The Rudolf Steiner Archive

The purpose of the evening review is to turn the life of the past into lessons for the life of the future. Some say: yes, I do it every day. Self-examination is also a double-edged sword; it is fruitful only when it really detaches the higher self from [the lower]. People do not become strangers enough to themselves, worrying ...

This is not unjustified, theosophy does not say to become hard-hearted; but often we prevent something by worrying and worrying about past things, prevent doing better. The purpose of meditative work is to pull oneself out; during the day one can have sorrow and worry, during the review [one must reject them] as well as the everyday thoughts. It is good to make this day review from backward to forward. For man lives toward the future, and in truth the future is approaching, perfection is at the end. If we extend [the review] not to twelve hours, but to twenty-four hours, we will see that it is good. The dreams will be only confusedly conscious at first, but it is good that one extends one's memory, for thereby the sense of the astral is sharpened, and the consciousness becomes continuous. One learns to understand that the dream life has a higher reality. To man the astral appears in distorted images, because man is not able to see properly. Later comes the moment when during the dream man is fully conscious, and this leads to the continuity of consciousness, so that it becomes indifferent whether we are awake or dreaming. This is also the way in which the masters teach the occult disciples.

One should not care whether one is a valuable personality or not. As for the morning meditation, it is mainly a matter of having a completely sightless consciousness, so that this void is filled with spiritual content ... or scripture. Let's try to bring about this emptiness by imagining the absolute, dark and empty space that has no boundary. The state we have to invoke is just like when we are asleep. To exclude the senses and the memory is the art. Then we imagine the absolute empty and dark space, and then out of this blackest darkness we let rise: "aum mani padme hum" - then the formula and the elevation to the higher self. Again darkness - and then as on a wall the sentence.

Sitting down more often, when there is time and opportunity, and thinking of nothing at all is a good exercise. It is hard to resist the always angry thoughts. This even strengthens the physical organism. Very significant is to get free the brain with present astral body.

A strong reason why the astral body is egoistic is the thoughts; everyone surrounds himself with a shell that is astral. When the thoughts are taken away, this astral stuff dissolves again, and nothing is better than when an organism is left to itself. Man has such a harmonious heart, lungs and so on, because the higher formers have created on it and he could ruin little. One acquires also thereby a certain exercise to scare away thoughts.

With the concentration it is necessary that from it is sharply separated the thinking, the speculating about a [meditation] sentence. We must already be finished with it. Such a sentence comes from higher experience and always contains more than we know. Even the inspired one meditates on his own sentences. So firm is his belief that it is higher revelation.

Patience must be so long, even in failure, that the unconditional belief that things will get better one day does not waver. Not forcing things, not forcing, is necessary. Patience must be there in tremendous measure; it is it that comes over the occult student in the

Meditation must be poured out completely. It is through this that he becomes a disciple. As the plant does not skip a single one to get to the last, crowning one, so the disciple; never skip an intermediate link; detour where necessary; form is adapted to the cleft of the rock. Patience, constancy and steadfastness are the qualities of the divine nature that we have to develop. It is a matter of mind, not of success.

The devotional part then follows.

Phrases: Let us keep in mind the one that basically man is more perfect as a physical being than as astral and mental. Imperfection lies in the fact that man today is a tripartite being and still clumsy in the handling of what are the higher principles and in the free use of the lower principles. For he can never become happy if he abandons himself to the lower principles like the animal, which does not have its mental body on the same plan as its physical and astral. Animals can be trained, but man works through the animal again to the higher plan, which then works down. But only the one who moves freely on the mental plane, only an occultist, is allowed to do that.

Man must keep the balance between his mental and physical nature, oscillate back and forth between both. This is already expressed in the exterior. The animal is horizontal; the human being is imprinted with being torn out of the physical vitality. This uprightness of the head is conditioned by the balancing between the physical and the higher spiritual. Because it is so, the head of man as a sign of his intellectuality is the organ which is pushed in the middle ...

The animal head is only instinctive. In occult relation the human head is quite different from the animal one. With the animal completely ... With man a beginning; the stream is poured out into the animal and has found its end there - dead end. With man there is a new beginning; through all the openings of the head all the streams go on, so that man through his head is a bridge, a connecting link between the higher and lower nature.

The animal eye looks out only to the sensed object; the human eye connects the mental image with the object, and thereby opens to the spirit; while the animal eye forms a cul-de-sac.

The main human openings are related to space by the seven planets, to time by the seven days of the week. The sacred line in the world, the lemniscate, is to be traced here; we recognize in this way the occult placement of man in the world-entirety.

Through the right eye passes the second principle, Budhi; through the left the third principle, Manas; through the right ear the mind soul; through the left the sentient soul; through the right nostril the etheric body; through the left nostril the astral body, Linga sharira. And on the top of the head, in the future, there will be an opening for the outpouring of Atman. Through the mouth flows the Word, which must always be thought through. Through the seven planets these main openings are placed in relationship to space.

The top opening on the head has a connection with Jupiter, the right eye is connected with Mercury, the right ear with Saturn, the right nostril with the Sun, the left nostril with the Moon, the left ear with Mars, the left eye with Venus. Through the seven days of the week they are connected with time. Here it is necessary to notice the Sacred Line of the World. It points us to the occult construction of man in the universe.

Concentration is followed by a prayer part, which should consist of awe and reverence [toward] the great spirits who have penetrated deeply into the mysteries of nature and the universe and who are above ordinary human nature.

When the moon is waning, nothing new should enter into meditation.

Right Eye Second Principle, Budhi Mercury
Left eye Third principle, Manas Venus
Right ear mind soul Saturn
Left ear sentient soul Mars
Right nostril etheric body Sun
Left nostril astral body moon

We want to submit some more questions in relation to the three kingdoms of nature. We know that every being must pass through these three kingdoms. To each mineral belongs the form; from this formed being of nature the plant is to arise. If it were to evolve in the same direction, without new impetus, it would of course always remain mineral - at most it could become more perfect as a mineral.

If the mineral is to become a plant, this mineral must acquire the special power for plant existence - the abilities which form organs to draw this individual life into itself. Now, however, it remains mineral for the time being; it will still retain the property that when the forces of nature are overcome, it will decay. It cannot transfer the form it already has to a new individual. It must incorporate its form and the newly acquired organs and transfer them to a germinal state. Now, when it passes to life recently, it has acquired to its former property of having form a new one of breathing in life, and when it now passes into germinal state, it has to draw this life into its own. Now we have vegetable essence. The mineral has added to its own essence, which consists in having form, the new property of having life. This is the essence of a round or cycle.

As the plant being progresses, it takes the kama from the environment, forms organs. We have plant being with the ability to take in desire, but this being, while able to take in desire, cannot keep it inside. It flows desire in and out. This goes back to the germinal state, and after revitalization, animal being is formed. This is the process of a cycle.

Now a mineral would always remain mineral if there was no driving force to take care of the same, There has to be something taking care of the mineral for all this to come into being, and that is the monadic essence. It is the driving element. If it had only the drive to be plant, it would stop here. As high as the being is to develop, so high the drive must already be. No mineral can move up to a higher level than it already has in itself according to the plant. The mineral, which later becomes a plant, is already a plant according to its disposition, a latent plant. The mineral, which later becomes animal, is already latent animal. We can also say: The mineral, which later becomes plant, is already plant according to the spirit; the mineral, which later becomes animal, has always been animal according to the spirit; it was only not according to the physical reality animal, but mineral. Every being, from which something becomes, must have an invisible spirit nucleus in itself. What we now call a mineral is not like minerals of yore: each had an astral body. Now it has none, is in a dead end. When we speak of man having once passed through the mineral kingdom, it is not to be understood that he was mineral like the minerals of today; we must never say that man was mineral, plant, animal as he is today. It follows: Man has never been anything but man, he has only in previous periods of evolution always developed parts of his full reality, the physical parts, and the spiritual he has retained.

