of nature. The source, the germ of that which can be true spiritual science, we can find it precisely within this world picture of German idealism!

In the third of the German idealistic philosophers, in Hegel, who is difficult to understand and who is so far removed from many, this lively character of the scene of the thoughts within German idealism appears in the same way. In our own time, when the abstract is so much decried and mere thought is so little loved, this world-view strikes us as strange. And yet Hegel feels himself closely connected with the Goethean direction of nature towards the spirit. The content of his world-view – what is it if not mere thinking, a progression from one thought to another? With his world-view we are presented with a thought organism; necessity is created for us, so that we stand face to face with a mere thought organism, which we can only create by thinking it, as we would with any other organism through our senses. But behind this presentation of a thought organism there is a consciousness, a certain attitude. This attitude consists in stripping away all sense perceptions, all perceptions of the senses, for a few moments of world-gazing, stripping away everything that one wants and feels as an individual, and surrendering to what as if the thought itself were taking one step after another, — that man then immerses himself in a world that is a thinking world, but no longer his thinking world, so that he no longer says to this world: I think, therefore I am! but: “The spirit of the world thinks in me, and I give myself to the spirit of the world as a theater, so that in what I offer as soul to the all-encompassing spirit of the world, this spirit can develop its thoughts from stage to stage and show me how it bases its thoughts on world-becoming. And the deepest religious impulse is connected with the striving to experience in the soul only what that soul can experience when it surrenders all its own being to the thinking that thinks itself within it. One must also see this Hegelian philosophy, this so idealistic excerpt from the German essence, in such a way that one does not take it as a dogmatics, on which one can swear or not, but as something that, like a symptom of German striving in a certain time, can stand before us. In Hegel's philosophy, the world spirit appears as a mere thinker; but while it is true that much more than mere thinking was needed to shape the world, it is nevertheless true that the path that once led to it, to seek logic, is one which produces in man the attitude towards the living that reigns behind existence and which leads man to the scene not of abstract, intellectual thought, but of living thought, which in the experience of thought has experience of the world.

The three idealists, Fichte, Schelling and Hegel, sought to elevate the human spirit to the realm of thought in three different directions: Fichte tried to shine a light into the depths of the human ego and did not say, like Descartes, “I think, therefore I am!” For Fichte, if he had only been able to arrive at Descartes' thought, would have said: “There I find within me a rigid existence, an existence to which I must look. But that is not an ego. I am only an ego if I can secure my own existence myself at any time. Not through the act of thought, not through mere thinking can I arrive at my ego, but through an act of action. That is a continuous creative process. It does not depend on looking at its being; it leaves its previous being; but by having the power to create itself again in the next moment, out of the act of doing, it is constantly being reborn. Fichte does not grasp the thought in its abstract form, but in its immediate life on the scene of the thought itself, where he creates vividly and lives creatively. And Schelling, he tries to recognize nature, and with genuinely German feeling he lives into the secrets of nature, even if, of course, his statements, if you want to take them as dogma, can be presented as fantastic. But he immerses himself in natural processes with his deepest emotions, so that he does not feel merely as a passive observer of nature, as a being that merely looks at nature, but as a being that submerges itself in the plant and creates with the plant in order to understand plant creation. He seeks to rise from created nature to creative nature. He seeks to become as intimate with creative nature as with a human being with whom he is friends. This is an archetypally German trait in the Schellingian nature. Goethe sought to approach nature in a similar way from his point of view, as his Faust expresses it, as to the “bosom of a friend”. There Goethe, to describe how far removed every abstract observer is from a contemplation of nature, there he calls what he, as an external naturalist, is to the earth, his friendship with the earth. So human, so directly alive does the German spirit feel itself in Goethe to the spirit that reigns in nature in the striving to be scientific, in that he wants to raise science itself to the arena of thoughts. And Hegelian logic – abstract, cold, sober thought in Hegel – what becomes of it? When one considers how mere logic often appears to man, and compares this with what prevails in Hegel's idealistic world-view, then one gets the right impression of the world-importance of this Hegelian idealism. In Hegel's work, what appears to be the furthest thing from mysticism, the clear, crystal-clear, one might say, crystal-cold thought itself, is felt and experienced in such a way that although the thought , but that what the soul experiences in terms of thought is direct mystical experience; for what Hegel experiences in terms of thought is a becoming one with the divine world spirit, which itself permeates and lives through the world. Thus, in Hegel, the greatest clarity and conceptual sobriety become the warmest and most vibrant mysticism. This magic is brought about by the way in which the German mind rises from its direct and living idealism to the realm of thought. In doing so, it proves that what matters is not the individual expressions that are arrived at, but the soul foundations from which the human soul seeks a worldview. Hegel is said to be a dry logician. In answer to this it may be said: He who calls Hegel's logic by that name is himself dry and cold. He who is able to approach this logic in the right way can feel how it pulsates out of German idealism; he can feel in the apparently abstract thoughts, which in Hegel's system are so spun out of one another, the most living warmth of soul that is necessary to strip away all individuality and to connect with the divine, so that in Hegel logic and mysticism can no longer be distinguished; that although nothing is nebulous in it, a mystical trait prevails in all its details.

Even in our time, the German mind, even the opponents of German idealism, has endeavored time and again to fathom the fundamental idealism of this German nature in its significance as a riddle. And the best German minds, even those who are opponents of Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, if we turn our gaze to them, we still find that the development of Germany consists in absorbing more and more of the basic impulses of this idealism.

How these fundamental impulses can lead to a living experience of the spiritual worlds has often been discussed and will be discussed more often. Attention should only be drawn to how – one might say – German idealism, after it had reached one of its high points in the German world view, then continued to have an effect on German intellectual life as a different impulse. There was a period in this German intellectual life, and it was lived out in minds of the very, very first order until the middle of the 19th century, until the last third of the 19th century, when the view was that such creative work as is expressed, for example, in Goethe's Faust, where thought really takes hold of the imagination directly and can unfold dramatic creativity, was only possible within poetry; but the development of humanity shows that, for example, in the sphere of natural science, the same process of thinking can be observed that is expressed in Goethe's Faust. example, in Goethe's Faust, where thought takes hold of the imagination directly and can unfold dramatic creation, is only possible within poetry; but the development of humanity shows that, for example, music has a different area; that music is, as it were, the field that does not seek to grasp the highest in man by the detour of a work of fiction such as Faust, but that music is the field in which sensuality must be grasped directly. For example, the contrast between the legend of Don Juan and that of Faust has been cited, with a certain amount of justification after the experiences that could be had within the development of humanity, how mistaken it is to legend on the same level as the Faust legend; it has been asserted that what this other legend, which shows man completely absorbed in sensual experience, can be correspondingly portrayed only within music that directly evokes and seizes sensuality. — The way in which the German does not rise to the scene of thought in the abstract, but in a lively way, has also brought the refutation of this view. In Richard Wagner, we have in modern times the spirit that has triumphed over the merely external, emotional element in music, that has sought to deepen the setting of the thoughts so that the thought itself could take hold of the element that was thought to live only in music. To spiritualize music from the standpoint of the spirit, to show that, was also only possible for German idealism. One can say: Richard Wagner showed that in the most demure element for thought there is nothing that could resist or be opposed to the strength of life that dominates the German spirit. If, through his philosophy and his contemplation of nature, the German has tried to present nature to his soul in such a way that the seemingly mechanical, the seemingly external and rigid loses its mechanical aspect and what would otherwise appear in a formal way comes to life and moves as soulfully and vividly as the human soul itself , on the other hand, the element that flows in the immediate sensual sequence of tones has been allowed to seek its connection, its marriage, with that which leads the human soul to the highest heights and depths in the realm of thoughts, in Wagner's music, which has thus effected an elevation of an artistic-sensual element into a directly spiritual atmosphere.

This aspect of German idealism, which leads to a result that can be characterized as the soul standing on the scene of thought – I wanted to characterize this aspect today with a few strokes. This trait of German idealism, this living comprehension of the otherwise dead thought, is one side, but a remarkable side, of the nature of the German people, and will appear as a remarkable phenomenon to anyone who, I might say, is able to place themselves within the German people in a way that revitalizes thought within themselves. Indeed, the German cannot arrive at the fundamental trait of his people's character other than by penetrating ever deeper into the self-knowledge of the human being. And this the German may, as it seems to me, feel so rightly in our immediate present, where this German essence really has to defend itself in a fight imposed on it, where this German essence must become aware of itself by having to wage a fight, which it feels is due to it from the task that appears to it as a sacred one, entrusted to it by the world forces and world powers themselves. And although today, in a different way than in the times of which we have mainly spoken, the German must fight for his world standing, his world importance, it must still come to life before our soul, for which the German today enters into a world-historical struggle. A future history will have to establish more and more the deeper connection between the German soul, struggling through the course of the world, and the bloody events of the times, which, however, bring us bliss out of pain and suffering. I wanted nothing with today's reflection but to show that the German has no need to speak out of hatred or outrage when he wants to compare his nature with that of other nations. We do not need to point out the nature of the German soul in order to exalt ourselves, but in order to recognize our duties as they have been handed down to us by world history, we may point this out. And we do not need, as unfortunately happens today in the camp of our enemies, to invent all sorts of things that can serve to belittle the opponent, but we can point out the positive that works in the German national substance. We can let the facts speak, and they can tell us that the German does not want to, but must, according to his abilities, which are inspired by the world spirit, his nature, his abilities – without any arrogance – in comparison to the nature of other peoples.

From this point of view, we do not need to fall into what so unfortunately many of our opponents fall into. We look over to the West. We certainly do not need to do as the French do, who, in wanting to characterize German nature in its barbarism, as they think, in its baseness, want to exalt themselves; truly, the French needed, as they believe, a new sophistry to do so. And minds that spoke highly of the German character just before the war, even at famous teaching institutions, can now, as we can see, find the opportunity to advocate the view that, given the nature of his world view, the German cannot help but conquer and , as Boutroux says, to assimilate what is around him; for the German does not want to ascend to the sources of existence in a modest way, as Boutroux thinks, but claims that he is connected to these sources, that he carries the deity within himself and must therefore also carry all other nations within himself. This German world view is certainly profound; but it is not conceived immodestly.

Nor perhaps does the German need what is sought today from the British side when German character is to be characterized. The British, in emphasizing the peculiarities of their own national character, have never taken much interest in penetrating the German national character. When the forties in Germany were passing through a period of development, it seemed to me that the German mind was so fully occupied with the sphere of ideas that the way Hegel's disciples thought was felt by Schelling , who was still alive, and by his students, was felt to be too abstract, too logical, and that on Schelling's side, efforts were made to gain a greater liveliness for the thoughts themselves on the stage of thoughts. Whereas in Hegel one sensed that he allowed one thought to emerge from another through logical rigor, Schelling wanted people to sense the thoughts as active, living things that do not need to be proven in logic, just as what happens from person to person in living interaction cannot be encompassed in logic. He wanted to grasp it in something that is more than logic, wanted to grasp it in a living way, and that is how a great dispute arose on the scene, which the German tries to illuminate with the light he wants to ignite from his living knowledge. The English observed this dispute that arose. A London newspaper wrote what seemed to them a clever article about this dispute, in which it was said: These Germans are actually abstruse visionaries. Many are concerned with the question of who is right: Schelling or Hegel. The truth is only that Hegel is obscure and Schelling even more obscure; and the one who finds this is the one who will most easily come to terms with things—a piece of wisdom that roughly corresponds to the point of view of studying the world not when it is illuminated by the sun but at night, when all cats are black or gray. But anyone who today surveys the British judgment on the necessity of what is happening within the German character will perhaps be reminded of such “deeply understanding” words, especially when these words are used primarily to conceal what is actually taking effect and what one does not want to admit even to oneself. The present-day British really need a new mask to characterize their relationship to the Germans, and the foreign philosophers need a new sophistry to disparage Germany – a new sophistry that they have found since the outbreak of the war.

And the Italians? They also need something to reassure them about their own actions at the present time. Without arrogance, the German may say: it will uplift him within the difficult world situation when he thinks of the duty the world spirit has assigned to him, as he gains self-knowledge and this becomes knowledge of the German essence. What he should do will flow to him as realization from the realization of the German essence. When D'Annunzio spoke his resounding words before the Italian war broke out, he truly did not delve as deeply into Italian national character as he could have. But it is not for us Germans, who have gladly immersed ourselves in what the Roman spirit has created, to believe that d'Annunzio's hollow words really come from the deepest essence of Italian culture; but that they come from the motives that d'Annunzio needs to justify himself. The others needed sophistry, masks, to remove the causes of the war from their own soil, so to speak. The Italian needed something else, a justification that we have already seen emerging in recent years, a strange justification: he needed a new saint, a saint appointed from within the ranks of the profane, “holy egoism”. We see it recurring again and again, and it is to this that we see the representatives of Italian character repeatedly appeal. A new saint was needed to justify what had been done.

Perhaps it will lead the objective, unbiased observer of the German character to a position within today's historical events; because German character does not arise from such sophistry, such masks, nor from the “appointment of a new saint”, but from human nature, from what this human nature allows to be expressed, from what the national spirit of the German people has revealed to the best minds of this people have revealed to this people, but also what these spirits hoped for the people, because that is also a peculiarity of this German nature, which can be described by saying that the German always sought to direct his soul's gaze to what was aroused in him from the scene of thoughts, and from this he also wanted to recognize what hope he could harbor for what his people could achieve.

And today, when we need to develop love, a great deal of love, for what the ancestors of the German character have established within the German national soul and national strength, in order to place ourselves in today's historical events through this love, today, when we need faith in the strength of the present, today when we need confident hope for the success of that which the German character must achieve in the future. Today, we can look at what Germans have always loved, believed, and hoped for in the context of their past, present, and future. And so let us end with the words of a man who is indeed unknown today in the widest circles, but who in lonely thought wanted to fathom the popular and the intellectual of Goethe's Faust in those years of German life in which Germany had not yet produced the German state in its modern form. In those years, which preceded the deeds of the German power, in the sixties, a lonely thinker was concerned with the idea: in imagination, in the life of the soul, in idealism, the German wanted to rise to the highest that can only somehow be sensed by him. He had to develop a strength that must lie in his nature and that gives us hope that this strength will be fruitful, victorious in action. A simple German Faust observer, an observer of poetry that truly shows that German nature holds future forces, is quoted with his words. By pointing to words that Goethe himself, intuitively placing himself in the German future, spoke as a 65-year-old old man, he ties his own words to them and says:

"The earnest style, the high art of the ancients,
the primeval secret of eternal forms,
It is familiar with men and with gods,
It will leaf through rocks as through books.
For what Homer created and the Scipios
will never live in the scholarly hothouse!
They wanted to transplant us into the hothouse;
But the German oak grew to the whole!
A storm of growth has overtaken her,
She has taken the glass from the hothouse with her.
Now grow, O oak, grow to the delight of the world.
I can already see new solar auras flying.
And when my gray eyelashes close,
A mild light will still pour forth,
From whose reflection of those stars
The late grandchildren will learn to see,
To report in prophetically higher visions
Of God and humanity higher things.»

And the Faust viewer from the sixties continues:

"Let us add the wish that the Master's word, which looks down on us from better stars with a mild light, may come true in its people, who are seeking their way to clarity in darkness, confusion and urge, but with God's will, with indestructible strength, and that in those higher accounts of God and humanity, which the poet of Faust expects of the coming centuries, German deed too may no longer be a symbolic shadow, but in beautiful, life-affirming reality, may one day find its place and its glorification alongside German thought and German feeling!

We believe that such hopes, expressed by the best of Germans from the deepest German national sentiment, may be fulfilled in our own day, out of the blood and the creative energy of our courageous and active people. We believe that in these difficult days the German can develop to his strength, over which the atmosphere of hatred spreads, still another: that he can vividly grasp to strengthen his strength the love for what has been handed down in spirit and strength, in the life and work of his fathers as a sacred legacy, because he can be convinced that he, by permeating himself with this love for the past, he will find the strength to believe; because in this faith and this love he may find the hope for those fruits that must blossom for the German people out of blood and suffering, but also out of the blessed deed of the present, which the German performs not out of bellicosity but out of devotion to a necessity imposed on him by history. Thus, in the present difficult times, what may support, uplift and guide the German through the difficult struggle in which he finds himself is integrated into German life, German work, German feeling and sentiment: love for the German past, faith in the German present, confident hope for the German future.

I would like to take the liberty of outlining tomorrow a world view from the perspective of spiritual science. Today, as an introduction, so to speak, I would like to precede it with a description of the world view of German idealism.

It is possible to speak of such a world view of German idealism if one attempts to extract from the innermost being of the German national soul, so to speak, what has been attempted by this national soul in the greatest period — in terms of intellectual life — to get closer to the riddles and secrets of the world. If we consider the impulses and forces assimilated by the national soul in those days as still active in the second half of the nineteenth century and continuing into our own time, when the world picture of German idealism has receded in the face of other endeavors, where it has lived hidden, as it were, as an urging force in the development of the national spirit, then one can also speak of such an effective world view in the present. However, we must bear in mind that, due to many things that have arisen in our intellectual life and have become dominant for the generality of this intellectual life, this – I would say – most “original German” intellectual construct of German idealism has receded. But especially in these days we may express our hopes that this world picture of German idealism will again come to the surface and incorporate its strength into the general process of human development.