He has always been present in a higher spiritual way; only he [evolves] in the first round visibly in the mineral, [in the] second round visibly in the vegetable kingdom, [in the] third round visibly in the animal kingdom, and [is] only in the fourth round also visible as man.

Common Darwinism says: before was mineral, then plant, then animal. And he explains that man has emerged from these three. So it looks from an external point of view, for the one who does not see the invisible. Darwinism is a half-measure; but when it is recognized in its right meaning, it has its good sense. In descending, that which is acquired as a faculty is absorbed into the being. Now we are in the ascending line and have to acquire new abilities. Memory, as we know, develops in the Atlanteans. There man begins to absorb what he receives through the mental images. The abilities acquired during the ascending arc are new parts of the entity during the descending arc. And since since the middle of the Atlantean time the ascending arc has been begun, and on this ascending arc thinking as a faculty is more and more developed, so in the next round during the descending arc thinking will be absorbed in the beingness of man.

The Upanishads reckon one round as the day of Brahma. "What you think today, you will be tomorrow." This is true of man in his present round. Thus we can imagine the rhythmic course of the world, that a being sucks in an element from the environment or universal world and then gives it to the outside world. Man sucks in thought - he will send out the thought from himself in the next round. During one half of the round, a being sucks in what it gives out during the next. That is why esoteric philosophy calls a whole round an inhalation and exhalation of the Supreme Being. "Brahma breathes a world in and out."

It is not a mere comparison; what was originally taught is the world process. The first teachers taught these great truths - man later added his lesser realizations. The macrocosm came first, the great nature - then the microcosm, the small nature.

The knowledge of the earlier time referred to the higher world (Brahma breathes in and out). According to this revealed cosmic truth, people later named the process noticed in humans as inhaling and exhaling. Then people forgot the cosmic process and considered the naming more a figurative one.

Even the Greeks did not attribute their knowledge to experience, but to the revelation of higher beings.

If we keep evolution in mind, we find that man has been quite ascendant since the Atlantean period. The Ursemites have passed from memory to combining thought. The Aryan, the fifth root race, had to train thinking - working from manas to kama. Right thoughts have an effect on the astral body like higher natural forces. At the end of the round, the astral body must be formed. At the end of the fifth race, the astral body must be formed regularly. In the sixth root race, social love will have been formed and the astral body must be ennobled; the pull upward, toward the spiritual, will be the achievement. And at the end of the seventh, he will be completely purified.

Sixth race: purification, refinement of kama-manas,

Seventh race: purified kama-manas.

By advancing in this way, man is able to gradually acquire abilities for higher worlds. These worlds, to which man acquires a kind of ideal relation, are called:

Bhurloka fourth race
Bhuvarloka fifth race
Svarloka sixth race
Maharloka seventh race

These four worlds really exist, the heavenly worlds to which we form the earthly one. During the ascending evolutionary epoch they are developed as an annex in human beings

You have to acquire a few terms to understand how self-knowledge becomes world-knowledge. First, a simple concept. Let us consider a lily seed and then the whole lily. The power of the whole lily is inside the seed. If we sink the seed into the earth, the power inside it is able to group earth, water, air in such a way that the lily becomes. The material comes from the environment, but the organizing force from the lily.

Similarly, we must imagine the Pitri nature according to a Pralaya. In the form of a seed we have it after a great pralaya. He is perceptible only in the beginning and at the end of his development on the Budhi plan and in the middle on the Nirvana plan. Nevertheless, when he comes into matter, he has the power within him to organize it as the lily seed does.

Let us note: Pitri whole force without matter; in contrast to this we have man in his material arrangement. In a sense, similar. After the seventh round, when man will have reached nirvana, he will again have seed nature, but a different one. Everything he has experienced here, he will take over into the seed. We have the state where everything is rolled up into one point: Involution; and the one where unfolded is: Evolution.

Seed of the lily - involution unfolded lily - evolution

They are states relative to each other, [they are] mutually dependent. If man, as he is, went to Nirvana, he would not be able to unfold all that he is capable of. One side of the being is always in evolution, the other in involution.

Let us go through the Middle Ages, the time of Augustine to Luther and Calvin. Little of external science was then, but more mystical-internal life. This was therefore in evolution; mind in involution. - Later time: intellectual life [emerges] and mystical recedes. Mind life: Evolution; mystical: involution. What was then in germ, now came up. - In life the activity of our senses is in evolution - after death we have no senses, but all that we have experienced through them is properly spread out. Involution and evolution.

We have no time at all to process everything we see, only a small part we process. From this it can be seen how much we involve, absorb, how much must spread, evolve in the Devachan. From this we can see why the time in Devachan has to be so long. And again, what is prepared in Devachan by this propagation, becomes investment at birth and evolves in the next life. So, it is a continuous equilibration between involution and evolution. And to penetrate this completely is the task of theosophical immersion. It corresponds to a world process. Man usually jumps from one impression to another, taking in impression after impression; that he spreads them out in devachan will depend on the fact that he already holds them in life. Ordinary life is a kind of spiritual involution; meditation-life is a kind of spiritual evolution.

Just as evolution and involution play an essential role in understanding the world order, so does triplicity.

Let us think of a sphere, a glass sphere, compact, it is a unit, holds together. Let us think it divided into innumerable parts, all the same: The glass ball will fall apart, be a heap. If it doesn't, it must be held by forces that make it float in space. [unreadable word] Sphere made of many parts; forces that hold it - shape.

This applied to the whole universe: originally one, then divided into millions of parts; and then the forms, the arranging spirit. - The first, infinitely times divided is:

a) I. Logos, original power, on which everything [unreadable word]: Father, b) II. the powers that hold together: Word, Son, c) IIL. the ordering, the Holy Spirit.

Namely this was in use by the greatest Christian esotericist: Dionysius Areopagita, disciple and initiate of the Apostle Paul. - He is called Pseudo-Dionysius because [the teachings] were not written down until the sixth century.

There was a watchword among Christians, "From mouth to ear." Written things can be abused; the truly initiated did not write down. Dionysius was the head of a school of mystics. It happens with such developed people that they do not remain in devachan as long as other people. They can soon return to new incarnation. The heads of initiatory schools usually do; these schools often have the good fortune to keep the same head through many centuries. So it was here. And it was not until the sixth century, when people thought more of writing down teachings, that they were written down here.

From this Dionysus are the original teachings of Christian esotericism; one can learn Christianity in its original form from him, and to this belongs this interpretation of the supreme entities.

The Father reveals himself first in the higher being, then in the mirror image:

Atma - Father
Budhi - Word
Manas - spirit and in physicality:
Etheric body - Father
Astral body - word
Kama-Manas - spirit, the lower.

In [John]: Three are they that beget on earth: the blood - life principle -, the water - astral - and the spirit - KamaManas; and three are they that beget in heaven: the Father, the Word, and the heavenly spirit: Atma - Budhi - Manas.

This is how gnosis, esotericism, was taught even then in Athens. Pulpit speech was exoteric, priestly teaching: esoteric.

Seven states of consciousness develop one after the other. What develops and rises to higher degrees is the ego. What we study is what the I experiences. So that theosophy is: self-knowledge. We were there and participated in the life on all planets. On the first one was a peculiar state of consciousness, not spatially we have to think of the planets. They are states that emerge from each other, like the girl from the child - in between only pralaya states. Metamorphoses they are.