In my lectures this winter, but also earlier, I have often mentioned a name that was borne by one of the most German minds of the second half of the nineteenth century; I have mentioned the name Herman Grimm, the great art historian. And it may be said that what I have ventured to suggest here about Herman Grimm can, especially when one considers what Herman Grimm achieved as an art historian, as an art observer and in other ways through his entire literary work, be proof that it is born directly out of German feeling, out of German thinking, in short, out of the innermost impulses of the German national soul. When Herman Grimm tried to lift up his soul to that which presented itself to him—more from his feelings than from philosophical reflection—as the world view of the Goethean worldview, he had to place this world view alongside the other which in modern times has found the widest dissemination and the widest interest; that world view, of which its adherents, its believers, repeatedly claim that it is based on the genuine and correct assumptions of science. This world-picture, which in a certain sense now holds sway in the minds of many, Herman Grimm, moved by his intuitive perceptions, desired to set beside the other, which presented itself to his imaginative fancy as the world-picture on which all Goethe's work and activity was based. I have already mentioned the conclusion which Herman Grimm arrived at when he made this attempt. He said:

“Long ago, in his” — Goethe's — “youth, the great Laplace-Kantian fantasy of the origin and the former destruction of the globe had taken hold.” Herman Grimm wanted to suggest the idea that if Goethe had wanted to profess this Laplace-Kantian world view, he would have had plenty of opportunities to do so because it had already taken hold in his youth. And now Herman Grimm continues:

"From the rotating nebula – which children already learn about at school – the central drop of gas forms, which later becomes the Earth, and, as a solidifying sphere, goes through all phases, including the episode of habitation by the human race, over inconceivable periods of time , and finally to plunge back into the sun as burnt-out slag: a long process, but one that is completely comprehensible to today's audience, and one that no longer requires any external intervention to come about, except for the effort of some external force to keep the sun at the same temperature."

Herman Grimm alludes to the world view that is so widespread today: that once upon a time there was nothing but extraordinarily thin matter, that this thin matter clumped together, began to rotate, to move in circles, that from this the world building gradually formed, the planets split, that then on the earth – the one of the planets split off from the central gas drop – in the course of time the mineral, the vegetable and the animal kingdom developed from the gas, and that then the whole course of evolution took on that form which presents itself to us as human 'history'. But then, later on, there would come a time when all living things would have to wither and dry up, when everything would fall back into the sun, and with it all life would sink back into inanimate matter. Many people believe that this world view is the only one that can be achieved on the solid ground of natural science. And, as I have already indicated, it is easy to make this world view comprehensible. Herman Grimm says of it: children already learn it at school. You just have to carefully slide a cut-out card through a drop of oil floating in a liquid, stick a needle through it from above and turn the needle to set the whole thing in motion; then smaller drops separate from the larger oil ball and move around the larger one. And so, there you have, quite “evidently,” the origin of a small world system, and from that you draw the conclusion that the origin of the great world system must have occurred in just the same way. However, I have always pointed out how obvious it is, even to a child, that the world could not have come into being any other way; but in this experiment, people usually forget one thing – and one should maintain perfection when demonstrating something. For it is usually not taken into account that the “Mr. Teacher” or the “Mr. Professor” is standing there, turning the needle and setting the whole thing in rotation, and one must not forget oneself in an experiment that one does. Therefore, if one wanted to accept the experiment cited as proof, one would have to place a giant Mr. Teacher or Mr. Professor into outer space.

Herman Grimm continues:

So said Herman Grimm. In contrast to this, it may be pointed out that the entire period of German Weltanschauungsidealismus in its striving for a Weltanschauungsbilde was basically a protest against the fact that the culture of the time incorporated precisely this world view with the most fruitless perspective; and it may be further pointed out how it actually came about that such a world view could take hold. But to do this, it is necessary to point out a little of the way in which, so to speak, popular thinking, the world-view thinking of the present day, has come about. And since it can be noted again and again how little account is taken of all the circumstances that are drawn upon in these arguments, I would like to point out that what I have to say in this regard is really not only of this war and is not said merely because we are living in these fateful times; rather, as many of the listeners here present know, it has been said and advocated again and again, not only in Germany but also outside of Germany. I would like to emphasize this in particular because it could very easily be thought that these discussions lack objectivity precisely because, in our fateful times, they draw attention to what can help to guide the German soul to what is rooted in the deepest depths of the German national spirit.

If we want to grasp the development of our newer world view, we have to go back – to not go further back – at least to the point in time when, under the impression of powerful external discoveries about the world building of space and also about the world building of time, humanity began to work on the renewal of the world view as well, as it must present itself to the human mind. In this context, it must be pointed out time and again how the work of Copernicus and what was achieved by minds such as Kepler, Giordano Bruno and Galileo in the wake of this work, basically provided the first impetus for the world view under the influence of which present-day education still stands. Today, I would like to focus on the extent to which Europe's individual nations and peoples have worked towards this world view, which now surrounds us in the consciousness of most thinking people; and how, on the other hand, the world view of German idealism has been incorporated into what Europe's peoples have contributed to the common world view.

The spirit that can appear to us as particularly characteristic in the — I would like to say — reshaping of the world view of modern times is that of Giordano Bruno, who was burned in 1600. By pointing to Giordano Bruno, we must point out the contribution that Italian culture, Italian thinking, and Italian striving for a world view has made to general world culture. In earlier lectures I pointed out that the life and striving of the human soul can be seen in three forms of expression by a true spiritual science: as sentient soul, as mind or emotional soul, and as consciousness soul. and that in this surge of inner experience, which comes about under the influence of the forces of the sentient soul, the forces of the mind or emotional soul and the forces of the consciousness soul, the actual self of the human being acts as the all-uniting element. I have also said that today one can certainly scoff at this classification as an arbitrary one, but that in the future spiritual science will make it clear that the division of the human soul into a part of feeling, a part of understanding and a part of consciousness is just as 'scientific' as the division undertaken by physics in order to divide light into seven colors or — we could also say — into three color groups: into the yellowish-reddish part, into the greenish part and into the blue-violet part. Just as one will study the colors of light in this threefold division, not out of arbitrariness but out of an inner nature of the thing, if one wants to come to a result at all, so the human soul in its wholeness must be studied in the three “color nuances” . The reason why the same mental operation that is accepted in physics is regarded as mere speculation in spiritual science is that today we are not accustomed to approaching the soul in the same way that we approach the nature of light in physics. I have also pointed out that the essential thing about the national impulses, in so far as they take hold of the human soul, consists, for example, in the case of the Italian people, in the fact that the impulses which play from the Italian folk soul into the soul of the individual Italian ripen the soul of feeling in the latter , but not in the sense that he is considered as an individual, but as a member of his people; so that a person who strives for a world view within Italian culture will do so as a person pulsating with the power that works through his sentient soul. And if we look at Campanella, at Vanini, and at other spirits in the newer age of Italian culture, we see that it was Giordano Bruno who most vividly expressed this aspect. Bruno, in the dawn of modern times, seizes with the powers, which we say are the powers of the sentient soul, that which Copernicus has brought up as a spatial world view?

Let us take the medieval world view. Man could see no further than the sky, which was bounded by the vault of heaven, in which the stars were set. Then there were the spheres of the individual planets, with the spheres of the sun and moon. Such a world view corresponded to the senses. But it was only compatible with the view of the world of space that preceded Copernicanism. As Copernicanism — I might say — descended into the infinite capacity for enthusiasm of the soul of Giordano Bruno, who with all the depths of his sensibility recognized the world, this view arose in him: What was called the vault of heaven up there is not up there at all; it is not a real boundary, but only a boundary up to which the human view of space comes. The world extends into infinity! And embedded in infinity are innumerable worlds, and dominating these innumerable worlds is the world soul, which, for Giordano Bruno, permeates this perceived universe in the same way that the individual human soul permeates the individual human elements that make up our organism. One needs only to read a page of any of Giordano Bruno's writings to realize that the enthusiasm kindled in his soul by Copernicanism led him to direct his hymns – for that is what his writings on revelation are – to the infinite world building permeated by the soul of the world. And so will others who, like him, have been inspired in their quest by his folk culture. Thus we see how in Giordano Bruno we are confronted with a world picture which everywhere sees not only the material and spatial in the world, but sees everything material and spatial at the same time spiritualized, ensouled; how the individual human soul is for him only an image of the entire world organism, which is permeated by the world soul just as our individual organism is permeated by our soul.

This world view of Giordano Bruno stands before us — I would like to say — formed from the same basis of feeling as the older world view of Dante; only that Dante's world view took up in its poetic creation what had also been handed down from earlier times and led into the infinite, but into the infinite supersensible. I have already pointed out how Giordano Bruno can teach us lessons that are so necessary to learn in the face of the newer spiritual science. For, in the first place, this newer spiritual science is always objected to on the ground that it asserts something that contradicts the “five senses” of man. Now, nothing contradicted the five senses of man more than the world-picture of Copernicus, which made on Giordano Bruno the impression just characterized; nevertheless, the world-picture of Copernicus has entered, if gradually, into the thought-habits of mankind. But other things have also become part of people's thinking. Just as Giordano Bruno called out to his contemporaries: “You imagine space as being limited by the blue vault of heaven; but this blue vault of heaven does not exist, because it is only the limit of your perception,” so the newer spiritual science must speak in the face of what the older world view sees in birth and death as the limitation of the world view. For what appears in birth and death as the limits of the temporal is just as little really there outside of human perception as the blue vault of heaven is really there for the spatial perception outside of human perception. It is only assumed as the boundary of the spatial because the human spatial view only extends as far as the blue vault of heaven. And because in relation to the temporal, human perception only extends to birth and death, birth and death are assumed to be the limits of the temporal; and today, with spiritual science, we stand at the same point in relation to birth and death as Giordano Bruno did in his time.

I would like to say: in order to effectively impress what emerged as his world view on the culture of the time, the stirrings arising from the sentient soul that Giordano Bruno gave to this world view were needed. It is as if what he has to say about the world does not in the least engage his intellect, does not in any way trouble his reason – one has only to read a page of his work to find confirmation of this – but as if everything emerges for him from the most direct intuition, that is how Giordano Bruno speaks. Thus, at the end of the Middle Ages, the Copernican world picture was accepted, which was bound to be accepted because it was so deeply significant for human progress. And so we can say: the “nuance of feeling” of the soul's life is clearly pronounced in the world picture of Giordano Bruno and also in that of those who, with him, received their most significant impulses from the Italian soul. For that is the significant thing that has come from this side to the present day: that all philosophizing, all the gathering of thoughts into a world-view, has flowed out of this most direct life of feeling. What warms the worldview with inner strength comes from this source. Therefore, we may say: insofar as the individual Italian places himself in his nationality, the enthusiastic soul speaks out of him when he wants to work out a worldview.

If we now turn to another current – one of those currents that then led to the modern world view: to the French current, we also find an excellent spirit at the starting point of the newer world view current; but if we look closely, we see him facing the origin of the world view under completely different conditions than Giordano Bruno: Descartes (Cartesius). He is also a spirit who, like Giordano Bruno, belongs to the turn of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but he starts from completely different premises. Let us take a look at these premises as they present themselves in this outstanding mind. What is it that he starts from, in contrast to Giordano Bruno? In Giordano Bruno, we see how he is seized by an ever-increasing enthusiasm for what gives him the foundations of the modern world view. With Descartes, we see the opposite: we see how he starts from doubt, how he realizes that everything that arises from the external world or from within the soul as knowledge, as insight, as experience, can be doubted as to whether it is a reality, whether it is justified, whether it has more justification than a passing dream image. Descartes comes to doubt everything; but he seeks knowledge, to know with inner powers. First of all, he looks for the characteristics that knowledge must have in order for the soul to accept it; and for him, clarity and distinctness are these characteristics. What can present itself most clearly and distinctly to the soul bears the mark of certainty. I would like to say: in the sea of doubt in which he initially finds himself, he realizes that he must seek something that presents itself to him with clarity and distinctness, with transparency; for only that can count as a certainty for him. So it is not the original enthusiasm that drives him, but the striving for clarity, for distinctness and transparency. From this it then follows that he says to himself: And even if I doubt everything, even if everything I could perceive in the external and internal world were only a dream image: I cannot doubt that – whether it be a dream or not, I am thinking this; and if everything that takes place in the sea of experiences and that I can doubt is not, and this is established with clarity above everything: I think – then I am too! And from this clarity and distinctness, the thought arises in him: everything that presents itself to the soul as clearly and distinctly as this model of clarity and distinctness has legitimacy; one may think about the world as one must survey it: I think, therefore I am. And now let us see from this starting-point with Descartes and his followers how a world-picture comes into being that thirsts for clarity and distinctness. This clarity and distinctness was prefigured in Descartes' soul in that he was a great mathematician, and above all a special thinker on the basis of geometry. He demands mathematical clarity for everything that should belong to this world-picture. He and his successors then went on to say: About the world of space and about everything that moves in space, one can gain clarity and distinctness, one can form an image that is inwardly as clear and distinct as only mathematics itself is clear and distinct. But I would like to say that the soul-life actually escaped this world-picture. Not that Descartes denied the soul, but by taking certainty: I think, therefore I am —, he did not take it in such a way that one would get the impression that he delved into the soul as he delved into the external world of space, into what happens externally. What happens externally in space gives him the opportunity to survey the details, and also to survey the context of the details; but the interior remains more or less obscure. He said to himself: “Certain ideas that arise in the soul are clear and distinct; these are ‘innate’ ideas; by arising clearly and distinctly, they structure and organize the soul internally. But a connection between the inner-spiritual and the outer-spatial did not arise for him; they stood side by side like two worlds. Therefore, he could not — like Giordano Bruno, who thought of everything as inspired by the world soul and of this world soul pouring its spiritual impulses into everything — come to think of the soul in everything spatial as well. He said to himself: When I look at an animal, a spatial structure presents itself to me; I can look at it like another spatial structure; but it does not show anything other than spatial structures; therefore it appears like a moving automaton. He did not find in animals that which moves the animal. He found it only in himself. Therefore, he ascribed a soul only to human beings, not to animals. He called animals “living machines” — and with that we have the beginning of a mechanical world view. They were not so bold – neither Descartes nor his disciples – to deny what was present from the old religious tradition, this inner soul, but they sought to consider it as belonging only to humans; and in animals, they considered it as presenting its creations to the soul in the way that mathematical creations present themselves to the soul.

Do we not see clearly and distinctly the working of the intellectual or mind soul, the middle soul, in the striving for clarity and distinctness, which has increasingly become the characteristic of all work on a worldview in France? Until recently, this remained the basic feature of the current that worked from this perspective on the construction of a general world view. One might say that everything in a worldview that is mathematically transparent, that can be expressed in mathematically clear thoughts, that can be presented in such a way that one thing mathematically follows from another, came from this worldview – up to the world view created by Auguste Comte, where everything – from the simplest phenomena of nature to human social coexistence – is to be presented as in a large, powerful painting, with one sentence always following another in mathematics. It would be interesting to show how this nuance of the mind or soul, this systematizing soul, permeates this entire culture, how it forms the innermost nerve of this culture.

And if we now turn to a third current that also had an enormous influence on our intellectual culture, on our intellectual world view of the second half of the last century, if we turn to British culture, we find Bacon, Baco von Verulam, as the dominant spirit, in whose footsteps all of England's other leading spirits still follow. And how does he assert what he has to say? He said to himself: Mankind has lived for too long on mere ideals, has busied itself for too long with mere ideals and mere words, and it should now turn its attention to external things, to the things themselves, that is, to those things that present themselves to external observation ; one could only arrive at a true picture of the world by directing one's eyes and other senses to what is taking place in the external world, and only allowing “thoughts” to be valid insofar as they bring what is happening outside into a context. Bacon became the philosopher of experience, of the world view of experience, the world view that serves to summarize what is happening externally. Hence we see how, in the course of this school of thought, an outstanding mind such as Locke denies the possibility that the soul can gain any knowledge from itself; all it can do is to stand and observe the course of the world; then what it can observe will be written on the soul's blank slate. In this sense, the soul itself is a blank slate, a tabula rasa; not as with Descartes, innate ideas arise that are connected with the essence of the soul. Locke crosses out all innate ideas. For him, the world view arises only from the fact that the human soul focuses on its surroundings, that it analyzes, synthesizes and reflects on what is going on outside. This current extends right up to more recent times. People like John Stuart Mill, Herbert Spencer and others are influenced by an impulse such as that just mentioned. One would like to say: with such a world view, everything that the soul could achieve by developing inwardly and bringing up what it does not yet have when it is placed in the world in a natural way, is rejected, so that it must stop at everything that presents itself externally and apply all the soul's strength to summarizing what presents itself from the outside.

When I first tried to find a concept, an idea for this kind of English philosophy, especially for John Stuart Mill, about fifteen years ago – this is presented in my “World and Life Views in the Nineteenth Century” – I struggled to find a suitable expression to characterize John Stuart Mill's world struggled to find a fitting expression to characterize John Stuart Mill's world view; and even then I had to characterize this world view in such a way that I said: This point of view is that of the 'spectator of the world', it is not the point of view of a soul that works inwardly on itself with the belief that it can advance in the knowledge of the inner connections of things through this inner work. John Stuart Mill also takes this standpoint as a spectator, for Mill was also one of the followers of Locke and Bacon, and he faces the world in such a way that he stands before what is presented to the senses externally and what can be joined together in thoughts, just as thoughts are joined and dissolved in everyday life.