From distant states we come to the esoteric plan. Mars. - On it we lived and had a consciousness that was quite dull -, not yet dream consciousness - as it is today in the stones, mineral. - But it went into the vastness, an all-consciousness it was. Such a person knew /gap in transcript]

Now only to be artificially evoked in pathological states. There they begin to draw /unreadable] great world systems [...]. A dull trance consciousness, but extending over the earth with surrounding world bodies.

In each round it becomes brighter. Seven rounds, each in seven states. So that 7x7=49 states the consciousness has already gone through. - Materially, the planet dies, but all the plants pass over, like the lily from the seed.

On the second planet - Sun - a consciousness is formed which extends not so far, not over the dead, but over all living things, the consciousness which man has in dreams, where all vegetative functions continue to work; plant consciousness in 49 states. The planet is esoterically called the sun. Solarpitris, which here complete themselves high.

The third planet - Moon - develops a higher state of consciousness, dream trance, like the consciousness of the higher animals. Moon - again seven states: arupa, rupa, astral, physical, [illegible]

Fourth planet: earth. Now it comes over and becomes earth-development, which has to develop the bright day-consciousness.

Then passes over into the fifth state of consciousness - fifth planet: Mercury: psychic consciousness. To be distinguished by the fact that man will be brightly conscious not only in the physical but also in the astral. The desire nature of the other becomes transparent, his own he can direct like a force. Psychic consciousness.

On the sixth planet - Venus - more-than-psychic, super-psychic. Thought is conducted.

Seventh planet: On Jupiter spiritual consciousness; man will be all spirit.

343 states man thus undergoes. 7 x 7 on each planet. Thus we understand the seven principles that are in eternal formation. Four are formed in man, three in the plant. The earth is for man to be formed as he is now; because man is in the fourth round, he has also formed his fourth principle.

Important theosophical proposition that basically everything is one and we are connected with all beings - let us study.

In the great seed that arose as earth, as loud seeds were pitris that surrounded themselves with matter of various kinds, took bodies and lived out in seven principles. What happens on the earth is the means for man to reach his goal, to climb up the ladder. Man is the center and goal of the earthly development. There would be no /unreadable] if /gap in transcript]

The Pitris enter, find the earth quite undeveloped, must prepare the ground; form the mineral world. The human being has it in itself - bone structure is mineral -, even we have predisposed it, together with the formers. Not like today it was, a radiating system and germ of what should become. However, one had not been able to use everything, but had to separate out. From the rest dead bodies became, the nobler materials were taken away to living ones. So the human being came into being at the expense of the mineral kingdom. So that we can stand and develop further, we had to form it. Everything can be distributed only polar. If we climb up, we push the others down.

Now man got out of what he had already drawn to himself the vegetable and repels that which is useless for him.

During the third round, he does the same with the animal kingdom, but only as far as the fish-like creatures.

During the fourth round, the mineral, plant, and animal kingdoms are there, and man first segregates what becomes amphibians, and also the birds. Within the animal kingdom he segregates the higher, so that he eliminates at their expense the very noblest parts to form himself. - Thus within the warm-blooded animals man arises.

Elohistic days - the rounds.

So the mineral kingdom arises in the first round, becomes properly finished in the fourth. The plant kingdom begins in the second, becomes finished in the fifth. The animal kingdom comes into being in the third, is completed in the sixth. Man comes into being in the fourth, and in the seventh becomes the image of God.

Fifth day: teeming [Mostly illegible and very fragmentary notes follow]

That man rules means that he has already sucked into himself.

Let us once again visualize the sequence of stages of the three kingdoms of nature. The mineral kingdom merely takes the form for the particularity. The plant takes the life from the general nature and transfers it to a single being. Thus it seeks in universal nature a perpetual source of life. This is the difference between plant and animal, where life depends on the ancestor. Hence this intimate being of the plant interwoven with universal nature, more chaste life.

Man has already passed through these three realms on three previous spheres. He was realized in the mineral, plant and animal kingdom. The shape was admittedly different. It resembled an automaton in the mineral; human plants looked radiate; human animal forms were egg-shaped. The human being reaches a kind of completion on the three first plans, so to speak. In the order of the kingdoms he could not have perfected himself further - only as an animal. Perfection of animality there can be much greater.

We only have to be clear that as long as an animal remains animal, manas in animality does not work on the physical plan, but on a higher one. Think of an animal: it will differ from man under the condition that its manas does not remain in the animal, but on a higher plan, so that if one wanted to imagine it sensually, one would have to think of the animal as pulled on strings.

The mind lies on the higher plan and acts into the lower. So with lower organs of the human being. A thigh, for example, is so artfully constructed that the thing could not be made more ingenious by the sharpest engineering.

To train the animal means: manas cannot do anything if the animal has no organ to do it; if the brain cannot be used to count, manas cannot count. If you prepare the brain of the animal, you give Manas opportunity to work from the higher plan down to an animal. Therefore, only occultists and mystics should do it. Otherwise, you can do something that is harmful in the universe.

In the Atlantean race, animals were artificially formed and trained into new species by crossbreeding; to this our animals now owe their higher qualities. Thus we must not be surprised that certain animals rival man in the skill of their ability. A bone can do even more than man. The Moeris lake was created with perfect art. The ancient Egyptians still knew how to drain the Nile waters into an artificial lake that irrigated the land through canals. It was still a kind of higher instinct, manas worked into it from the higher plan.

Man differs from the animal in that Manas works within him, not from above. Manas has descended to the physical plan. That is why an animal can progress further than a man, yet it is qualitatively below man. - What shows me the time is spirit of the clock inventor; he works from another sphere. Thus manas in the higher sense. That can also be called highest at the same time, what man achieves in the three former spheres: Being into which Manas works from outside. The task of earthly development is to transform the body so that Manas can work from within. And now you will also become clear about the difference of the human being standing on the fourth stage of development from the one standing on the third: that that which formerly acted upon him from the outside, bursts forth from within.

Now everything must be properly prepared. Let us think the lunar period completed. Now everything had to be repeated briefly, and for this purpose previous stages were necessary. Only the Lemurian period was so far that Manas could make the transformations. Also the Lemurian race has seven sub-stages. In the fourth, Manas bursts forth from within the human being. Let us imagine the great contrast: the certainty with which Manas works from outside in the animal; fallibility is unthinkable. Therefore, free will is also unthinkable. Only when Manas moves into the inside, fallibility is conceivable.

Now that the spheres are closed and Manas is within, he is, as it were, locked in prison and dependent on meeting his fellow Manases. Fallibility occurs only when Manas shines forth from within. Throughout the evolution of mankind, the possibility of freedom occurred, the ability to choose between good and evil. In the whole early macrocosmic nature there can be no question of freedom. Until that time, animals lived with absolute security. All animals with warm blood and fighting instincts arose only after the middle of the Lemurian period, with sexuality at the same time.

Before there were single beings, directed by Manas; now single beings with freedom of choice arose. Now something new must arise, which harmonizes the beings. The drive cannot now come from Manas, for it has lost its security. A new element appears. This is the element of love. Love has not been necessary before, because before the security of instinct has worked. From the lowest to the highest, what is called love has now arisen. Even the most subordinate form, sexual love, appeared only now, up to the forms of the most spiritual love. As in an atmosphere our whole earthly macrocosm was wrapped up in love at that time. This love in the organic was connected with the development of the warm blood. It is the physical vehicle for love.

Those entities that were powerful, great entities before could not remain; these were the fishes, they withered away. Cold-blooded beings of today are the last remains of great, mighty fishes of the Lemurian time. Only warm-blooded animals feel well now.

And now we see what the earthly development has become since that time. The animal spreads its beingness like a cover over something, which reveals itself from the outside in: "The animal is gone.

Man reveals himself. Higher development is that he reverses the matter, that he sends the threads of his mana outside. He gives the threads of his being as love. So on the one hand revelation - to the animal, then intermediate realm of egoism, then realm of love.