Now we see how, in yet another way, Giordano Bruno, Descartes and Bacon in the way they are characterized work on the creation of a world view, in German, Central European intellectual culture on the emergence of a world view; we see how, in solitude, a profound German mind seeks to gain a world view from the depths of the national soul. It is easy to misunderstand this thinker, who strives for the highest possible insights for a human being, and to ridicule him; but when we speak of German intellectual life, we must draw attention to this one man: Jakob Böhme, who lived at the end of the sixteenth and the beginning of the seventeenth century. It is certainly easy to misjudge this simple shoemaker from Görlitz, for he did not speak as did Copernicus or Giordano Bruno, who drafted a world picture out of his elementary intuitive perception; nor did he speak out of a striving for clarity and distinctness, as we find in Descartes, and he spoke even less like Bacon, who wanted to summarize what presents itself outwardly to the senses. Rather, he spoke in such a way that when he delved into his soul or was with nature, something was there that had not been there before; he spoke of how an inward path is traversed that leads to the innermost secrets of existence. He spoke of what ignited within him when, as a shepherd boy, he once looked into a hole in the ground at the top of a mountain and saw a metal vessel full of gold in the recess. He said that this experience ignited something within him, and he wanted to say: A spark has been kindled in my soul, which has been ignited by the spirit that is weaving in the world; I felt connected to the spirit living in the world. And he goes on to tell us how he pursued this experience in his soul and also lived in a state of soul alienated from everyday life for seven days, how he had gone through a “paradise and realm of joy,” how he did not feel connected to reality through his senses, nor to what the senses presented through his mind, but how he felt connected through his soul to what invisibly and supersensibly reigns in things. But when he told this to his master, with whom he was then apprenticed, the latter told him to get out of there, because he could not use any young house prophets! And many still speak like this master today; in this respect, people have not become more understanding.

But if we delve into Jakob Böhme, we see how he wants to tie his soul to what pulses through the soul spiritually and emotionally. While Giordano Bruno directed his soul outwards, in order to see the 'soul of the world' everywhere, which he assumed, it is the case with Jakob Böhme that he only wants to form and shape his soul inwardly, that he does not want to look at the soul of the world outwardly, but rather immerses himself in it, so that he participates in the life of this soul of the world. Participates, I said. This is the starting point for world views that arise from a dark urge, for Jakob Böhme works without external scholarship, only from his soul. It is the beginning of the striving of a soul that draws its impulses from the impulses of the German national soul: this immersion in what is otherwise only observed or what is presented in clarity and distinctness. Jakob Böhme would not have understood what Cartesius strove for; for him it was not a matter of clarity and distinctness, but of allowing the soul to live the life of the great world soul. And if he could do that, then it did not matter to him whether it was clear and distinct, because “it is simply experienced!” And this “it is experienced” has remained like an impact, like a ferment within the striving of the German national spirit. Those spirits whom I mentioned in my lecture of eight days ago are the continuers of that first germ which was in Jakob Böhme; one can still see in them how they only want to strive clearly for what was already in Jakob Böhme's striving, which can be expressed by saying that he wanted to experience the secrets of the world — not just look at them!

Now, however, we must look at a second starting point for the more recent striving for a worldview if we want to recognize all the forces that are inherent in this newer striving for a worldview. This other starting point is often more admired today by people who are striving for a worldview than the starting point of Jacob Boehme; it is the one that is also found in a German mind, and again in an eminently cosmopolitan mind, namely in Leibniz. His world view is similar to that of Giordano Bruno, but expressed in a German world view nuance. If we want to characterize the Italian world view, we have to say: it is born out of the sentient soul. In the same sense, the French world view is born out of the mind or mind soul; especially when studying Cartesius, one notices this to a very special degree. The British world view is born entirely out of the consciousness soul, out of that consciousness soul which, especially in the stage of observation, is able to focus on what is external and what the mind can bring to consciousness from it. The German view of the world emerges from the I itself, from the most intimate inner workings of the soul. And just as light is present in both the red-yellow and the green-blue-violet, so the I is present in the sentient soul, in the mind or emotional soul and also in the consciousness soul, , but is therefore also a continuous back-and-forth striving, sometimes striving for the sentient soul, as with Jakob Böhme, sometimes more inclined towards the intellectual soul, as with Leibniz. What Jakob Böhme strives for inwardly as a way of living in the soul of the world, Leibniz strives for through the intellect, but not, as is the case with Descartes, not as a mathematical mind, but as a soul that has a clear awareness that man in his essence is a part of the whole world. And so Leibniz said to himself: What I am as a soul, a conceiving being, is basically everywhere, underlying the whole world. What we see in space is not a mere spatial construction, but the reality is that everything that is reality outside is of the same kind as that which is within me; only my soul comes to an alert consciousness, as it were. In the beings outside, which are not human, there are also such basic components as are present in humans. Leibniz calls them “monads.” What is “really” in them is consciousness. Only the monads of the mineral and plant kingdoms have something like a sleeping consciousness; then they become more and more aware and aware, to finally come to self-awareness in the human kingdom.

For Leibniz, the world is composed entirely of monads, and if you do not see the world as monads, it is because you see it indistinctly – as it is with a swarm of mosquitoes, which, seen from a distance, appears indistinct and looks like a cloud, but as soon as you get closer, it dissolves into the individual mosquitoes. So, for example, the table in front of me consists of monads, but these monads are seen pushed together like the individual midges in a swarm. Thus, for Leibniz, the entire world consists of individual monads, and just as the individual monads are mirrored in the whole world, so they are a microcosm in the macrocosm. One must imagine that the entire world is mirrored in every single monad, and a harmony implanted by the original monad spreads throughout the whole.

If one wants to characterize the salient feature of this Leibnizian world view, one must say: the salient feature is its abstractness, its thoughtfulness; and this abstract-thoughtfulness is indeed immediately apparent when one looks at it more closely. For what would be the use of it if, as Leibniz does with regard to the individual monads, one were to dwell only on a clock and say: the individual link, the individual cogwheel would be effective with the whole clock, would thus be a “little clock,” and all the effects of the clock would find expression in it? Certainly, anyone who has knowledge of the composition of the clock can say how its individual parts are connected. But what would it matter if one were to say that the real characteristic of the clock is its harmony? One encompasses it with an abstract concept. Today, however, people are usually glad when they can put an abstract concept for something; but one cannot grasp a clock through the mere concept of harmony. In this we can feel the contrast between a rational, abstract world view, as offered to us by Leibniz, and an ever-increasing immersion in the workings and weaving of the world spirit, as first presented to us by Jakob Böhme, albeit more in the form of a hunch.

In a similar way to Descartes, who sought the possibility of mathematically subordinating thoughts to the world view, Spinoza also strove for a world view that is comprehensible like a mathematical system; but at the same time, he wanted to shape it in such a way that, as one ascends from concept to concept, an ever higher and higher experience of the human soul results. He characteristically calls his mathematical world picture 'ethics' because, as he strings concept to concept, each successive one leads the soul ever deeper into the secrets of existence, until the soul, by becoming ever more absorbed in the concepts that lead from mathematics to mathematics, can feel at one with the unified substance of the world, with the unified spirit of the universe. It is an inward progression, a self-development in Spinoza. Therefore Spinoza stands alone in his striving for a world view. He has the impact that he was able to get from Descartes; but he has brought it into his world view in a deeper way through what he himself was able to get.

All the elements that have now been mentioned have influenced, in a certain way, what the world view of the nineteenth century has now become. But one can say: the blossoming and development of what was called “German Idealism” here eight days ago was a protest — which only never came to full effectiveness — against the fact that the world view developed into what Herman Grimm said: “A carrion bone that a hungry dog would avoid would be a refreshing, appetizing piece compared to this excrement of creation.” And it was always the case with the most outstanding minds, who stood with their natures within the development of the German people, that they endeavored to take up all the impulses that necessarily entered into the spiritual development of humanity in the construction of their world view, but to shape this world view in such a way that the striving for a worldview is not merely looking, not merely “watching”, but inner experience. Thus we see that in the characteristic spirit of German striving — in Goethe — the individual members, the various parts of the currents of world-view, are absorbed. In Goethe's 'Faust', which in this respect is a reflection of his own striving, we can see how his Faust develops out of the details of external observation, how he wants to arrive at an overall feeling for what permeates and animates the world. This is truly the spirit of Giordano Bruno. In this, and in the other, how later Goethe did not rest until he could fully immerse himself in Italian art, we see everywhere something of that nuance of feeling of the soul that seeks to expand one's own self into the world's self. And this already flows through the first parts that Goethe wrote down of his Faust.

On the other hand, we can see how the second world-view current, which in Descartes took the form of the pursuit of clarity and distinctness, has taken on a characteristically materialistic expression in Europe. Goethe was already aware of this as a young man when he was in Strasbourg, in Holbach's “Systeme de la nature”. I have already indicated how Descartes, in his world view, presents animals as animated automatons that are not ensouled. From what this Cartesian world view and, later, the British world view, which spread to the continent through Voltaire and fully embraced the aforementioned rejection of what the soul can inwardly achieve in inward striving, in order to accept only that which can be space can be systematized: from this arose the world view that Goethe opposed in Holbach's “Systeme de la nature,” which knows only the moving atoms that group themselves into molecules, and through whose agglomerations everything that can be seen in the world is said to arise. That world picture, which seeks to resolve everything into the effect of moving atoms and molecules, has clarity, the greatest clarity, and distinctness, a clarity, a distinctness that cannot be increased in such a world picture. But everything of a spiritual-soul nature must fall away from such a world picture. There is no room in it for anything of a spiritual-soul nature.

Goethe was already confronted with such a world view in his youth. He rejected it by saying:

Goethe finds this world view “cold and barren”.

And now we see how Goethe, summarizing everything that is in his soul, wants to combine clarity and distinctness with direct experience, in a way that was not present in Descartes. This is the characteristic that enters into the German world view during Goethe's time. How do we see the striving for clarity and distinctness in Descartes? In such a way that what one looks at, what one thinks about, must show itself clearly and distinctly. It must show itself clearly and distinctly to the observer. Goethe is clear about the fact that one does not gain any knowledge at all by merely seeing things clearly and distinctly placed before one; but he is clear about it, even if he does not want to stop at the mere inkling of Jakob Böhme: If one wants to gain a real world view that corresponds to reality, one must immerse oneself in things, to witness the forming of the crystal by placing oneself in the position of the forces that form the crystal; and in the same way, one must enter into the plant, witness the forces that make the plant a plant, and immerse oneself in all beings. Goethe does not want an abstract world view, cobbled together out of monads and harmonies, but a world view that is experienced. But not, as with Jakob Böhme, only intuitively, but by immersing oneself in all the things of the world, and through this immersion, the human being undergoes the path by which he or she approaches more and more the innermost sources of existence. That is why the world view that presented itself to him in Spinoza's work was able to have such an effect on Goethe. Spinoza never had the impulse to immerse his soul in the real external world. He sought to string together the impressions of the world in front of him, one after the other, but in such a way that the soul would undergo something in the process. Not that Goethe was ever a devout follower of Spinoza's world view; only those who know nothing about Goethe can say that. Rather, it is the case that Goethe felt the way he wanted to find his way into a world view with Spinoza, found it with him. The only difference is that what Spinoza strove for in an abstract way, Goethe wanted to seek in a concrete way. Just as Spinoza moves from concept to concept, Goethe wanted to move from plant to plant in order to experience what the plant experiences. Goethe called the soul's attainment by immersing itself in the plant world the “Utrpflanze”; and what the soul experienced by immersing itself in the animal world in the same way, he called the “Urtier”. Thus for Goethe the striving for a world-picture became a participation, but not a dark one as in Jakob Böhme; but the experience itself was to proceed in clarity and distinctness. This is witnessed to by Goethe's little essay on the “Metamorphosis of Plants”, in which he describes how the plant develops from root to leaf and to flower, with constant transformations taking place. But we must always bear in mind that Goethe sought to achieve his goal by immersing himself in the essence of things. While Cartesius, in his world view, threw everything of a spiritual nature out of the essence, for example out of animals, and turned them into living automatons, Goethe allowed his own soul to flow into plants, into animals, into the whole world, in order to connect with it in his soul and to recognize it clearly. Clarity and distinctness of experience is what entered the world-view striving of German idealism in Goethe's time. What Cartesius makes an external characteristic of knowledge, which he presents and behaves as a spectator, Goethe connects with the inner experience. And what is wrested with dark, elemental power from the soul of Jakob Böhme and expressed in his words, is also present in Goethe; but in that it shows itself in him, we find it in clarity and distinctness.

Now, however, we see in Goethe what the three great minds also strove for, which were cited as characteristic of German idealism.

Let us look at Fichte. Eight days ago, we characterized how he strives to gain a world view by seeking certainty entirely from the impulses of the innermost part of man, the I. And if we want to see through Fichte completely, what then dominates in his world view? We might put it this way: what dominates in his world view is everything that a person can develop within themselves, without directing any kind of gaze to the outside world, by gaining self-awareness. This is a welling up and flowing up from the innermost depths of the soul. I have often characterized it here: every external thing can be named by everyone in the same way as the name expresses it; but we can only name the I in such a way, if it is to express our being, by letting it resound within ourselves. Fichte did not express this; but it underlies his entire world view as an impulse, and he starts from the assumption that the I is only there when it places itself in the world. A volitional decision, then, is what Fichte seeks as the center of the development of his worldview. And he asserts of the ego — and this already characterizes Fichte's worldview — that it can find out of itself what the mission of itself is. For Fichte, this is the moral worldview. And the national world exists only to engage in moral activity. Thus, for Fichte, everything is permeated by the divine within man. Everything else is only appearance, is only created so that the moral world order can be active. The will, which is grasped in the consciousness of self, in the point of self-awareness, and radiates from the consciousness of self, is grasped as part of the soul of the world.

The way in which Fichte presents this shows us that, in a sense, he starts from full self-consciousness. Just as the light appears in every single color nuance – to return to this comparison – he starts from the self that appears in all three soul members; but he lets it prevail in such a way that it works through the consciousness soul. And in this respect, I would say that in Fichte we have the thinker who is the antipode, the opposite pole, of the British spirit. While the British spirit essentially brings to bear that which can prevail in the soul impulses in the consciousness soul, Fichte radiates everything that lives in the I into the consciousness soul. Hence the British spirit in Spencer's more recent work has come to expect the blessing of the world above all from the establishment of such an outer order, whereby the whole outer world is so arranged that the greatest possible benefit for outer human needs arises. What industrialization can offer humanity stands as an ideal in Spencer's world view; and to him, every link in a social order that is incompatible with the industrialization of society appears to be a curse, because the industrialization of society, of the state, brings eternal peace, according to Spencer, and works to eradicate everything that endangers peace. Thus the ultimate principle of utility has been incorporated into the world view.

With Fichte, we see that he is no less a practical mind. We have been able to emphasize how he directly influenced the development of his time, for example through his “Speeches to the German Nation,” how he stirred hearts, how he awakened enthusiasm, how his entire work is aimed at , but to take hold of what is not from the point of view of the external world of the highest benefit to mankind, but what is to be placed as the deepest ideals of the soul in the moral world order. So we see how Fichte works out of the nuance of the consciousness soul and, as it were, brings about the counter-image of the British spirit.

A spirit that places at the center of his world view what the soul can experience within itself, but which, through the way in which he processes this, is infinitely close to the French spirit, is Flegel. Hegel is one of the most German thinkers because he accomplishes from the opposite side what is peculiar to the French mind. Clarity and distinctness, systematic order in the spectator's point of view, in the point of view that is gained when one only confronts the world: that is what has emerged from Cartesius to Bergson as the characteristic of the French world view. Hegel wants to have the world picture as an experience; but he can only absorb from this world picture that which is as clear and distinct as a mathematical concept. That is why Hegel's world picture seems as clear as a mathematical concept. That is why one has the “cold feeling” towards it, as I have explained. But it is not a system of mathematical concepts that has been picked up, but it is conceived in such a way that it touches the soul in its deepest innermost being. And by touching the soul in its deepest innermost being, it finds itself elevated above all that is unclear and indistinct in the external view. But what remains for it, after all that is vague and indistinct has fallen away from it, is the clarity of the full being — to the point of the Gnostic and philosophical concept. What characterizes Hegel's world picture is this: even if it contains only external abstractions, these abstractions are experienced, directly experienced. That makes a great deal, to be sure. First of all, it makes it unthinkable for someone to become a “true Hegelian.” Basically, one cannot become a true Hegelian; it is an impossibility. Because thinking, continuing these external abstractions, really has no appeal for anyone else, and one always has the feeling that once someone has done this, that is enough in the world. What matters is the endeavor to see how the human soul can be experienced if one only experiences concepts, if one only feels as inner direct experience that which is a clear but also completely abstract concept. The pursuit of such a world view is what is admirable about Hegel; looking at him as he pursues it is what matters. Particularly when one is absorbed in a work such as his Phenomenology of Spirit (though admittedly very few people will be able to immerse themselves in it), one has a web of nothing but abstractions, of the most terrible abstractions; but it has life, it has soul. It is a characteristic sign that the German mind has once gone so far in its experience of a world picture that it said to itself: I find no clarity and distinctness anywhere; I will see what happens when I let one concept arise from the other. While Fichte allows the divine essence of the world to merge into “God as moral world order,” for Hegel God is the “world thinker”; and the individual soul can immerse itself through the most abstract logic by reflecting on the divine thoughts. That is certainly the tremendously sobering and cold thing about Hegel's philosophy, that if you get involved with it, you must get the thought: the divine order of the world was only concerned with “thinking,” and in order to represent thinking, everything else was represented. A moral worldview warms us; a moral worldview also, so to speak, places us in everyday life. Thinking only allows us to “behold” the world, and in this respect, beholding is also an experience with Hegel. And because it is the experience that is important in forming the world view of German idealism, we see how it is made fruitful by Hegel in such a way that he does not lose himself in the most external abstractions, but adheres to the thoughts that the divine order of the world allows the human race to experience by letting it go through history. The human soul is, as it were, directed to go through history in order thereby to take part in the course of the divine world-order. This “taking part” in the world, which I indicated in a much more universal sense in Goethe, is what we encounter in Hegel in relation to history. The way in which the thoughts run in relation to history, so they contribute to a world-picture of history. But in this experience of the logic of the world, history becomes for him what it must become: a twofold one. The whole ancient history up to the appearance of Christ on earth is the one part; and the appearance of Christ is a mighty impact, is the most powerful impact on earth-history, in order to bring something completely new into human evolution, which was not previously connected with the earth, and which now guides earthly evolution. The Christ-idea connects in the characterized way with the historical world picture, which the German evolution has brought forth. For Hegel, the whole of history is a progression conceived by the divine world government, so that it presents itself as an education of humanity to freedom. And the greatest educator, but one who divides the entire progress of earthly evolution into two parts, is the Christ-Being, which has come into earthly evolution from without — also in Hegel's sense. And the characteristic feature is this: with the clarity and distinctness that Cartesius demands, but with which all experience is also connected in Hegel, the soul can live itself into the whole course of history; there it immerses itself in the stage in which in which the event of Golgotha took place, and experiences in microcosm what the whole development of the earth has gone through, in that the Christ has incorporated Himself into the development of the earth.