Exusiai - coming forth of a higher entity into a lower one. Revelation. Light is the physical expression for this shining in; this revelation. Occult light is the revelation of a higher element by a lower being. Love is the surrender of one's higher element through a lower appearing being. In this struggle humanity still stands. Earthly development is the struggle between light and love.

What resides in man himself? A drop of manas, the inner glow itself. Love is the inducement for Manas to push outward. - Two principles.

The manasic entity that works in infinite facets as human souls is called Lucifer. Occult name for that which acts as light on man. The power that lets it flow out, that pushes outward, is Jehovah. The love entity that pushes the manasic entity outward is Jehovah. "God is love." It came in to the world in the middle of the Lemurian period.

What will fully express itself as love when the human way of life is at its goal, will express itself as divine wrath while it is still in an imperfect state.

Let us consider once again the lines of development which have flowed together in the time of which we have spoken. Development does not go in a straight line, so that when you have a stage, you had only to retrace it, but [gap in transcript]

It someone wants to comprehend the electric clock, if he only traced a mechanical pendulum, so he would not comprehend, but he must El /gap in the transcript]

In the middle of the Lemurian race we have a confluence of various streams. Above all, the psychic of man was already there. Was on other plan. Has gone through seven races and rounds there. What took possession of the body at that time, was after long development on a certain point of maturity. This soul, which took possession at that time, we ask probing questions of. The first and second root races were still soulless. Souls could not take possession because earth was not so mature.

If the soul would have wanted to take possession of the body in the then point of view of maturity, it would be like when very bad piano player /gap in transcript]

It was necessary first for the earth to produce bodies so mature that their degree of maturity corresponded to that of the souls. There we have two streams of development flowing together. Earth develops bodies, and the other stream was the soul development, which took place in other worlds, and now coincides with first stream. We must take into account that development does not proceed so smoothly.

If we take into account the earthly stream. It was only a certain number of bodies so far matured that they could be inhabited by souls at that time, not everything has ge/gap in transcript] sh/gap in transcript] gr/gap in transcript]. Besides, the whole body development was so far that only most advanced souls knew something to do with these bodies. So we have first of all a group of people with advanced souls. This is a special human race: highly evolved Arhats, a small crowd. The souls of these arhats were already beyond the stream of development of that time. That is, they already foresaw what the others could only achieve in longer development. So they could really be leaders of man, because they foresaw. Now the number of the excellent bodies was exhausted by them. The others had to be content with inferior ones. Manas could make do with these tools only in an awkward way. These bodies could develop only so far as the Atlantean; then they had to die out little by little. The Ursemites were the basis for the fifth root race. These had found more mature bodies, and had moved up behind. This is the third group.

First group: particularly advanced arhats.

Second group: who got only dull spirit and died out.

Third group: those who always follow, depending on the readiness of the bodies.

From these are recruited those who are able to go over into the fifth race and form other future races.

The Arhats are highly evolved entities who, where they incarnate, stand higher than a normal human being can. Hence, able to live on higher planes and have higher intercourse. Hence, able to take high orders: Messengers of the gods, kings and leaders were these Arhats. At the most, they were able to draw some to themselves, but on the whole, these people were directed quite unconsciously. This still lasted through the whole Atlantean period. Only the generation, which develops out of the Ursemites, delivers those, who are able to take their fate into the hand. And these were therefore capable of being taught by the messengers of the gods. Hence properly called: Heroes.

So also in myth we have to take the matter literally. Now to a certain extent these people could be initiated, and this is what the myth recorded, and also danger: Tantalus was allowed to eat with the gods. He was human and was allowed to consult in the decisions of the gods. Therefore seduction great. For people who were mortal - could load karma on themselves. What Tantalos brought forth as his own son is the finite. It is the greatest offense that an initiate can commit, to mix finite resolutions with eternal ones. And it is easy to deceive gods, because for them even the finite, which is wrapped in the veil of maya, is eternal. In a sense, it is easy to deceive initiates. Tantalos does it and brings the most terrible upon himself and his descendants. From all this we see that men were incapable of directing themselves until the end of the fourth race; those higher beings still directed them into the fifth.

Even in the beginning of the fifth race they still needed the leader Manu. He separated the most able ones from the rest and directed them to the region Gobi; some hundred families, which were withdrawn from the rest and only educated by instruction of the Manu. He taught the original religious mental images of the fifth race, arts, use of fire, preferably. Then astronomy, alchemy, these fundamental sciences. Above all, strict morality. Earlier, when people were guided, they did not need moral principles; that began now. People should become independent. Therefore it was necessary to educate in freedom; otherwise purpose would not be achieved if forced. And because free, many did not follow. Therefore very sifted, these Ursemites. The few had followed completely freely.

First colony went towards front India: first subrace, Indo-Aryan. Till now people were children under guidance of Arhats; now they gradually begin to be able to use the faculties to work themselves up, to be initiated. These first rishis were the first initiated human beings; the earlier ones were descended gods. Entirely new beings are appearing. Initiates descended from the earth itself, who could become leaders; about fifteen to sixteen million years ago. Since then always incarnated, and these are the entities called masters. Only the sixth root race will have entities descended from humanity itself that will guide people, as Manu. Transition from messengers of the gods to human masters, mahatmas.

And now this Manu is at the head of the theosophical movement, creating preparation for the sixth root race, so that within the theosophical movement happens what happened in the Atlantean time. Master Morya is the first human Manu who will establish the sixth root race, whereas in the past they were messengers of the gods, divine Arhats incarnated in the Lemurian period and gest/abbreviation not resolvable], and they are also called Sons of the Fire Mist because the Earth was in that state at that time.

Third root race perished by fire.

Fourth root race has perished by water.

Fifth root race has perished by immorality.

That is, in the end, egoism will appear in even stronger form, in the form of a furious struggle for existence, with will; whereas until now unconscious, and only those who have learned to be unselfish, will form the sixth race. This will emerge as a more unselfish race with revival of the Christ principle, again emergence [gap in transcript]

Doom by fire

Doom by water

Doom by Will In this foresight of the struggle of all against all, the Theosophical Society wants to lay the nucleus of universal brotherhood. It is not thought out arbitrarily, but out of the world plan.

The Masters have spoken for the first time because it is incumbent upon the Masters to create the material for the sixth race.

The stopping forces are called Mammon, and only in secondary meaning money has been given this name; Mammon is the god of stopping progress.

The Atlanteans were led by initiates. They were not yet human initiates, having only powers available to man, but bringing with them certain higher faculties which man does not develop until the fifth root race, so that these sons of the gods, Arhats, could initiate them - and withdraw more and more. But our race, too, was guided by a Manu who still /gap in transcript] and aimed [gap in transcript].

The ursemitic race - first with combining thinking - has dwelt, fifteen to sixteen million years ago, in what is now Ireland. From the race has chosen the most capable of the Manu [gap in the transcript] and morally best and has moved to the desert Gobi. With the Atlanteans one could not speak of actual religion and religious worship. Atlanteans have mastered life force, but it was not thoughtfully conscious, but more like a suggestion that Atlantean kings exercised on their peoples; not a dream state, but also not such a bright consciousness as today. Sensed that power came from the divine, but did not worship it.

The Manu aimed to bring everything they could achieve into a religious character. Manu was supported by number of lesser messengers of gods. The Atlantean could follow only what he had in front of him. The god he felt. The adept king also met him visibly; he could not understand everything, but he saw him. To this they were to be urged, that they worshipped not only the visible, but also the invisible. "You have to believe also in what you do not see; the highest is an invisible. And a whole monumental teaching plans over those beginnings of the fifth race. Worship that of which you cannot form a picture, for as soon as you form a picture, the unseen escapes you."