Thus Hegel anchors his world picture in the soul of the intellect, and thereby becomes the opposite pole to Descartes' world view, just as Fichte is the opposite pole to the British world view.

The case is different when we come to the third of the thinkers mentioned, Schelling. One could say of him that his outer thinking already expresses how he can be brought into a relationship with the southern world view, the Italian one. I have already mentioned how he seeks to shape what underlies all natural and historical becoming out of a heightened imagination. In this regard, Schelling's outward appearance is physiognomically significant: his eyes, which sparkled throughout his life, bore witness to inner fire; the powerful forehead, his sardonic laughter and the inner fire made him a spirit similar to Giordano Bruno. Whereas in Fichte we have the point where the German mind tends towards the same nuance of soul as the British mind, but in complete contrast to it, and wants to grasp world events from within—whereas the German mind produces in Hegel something that is still opposed to the French mind , but which is more similar to it, the German spirit produces something in Schelling that is completely similar to Giordano Bruno, because Schelling works in just the same way as Giordano Bruno according to the nuances of the soul. It is only that Schelling builds his world view in a slightly different way than Giordano Bruno in all of nature and history. And while in Fichte the world-spirit pervading the world is the moral order of the world, while in Hegel we see this world-spirit as the clear and distinct logical thinker of the world, in Schelling — similarly to Giordano Bruno — we have before us the highest artist, art itself, the artist who creates everything in the world according to artistic principles. But if we compare Schelling's unique quest with Giordano Bruno's, we see again the difference between the work of the Italian national soul, which comes from the soul of feeling, and the work of the German national soul, which comes from the ego. In Giordano Bruno, everything is, as it were, of a piece, everything bears a common character. I would like to say: Giordano's world view is as clear as a shot. In Schelling, we see how he starts from the world view of his youth, how he laboriously searches to feel some of it, how one can experience a spark of world life in nature. And he arrives at the view that whatever lives in my spirit as feeling also lives in matter; matter is enchanted feeling, I must release it from the enchantment, must disenchant it; the experiencing of everything that is in nature is an experiencing of feeling. While Giordano Bruno attempts to gain his world-picture as if in a single bound, Schelling sets out on a journey. And I might say that from year to year we can follow how he seeks to penetrate deeper and deeper into the secrets of the existence of the world. He is passing through the path of evolution. He had to go through it in such a way that in his youth he was still understood in the way the inwardness of the I had opened up to him; later, when he still wanted to show the I in the moral world, he was no longer understood, and in the end he was laughed at and ridiculed.

The world view of German idealism is above all a path into the deeper foundations of world existence. If I may use an image, I would say: the British world view is like a person who is in a house and looks out of a window. What he sees there, he takes as the description of the world; and so he takes what he sees through the tools of the house as the world itself. German idealism is pointed in the direction of seeking to experience the world-spirit together with it. If we follow the path, however, we see how he, also living in a house, grasps himself inwardly. In Schelling, Hegel, Fichte, we see that German idealism seeks to make itself at home in the house; it sees meaningful images everywhere in the house, and the “images” already express the external entities; and because it wants to decipher the images, it seeks a world picture. Fichte seeks it in the moral soul: a world picture, sketched in the house, not created through the windows. Hegel explains the pictures in the house that represent nature and humanity. Schelling, in turn, deciphers another part, or rather, Schelling makes “house music,” and in it he sees an imprint of what is going on outside. Hegel sees what has been painted about what is outside. All these minds have a world picture ; but they have created a home in order to decipher what is in the house. What they have not come to, however, is, I might say, the door of the house – that they might go out, so that when they had come through the gate they might fuse the image with reality, might experience it directly.

It is true that Goethe took this path – through the gate. But he also went through all the difficulties of this path. He showed us how we must struggle endlessly to find an expression for what we experience when we really set out on the path of experience. Thus he went through the experience with its struggles and difficulties, which such an experience must go through, just as one who seeks development must go through life. We see how Goethe defined a certain stage of his life in Faust of 1797, which he characteristically calls a “barbaric composition” and of which he is convinced that something completely new must come in at a new stage of his life. That is one of the characteristics of the German view of the world: it can never be “finished”. That superficial judgment, which finds the great only “great” when it is “flawless,” is not a judgment suited to the hero of human endeavor. Anyone who might entertain the opinion that we can have a work of art in the Faust that is just as perfect as that given us by Dante in his Divine Comedy would be mistaken. In Dante's work, everything is magnificently complete, as if cast from a single mold; in Goethe's, the individual parts are written piece by piece, one after the other, with each one left lying around for years, then taken up again, and so on. It really is, as he himself says, a “barbaric composition.” Goethe's Faust is certainly incomplete as a work of art, for the reason that it could not become a unified composition from a single mold, because it always went along with life. But the point is not that we say: Faust of 1797 is a barbaric composition, a “Tragelaph”, as Goethe put it, but that we take Goethe's point of view and try to understand how it can be a barbaric composition; only in this way do we escape blindness, while one can only speak of recognition with the abstract word.

Thus Goethe goes the way through the gate, knowing that one can go out through the gate, and differs from the philosophers in that he tries to get ahead. But at the same time he knows: whatever man can imagine of himself, whatever picture he can make of himself, it cannot be what Fichte presents in his philosophy, nor what Schelling or Hegel present; otherwise one arrives at nothing but abstractions, at an abstract moral world order and the like.

What then is it in the Goethean sense that man can only gain as an idea of himself? It is Homunculus, as he presents him in the second part of Faust, the little man Homunculus, an artificial product of what man can know of himself. This must now first be submerged into living nature. And how that which man bears of himself must merge with living nature, that Goethe presents in turn. In the lowest becoming you must begin, Homunculus is told.

Thus Goethe presents the process of development in its entire becoming. For example, when he speaks of the passage through the plant stage, where he uses the words: “It grunet so.” He admonishes the homunculus to immerse himself in the entire process of development; he even admonishes him: “Do not strive for higher places” - it must be “places”, not “orders”, as it because Goethe spoke in an unclear Frankfurt dialect, the transcriber wrote a “d” instead of a “t”; and the Goethe commentators have thought a lot about how the homunculus should come to all kinds of medals. And then it is further explained how, by becoming part of the world, he can come to appear as Helen; for what appears in Helen is the human reproduction of what passes through the secrets of the world.

Thus, in Goethe we see the setting out for a world picture. The German spirit is aware: I must go out through the gate to what is present in living nature; then, in the continuous development of my soul, a world picture will come about. This world picture, however, demands what it means to experience the world. Patience for this was not yet present in the second half of the nineteenth century. Therefore, the striving for a world view, as it was inaugurated by Goethe, is being held back. So it could come about that in the second half of the nineteenth century — characteristically in Karl Vogt, Büchner and Moleschott, who are referred to as the “materialists,” Haeckel himself could be mentioned in this context — that which the British world view has brought has been resurrected. One can say that the British world view was absorbed by the German spirit in the second half of the nineteenth century. It is Haeckel's tragedy that he must now turn against the British world view, even though it has entered into the German striving through the characterized development.

But in this respect, too, the German conception of the world differs from the British one: the British conception is satisfied with the pursuit of ideas that merely synthesize the external sense world, and it allows “faith” in some spiritual world to coexist with the external conception of the world in which it believes, as a “scientific” conception of the world. Thus, for Darwin, faith can arise as he expressed it in his main scientific work, saying: “Thus we have traced the life of organisms back to a few to whom – as he puts it – the Creator has breathed life!” Yes, the remarkable thing happened that the German translator even left this sentence out at first! For the German mind everything must be capable of furnishing the basis for a Weltanschhauung; for the British mind this demand need not be satisfied, because it does not have the consistency to build up its Weltbild to such an extent that everything becomes material for its Weltanschhauung. It can afford a “double entry”: the scientific world provides it with the building blocks for what it considers to be scientifically correct; for the rest, there is faith. For the German mind, no double-entry bookkeeping is good enough. That is why German idealism was overwhelmed by English empiricism. That is why we see strange phenomena in the German pursuit of a world view. I will cite only Du Bois-Reymond: in him lives the admiration for the Descartes-Laplacean spirit, which thinks the world as a great mathematician might have put it together from atoms and forces. But: Ignorabimus! We can never know anything about the soul and spirit. Cartesius and Giordano Bruno did not need to go so far as this. But Du Bois-Reymond goes so far as to say: “[...] that where supernaturalism begins, science ends.” Descartes does not say this, but Du Bois-Reymond does, where we find the German spirit overwhelmed by Descartes. And so one can show further how the Italian spirit, that of Giordano Bruno, has flowed into numerous endeavors of the German striving for a world view. Thus today we already find many who show how the plant has a “soul” and how everything is ensouled. We need only think of Raoul France. But we could also mention many of his contemporaries, even Fechner himself, who says that everything has a soul: a revival of the spirit of Giordano Bruno. But something is missing. What is missing is precisely what lived in Giordano Bruno. That is why I have often been able to point out: when someone like Raoul France comes and says: there are plants – when certain animals come near them, they attract them, lure them; once the animal has crept into them, they close up a gap and suck it dry... don't we see a soul life in the plant? We have to say: if you read the same thing in Giordano Bruno, you would fully understand it because it is imbued with the impulse of the sentient soul. But when it occurs, as it has done through the clarity and distinctness of German idealism, then what I have often stated applies: there is something that, by the very nature of its being, attracts small animals, absorbs them – very much like the Venus flytrap – and then even kills them. It is the mousetrap. And just as one can explain the ensoulment of plants in the sense of Giordano Bruno, so one can also want to explain the ensoulment of a mousetrap.

The fact that certain ideological impulses poured into the worldview of German idealism, which is the protest against all externalization of the worldview, means that something has taken place that can be said of: German idealism has retreated for a while into German souls and minds. And today we see it only as an ideal of struggle, of inner discipline; we see it as transformed into outer action, again filling souls with hope and confidence and with strength. But we must realize that this power is the same power that once sought an inward world-view through an inward struggle on the road to the world-picture of idealism. And this world-picture of German idealism is in reality that which the German spirit must seek as lying on its own predetermined road. And our fateful time contains many, many admonitions, but undoubtedly also the admonition that the German spirit must struggle to bring forth again that which is in its deepest depths, so that it may be an obvious part of all its striving, of all its work.

I do not believe that this could lead to a lesser understanding of the peculiarities of other nations, that the German spirit will become aware that it must become the bearer of the world view of inwardly experienced idealism. On the contrary: the more the German brings to the world that which lives in his soul as his deepest being, the more he will be valued in the world. We shall be all the more understood if we bear in mind the words of Goethe:

“The German runs no greater danger than that of rising with and by his neighbors; perhaps no nation is better suited to develop out of itself, because it has been to its great advantage that the outside world took notice of it so late.”

And indeed, it has taken so little notice to this day that it was possible to make such judgments about the German character as were heard.

This is what German idealism calls to us as a warning in our fateful time: may the self-confidence of the German national soul awaken in our souls! This German idealism had to produce a moral, logical, artistic world view in the house, since it already reigned, I might say, in the house; it had the gift of recognizing the world – in paintings in the house. And it must find the way through the gate into the surrounding area. And he must recognize what this path looks like, in contrast to others, which leads not only to looking at the surroundings through the windows, as is the case with the British world view, but to reaching these surroundings through the gate, to lovingly reach everything in the world by becoming one with it. If German idealism practised itself by contemplating the world pictures of the microcosm, the human body, it will also find the gate out of the body to the path already indicated by Goethe, and which leads to seeking the world view experienced with things instead of the merely conceived, devised, inwardly fought world view. is contained in the first ominous lines of Jakob Böhme, which in Goethe's work have taken on clear contours and shine forth as an ideal for the future, and which does not remain limited to the ideas suggested by Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, who were looking at the paintings in the house, but which can also find its way through the gate to connect the living human soul with the living soul of the world.

In the course of these lectures, I have often emphasized that it is quite natural, as a matter of course, that from the point of view of the majority of people today, objections about objections must be raised against spiritual science. But I also emphasized in the lecture I gave here on the question of immortality from the point of view of spiritual science that genuine. Spiritual Science wants nothing to do with what is all too often done in its name, but that it is in complete harmony with natural science. But it is also in complete harmony with what a healthy philosophy has to say. Since this is noteworthy for our consideration today, I would like to emphasize this harmony with philosophical thinking in a few introductory remarks.

What spiritual science always has to assert is not based on philosophical speculation, but on what has been called the inner experience, the inner experience of spiritual facts; it has to assert the independence, the self-contained nature of the human soul — to put it more popularly: that the human being has a spiritual-soul existence that goes beyond the physical-bodily. I said that this is entirely consistent with a healthy philosophy based on scientific principles, because many people, from the way of thinking of our time, perceive such an assertion as the extreme of all unscientificness. It is easy to say from a scientific point of view: How can one speak of the human soul as something independent when physiologists show that everything is dependent on what develops physically in the human being. We see how, when a part of the brain is injured, disturbances occur immediately due to the loss of a part of the brain functions. Must we not be led to the thought that the soul activities lie in the normally behaving nervous system or brain? One can point out how mental abilities grow with the adolescent human being, how in old age, when the external system withers, hardens, mental abilities decrease and so on. On the basis of such observations, many a train of thought could be formed that would have to suggest the idea that spiritual experience basically consists in nothing other than the activity of the nervous system and the rest of the organism. Let us hear what an astute philosopher, Otto Liebmann, whom I have mentioned in my book “Riddles of Philosophy,” has to say about this. He is not one of those who make assertions based on superficial thinking, but rather he states what the facts of the analysis of human thought are capable of providing. He deals with the belief that the human soul exists only in the physical, and says remarkable words, corresponding to a sharp-witted philosophy that coincides with the current state of natural science. In summary, he says: It is by no means certain what Munk and others have established regarding the dependence of mental activity on the brain, because, for example, an injured part of the brain can be replaced by other functions. But if we had reached our goal, then in principle nothing would have changed. That is to say, modern philosophy says that no matter how far one advances in the study of the connection between the soul and the physical, one can only know that one must use certain internal organs in order to think, feel and will. We can draw the parallel that we need certain parts of the brain for the soul, just as we use the hand to grasp. But when we use this hand to grasp, the mechanical action of the hand is added to the soul. We cannot speak of the soul actions of the brain in this way. However, this is only because the investigations of natural science are not complete. As it moves forward to prove the connection between the physical and the soul, it will find that there is a different connection between thinking, feeling, willing and the nervous system than between the hand and grasping. It will find that they are connected in the same way as the imprints that feet make in soft soil are connected to the soil.

What specifically can be found in the brain can be derived from the soul's activity, just as footsteps can be derived from feet on the earth. Just as there could be no connection between walking and footprints without solid ground, so it is with everything that is done in the physical body. Everything that a person thinks and wills leaves an imprint in the nervous system in the physical body; but it does not emerge from it, any more than footprints emerge from the earth. One needs the physical body as a surface for resistance, just as one needs solid earth to walk on. Therefore it is self-evident that one must find imprints. It is a scientifically legitimate endeavor to find them; but it is unscientific to want to extract from the physical what has been impressed by the soul-spiritual. In this respect, Liebmann's assertion is false. The imprint is only the accompanying phenomenon of the soul-spiritual. It is precisely this that natural science will prove in the most eminent sense by its means; it will show how one can follow the traces, but will not want to explain them from within the organism. Natural science is already on this path; today, full-fledged proof of this could be provided. Spiritual science does not dispute any of the facts of natural science; spiritual science fully recognizes natural science. It only rebels against the unwarranted claim of the natural scientists to be doing something that they themselves do not know about — against the despotism of the scientists. This goes even further. One could almost grasp how they are driving individual philosophers into what spiritual science wants to present, following on directly from the example already given by Otto Liebmann. What he says is exemplary in terms of acumen and dissection. He says that someone might say that a hen's egg contains not only egg white and yolk but also a ghost; that it embodies itself, pecks open the shell, runs out and immediately pecks up the scattered grains. One could understand that someone would take this as a joke. But Otto Liebmann certainly does not mean it as a joke. He continues by saying that there is no reason to object to this, except that the preposition “in” must be understood not spatially but metaphysically. Understood in this way, it is quite correct, says Otto Liebmann. The fact is that an astute philosopher must admit: one cannot object to the statement that a chicken egg contains not only yolk and egg white, but also an invisible ghost that materializes. Otto Liebmann does not believe, however, that one should form a worldview immediately after reading a few books, but wants to carefully consider how one sets one's thinking in motion. From the spiritual science lectures, one can see how what Otto Liebmann addresses here as a “ghost” that materializes is present in the human being himself as a supersensible being.