And an echo of this primal teaching of Manu is in the Mosaic Law. Everything that filled the new race took on such a religious tinge. The orbits of the heavenly bodies were explained, how the divine laws and powers ruled in them. [As divine wisdom was taught] what we know today as Theosophy.

To the chosen race Manu communicated this. During last atJantic times the people, without thinking of divine, had already known science and arts; first the fire. Now the Manu let say to his people: "You can see indeed what you need for the immediate life now. But you should voluntarily relate what you know and know to the divine; connect it with the divine." Then Manu set up something that could relate these initially worldly pursuits to the divine. The fire was to be lit on the altar as a connecting link on certain days, and thus the sacrifice was born.

So Manu gave a religious character to human activity, human morality was given in the form of commandments. The ursemitic race was endowed by Manu with the religious character. Earlier there was no such thing; instinctively the Atlantean felt the divine; consciously he did not grasp it. In a worldly way Atlanteans have known art and science. Now the Manu has broken with the policy of Atlantean adepts. Not suggestive anymore. Manu put everything freely. They could believe, but also refrain. Consequence of it was that only a part followed the Manu voluntarily, the others devoted themselves to the service of the own benefit. With the small part he withdrew even more inside; with these he undertook the consolidation of his work. The small group are the selfless and pious living within our race; the others, who had not quite followed, serve self-interest.

When Manu had prompted several hundred years of primal religious wisdom and had initiated some, they moved, as it were, as colonizers to the peoples who had remained behind. To them they grafted what they had learned, and depending on it these teachings took other colorings. From this the new sub-races arose.

First: The first train, led by the Rishis, went to India, and there arose the first subrace; it was the most spiritual, for it was closest to the source. Earlier the people had guessed more, now the thought grasped its own origin and what it was in the stars [gap in the transcript]. With this subrace, the Indian, had remained mainly wisdom.

Secondly, in Central Asia a more practical activity arose. Man had to conquer nature first. In the work the task was given, and in standing his man. Agriculture was cultivated and directly human activity - strength. The personal is what is enclosed between death and life. Indians did not need to work so hard, and therefore they could devote more to the care of the spiritual. In Persians: Here also developed the race that did not directly believe in reincarnation. Personally, man should be such that he could be relied upon in all cases of life. Truth to speak one taught the boys. Fire sacrifices were especially in place here. Zarathustra lived about fourteen million years ago. There were seven Zarathustras. History knows only of the last; it was the same one in ever new reincarnations.

Third, colonists moved to the Near East, Egypt but also to Greece and Italy. The legend has preserved souvenirs of the initiates who came over from Asia. Orpheus who came to Greece, Theseus, Kadmos; Moses initiated in Egypt. These are phenomena that took place at about the same time. Human initiates, but worshipped like demigods.

Fourth, a fourth subrace came about in a similar way at the beginning of our reckoning, Since Homer Latin-Greek race, which later adopted Christianity, and here the Christian Church was founded.

As in the past winters, I will take the liberty of giving a series of lectures on spiritual science here in this place during the course of this winter semester. The program will show that these lectures will first cover what spiritual science has to say about the questions of life from its point of view, that then the transition will be made to the illumination of some important cultural phenomena, outstanding cultural facts and outstanding personalities of the past, such as Raphael and Leonardo da Vinci, and that finally the relationship between spiritual science and various phenomena in the immediate present spiritual life will be illuminated. Today, these lectures are to be begun in a peculiar way. At the outset, we shall not present what can be said in support and confirmation of this spiritual research, but, on the contrary, what can be said in the way of possible, more significant objections to this spiritual science.

It is in the nature of things that this spiritual research attracts much opposition in our time, owing to the state of our present-day culture and owing to many other facts. But nothing would be more inappropriate to this spiritual science than for it to lapse into fanaticism and, so to speak, only to want to see what can be adduced in support of it from the standpoint of its representatives. Fanaticism must — and we shall see for what reasons this is completely foreign to spiritual research. Therefore, more than is perhaps necessary from any other point of view, it must be anxious to understand the objections of its opponents; indeed, in a certain sense it must almost tolerate them, and it must appear understandable to it that a good number of honest truth-seekers of the present time cannot go with it. It has been my custom – and those who have honored me with their attendance at my earlier lectures will be aware of this, and I shall continue to follow this practice – to take possible objections into consideration at the same time as I present my arguments. Today, so to speak, more significant and weighty objections are to be anticipated. For objections to what can be said from the point of view of spiritual research do not arise merely from the opponents, but in the conscientious pursuit of spiritual research, the soul that is devoted to such an undertaking is confronted with these possible objections at every turn. Since the truths of spiritual research have to be won and fought for in the soul, the soul must in a certain sense be equal to the opponent with regard to such objections as are raised in the soul itself. And much better progress will be made in this field if one is clear from the outset about what can be objected.

Now it is not my intention to deal with those objections or alleged refutations which can be found on the street, so to speak, or conjured up out of thin air. Instead, I shall consider the objections that an honest seeker of truth in our time, based on our education and the spiritual foundations of our present age, can and to a certain extent must raise. Nor will the objections of those be dealt with who often call themselves spiritual researchers or Theosophists; for it must be admitted at the outset that much of what passes today under the name of “Theosophy” is not to be taken seriously. But what has been and is advocated here is to be taken into account in my objections today. But if we want to engage with such objections, then much of what has already been said in the course of the previous cycles and what will be discussed in the next lectures must be brought to mind, as it were in outline. So, let us briefly agree on what is meant by spiritual research in terms of its content and sources here.

First of all, one can characterize spiritual science in very general terms by saying that spiritual science takes the view that it must go beyond everything that man perceives through his senses, everything that he is able to fathom with a science that is based primarily on the senses and on the intellect, which draws its conclusions from the senses. that it must go beyond all this to the spiritual causes of the sensual facts that can be investigated by the mind, so that it not only assumes but attempts to prove a spiritual world behind these sensual facts, a spiritual world in which lie the causes of all that the senses can see and the mind can investigate.

This spiritual science differs from many other schools of thought in the present and the past in that it does not merely assert in general, hypothetically, that there is a spiritual world beyond the mind and the senses, but that it assumes that the human being is capable of training and developing his powers of knowledge and soul to such an extent that they are able to see into a spiritual world — something they are incapable of doing without this development. So it is not just the possibility of a spiritual world, but the recognizability of a spiritual world that is the peculiar feature of this spiritual research or anthroposophy, if we want to call it that. It is admitted from the start that the soul forces and the qualities of the cognitive powers as they are in man in his ordinary daily use, if we may so express it, are not such as to enable him to penetrate into the spiritual world. But spiritual science denies that these powers of knowledge are undevelopable, that they cannot unfold to look into a spiritual world after their externalization to this higher point of view, just as the eyes look into the sensory world. But with that we are already at the sources of this spiritual research.

These sources reveal themselves to the soul when, through inner work, through inner development — and the methods of this inner development have often been mentioned here — this soul works its way up to a higher point of view. Then, as spiritual science shows, there is another world, a spiritual world, alongside the sense world that surrounds us, and it is from this spiritual world that the true causes of all phenomena in the sense world emanate.

Through the study of the spiritual world, however, we come to see man as a much more complicated being than he is for ordinary sensory or intellectual perception. We come to see man as a four-part being. That which is called the physical body is regarded by spiritual research only as part of the entire human being. This physical body can be observed by the ordinary sense life and can be grasped by the intellect. This sense body is the subject of ordinary science. For a large part of our present-day view of the world, this physical body is the totality of the human being. For spiritual scientific research, it is only one part among four members of this human being.

Beyond this physical body, spiritual research distinguishes the so-called etheric body or life body, which is incorporated into the physical body. But spiritual research does not speak of this etheric body or life body in the same way as if it were only accessible to the mind, but in such a way that the developed soul powers are able to see it, just as the developed eye can see the colors blue or red, while the color-blind eye cannot see these colors. And then she says that the necessary conclusion arises that the physical body, through the powers inherent in it, naturally disintegrates at death, because the powers belonging to the physical body cause its disintegration, its decay, and only held together by the etheric body, which is a continuous fighter against the disintegration of the physical body, being incorporated into the physical body during the time of life between birth and death. Only when the separation from the etheric body occurs at the moment of death does the physical body follow its own forces, which, however, then, because they work in their own way, cause its decomposition. The human being has the physical body in common with the whole mineral, inanimate world. The etheric body is shared with all living things, with the whole plant world.

But spiritual science cannot stop there. It recognizes a third link in the human being that is as independent as the physical body. There is no need to be offended by expressions; they will be explained and have already been partly explained. The third link is the astral body. It is the actual vehicle of the passions, desires, instincts, affects, in other words, of everything that we call our soul life, that takes place within. And in spiritual research, we then distinguish the actual carrier of the ego from this astral body. While the human being shares the astral body with everything that, for example, has affects and passions in the animal world and can develop an inner life of imagination, the human being has the ego as the fourth link of his being for himself as the crown of his individuality. Man's being initially lies in the physical body, in the etheric or life body, in the astral body and in the I-bearer for spiritual research.

Furthermore, for those who are able to penetrate into the spiritual world, there is the realization of how a large part of our life conditions, to which we are subject, differs from ordinary life, namely the life of sleep. For the spiritual researcher, sleep differs from waking life in that in sleeping humans, the I-vehicle and the astral body of the person are separated from his etheric body and physical body. The latter two remain in bed during sleep like a vegetative form, whereas the I-bearer with the astral body and with the affects, drives, imagination and so on move out of the physical body and ether body during sleep and then unfold their own life in a spiritual world that exists for itself. But for the average person today, when the I and the astral body are alone during sleep, ordinary life is impossible because this astral body and the I have no organs for perceiving the environment, do not have eyes and ears like the physical body. So it is impossible for the astral body and I to perceive the world in which they then are.

The higher development of the soul consists precisely in the astral body and I becoming able to develop organs to perceive their surroundings, and that through this a state can arise for the spiritual researcher in which he perceives the spiritual world ; so that in addition to the waking state and the sleeping state, he has a waking sleep state, if we may call it that, which is precisely the state in which the spiritual researcher can perceive the spiritual world to which man belongs according to his actual origin. Thus spiritual science tries to explain the transition of man between waking and sleeping in twenty-four hours on the basis of spiritual facts.

What is more, spiritual science approaches the great riddle of life and death, that is, in other words, the question that moves the human heart so: the question of the immortality of man. Spiritual science comes to the conclusion that the actual spiritual essence of man is not just a result of his physical organization, but an independent unit and entity belonging to a spiritual world, which builds up the physical body, which exists before birth, even before conception, and from the first moment when man enters into existence as a germ cell, has the effect of building up his organism. In other words, it is the spiritual soul that is actually active and constructive, that organizes the human being throughout his life, that carries only the fruits of his life experiences through the gate of death and that passes with death into a spiritual world to then have further experiences, and that then organizes a new physical body for a further life, to undergo a new life and repeat the cycle.

Spiritual science speaks in other words of repeated lives on earth, speaks of repeated lives on earth in such a way that we look back from our present embodiment within the sensual existence to other embodiments in the past, but also look into the future to later incarnations of our being. So that we divide the total life of a person into one life between birth and death and into another one, which runs purely spiritually for the senses and for the mind between death and the next birth. But spiritual science does not see this in an eternally recurring way, but rather in such a way that it recognizes only intermediate states in these repetitions, but traces the total life of man back to an original spiritual state that preceded all life, especially on our planet; so that the lives on earth once had a beginning when man emerged from a purely spiritual existence, and that, after the conditions have once been fulfilled, man will again enter into purely spiritual states, which will contain within them the fruits of all that man has gone through through the various earthly lives.

This is, of course, only an outline, which will be filled in with individual colors in the coming lectures, but which can show the results that spiritual scientific research comes to. If we picture this whole tableau before our mind's eye, then it must be said that for a large part of thinking humanity today, this picture will not only have something incomprehensible, unprovable, but perhaps even something offensive, something that may even provoke irony, scorn and derision. Even when speaking of the nature of spiritual science, a person who wants to relate everything important to him on the right ground of science must raise serious objections. A person who stands on this ground of science must ask himself: What do all the great, not just individual, achievements of science mean in the face of such an argument? What do scientific methods mean, what do seriousness, dignity, exactness mean in the face of spiritual research, what do all the efforts that science has made in recent centuries and decades to achieve certainty, to achieve objective certainty, mean? Spiritual research does not want to work against science, as has often been emphasized, but to be in full agreement with science. Therefore, it must be aware of what science has to object to, not only in terms of its content, but especially in terms of its seriousness and its achievements in recent centuries.

It can rightly be said that spiritual science points out that these sources of spiritual research lie in a certain development of the soul, in that the soul undergoes certain inner processes of perception, feeling and will, undergoes that what is called meditation, so that it has inner experiences, which are of course purely limited to one's own soul, which no one can control but the person experiencing it, and then something like this is presented as a scientific result about the spiritual worlds that cannot be verified. Where does science come in, can it say, on what is precisely the most beautiful achievement of this science, that through the research of the last centuries it only accepts that which can be verified by every person, objectively and everywhere and at all times? External experiments and observations have the peculiarity that everyone can approach them. Not so with that which is achieved and fought for within. When we look at people who experience things in this way within themselves, does the great variety of the contradictory things they constantly express not show how uncertain the experiences are that are given through a mystically absorbed consciousness? By contrast, how the research conducted by individual researchers in the clinic, in the laboratory and so on must agree! It will be pointed out that this could not be otherwise, so that what a person experiences subjectively is thus shown to be unscientific, and this especially because it cannot be checked by anyone else, since the other person cannot look into the soul of the spiritual researcher in question.

Do not these experiences of the soul bear a complete similarity to everything that can be proven to come from some kind of pathological state, from exaggerations of the soul, in ecstasy and so on? If the spiritual researcher objects that he is not willing to accept every vision that occurs in the soul as a research result, but that he proceeds according to certain methods, then one can still object, and this objection seems entirely justified: Yes, but does it not appear in everything that people experience through visions, hallucinations and so on that such people, when exposed to such states of mind, develop a much greater belief in their fixed ideas, in their hallucinations and visions than in what their senses give them externally or what their minds impose on them? When one beholds the rigid and unbending faith of the illusionists, one must become dubious about what the spiritual researcher wants to bring up from the depths of his soul, as something that is not an illusion, that is supposed to have objective existence in the spiritual world. One could say that there could be something that has an objective existence in the spiritual world, but with regard to the validity of such a soul experiment, it must be said that the illusionist has just as much confidence in his delusions as the spiritual researcher has in his research results, which he owes to what comes up from the depths of the soul.

Only someone who has not followed the development of objective research, which one might say is the sound science of the last centuries and decades, can smile at such an objection. It is more weighty than one usually thinks, and is usually thought by those who come to their spiritual-scientific results from a one-sided direction. It must be said, for example, with reference to what is communicated in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds”, where certain indications are given for the individual soul, that the soul, if it abandons itself entirely to such an experience, has no point of reference to control it. All this shows that one must deal with such an objection, which may even appear trivial to a superficial spiritual researcher, in the most serious way. So much has been said about the nature of, as one might say, untrue ideas that what is said against it can also be applied to spiritual science by saying: everything you present as methods to educate the soul need not be anything other than just a more sophisticated ability to create illusions and hallucinations.