Today I cannot talk about the methods that are used to detach the soul and spiritual from the physical and bodily, and to discover something in thinking of which one knows nothing in ordinary life; likewise to discover something underlying the will and feeling, of which the will and feeling are only an impression. For the spiritual researcher, what Otto Liebmann describes here in theory in regard to the chicken egg can become an inner experience for the human being. Spiritual science will not claim that it can present it ghost-like, for instance in a halo of light, to the physical eye; if it did so, it would be a physical and not a spiritual experience. But it can be realized consciously, just as the experience is mediated by the bodily in everyday life, but only by detaching oneself from the bodily. Otto Liebmann sensed that the bodily is based on a spiritual. Spiritual science proceeds by showing how the spiritual-soul methods lead to developing the consciousness of what Otto Liebmann speaks of. This consciousness can be developed. Just as the outer, sensory world becomes an object for ordinary consciousness, so too, when a person frees their soul and spirit, they become an object themselves: they look at themselves from the outside.

It could be objected that one would then claim to be in harmony with philosophy, but it remains to be seen whether Otto Liebmann would accept these musings or declare them to be just that – musings. But suppose that in the time when the telephone was yet to be discovered, one physicist had spoken to another about it, and the other had said that it was impossible. Does that mean that the telephone as we know it today is not in line with what physics was at that time? This is how it is with spiritual science. With a way of judging as suggested, one would be forced to fight against all human progress from the prejudices of a once adopted point of view.

Man can truly free himself from the physical body. From this point of view, some light will be shed on the mysteries of sleep and death. When man frees himself from the physical body, he enters a state in which he can see through his entire humanity as it is in the physical world. Only now is true self-knowledge possible. Only now do you become an object, like the hydrogen that is otherwise in the water only becomes an object when it is released by the chemist. Now you are able to relate this new insight to states of consciousness that cannot be related to each other in ordinary everyday consciousness: the experience of being awake in relation to the experience of being asleep.

When a person is absorbed in sleep, the spiritual and mental have stepped out of the physical. Otto Liebmann's “ghost” temporarily detaches itself from the physical, and a purely spiritual-soul relationship is established between the state as one gains it through spiritual development and the state of sleep; a relationship as between what I am now experiencing and a memory of what I once experienced. As I look at what I once experienced, so I look at the state of sleep and find that the spiritual and soul-life is outside the physical and bodily from the moment I fall asleep until I wake up. One must connect with it spiritually and mentally. So one overlooks the two parts of human nature, the physical body that has remained in bed and that which has left, just as one overlooks hydrogen and oxygen when they have been separated from water. But even more: one sees that what has remained as corporeality is indeed a duality, namely the physical body and that which prevents it from following its own chemical laws, which makes it a living being; this is the etheric body – the word is not important – a finer body of forces. The word etheric body should not be pressed; it has nothing to do with what is called ether in physics today.

What goes out during sleep, namely the word used for it, can be ridiculed. Let people ridicule. What goes out is the astral, the actual soul body and the I. So we have the fourfold human nature before us: on the one hand the bodily and the etheric, on the other the soul, in which the I-nature is embedded, as it were. In ordinary sleep, the I is not able to produce consciousness because, at the present stage of humanity, it is developing its I-activity in connection with the bodily-physical. You can't walk on air either, and just as little can the I-consciousness develop without the resistance of the bodily-physical; it develops from it. In sleep it does not find this resistance and therefore cannot come to consciousness. It develops a dull consciousness; but this is only a paradoxical expression, since it does not come to consciousness.

Likewise, from the moment of falling asleep until waking up, the soul body is continuously active. We could compare it to the way we are active when we think about something that happened some time ago. Its activity is a reverberation of what it has experienced in the etheric and physical body. We can imagine the meaning of this reverberation as follows: We think, feel and want in our waking hours with our etheric body, which offers resistance within the physical body. That is, only the thoughts that reflect the effect of the etheric body resonate. Because we are so active in the etheric body, we imprint the after-effects on it: what we think during the day is impressed on it. But the ether body offers resistance; it has its own inner movements. It is these that constitute the life that permeates the physical body. By forcing into it what is carried out in our thinking, we impose something alien on it; after all, its primary purpose is to convey life. Because of the tensions that arise between the ether body's two activities, the astral body cannot absorb what has been imprinted on it. During sleep, it resonates with what we ourselves have pushed into our ether body during the day; it is like a memory of what we have thought, felt and willed during the day. Thus we can say that the human being cannot develop consciousness in relation to his ego during sleep, but that the astral body resonates with everything that has taken place in us during the day through the activity of the soul. This activity of the astral body cannot come to consciousness either; for if it continued for a long time, it would intensify to such an extent that we would become fully conscious of it every morning, with a clear memory of what had been forced into the astral body. We do not have to visualize all the individual acts we have performed during the day, but rather the activity of thinking, feeling and willing. By exercising these, we give the astral body a structure, a general imprint – not through the individual acts – in which it resonates. Then, in the morning, we have, in the image suggested, we can say, in what we experienced the day before, not in thinking, feeling, willing, something new. We would overlook this if the astral body did not have to develop the urge to return to the physical and ether bodies, that is, to wake up. The highest tension leads us to submerge into the physical body. Otherwise, one should be able to draw out, at least for a very short time, the force that one has to leave behind in the physical body and in what is called the etheric body during sleep. In what can be called the real, spiritual view, one actually revives what can be called the unconscious power of the etheric body, making it flash. One must then wait for the moments when the etheric body also detaches itself during waking life; it is like a blood pulsation: the etheric body is first more intimately connected to the physical body – and then withdraws. By using such moments, one gains consciousness of the etheric body for a brief moment. Then the supersensible consciousness flashes: one is in the spiritual world and can ask questions in it.

We see what an intimate process underlies it. What really happens is like something that flits by. If you want to put it into scientific forms, what remains is like a memory, like a memory of dreams that flit by. Therefore, in spiritual science one does not arrive at success by stringing together conclusion after conclusion on what one already has. It is not a logical recollection, not a thinking, but a growth arises through such fleeting moments. Therefore, the spiritual researcher, when writing down what he gains in this way, cannot proceed as one who describes from memory. He cannot, for instance, claim that a lecture he is giving for the twelfth time will be easier because it is fixed in his memory. If one really wants to be honest, in spiritual science one cannot allow anything to become fixed in one's memory; rather, one must always speak anew out of the inner work of the soul, not out of memory. That is why a lecture is as new the fourteenth or fifteenth time as it was the first time. It is much more a deliberate performance, a continuous active process in the soul that develops activity. Therefore, in the case of an honest spiritual presentation, the person who presents something from direct contact with the spiritual world will try to shape the words anew each time. It is precisely for this reason that only inner, genuine honesty can lead to the presentation of spiritual science. It is said that anyone who wants to lie must have a good memory. The spiritual researcher, on the other hand, must be imbued with honesty to the highest degree. He must not color; then what he says will already correspond to what he does not need to remember in the ordinary way. But the way of remembering of ordinary consciousness cannot be applied. |

Through such insight into the structure of the human being, one sees through the nature of sleep. In Vienna, I described this process as the separation between the physical and etheric bodies on the one hand, and the astral body and the I on the other. This is only to be understood relatively; relationships remain and are established. While the astral body, as it were, resonates in its feeling back, it encounters the ether body in its ordinary experience, and in this way, what it would experience purely is mixed with what happens in ordinary life, and dreams arise. They are chaotic or more or less lawful, even prophetic, mixed with what can happen in ordinary life. If Schopenhauer had not judged merely from the ordinary philosophical point of view, he would not have seen the world merely as will and representation; but he would have seen that the representation can be condensed in itself, that one can soul-spiritual can be consciously experienced in it as spiritual, and that what he sees as will in the human organism pours out into the whole environment and is revealed for the spiritualization of the entire world. In the astral body, that which makes a person more at the end of the day than at the beginning resonates. The same occurs in all of life. To understand this, let us think of a plant and the ripening seed; let us let this image take effect on us. But that remains in the etheric body; the astral body only resonates. But it takes the ether body with it through the gate of death: and now, drawn out of the physical body, the astral body can develop full consciousness together with the ego; it is now suddenly imbued with the life-force of the ether body, and consciousness emerges. But then, when it is so animated – because the etheric body is actually the provider of life for the physical body and cannot serve for more – when the extract is drawn from it, so to speak, what only maintains the life functions is expelled into the rest of the etheric world. Through the spiritually held consciousness, which arises from the impetus of the astral body and the ego on the extract of the ether body, the human being must first struggle until he comes to the use of the new consciousness, in which he spends the time between death and a new birth. During this time, the human being accomplishes a great deal. We can only gain insights into the length of time that passes if we consider the individual human life in the context of all earthly lives. Then we can see what attracted him to the earth, what led him from the spiritual realm to this life; the forces that led the human being down have thus found their conclusion, their goal. Meanwhile, the earth must have changed so much that the person can experience something new. Therefore, it takes centuries for a person to gather his strength to descend into a new life on earth.

In the time between death and a new birth, one must also imagine two alternating states of inner experience. In everyday life we have waking and sleeping; in the time between death and a new birth, there are alternating periods, successive states of inner activity and of isolation from the spiritual environment, where one knows nothing of the spiritual environment but inwardly lives out what one has previously absorbed in it. These experiences are like a mighty inner image arising from within oneself. Then again, one is completely absorbed in the spiritual worlds and incorporated into them.

One can assume a spiritual center in the time between death and a new birth. In the first half, what has newly begun in the last life on earth is processed; in the second half, what is taken up is what makes the spiritual-soul permeate the physical person in a new life on earth.

What is presented as spiritual science only appears to contradict natural science. In the future, spiritual research into the values of human life will advance in the same way as the physical sciences do in their own field. Spiritual science still appears to many to be a fantasy because they shrink from the strict mental work and mental discipline it demands. Many would like to arrive at spiritual science by easier means than are possible. They do not want to take the difficult step, which consists in a further development of consciousness. The progress of chemistry can be utilized without being a chemist; in the same way the results of spiritual research can be appropriated. And even if one cannot engage in spiritual research oneself, one should at least endeavor to cast aside one's prejudices. But many would like to arrive at spiritual science by a more comfortable route than by overcoming their prejudices, and then use it primarily for their own benefit in life. Misunderstanding of spiritual science is the result of such an attitude.

Natural science will increasingly reveal itself not as the source of answers but as a field that poses questions in new ways. The answers will then come from spiritual science – the answer that Faust craves:

Mysterious in broad daylight
Nature cannot be robbed of her veil,
And what she may not reveal to your mind,
You cannot force from her with levers and with screws.

You cannot penetrate its inner workings with levers and screws. You have to illuminate it with the light and power of the soul.

The first thing the soul needs to get to know its own nature scientifically, not just by faith, is a sharp concentration of thought that appeals not only to ordinary thinking but also to the application of inner willpower in imagining and thinking. The thoughts that penetrate us from the external sense world cannot help us with this. If we seek the immortality of the soul, we must think differently. Outwardly these thoughts resemble those mental images, those inner experiences that are destined to be forgotten. We can see this in the experience of 'dreaming'. Why? Because the dream engages the physical body in a much less intense way and thus creates less opportunity to feel and experience the dream as reality. It is the same with our free thoughts, which we let pass through the soul; we call them musings and quickly forget them. But the more one trains oneself to unfold the power of retaining freely formed thoughts, as otherwise only experiences supported by memory, the more one approaches the concentration of thoughts. Thoughts as images of external reality are least suitable for this. In the book “How to Know Higher Worlds” I have set forth thoughts that are suitable for concentration.

If one wishes to hold fast to such freely-generated thought-images, one must exert a stronger will than in ordinary life. The experiences of everyday life are so coarse that they cannot serve as a basis for comparison. What spiritual science reveals as immortal is fundamentally different in its meaning from what we feel and want in everyday life. Man passes by heedlessly, all the more heedlessly because he is inclined not to ascribe reality to that which confronts him as the being within himself, which finds the way through birth and death.

It is easy to see that this inner being exists, but it is not easy to ascribe the most intense reality to it. One must speak again and again about immortality from different points of view, because only when one has characterized it from the most diverse points of view is it possible to gain a true idea of it. The reality of immortality must be grasped by soul forces that are brought forth from within. Now you might say that I maintain that only subjectively something can be achieved! — The beginning of spiritual research is indeed subjective: an inner overcoming, a working one's way up from darkness to light. This is certainly subjective, because most people lack the patience to go far enough with spiritual research and to develop themselves out of the most personal of personal realms. It is precisely through this inner struggle that the soul is driven to work itself out of this realm; then it can enter into a world that is revealed to it. But the path from subjective to objective spiritual research is an intimate one, which makes it necessary for the human being to acquire soul habits within himself that otherwise do not occur in everyday life. We have to develop little willpower in our everyday life to hold on to it, but the other requires a strong tensioning of the soul's inner powers. They have to be drawn from the deeper soul life. These are strong inner energies that otherwise remain untrained in everyday life. People who need the support of sensory experience soon become exhausted and fall into a state not unlike that of falling asleep. When a person has developed thinking united with the will over a long period of time, when they have strengthened their inner life of imagination to such an extent that they are completely absorbed in it, when the rest of the soul life sinks away, the world flows away on all sides, the soul becomes completely one with what it has attained in a healthy way through practice: only then does man realize what the power of thought is, and how it must be supported by strong will if it is to rule freely in the inner life. Then, after months and years of practice, certain experiences begin to occur. At first, he succeeds in concentrating more and more brightly, clearly and intensely. He notices that the thought-experience grows ever stronger, and he feels that his whole consciousness is heightened as it merges with the thought.

Then comes a critical moment when he has arrived at the experience of the full strength of the thought. The thought fragments and dissolves in the soul, darkens and ceases to be present for us. We feel our whole being going with the thought. This is not easy. This experience shakes up all the human soul forces, calling into question everything one has previously held to be valuable. One resists coming to terms with this experience. Human egoism does not allow the forces associated with the depths of the soul to enter into consciousness. If we do not exert all our willpower, we will not be able to do so. In the subconscious, we fear that something much worse could happen to us than physical “death”. The materialist says: compared to physical death, the experience would not be so bad after all! But it does not enter into ordinary consciousness in this way; it takes hold as an impulse of an elevated consciousness compared to the ordinary life of the soul. It is not fear of the destruction of the body, but of the outpouring of one's own being into the cosmos. These are unspeakable feelings, yet they can be called feelings of fear. If one overcomes them, then an experience comes that could be described as follows: By developing these forces, you pull something out of the body. This seems particularly dangerous. It is a feeling as if something were being pulled out of us, as if it remained in us and yet had to be pulled out. There is a clear awareness that something else must be pulled out, that it is not possible with thought concentration alone, that this only pulls out a part of us.

If we want to understand how a person arrives at these descriptions, we must start from everyday experiences. The person must enter into a new relationship with themselves, develop a much more precise self-knowledge. In ordinary life, nothing is as questionable as a person's relationship with themselves, the opinion they have of themselves. How inadequate man's self-knowledge is can be seen in numerous examples, such as in the story of the philosopher Mach: when he got on a bus and saw his face in a mirror, he wondered what kind of ugly schoolmaster it was, until he realized that he was seeing himself.

It is easy to laugh at such things, but they are deeply indicative of man's questionable relationship to himself. Man must seek to come into a relationship of self-knowledge with himself. He has accumulated the forces that prevent him from detaching himself from what is connected with his inner life throughout his entire life. But this must be added to the concentration of thought: that we gain a completely different relationship to what constitutes our destiny. In everyday life we see fate approaching us. It strikes us as sympathetic and antipathetic coincidences; we regard what happens to us as something external. Even ordinary reflection can teach us that so-called coincidences are not so external. If we look at what we are at any given time in our lives, such a look will be able to tell us, if we do not want to close ourselves off from real knowledge of human nature: that we would not be able to do this or that if this or that had not happened to us eighteen or twenty years ago.

We see how the whole bundle of our talents, gifts and habits of soul life grows out of our destiny. We look at ourselves concretely as a fifty-year-old person and try to follow the whole tangle of experiences of destiny. If one is serious about this, which does not happen too often, then one must say to oneself: Destiny is not external; I am in it, my I is in it, I go along with my consciousness and pour myself out into the stream of my destiny. — This must become a method, it must be added to what has been achieved through concentration of thought. We are within ourselves in our everyday thoughts; through thought concentration we go out of ourselves and believe we are losing ourselves in it. The reverse process occurs when we identify with fate: we go into something that flows to us in the outer stream; we grow together with something that we believed was outside us. What I believed to be experiencing as external fate, I was already in it; I brought it about myself. When such considerations have become habitual, we come out of ourselves again, draw our soul after us; a very hidden inner man is drawn out of us. In that in which we know ourselves to be living, we look as we usually look at tables and chairs in the outer life. In this way, we have two means of experimenting here that we would otherwise use in a physics laboratory or in a clinic; but these are not external experiments, but rather activities that relate to inner soul experiences.

Anthroposophical spiritual science does not speak in a general, abstract way about the fact that one can separate from the body, but speaks experimentally, as one speaks of the fact that oxygen can be separated from hydrogen by showing that oxygen is in the water. In the laboratory we can be relatively indifferent to the things we are dealing with, but it is not the same with the tragedies of the soul, with the struggles, with the inner disappointments when we are on shaky ground or have lost our footing. This is often dreadful, often blissful. Then, when the inner soul is separated from the body, it knows that what is now outside of it contains all the forces that begin with birth and are given back to the earth with death. It has grasped the eternal core of the soul at the same time as the destiny of man. She knows that what separates from the physical body every night is this eternal soul core, which just does not perceive itself in ordinary life because it does not have the powers to do so. At the same time, she has grasped what goes through birth and death and has united it with destiny, with what was given in the spiritual world and then flows through the forces of heredity through father and mother and through the formative forces into the physical body, what has been prepared in the spiritual world for new bodily life. The immortal life core, which is otherwise imperceptible, becomes more and more concrete and alive. In everyday life, one works all this into the life core, but continually darkens the formative forces if they remain the formative forces of the body and cannot be used as powers of knowledge. The body is not their cause, but their effect, which has descended from the spiritual worlds. It bears within itself the character of previous earthly lives. This is how it is now because it is not the first time that one has lived in the physical body.

Spiritual research does not pursue the eternal essence through abstract theories, but through a spiritual experimental method, which, from one earthly life to the next, is subject to fate. It will take a long time before a larger number of people will take part in spiritual science, but it will become a truly real part of human spiritual culture and will intervene in human life and in what moral impulses are, in the life of consciousness in one's own being. Then spiritual science will intervene when the prejudices that now still seem comprehensible will have been overcome. They will be overcome as radically as the former prejudices against science. People believed that what they dreamt up was reality, and they called it an error. They called Copernicus a fool because he said that the Earth revolved around the Sun, whereas common sense told them that the Earth stood still. Today, the five senses do not want to believe that by grasping the heightened thinking, one can draw out a piece of the inner man and draw the other piece by entering into destiny. Humanity will have to learn to no longer trust the senses. There is a stronger power of holding for true than relying on the five senses and the mind. This power is connected with all impulses of human wisdom progress. One must develop trust in this by kindling a strong moral power in the soul. When man appeals to the powers of realization in himself, he will carry himself courageously through the world, not merely trusting in what he can experience through the outer five senses. Today, we have reached the point in the development of humanity where science must become what it could not become before. What the spiritual researcher distills out was always in man: he does not create it, he only calls it into spiritual knowledge.

An obvious objection, which comes from mental laziness, is: Why do we care about the eternal soul core at all? He is eternal, we will live in it again. — That is too cheap a thought. Two things must be said against it. Firstly, it is not only important to man's moral sense that he knows this or that, but that the process of development on earth progresses from natural science to spiritual truths, which were first unknown and are now being brought out. All human progress is based on this. Those who do not want to take part in this should admit that they are indifferent. This point is important, but more abstract. Secondly, however, there is a very concrete progress. In ancient times, people on earth were essentially not the same as they are today; their souls were different from today's. We find there a clairvoyant consciousness originating from primeval times, from ancient epochs, in connection with the divine-spiritual forces of the world. Today, man has lost this; but he is taking his independence out of this earthly world to which he has connected himself. Now that man has attained the stage of detachment from earthly thinking, he must again be seized by spiritual life, must again enter through spiritual science. Today, however, we can say that we still have so much inherited strength that the soul's life after death cannot be stopped. But man must develop in such a way that he does not go through life between death and a new birth in dullness, but in clear experience. Man became free by breaking the thread that connected him to the spiritual world. Now he must tie it again. From the present time on, there is more and more necessity to recognize spiritual life. Therefore, where spiritual life has become more intense in recent times, repeated earthly life as a teaching occurs. For example, in the eighteenth century, in Lessing's 'Education of the Human Race', which he left behind as a testament to humanity, the basic idea of repeated earthly lives and a purely spiritual life in between occurs. There are those who say that Lessing had grown old and weak and that is why he had this complicated idea.

What was established by a mind like Lessing's forms a kind of predisposition that must be further developed in the German national soul, in order to flow into the stream of spiritual scientific research, in order to become real science, as was indicated today. This lies deeply as a predisposition in what Fichte felt to be the original source of German uniqueness. Fichte's idea is a wonderful one, in the sense that Not only when we have passed through death do we become immortal; already in the body we can perceive what is immortal and forms the body. Only in grasping this actual immortal do I recognize the meaning of life, for the sake of which everything in this mortal body may live itself out. What spiritual research is to carry out scientifically is present here as a predisposition. Fichte expresses it: if only the right powers are released, then the immortal can be grasped. Spiritual science is particularly present in the personalities of spiritual striving, which I characterized yesterday.

We encounter glimpses of it in the most diverse places, but here it is a straight line from German spiritual striving to what must develop into spiritual science. In the stream of Central European spiritual life, consciousness in grasping the spiritual core has never been completely lost. I will now draw attention to just one example of this consciousness, which only wanted to be given in a delicate way. Herman Grimm, an art lover and one of the intellectual giants of the second half of the nineteenth century, who stood firmly on the ground of Schiller's and Goethe's world view, expressed it in his novella “The Songstress”. In the 1860s, the time had not yet come for spiritual science, but the people who were immersed in it at that time felt the need to describe not only the sensory world but also the other part of the world. They knew that if you want to describe true reality, it is not enough to describe the sensual world. Take, for example, a horseshoe that has become magnetized, which still looks like an ordinary horseshoe. Man belongs to the spiritual world with his spiritual part, just as he belongs to the world of sense with his physical part. Out of the deepening of German idealism, these people knew how to develop a genuine spiritual worldview. They did this by objectively and impartially observing German intellectual life, which has a mission that should be fulfilled from within, out of an idealistic appreciation of intellectual life: to penetrate to the spirit as Fichte, Schelling and Hegel did, but to do so by still perceiving the world with the real spiritual eyes and ears that Goethe spoke of.

Where the view is directed towards German spiritual research, especially towards Goethe, a kind of hope for humanity is connected with the development of this spiritual life. If one reads between the lines of German spiritual life, one can often find a concise expression of how the world can come to an understanding of spiritual life precisely through the development of the German being. There is no need to be seized by pride, but one can feel how what the Goethe-Schiller era produced can be defended in Central Europe today so that it can develop.

Based on this fateful sense of time, I would like to present two images: We learned in the first days of August 1914 how the news of the coming event was received in the various countries of Europe. First in Germany. One stands before the great event – the Reichstag is convening – I do not want to go into day-to-day politics, not into what is related to the military events – the representatives of the various party directions stand there – and remain silent. That is a powerful impression, as if it were the herald of what was to come, before a great coming truth.

With a kind of inner weeping, one looks at the other picture, at the meeting of the State Duma. There was no silence: they all spoke – so that one gets the impression that it was formally convened, like a historical theater performance. The frenzy of false enthusiasm was spoken by many, in contrast to the silence further west. If you want to explore history, what runs through humanity, you will have to look at such moods. In this silence lies the confidence that trust can be placed in spiritual power, in spiritual truth, that it must be well guarded, that it must be defended – a confidence that carries the soul beyond death and destiny.

Emerson wants to describe Goethe and points out what Goethe culture means for humanity. Referring to him, he says: “The world is young. Great men of the past show us the way with the words: ‘We must write scriptures that bear witness to the eternal. It must not be that a lie remains for us.’ Emerson means that lie that there is no spirit behind the external world.

A bright solar horizon must develop out of the twilight of current events, heralding a lasting peace for the good of humanity. All that those who make the sacrifice of their lives have to endure in body and soul must become a warning for those who remain behind. The unspent forces of those who must leave their young lives before their time will help: the law of conservation of forces also applies in the spiritual world. In the future, we will know that this world is connected to the spiritual world. These unspent forces will be real forces for people who will have an awareness of the spiritual world.

The spirit world will remain closed to you,
unless you recognize within yourself
the spirit that shines in the soul
and can become a bearer of light for you
in the depths and heights of the world.

The terrible catastrophe of last New Year's Eve, the destruction by fire of the Goetheanum, which will remain as a painful memory for the many who loved it, may provide occasion to connect today's thoughts about the anthroposophical knowledge and conception of the world with this Goetheanum. But a connection is all I have in view; for the lecture itself that I am to present to you is not to be essentially different in kind from those I have been permitted to give here in Basel, in this same hall, for many years past.

That dreadful calamity was just the occasion to bring to light what fantastic notions there are in the world linked with all that this Goetheanum in Dornach intended to do and all that was done in it. It is said that the most frightful superstitions were disseminated there, that all sorts of things inimical to religion were being practiced; and there is even talk of all kinds of spiritistic seances, of nebulous mystic performances, and so on.

In respect to all this, I should like today to answer, at least sketchily, the question: What is this Anthroposophy to which the Goetheanum was dedicated?

Many people were scandalized at the very name, “Goetheanum,” because they failed to consider the fundamental reason for this name, and how it is connected with all that is cultivated there as Anthroposophy.

For me, my dear friends, this Anthroposophy is the spontaneous result of my devotion for more than four decades to Goethe's world-conception, and to his whole activity. Of course if anyone studies Goethe's world-conception and what he did by considering only what is actually written in Goethe's works, and from that deduces logically, as it were, what may now be called Goethean, he will not find what gave occasion to call the Dornach Building the “Goetheanum,” But there is, I might say, a logic of thinking and a logic of life. And anyone who immerses himself in Goethe, not merely with a logic of thinking, but who takes up actively his impulse-filled suggestions, and tries to gain from them what can be gained—after so many decades have passed over humanity's evolution since Goethe's death—he will believe—no matter what he may think of the true value of Anthroposophy—that by means of the living stimuli of Goetheanism, if I may use the expression, this very Anthroposophy has been able to come into being through a logic of life, by experiencing what is in Goethe, and by developing his conclusions, in a modest way.

Now this Goetheanum was first called “Johannesbau” by those friends of the anthroposophical world-conception who made it possible to erect such a building. The name was in no way connected with the Evangelist, St, John; but the building was named—not by me but by others—for Johannes Thomasius, one of the figures in my Mystery Drama; because, above all, this Goetheanum was to be dedicated to the presentation of these Mystery Plays, besides the cultivation of all the rest of the anthroposophical world-view. But of course it was inevitable that this name, “Johannesbau,” should lead to the misunderstanding that it was meant for the author of St. John's Gospel.

Hence, I often said, I think even here in this place, in the course of the years in which the Goetheanum was being built, that for me this building is a Goetheanum; for I derived my world-view in a living way from Goethe. And then this name was officially given to the Building by friends of the cause. I have always regarded this as a sort of token of gratitude for what can be gained from Goethe, an act of homage to the towering personality of Goethe; not because it was supposed that what was originally given by Goethe would be cultivated in the best and most beautiful way in the Dornach Goetheanum, but because the anthroposophical world-view feels the deepest gratitude for what has come into the world through Goethe.

If, then, the name “Goetheanum” is taken as resulting from an act of homage, an act of gratitude, then no one, as I believe, can take exception to it. For the rest, it is quite comprehensible that anyone unacquainted with the anthroposophical world-view, when approaching the building on the Dornach hill, would be at first peculiarly affected by the two dove-tailed dome-structures, by the strange forms without and within, and so forth. But this building proceeded as an inner artistic consequence, from the anthroposophical world-view. Therefore, I shall be able to form the best connecting link with what the Building stood for, if I try first—today in a somewhat different way from the one I have employed here for many years—to answer the question: What is Anthroposophy?

To start with, Anthroposophy claims to be a knowledge of the spiritual world, which can fully take its place beside the magnificent natural science of our time. It aims to rank with natural science, not only as regards scientific conscientiousness, but it also requires that anyone who wishes, not merely to receive Anthroposophy into his mind, but to build it up, must, before all else, have gone through all the rigid and serious methods used today by natural science.

In all this the purpose of Anthroposophy is the complete opposite of what I have cited as the opinions of the world about it. With regard to these opinions, which I have given only in part, we can only be astonished that it is possible for ideas about anything to become fixed in the minds of the public, which are the exact opposite of what is really intended. For it can be flatly said that all I have mentioned as opinions of the world is not Anthroposophy, but that Anthroposophy purposes to be a serious knowledge of the spiritual world.

You well know, my dear friends, that today anything claiming to be knowledge of the spiritual world is regarded somewhat contemptuously, or at least with great doubt. The scientific education that mankind has enjoyed for the past three or four hundred years was of such a nature that in the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th, the opinion came gradually to be held that, by means of the strict methods employed today by natural science, man can know what is presented to the senses in his environment, and also what the human intellect can deduce from sense-perception, with the help of its methods of experiment and observation. But on the other hand, knowledge of the spiritual is declined, by those very people who are firmly convinced that they stand on the strict basis of this natural-scientific world-view. For it is said, whether with a certain arrogance or with a certain despondency, that with regard to the spiritual there are barriers to man's knowledge, that with regard to the spirit man must be satisfied with concepts of belief.

Because of this there results a serious inner soul-discord for very many people who get their education from the natural science that is everywhere popularized today. The concepts of belief are handed down from ancient times. It is not known that they also correspond to concepts of knowledge which humanity attained at earlier stages, and that' these are still contained in the traditions, in what has been handed down. If they are accepted just as concepts of belief, then the soul is brought into contradiction with everything it takes in when it accepts what in our day is won for humanity and for practical life in such a rigorous way by the methods of natural science.

What is won in this way cannot really be called the possession of a small group of educated people; rather, this special mode of thought derived from natural science has already penetrated the instruction of the primary grades of school. And we might even say that the condition of soul that results from natural science, if not natural science itself, has been spread everywhere, ever farther and farther, even into the most primitive, outermost human settlements. This brings it about that many people do not know that their soul-longing is for concepts about the spiritual world similar to those they have about the natural world; but this causes in many of them, nevertheless, a discord of soul which is expressed in all kinds of dissatisfactions with life. People feel a certain inner unrest and perplexity. With the concepts and feelings they have, they do not rightly know how to take their place in life. They ascribe the trouble to all sorts of things, but the real cause lies in what I have said.

People today long for real knowledge-concepts about the spiritual world, not for concepts of belief. Such knowledge-concepts are what Anthroposophy strives for; but in doing so it must, of course, vindicate an entirely different concept of knowledge from the one we are accustomed to today. And if I am to characterize this concept, I should like to do it by means of a sort of comparison, which is, however, more than a mere comparison, and is to lead directly to the way in which Anthroposophy strives to know the super-sensible-spiritual.

Let us think first of the strange world which each of you knows as the other side of human existence, as it were, the other side of human consciousness—let us think of the dream-world. Each of you can remember the variegated, diverse, colorful pictures that appear out of the dark depths of sleep. If you observe dreams from the waking state, you will find that these are connected in some way with what one is or does while awake. Even when at times they are prophetic dreams, which is by no means to be denied, they are nevertheless connected with what the dreamer has experienced—only a natural formative fantasy acts in the most extravagant way to metamorphose these experiences. In a different way such dreams are connected with the human bodily conditions; difficulty in breathing, rapid heart-action, disturbances in the organism, are experienced symbolically in dreams in many ways.

Let us imagine for a moment, merely to develop the thought that is needed here, that a person lived in this dream-world, that he had no other world; he would never be able to emerge from this world, but' would regard it as his reality. If through some kind of outer forces, the human life took its course exactly as it does now, that we went about in the cities and did our work, but did not consciously see this work, just always dreamed, then we human beings would regard the dream-world as the only reality, just as the dreamer in the moment of the dream regards his variously decked-out dream-world as his reality» Only when we wake up can we truly form a judgment, from the waking point of view, by means of the way we are then related to the world of our environment, about the real value and significance of the dream, While remaining in the dream, we can come to no such judgment. It is only possible from the point of view of the waking life to judge to what extent the dream is related to life-reminiscences, or to bodily conditions. To form a judgment about the dream, one must first wake up.

Now the human being lives also in his will, for it is particularly the will that, upon waking, is projected into the events of the outer sense-world; man lives now in the pictures which this sense-world transmits to his soul. We have no judgment whatever about the reality, except the feeling of being in the sense-world, the feeling of union with this sense-world; and from this point of view—I might say of insertion of the whole soul-being into this world by means of the body—we at first regard it as reality, and the deceptive pictures of the dream as not belonging to this reality.

But now, especially when anyone surveys all that the pictures of the outer sense-reality give to him, certainly at some time the question will appear: How is what he himself experiences within him as his soul-spirit-being related to the transformations and the variability of the outer sense-world?

The great questions of existence present themselves when a man compares what he sees in the outer sense-world with what he feels as his own being, in his thinking and feeling, his sensing and his willing, rising out of the depths of his humanness,—those great questions of existence which may perhaps be comprised in the one question: What value, as reality, has that which pertains to the soul? This then expands to questions of soul-immortality, of human freedom, and numberless others that spring up. For one will soon feel how entirely different the experience is when looking outward and receiving sense-impressions, from that of looking inward and having soul-experiences. And from such experiences the question must of necessity arises Is it perhaps possible, through some kind of second awakening, a higher awakening, to attain from a higher standpoint knowledge about sense-reality itself, in the same way that a man acquires from the sense-reality a judgment about the dream-world, when, as a matter of course, he awakes in the morning?

When a man is convinced that the imagination of the dream can be judged with regard to its value as reality, only from the standpoint of waking life, then he must strive to gain a point of view which can in turn reveal something about the value as reality, of the higher value, of sense-experience itself.

And now the great question concerning a knowledge of spirit may be put this way: Can we perhaps wake up in a higher sense from our everyday waking consciousness? and does' there result from such second waking a knowledge about the sense-world, just as from the sense-world comes knowledge about the dream?

Now we can, of course, have a feeling about it, but exact observation gives us certainty about how the dream works. When dreaming we feel that our whole soul-life is laid hold of by vague powers. At the moment of waking, we feel that we now have control of our physical body. We feel that the extravagant concepts of the dream are disciplined by the physical body. And the reason we feel that these dream-concepts are extravagant is that, when waking up or going to sleep, there is a moment ' when we do not have the physical body completely in hand. Can a higher, a second awakening, be brought about by conscious soul-activity, in the same way that we are wrenched out of the dream, out of sleep, by the forces of the organism itself?