But then, especially spiritual science appears out of place compared to serious, verifiable science when it points out the individual results. The conscientious seeker of truth of the present day, who has become familiar with the developments of recent years, might say: Do you know nothing of all that has happened? You speak of an etheric body or life body that is supposed to have an independent existence from the physical body. Do you know nothing of the fact that until the nineteenth century people believed in something called life force, and that serious scientific efforts have finally dispelled the belief in this life force? Do you know nothing of the following fact: In earlier centuries, it was said that a chemical process takes place in inanimate nature between the individual chemical substances out there. But when the same combination of substances enters the human organism, the so-called life force takes hold of it; then, under the influence of the life force, the individual substances do not interact as we learn in chemistry and physics, but the individual substances interact under the influence of the life force. It was a great advance when this vital force was thrown overboard, when people tried to say that this vital force does not help at all, but that one must proceed in such a way that what can be investigated in the inanimate world can be investigated must be pursued further in the living organism, that one must only take into account the more complicated way in which the substances interact there, and that one does not have to throw oneself onto the quagmire of the life force.

The vital force was dismissed as just such a “scientific redoubt” when it was shown how the effectiveness of certain substances, which in the past could only be thought of as influenced by the vital force, could also be achieved in the laboratory. And because it is not yet the end of the day, science must still set itself the lofty ideal of also considering the composition of substances as they are present in the cell of the plant, and must not lie on the foul bed of a life force when it comes to investigating how the substances and forces work in the organism.

As long as it was not possible to produce certain compositions of matter in the laboratory, it was justified to say that they only came about when the individual substances were captured by the life force. But since we have succeeded – particularly through Liebig and Wöhler – in producing certain substances without the aid of a special life force, since we no longer believe in the life force, it must be said that even the more complicated combinations in the human organism no longer require the help of a special life force. Thus, in the course of the nineteenth century, science was confronted with the lofty ideal that most researchers hold, even if there are also “neo-vitalists.” This ideal will be fulfilled: to recognize the material connections as they assemble in the living organism and to produce them without the aid of a nebulous, mystical life force, which, as the serious scientific research of the nineteenth century has always maintained, is of no use at all because it contributes nothing at all to the objective knowledge of nature.

Anyone who recognizes these facts and, above all, who sees the seriousness and dignity underlying this development of science, may well object: Is it credible that a number of people are now appearing as so-called spiritual researchers who, in the form of their etheric body or life body, are reviving the old life force? Is it not a sign of scientific dilettantism? They may “believe” who know nothing of the ideals of science; but the scientific researcher himself cannot be taken in by what can only appear as a rehash of the life force. Thus spiritual science, one might say, dabbles in a dilettantish way, disregarding everything that belongs to the most beautiful ideals of modern science. It only uses the fact that science has not yet succeeded in producing certain substances found in the living organism in the laboratory, in order to be able to claim for the time being that a special etheric body or life body is necessary for the production of life. It can be said that advancing science will eventually expel this etheric body or life body from the human being. As long as science, in its triumphal march, has not yet succeeded in showing that there is no etheric body and that the combination of the substances of the living organism can also be produced in the retort, as long as the theosophists or spiritual researchers make a fuss about the etheric body, which is just a rehash of the old life force! This reproach could be raised, initially, as a fact of dilettantism.

If spiritual science now says of the sleeping life: affects, drives and desires of the human being are bound to a special astral body, and this emerges from the etheric body and physical body when sleep overcomes the human being and leads an existence of its own, then one can say that it is very easy to speak of an inner soul life if one simplifies matters by not accepting this inner soul life with all the difficulties and riddles that present themselves to science, but by saying: There is an astral body, and what takes place within is bound to it. One can also refer to the progress of science and ask: What about the great progress that has been made, especially in recent decades, to explain the phenomena of sleep life and dream life in purely scientific terms? It would take a long time if I wanted to present to you all the efforts of science – which are to be taken very seriously and with great dignity – to explain the life of sleep and the life of dreams. It would take a long time especially because a large number of research projects have emerged recently that are very much open to discussion.

It suffices to consider one point of view that can show how difficult it is for the serious truth-seeker of the present day to profess what may initially seem like an assertion: the I and the astral body of the human being withdraw from the physical body and etheric body when falling asleep.

If we take a blanket explanation of sleep life, summarizing a large number of different hypotheses and statements about sleep life, it is the following: It is said that to explain sleep life, all that is needed is an unbiased look at the phenomena of the human or animal organism. It shows that waking life consists of the phenomena of the environment making an impression on the sense organs, of them exerting stimuli on the brain. Throughout the whole day they exert such stimuli. How do they affect the brain and nervous system of the human being? They have the effect of destroying the substance of which the nervous system consists. All day long, says modern natural science, we are confronted with the fact that external colors, sounds and so on penetrate our soul, that is, our brain life. This causes dissimilation processes, that is, destruction processes. Certain products are deposited.

As long as these processes are taking place, the human being is unable to bring about the reverse process, that of rebuilding his organism. Therefore, every time we wake up, our inner soul life is destroyed to a certain extent, so that by the time we have become tired, we have destroyed our organism and it can no longer develop an inner soul life; it ceases. We need assume nothing else except that fatigue substances are deposited in our organism through the day's life. We need only assume the attrition of the organic substance, that the organic substance is no longer able to develop its internal processes for a certain time. But then the external stimuli no longer work, and the result is that the inner organism now begins to develop its nutritional processes, the opposite of the dissimilation processes, the assimilation processes, that it now restores the destroyed organic substance, and this is how night sleep is effected. Once the organic substance has been restored, the inner soul life is also restored, and so the waking life can again exercise new stimuli until fatigue sets in again. Thus, we are dealing with what is called the self-regulation of the organism.

Can we not admit that the conscientious truth researcher, who is familiar with the results of today's science, must say: If the alternation of waking and sleeping can be well explained by the self-regulation of the organism, then it is not only superfluous but also directly harmful to impede the progress of such human science by saying that there is no self-regulation, but that something comes from outside the organism because the human being is independent. Since it can be explained entirely by the organism that the alternation of sleep and waking occurs, it is unnecessary and harmful to assume that consciousness is something special and steps out of the organism to develop a special life during the night. Again, one can point out that on the part of spiritual science there is a terrible dilettantism in which only those who do not know the path of science itself believe in order to explain the organism from within.

When people speak of the independence of spiritual life, when they speak of the fact that spiritual life is independent, that we have the human organism as a physical one through our senses and explore through the methods of science how physical occur, while the spiritual is still there, this is something that has often been emphasized, for example by Du Bois-Reymond and also by others who do not readily profess materialism. For example, take any cerebral representation: if you magnify the human brain to such an extent – Leibniz already said this – that you could walk around in it, you would only see material processes in it. But the spiritual life is still something special, and that testifies that one is dealing with a spiritual life that is separate from the processes of physical life. If that is justified, then what Benedict says, for example, shows this: the fact of consciousness is basically no different from the fact of the effect of gravity in connection with matter. Because we see, for example, the physical matter of a celestial body. According to the assumptions of physical science, this exerts the force of gravity, and there is something that is attracted, for example, by the sun. In the past, such effects between the sun and the earth or moon were thought to be something supernatural. But it is just the same as if we have a piece of soft iron and, in addition to it, the power of electricity or magnetism. And when we have the brain before us, with its crowded ideas, passions, affects and so on, it is just the same as the fact that gravity and other forces prevail around the material earth. So why should it be different from another effect, when processes are at work around the brain that occur in the same way as the gravitational processes around the material earth? The earth in connection with gravity and the other invisible forces at work around it is no different from what is at work around the brain in the form of affects, ideas and other processes. How can one have the right, one might ask, to speak of the independence of the spiritual life when one does not ascribe to oneself the right to speak of the fact that gravity is also exerted when there is no attracting body? And one can go on to say: Just as one has no right to speak in such a case in the free space of the universe of a world body developing gravity, so one has no right to speak of a special soul that is not bound to a material existence in a brain.