This question can only be answered when we test, I might say in a higher sense, whether the soul finds forces within itself for such a higher awakening; and only by finding the answer to this can a different form of knowledge-concept be produced from that to which we are accustomed today, and which leads only to one's saying with regard to the spiritual world, “Ignorabimus,” “We shall not know.”

Now we shall have to turn first of all—and Anthroposophy proceeds in this way—to those soul-forces that we already have, and ask: Can something higher, still stronger, be developed out of these soul-forces, just as the waking soul-life is stronger than the dreaming life? We may reason that even this waking soul-life of the adult person has been gradually developed from the dreamy soul-life that we had at the beginning as very little children. If we had stopped with the soul-life that was ours during the first three years on earth, we should see the world in a sort of dream-form. We have grown out of this dream-form.

This may give courage, to begin with, to seek certain soul-forces which can be developed still further than the development achieved since earliest childhood. And anyone who deals with such a problem seriously will turn first to a soul-force concerning which even significant philosophers of the present admit, as a result of purely philosophic deliberation, that it points to a spiritual activity of man which is more or less independent of the body. This is our power of recollection, residing in the memory.

Let us picture to ourselves what exists in our ordinary memory. Of course this memory is not a force with which immediately to penetrate into the super-sensible, spiritual worlds. Above all, we know that this memory is only in perfect order when we can bring to expression in the corporeal what is in the soul. But nevertheless, there is something peculiar here. Among our recollections appear pictures of experiences which were perhaps decades in the past. Something experienced in our relation to the sense-world and to ordinary people appears in varying pictures—according to one's organization—which are really very similar to dream-pictures, only more disciplined. And if our memory is good, there comes today from the soul-depths a living knowledge of what occurred years ago, and is not now before us in sense-reality. This is expressed in a very popular way, of course; but we must start from a definite point of view. So we may say: There are images in the memory which portray inwardly something which was, indeed, once present, something experienced, which is not now present.

And so the question may arise which is still vague at first, and naturally acquires significance only when one can answer it—but we shall see that it can be answered. It is this: Is it possible for anyone, by soul-spiritual work, to acquire a further soul-force, a transformation as it were of the memory-force, whereby he pictures not only what is no longer present, though it once was, but whereby he depicts something which does not exist in the earth-life at all, either through sense-perceptions or any intellectual combinations? This can be decided only by serious inner soul-work; and this soul-work consists of an inner education of the essential element of memory; namely, the capacity for imagining.

How, then, do representations come about? and how is the activity of representation accomplished in ordinary life? Well, outer things make an impression upon us. First, we have sense-perceptions; then from these sense-perceptions we form our concepts, which we carry in the memory. And we know that a certain force is required when we wish to call up a memory-concept of something witnessed in earlier years in which we were involved. But we know too that man surrenders passively to the outer world, in order to have true concepts of this outer world, to bring nothing fantastic into the pictures of it. And this passive self-surrender, assisted besides by all possible experimental methods, is right for natural science. But we can do something more than this with the conceptual life. We can try to take up with inner activity concepts of any content whatsoever—only their content must be easily survey-able, so as not to work suggestively; an idea that is difficult to survey, such as one brought up from the depths of the soul, may easily work suggestively, We now try to ponder with inner activity upon such a concept, so that we surrender ourselves again and again with our whole soul-life to this thought,

I have minutely described what I might call the technique of such surrender to an active living in representation, in my books, “Knowledge of the Higher Worlds” and “Occult Science;” here I want to sketch the principle involved. If anyone devotes himself again and again to the content of an idea, quite independently of the outer meaning of the concepts he employs inwardly, upon which he inwardly rests, with which he unites himself, to which he allows his whole being to open—if anyone surrenders himself in this way to such an idea, he will gradually notice that in this inner work, in the thinking and representation, a notable aliveness is developed, an aliveness which one must first come to know before an opinion can be formed about it. But when anyone does come to know it, he begins to think somewhat as follows: A muscle we continue to use becomes stronger; in exactly the same way the thinking force of our soul-life is strengthened, if we do not surrender passively to the impressions of the outer world, but work inwardly; if in this way we again and again bring the soul-life inwardly and livingly into a certain condition with regard to an idea.

In this way we finally reach the point where the thinking—which otherwise appears shadowy, even in memory-pictures, and exhausts itself just in the mere presentation of pictures—is filled with a soul-spiritual content, just as in life we feel that we are filled with the breath, with the circulating blood. Life-force, if I may speak in this way, streams into thinking that has thus become active.

Truly, real Anthroposophy, as spirit-knowledge, is based upon intimate, inner methods of the soul, not upon any sort of necromancy? it is based upon the changing of the soul-forces of knowledge by the soul itself, making them into something different. And anyone who strengthens his thinking more and more in this way comes at last—it may be even years later—to a very special experience, an experience that may be described as follows: When we call to mind only outer objects or outer actions, we dive down to a certain depth of the soul-life, and from this depth we must then draw up the recollections. But when we actively work on our thinking in the way I have described, we finally come to the point where we know that with this thinking life we go farther down than the power of recollection reaches.

It is an important experience when we have reached the point of observing the recollections as at a certain level to which we dive down in the ordinary consciousness, and from which we bring up memory-concepts; and then when we glimpse that deeper down in the soul-life there is another level to which we have now penetrated, and from which, with our strengthened thinking, we can draw up concepts that are not the same as those to which we first submitted ourselves, but are entirely different. And while we can represent in recollections what was once present in the human life, but is no longer present, so we now learn that when we draw from this deeper level, we come to concepts that are beyond anything one otherwise ever has in life.

Through this gate of knowledge we have now penetrated into the spiritual world; and the first experience that results is this: we get a really tableau-like retrospect of our whole earth-life up to the present. We might say that in a flash—that is a somewhat extreme statement, but it is almost so—our earth-life up to this moment lies spread out in mighty pictures before the consciousness, with time changed into space, as it were. But these pictures are truly different from those we should get if we were to sit down and draw forth in recollection all that can be drawn out of our life, and should get continuous pictures of this earth-life almost to the time of our birth. This tableau is intrinsically different from the one described before. You see, in ordinary recollections the concepts are passively formed, and contain altogether not much more than our impressions from the outer world. For example, in recollections we call to mind how we met some one, the effect someone had upon us, how a friendship was formed; or again, we experience the effect upon us of some natural occurrence, what we experienced of pleasure or suffering from it, or from the influence of some one, and so on.

The content of the tableau, as I have described it, attained by strengthened, invigorated thinking, is this: A man sees himself—the way he approached another person, as a result of his temperamental qualities, or of his own character, or the desire, or the love, he had. While mere recollection gives to a man what is brought to him from outside, this memory-tableau brings to the fore what he himself has contributed to the experience, what has come out of himself. In the ordinary recollection, let us say of a natural occurrence, he has before him what this occurrence brought of pain or pleasure, that is, the effect upon him of the outer world. In the memory-tableau it would be rather his longing to be in whatever region of the earth he had this experience. The part a man himself has taken in an occurrence is what he experiences in the memory-tableau, In short, I might say that this total impression a man has of his life is diverted from the outer world, and that it contains all his activity during life. One really sees himself as a second person. When anyone has this memory-tableau, he has little impression of his physical space-body; but he feels himself within all that he has experienced, and he feels at the same time that it is all a flowing, etheric world, so to speak. And with this flowing, etheric world, which contains his own life in mighty pictures as in an onward-flowing stream, one learns at the same time that the moving etheric world of his own existence is connected with the universal etheric world. When as physical human being with his physical senses, a man confronts the outer world, he feels that he is enclosed within his skin. He feels other things as outer things. He feels a strong contrast between subject and object, to express it philosophically. This is not the case when, with strengthened thinking, one enters into what I may call the fluctuating world of the second man, of the time-man, in contrast to the corporeal, physical space-man.

We can really speak of a time-body, for a man becomes aware simultaneously of his whole previous life, and he feels this previous earth-life as moving in a universal world, like unto itself. He can say, that to the solid, dense, physical world is added a more rarified world, in which one has spent his life in flowing movement. Only now does he come to know what an etheric world is, and what man himself is as second man, as second human being in this etheric world. But with all this one has reached only the first stage of super-sensible knowledge.

It is only because one feels himself to be a spirit-soul being in a spirit-soul world that he knows from direct perception, as it were, that the whole world is interpenetrated and interwoven by a spirit-soul substantiality, which man also holds within himself, But as yet he knows no more than this. And most of all, he does not yet know of another spirit-soul world besides that one which unites him as earth-man with the surrounding etheric world.

But now we can go farther. If a man has acquired this ability to experience himself in the etheric realm, to experience the etheric world along with himself, then he can rise to another kind of development of the soul-forces.

This consists in bringing about in the soul what I might call the opposite process to the one first characterized. First we try to make the thinking inwardly very active, very much alive, so that, instead of passive thinking, we have within an active flow of forces, surging and weaving. Now we must try with the same inner force of free will to suppress again the freely soaring thought that we have put into the soul.

In the soul-exercises to which I am alluding, everything that I describe for you must be done in the same way that the mathematician works out his problems; so that it is all carried out with complete self-possession, with nothing whatever in it of false mysticism, of fantasy, even of suggestion, or anything of the kind. The exercises must be performed in the soul with the same objective coldness with which a geometric problem is solved—for the warmth and enthusiasm come not from the method, but from the results. Nevertheless, we experience the following: that when we acquire this strengthened thinking, it is difficult to dispel the representations we get by it, especially those of the previous life, with which we can be completely engrossed if we want to dwell on them. But we must develop in us the strength to disperse the images again, just as we can call them forth, by our own activity. In other words, we must acquire the faculty to extinguish in our consciousness all thinking and imagining, after having first most actively kindled it. Even extinguishing of ordinary concepts is very difficult, but this is relatively easy in comparison with the obliterating of those concepts that have been set up in the soul by spiritual activity.

Therefore this obliteration means something entirely different. And if one succeeds, again through long practice—but these exercises can be done along with the others, so that both capacities appear simultaneously—if one succeeds in producing these strong, active processes of thought in his consciousness, and then in obliterating them again, something comes over the soul that I might call the inner silence of the soul—for we must have expressions for these things you know. There is no knowledge whatever of this inner silence in the consciousness of the ordinary life.

Of the two things needed by the spiritual researcher who wants to make research in the anthroposophical way, the first is the strengthened conceptual life, the strengthened thought-life, by means of which he comes to self-knowledge in the way indicated; the other is that he must cultivate a completely empty consciousness; in which all the thinking, feeling and willing, otherwise in the soul, is silenced—but silenced only after this soul-activity has been enhanced to the highest degree. Then this silence of soul is something quite special. It represents the second stage, as it were, of spirit-knowledge; and I can describe it somewhat as follows:

Let us imagine that we are in a great city where there is a terrific uproar, and we become quite deafened by it. We leave the city, and when we have walked for some time, we still hear the roar behind us, but the noise has already become somewhat less, and the farther we go the quieter it becomes. If we finally reach the stillness of the forest, it may be that all about us will be quiet. We have experienced the whole range from raging noise to outer silence. But now I can go farther. This will not take place in outer reality, of course, but the concept is an entirely real one, when we come to what I have just designated as silence of the soul, I will for once use a very trivial comparison: We may have a certain wealth and keep spending it; we have less and less and finally nothing at all. Then our wealth is zero. But we can go still farther; we can go into debt; then we have less than nothing. We know from mathematics that one can have less than nothing.

Well, it can be the same with quiet, with silence. From the noise of the world complete silence can be restored, equal to zero. This can even become less; it can become more silent than the silence that equals zero, more and more silent, negative silence, negative quiet. And that is really the case when the strengthened soul-life is blotted out, when the silence in the soul becomes deeper than zero silence, if I may express it so. A quiet is established in the soul-life that tends toward the minus side, a stillness that is deeper than the mere silence of the ordinary consciousness.

And when we have penetrated to this silence, when the soul feels that it is removed from the world—not only when the world around it is still, but when the soul feels that the world-quiet can only equal zero, but that the soul itself is in a deeper silence than the silence of the world—then, when this negative silence sets in, the spiritual world begins to speak, really to speak, from the other side of existence.

Ordinarily, we ourselves as human beings interrupt the quiet of the world with our words projected into the air, When we have established in ourselves this quiet that is deeper than zero-quiet, this silence that is deeper than mere silence, the spiritual world begins to speak; but it is a language to which we must first become accustomed, a language utterly different from the language of words, a language formed in such a way that we gradually become accustomed to it by drawing upon our knowledge of the sense-world, of colors, of tones, in short, all that we know of the sense-world. We use this to describe the special impressions of the spiritual world according to our experiences of the sense-world,

I want to call attention to a few details. Suppose that in this inner silence of soul we get the impression of the presence of something out of the depths of spirit which attacks us aggressively, as it were, and excites us in a certain way. We know first of all that it is a spiritual experience, that the spiritual world is revealing itself. We compare this with an experience we have had in the sense-world, and learn that in the sense-world this experience has about the same effect upon us as the color yellow. In exactly the same way that we coin a word to express something in the sense-world, so now we take the yellow color to express this spiritual experience; or in another case we might take a tone to express it. As we use speech to talk about the things of the sense-world, so now we make use of sense-qualities and sense-impressions in speaking about what is spiritually received from the spiritual world in the silence of the soul.

This is the way to describe the spiritual world. I have described it in this way in my book “Theosophy” and in “Occult Science,” and the descriptions need only to be rightly understood. We must understand that for the silence of the soul there is a new language. While we have articulated speech for outward expression as human beings, something comes to us from the spiritual world which we must put into appropriate words, but it can be apprehended only in a subtle way, and must be translated into human speech by using words formed from sense-perception.

And when you have these experiences in the silence of the soul, you come to know that the world of invigorated thinking that you had at first is really only a picture,—a picture of what you see only now, for which you only now have a language, a picture by which you penetrated into the silence of the soul. The spiritual world now speaks to you through the silence of the soul. And now you are able also to efface this whole life-tableau, which you yourself have formed, which has brought the earth-life etherically before you, as by magic. This inner quiet of the soul appears now also in the personal life as you live it here on earth. The illusion of that ego which exists only in the physical body now ceases.

Anyone who holds too firmly to his ego, through a theoretical or a practical egotism, does not succeed in establishing this silence of soul in the presence of his own life-tableau. A man who combats theoretical and practical egotism comes to see that he first has this ego to enable him to make use of his body in the physical life, that the body gives him the possibility of saying “I” to himself. If he then passes from this corporeal sense of the ego into what I have described as the etheric world, where one flows together with the world, where the world is etherically united with one's own etheric being, he will no longer hold firmly to this ego. He will experience that of which this life-tableau, to which he has lifted himself, is a picture. He will experience his pre-earthly existence, in a spiritual world, before he descended through conception and birth into a physical human body,

Anthroposophy does not speak from philosophical speculations about the immortality, the eternity of the human' soul, but it tells how, through a special development of the soul-forces, one may struggle through to the vision of the soul-being before it descended to the earth. There actually appears now to the silenced soul a direct view of the soul as it dwells eternally in the world of spirit. As we look in recollection at what we have experienced on earth, as the past earth-life awakes in memory, so now, after we have learned in the soul-silence the language of the world of spirit, as I have described it, events appear that have not existed in the earth-life at all, events by which we have been prepared for this earth-life before we descended to it,

And now one looks upon what he was before he came down to the earth-life. As long as he was still beholding the life-tableau, he knew that he himself and the world are permeated and interpenetrated by moving, weaving spirit—though finer and more etheric, it is still a sort of nature-spirit, which he finds in the world and experiences as akin to himself. But now, when he looks into the pre-earthly existence, being united with what father and mother give at birth, he sees the unity of the moral world-order and the physical world-order. In this pre-earthly existence are all the forces that are prototypes of the forms produced during the physical earth-life. Here one sees that the spiritual forces reign and weave in the human body even in the physical earth-life. One marvels at the structure of the human brain as it gradually takes shape. One notices how undifferentiated this brain was when the child was born, what it became with the seventh year of life, about the time of the change of teeth. One turns his gaze upon the inner, plastic, formative forces; and does not stop short with the indefinite dictum about heredity.

We know that what the child works out in the first years of' life alone, in the plastic formation of the brain and the whole organism, is the after-effect, the imitation, of the far-reaching, universal events experienced in the spiritual world, where the soul was among spiritual beings, in just the same way that we live among the creatures of nature and human beings on earth. And one now comes to know that the spiritual world works into the physical earth-world, and that the after-effects of this pre-earthly existence are contained in all that is active in the inner organization of our being; one knows that he himself is a soul-spirit-being within the physical corporeal.

As we go farther, a third experience must be added to what I have already described, I have called attention to the necessity of first overcoming the illusion of the ego; one must overcome the ordinary, everyday, theoretical or practical egotism; and one must understand that this ego of our earth-life is bound up with the physical body, and comes to consciousness first of all in the sensations of the physical body. But there is something in the physical earth-life which, when I name it, may perhaps cause a little disturbance here and there in one's theory of knowledge, because it is usually not counted at all among the forces of knowledge, and it may be found distasteful to place it there. But it must be done nevertheless. And anyone who has come in the way described first to the invigoration of thought and then to soul-silence, will understand that it must be done. There must be added to these, as a third, a higher development, a more intensive development, of what exists in the ordinary life as love: love for people, love of nature, love of all our work, love for what we do. All the love that already exists in the usual life can be increased by doing away with theoretical and practical egotism in the way described. Love must be intensified, And when this love is increased, when the expanded love-force is joined to the strengthened thinking and the silence of soul, one comes to a third experience, Man comes now to the conscious laying hold of the true form of the ego, when he comes to know not only the pre-earthly existence, but when he now learns by means of this that an augmented love-force further energizes the other developed, strengthened forces of knowledge. He comes to an exact experience: All that has been won has nothing to do with the physical body; you experience yourself outside the physical body; you experience the world as it cannot be experienced through the body. Instead of natural phenomena you experience spiritual beings. You experience yourself, not as a natural being between birth and death, but as a spiritual being in a pre-earthly existence.

If a man has won this, and there is added to it a heightened, increased capacity of love, the possibility of dedicating himself, of surrendering himself with his whole body-free existence, to what he sees here, then there comes to him the knowledge of what exists within man in the immediate present, independent of the physical and even of the etheric body. He gets a direct view of what rests within him and goes through the gate of death into the post-earthly existence, when we enter again into a spiritual world. Because he comes to know what he is in a body-free state, he learns also of that which continues to exist, free of the body, when the physical body is laid aside at death.

You see the purpose of it all is to come to the perception of the eternity of the human soul. But in particular, one attains by means of it to the perception of the true ego, that ego which goes through birth and death, of which one cannot say that it dwells in the body, but that it rests in the body. One learns at the same time of the movement and activity of this ego in the pre-earthly existence in the spiritual world. One comes to know it in the same way that we know the human being here in the sense-physical existence through the sense of sight. Just as a man goes about here among the things of nature, among natural phenomena, among other people, so one learns to know, I might say, how the soul moves about in the pre-earthly existence in the spiritual world. But one learns also that the soul's movement and its relations there are dependent upon an earlier earth-life. I said that one learns of the oneness of the moral and the natural; one learns that in the pre-earthly existence man is permeated not only by spiritual but also by moral impulses, While one merely perceives, during the continuance of the etheric life-tableau, that spirit streams through the whole world, one now learns that in the pre-earthly existence there pulsated through our soul-spirit-being the moral impulses which appear in the memory during the physical life, and especially in the moral predispositions» One has now come to know the oneness of the moral and the physical world.

But now, in this moral-physical world (physical only in the pictures shining up into the spirit from the physical existence)—in this world experienced by the soul in the spiritual realm, one comes to know how the soul, as man's real ego, lives in the spiritual world in conformity with the previous existence. Truly when we come to spiritual vision and escape from the illusion of the ordinary ego, then we come to know how the ego has already passed through the spiritual world between death and a new birth; we learn how it comported itself, in conformity with its former earth-life, in this world endowed with moral impulses; and we learn that it is all carried into this earth-life as an inner determination of destiny. We see this expressed in the tendencies of a person, or in the special coloring of the desire which drives a man to one thing or another in the earth-life.

This does not encroach upon freedom. Freedom exists within certain limits, in just the same way that we are free, when we have built us a house, to occupy it or not; but we will occupy it because we have built it for ourselves for a certain reason. In the same way we are still free, even though we may know that there are impelling forces in our physical body which cause us to turn this way or that in life, or to live in one way or another. On the one hand we can regard this as a destiny that we have woven for ourselves out of earlier earth-lives, out of the world through which we have passed that contains not only spiritual but also moral laws. These have permeated what we were in a former life with definite spiritual impulses, and out of these have formed the destiny for our earth-life. But we notice also, when we look at what comes from the former earth-life, in the way described, that it is the eternal in the soul that has determined our earthly destiny» After we have passed through the gate of death, and have united what is of moral or soul-nature with our soul-being, in order to bring greater harmony into our relation with the demands of the moral world—we carry this into the world and come down again into a new earth-life, with what I might call the resulting total from what we were in life and what the spiritual world has made of us between death and a new birth.

So you see the really important thing is first to develop a certain perceptive faculty, with which one can look up into the spiritual world.

You must bear in mind, my dear friends, that not everyone has the gifts of a mathematician. It is very difficult for most people even to have these geometrical concepts, that are really to be formed only in the imagination. Geometry is not a spontaneous element of nature, but we understand nature by means of it. We must first produce geometry within ourselves, and by means of geometry we create the forms which will lead us into the structure of the lifeless world. With just such inner rigor do we produce inner vision, by developing strengthened thinking, silence of soul, and love which has become a force of knowledge, so that we may apprehend the living, the sentient, the self-conscious. In the same way that we apprehend the lifeless through mathematics, we come to an understanding apprehension of the living, the feeling, the self-conscious, when we proceed in a purely mathematical way, and develop a certain kind of vision with vigor and exactness.

So we may say that anyone who is serious about Anthroposophy pursues it as if he were required to give account of the use he makes of his forces of knowledge to the strictest mathematician. The forming of mathematical concepts is elementary Anthroposophy, if I may speak thus. And when anyone has learned to develop this self-creativeness of mathematics in order to apply it to the lifeless things of the world, he gets the impulse to develop further the kinds of knowledge which will lead to the vision I have described to you. We come to know that the lifeless world has a different content when we know it mathematically—mathematics is elementary Anthroposophy—and we know the living, sentient, self-conscious world when we study it with complete anthroposophical understanding.

Therefore, what in ordinary life is called clairvoyance, or anything of the kind, must not be confused with what we have in Anthroposophy for obtaining knowledge of the spiritual world. When we call this clairvoyance—and of course we can do so—we must mean exact clairvoyance, just as we speak of exact mathematics, in contrast with the mystical, confused clairvoyance, which is usually what anyone has in mind when this word is used.

Now you will perhaps have received the impression from my description that this is difficult. Yes, it is difficult] it is not easy. Hence, many people who presume to have an opinion about what goes on in Dornach do not try to understand what appears so difficult to them, but judge according to the trivial, confused clairvoyance. And then the result is all that I mentioned at the beginning of my lecture» But the Anthroposophy with which we are concerned is an exact kind of knowledge, which can actually be understood by anyone with sound human intelligence, just as anyone can understand a picture without himself being a painter. To get Anthroposophy one must be an anthroposophical researcher; to paint a picture one must be a painter; but everything I have described can be understood by anyone with good common sense, if only he does not himself put hindrances and obstructions in the way.

To paint a picture one must be a painter; to judge it one must rely upon sound human nature. To build up Anthroposophy one must be a spiritual researcher; to understand Anthroposophy one need only meet the more or less well-given descriptions of it with his healthy, free human spirit, undisturbed by natural-scientific and other prejudices. But Anthroposophy is only in its beginning, and what I have perhaps not described very well today will be described better and better as time goes on; and then the time will come which has always arrived ultimately for anything new in humanity. How long it was before the Copernican world-view was accepted! It has nevertheless upset all concepts previously held. Today it is accepted as a matter of course, and is taught in the schools. What is considered by people today the quintessence of fantasy, of nonsense, perhaps madness, will later be a matter of course—just as it was with the Copernican world-theory. Anthroposophy can wait until it is a matter of course.

This Anthroposophy, above all else, was to be cultivated at the Dornach Goetheanum. Therefore—permit me to say this in conclusion—more than ten years ago friends of our cause conceived a plan to build an abode for this Anthroposophy, and commissioned me to carry out the plan—I was only the one to execute it—and this abode is the Goetheanum. If Anthroposophy were a theoretical world-conception, or even a mere idea of reform, what would have happened the moment the idea appeared to build a home for Anthroposophy? An architect would have been consulted who would simply have erected a building in antique, or Renaissance, in Gothic or rococo style, or something of the sort. But Anthroposophy does not work merely theoretically, merely as scientific knowledge; it passes over into the whole human being, lays claim to the whole human being. This is very soon noticed by the anthroposophical researcher.

You see when a man wants to think about outer nature, he needs his head, and if he wants to indulge in philosophic speculations, he needs it even more. What appears before the silent soul, as pertaining to the spiritual world, in the way I have described it to you, is something that appears more fleetingly. One needs presence of mind in order to take it in quickly; but one needs for it also his whole human being. The head is not enough. The whole human organization must be placed in the service of the spirit, in order to bring into the memory, into the recollection, what one sees spiritually without the body. To illustrate this, let me give a personal experience.

I have never been accustomed to prepare any lecture in just the way lectures are usually prepared; but it is my custom to experience spiritually the thoughts that appear necessary for a lecture, as one must also experience spiritually what one wishes to hold as the result of spiritual research. What is experienced in strengthened thinking and in the human soul must be conveyed into thought and for this mere head-thinking will not suffice. One must be united more intimately with the whole human being, if one wishes to express what has been experienced in the realm of spirit. There are various methods by which such experience can really be brought into the ordinary consciousness, so that it can be put into words. It is my custom, with pencil in hand, to write down, to formulate, either in words or in some kind of signs, all that comes to me from the spiritual world. Hence I have many cartloads of note-books, but I never look at them again. They exist, but their only purpose is to unite with the whole human being what is discovered in spirit, so that it is grasped not only with the head, so as to be communicated in words, but is experienced by the whole human being.

Anthroposophy does indeed lay hold of the whole human being, therefore it is in still another regard an expression of the Goethean world-conception. It is, to begin with, an expression of the Goethean world-conception, in that it was induced by Goethe's method of observing the metamorphoses, the transformations of life in the plant and animal world. In this Goethean mode of observation the thought is so alive that one can then try to strengthen it in the way I have described. But Goethe is also that personality who built the bridge from knowledge to art.

Out of his artistic conviction Goethe voiced this beautiful expression: Art is a manifestation of secret laws of nature which without art would never be revealed. This means that Goethe knew one lays hold in real knowledge of the ruling and weaving of spirit, and then implants this into substance, be it as sculptor or musician or painter. Goethe knew that artistic fantasy is a kind of arbitrary projection of what man can experience in its pure form in the spirit.

Any knowledge which, like Anthroposophy, is rooted thus in the life of the spirit, flows of itself into artistic creativeness. It comes into artistic activity, when one knows the human being in the way I have described, and sees how the pre-earthly forces work into the earthly-corporeal existence. Then one has the feeling that the human being cannot be comprehended with the mere intellect, merely in concepts. At a certain point abstract concepts must be allowed to pass over into artistic seeing, so that you feel: Man is created by nature as a work of art.

Of course this can easily be ridiculed, for nothing seems more dreadful to people nowadays than to hear anyone say that to know something it must be comprehended artistically. But people may declaim as long as they please about the need to be logical rather than artistic when something is to be understood—if nature works artistically, then man simply does not find out about it by logic. He must pass over to artistic seeing to learn the real secrets of nature.

This is what Goethe meant when he said: “Art is a manifestation of secret laws of nature which without art would never be revealed.” And this is what Goethe meant also when, after years of longing, he reached Italy and believed he had attained his ideal of art. He said: “When I behold these works of art, I have the notion that the Greeks in the creation of their works of art proceeded by the same laws according to which nature creates, and I am on the track of those laws.”

Goethe was a personality who always aimed to transpose into a work of art whatever was comprehended as knowledge in the soul. Because Anthroposophy is of this same conviction, it was not possible simply to go to an architect and say: Build us a dwelling-place for Anthroposophy—and it would then have been built in Renaissance or antique or rococo style; our building has to be based on an entirely different conception of life and of art.

I have often compared the basic necessity here in a somewhat banal way with the relation of the nut-shell to the nut-kernel. The kernel of the nut, which we eat, is fashioned according to definite laws of form, but the shell is also made in accordance with the same laws. You cannot imagine a shell being fitted to the nut from the outside; the shell arises from the same laws of form as the kernel. So the forms of the outer visible building, what was painted in the domes, the sculpture placed in it, had to be fashioned as the shell, so to speak, of what was proclaimed within through the word, through art, spoken or sung. As the nut-shell to the nut, so this building had to be related to what was fostered within it. This was really the result not only of my conviction, but of that of many others. We have had eurythmy performances, the presentation of an art which has a special language in movement, in which the stage-picture consists of moving persons or moving groups? and the movements are not dance-movements, and not imitative movements, but an actual visible speech. We have developed here on the stage of the Goetheanum an expressive art of movement. The lines in which the human soul expresses itself harmonize in a beautiful way with the lines of the architraves, the lines of the capitals, the columns, with the whole form of the building, and with the paintings in it. What was cultivated within and the covering were one. When something was said from the platform, when what was learned in spiritual vision was put into words and sounded out into the audience-room, then what was spoken from the podium was the kernel which lived within. The artistic form had to correspond with the kernel. The style of the building in all its details had to come from the same impulse, from the same source as Anthroposophy itself. For Anthroposophy is not abstract, theoretical knowledge, but a comprehension of life, of the whole life. And therefore it becomes art quite spontaneously. It fulfils what Goethe said again: He who possesses science and art has also religion] he who possesses neither should have religion.

I might say, all that lived in the forms, all that may ever have been said or artistically presented in the Goetheanum, was intended to be comprised in a wood-carved group about 30 feet high, in which Christ, as the Representative of mankind, is portrayed in the Temptation by Ahriman and Lucifer.

This does not mean that Anthroposophy has anything to do with the forming of any kind of sect. Anthroposophy is far removed from hostile opposition to any religious conviction, or from any wish whatsoever to found a new religion. But Anthroposophy can show that real spiritual knowledge leads to the climax of religious development, to the Representative of humanity, Christ, to the incorporation of the Christ-God in the body of Jesus of Nazareth. It shows also how spirit-knowledge needs the picture of this central point of all earth-evolution, the picture of the Mystery of Golgotha. Quite certainly a man becomes religiously inclined through Anthroposophy, but Anthroposophy is not the founding of a religion.

What Anthroposophy wanted to offer artistically in the Goetheanum had to come from the same impulses from which the spoken word and the song proceed. It can even be said that when anyone stepped on the platform—I want to say this in all modesty—the forms of the columns, the whole form of the inner architecture, the inside sculpture and painting—all this was like an admonition to speak in a manner that would really approach the inner being of the listeners. It was like a continuous challenge to the speaker to put his word into this building in a worthy way.

To sum up: The building was to be an outer garment for Anthroposophy, which came wholly from the spirit of Anthroposophy, but was there for physical eyes to see» There was nothing symbolic, nothing allegorical. The whole building was created in its architecture, in its sculpture, in its painting, in everything connected with it, in such a way that what was livingly grasped in spirit-vision expressed itself, not in intellectual, symbolic forms; but living ideas and mobile thoughts about the spiritual world come to artistic expression in such a way as to be directly felt and seen. There was no symbol in the whole building, and if anyone maintains that the building had a symbolic meaning, he speaks as one who knows nothing about Anthroposophy.

And so the building was for the eye what Anthroposophy is to be for the soul of man. Anthroposophy has to be that kind of spirit which knows that a longing for the unveiling of the super-sensible vibrates and quivers through present humanity; that this humanity—made what it is by its scientific education, which intends to be generally popular, and already is to a certain extent—can no longer be satisfied with traditional concepts of belief; that concepts of knowledge must come, which tend upward to the spiritual world; and that unrest and dissatisfaction of soul result from the lack of such concepts of knowledge.

Anthroposophy wants to serve the present by providing in the right way what men need to take from this present into the near future. What Anthroposophy wants to be, invisibly, for human souls, the Goetheanum wanted to be, visibly, as vestment, as home. Had the Goetheanum been only a symbolic building, the pain at its loss would not have been so great, for then one could always bring it alive again in recollection. But the Goetheanum was not for mere remembrance. It was something intended to bring tidings from the spirit to the sense-world, and like any work of art, wanted to be manifested directly to the sense-world. Therefore with the burning of the Goetheanum, all that the Goetheanum wanted to be is lost.

But it has perhaps shown that Anthroposophy wants to be nothing one-sidedly theoretical, mere knowledge; it can be and must be a life-content in all realms. Hence, it had to build its abode in a style of its own. The Spirit, which Anthroposophy places before the soul, the Goetheanum wanted to place before the eyes. And Anthroposophy must place before the human soul what this soul really demands as the innermost need of the modern time; namely, a view, a knowledge, an artistic comprehension, of the spiritual world. Souls demand this because they feel more and more that only by experiencing the whole human destiny can they discover the complete human worth.

The Goetheanum could burn down. A catastrophe has swept it away. The pain of those who loved it is so great that it cannot be described. That structure which came from the same sources as Anthroposophy, and through it willed to serve mankind, had to be built for the sense-eye, had to be made of physical material. And as the human body itself, according to my description today, is the sense-image and the material effect of the eternal spiritual, but in death falls away, so that the spiritual can be developed in other forms, so also could that—permit me to close by comparing the Dornach misfortune with what happens in the usual course of the world—so could that be destroyed by flames which had to be made out of physical substance, in order to be seen by physical eyes. But Anthroposophy is built out of spirit, and only flames of spirit can touch this. Just as the human soul and spirit are victor over the physical when this is destroyed in death, so Anthroposophy feels alive, even though it has lost its Dornach home, the Goetheanum. It may be said that physical flames could destroy what had to be built of outer physical substance for the eye; but what Anthroposophy is to be for the further development of humanity is built of spirit. This will not be destroyed by the flames of the spiritual life, for these flames are not destroying flames; they are strengthening flames, flames that give more life than ever. And all that life which is to be revealed through Anthroposophy as life of knowledge of the higher world, must be tempered by the flames of the highest inspiration of the human being, his soul and his spirit. Then Anthroposophy will continuously evolve.

He who lives in this way in the spirit feels no less the pain caused by the passing away of the earthly, but he knows at the same time that surmounting all this depends upon the realization that the spirit will ever be victorious over matter, and in matter will be transformed ever anew.