It should be clear to every serious spiritual researcher that such matters must not be dismissed with an unscientific fanaticism.

If there are already serious objections to the spiritual-scientific assumption about the life of sleep and wakefulness, about the independence of consciousness in general, how can anyone who takes the scientific methods of the present seriously somehow reconcile himself with what spiritual science about repeated earthly lives, about the existence of the human core of our being, which continues to exist after death, which undergoes experiences in the time between death and a new birth, and then reappears in a new, next physical earthly life! This is not only objected to by those who rely on scientific facts, but also by those who today want to be spiritual scientists themselves in many respects: by psychologists, by the soul researchers of the present day. The question is asked: What is the necessary characteristic for the continued existence of the human being? The psychologist of the present can find this in nothing other than in the fact that the human consciousness remembers the conditions it has gone through during life. Continuity of consciousness is what the psychologist of the present particularly focuses on. He cannot concern himself with that which does not fall within the consciousness of the human personality, and he will always have to rely on the fact that although man has a memory of his particular states in his life between birth and death, nothing analogous can be shown for the existence of the human being that comes over from previous earthly lives. Many a serious seeker after truth today will be able to object to many other things that have been presented in the course of this series of lectures. It can be said: You can indeed put forward the idea that certain things in human life appear in such a way that they cannot be explained by the events of the individual life, but that one must assume that a person brings certain abilities, talents and so on with them through birth, so that one can assume that the soul already exists before entering into physical life. But all of this remains a mere daring hypothesis. All this remains insufficient in the face of modern soul research, in that the latter again takes a path that seems to be steering quite conscientiously towards an ideal.

What is presented here can be characterized in the following way: anyone who looks impartially at human life, at how it unfolds with these or those passions, with this or that shade of feeling, with an inclination towards these or those ideas, will, if they place themselves without much hesitation the standpoint of spiritual science, will say: Our education has indeed achieved many things for us; but it cannot explain everything, for we bring with us from birth something that comes from earlier stages of our existence on earth. But, the serious scientist may reply, have we not started to investigate the first childhood life, the childhood life that is not remembered later?

The modern natural scientist or the philosopher might then say: Here the spiritual researcher wants to explain an ingenious person, such as Fexzerbach, for example, by saying that he has brought certain powers with him from his previous life and that this has enabled him to work artistically. But now the following discovery has been made: Such a painter paints with a very special color mood, prefers a certain facial expression and so on, in a very specific direction. If one follows this up, one finds that, for example, in his first years as a child he saw a bust in his room and that a particular way in which the light always fell on it engraved itself on the child's soul. This then reappears later, and it then becomes apparent, one might say, that such impressions are deeply effective and significant. It is possible to explain a lot through this. Spiritual science wants to trace everything back to earlier lives on earth, while perhaps everything can be explained by careful observation and research into early childhood.

One can then point further to modern natural science, which shows through the biogenetic law how man really does go through the animal forms, which are assumed to have passed through the human race in earlier states on earth, in the prenatal state, so that there is justification for showing this. Following on from this, one can say: Where does spiritual science point to something similar, that something is repeated in the individual life that a person has gone through in previous lives on earth? One would have to be able to demand this if, as a legitimate seeker of truth in the present, one is to believe that in this respect spiritual science applies the same seriousness and dignity that is present in a similar claim on the basis of natural science. And so it has come about — and with a certain justification one can say — that once man has acquired a little scientific knowledge about human life, animal life and also planetary life, which is accessible to us through astronomy, he can then give free rein to his imagination, draw conclusions and devise all kinds of other worlds that give a very strong impression of reality. Of course, someone who has no knowledge of natural science will very soon become entangled in contradictions, and his ignorance will soon become apparent as he projects all kinds of things that do not correspond to the results of natural science. But anyone who is familiar with natural science will show that his ideas fit very nicely into what natural science shows. Then he will not be refuted. But who in spiritual science stands up for the fact, one can ask again now, that something like this has not been projected out of such assertions without justification and then developed fantastically? Who guarantees that we take the standpoint that only that which can be investigated by everyone should be valid? Therefore, we would have to embrace this for the simple reason that we see how something emerged in the nineteenth century that is also asserting itself in modern spiritual science.

We have seen that in the nineteenth century in German and French intellectual life, the things that spiritual science asserts have asserted themselves. In 1854, Reynaud published a work, “Terre et ciel”, and Figuier published a work about what happens to man after death. There have been numerous opponents with a scientific education who have said: Yes, what is better, that you invent facts based on natural science about a multitude of human lives on earth, about life after death, and so on, or is it better to accept some other equally fictitious hypothesis about these things?

When such objections are raised, and when they are not raised in a frivolous way, but entirely on the basis of a serious search for truth, then it must be said that they are not objections that arise only from a spirit of contradiction, but that the human soul must raise itself, all the more so because on the other hand one sees again how little conscientiousness on the part of those who want to cultivate spiritual science when “proofs” are presented that human life is an individual one and it is said that one cannot find an explanation for phenomena such as human conscience and the sense of responsibility unless one wants to assume certain tendencies and inclinations from previous lives on earth. Some people say: If I feel responsible, then I must have acquired the disposition for it. Since I have not acquired it in this life, it must have been in a previous one.

It is also said that human conscience is a phenomenon that proves that an inner voice speaks to us that we cannot derive from this life, and therefore we must derive it from a previous one. Then it is also said: You look at the different children of the same parents, they have very different spiritual characteristics. But if everything is supposed to be passed down from parents to children by inheritance, how can such differences be explained, as they occur even in twins? Therefore, one may conclude - so people say - that the children of the same parents have different individualities, which cannot be inherited, but must have been drawn from a previous life into the present one.

The conscientious truth-seeker will object: Do you not take into account the fact that the individuality of a person, as he appears to us, arises from the mixture of the paternal and maternal elements, and that therefore the mixture must be different for each individual child? Should not even twins, because they have different mixtures, have different individualities if they are explained only by inheritance?

This objection is not far-fetched, but one that arises from the matter itself. If you consider everything, you find it perfectly understandable that those who always demand a “controllable” science do not include spiritual science because it is not controllable; and if you consider that such opponents have something significant for themselves, you understand them. They have this for themselves, that there is something else besides the critical spirit in our time. This critical spirit is certainly present, and when spiritual science says something, it immediately calls upon its opponents, who are not only logically irritated but also morally outraged that such theories are put forward. Such opponents are called upon, and criticism is something we see springing up everywhere. And because spiritual science and its ideas are a shock to our time, such criticism is quite understandable.

But alongside the critical spirit, credulity also lives in our time, running after anyone who claims something from spiritual science. The longing to get things in such a way that one can also understand them is not very present in people, it is just as little present as the critical spirit and credulity are strongly present. Thus we see that through credulity, through the acceptance of authority by a gullible public, which accepts all kinds of things from spiritual science, the way is paved for precisely that which has always asserted itself against real, serious spiritual research, namely, charlatanry. It is a challenge to charlatanry when people gullibly run after everything. And it is a great temptation for people when all sorts of things are believed, when they are relieved of the difficulty of really justifying these things before the forum of science, before the forum of the spirit of the age. Even in our time, what is mentioned here is only too widespread. We see how credulity and the most blatant superstition are running rampant. There are hardly two other things in the world that are as closely related as spiritual science and charlatanry. If one cannot distinguish between the two paths, if one accepts everything only on the basis of blind faith in authority, just as by nature some things must be accepted on authority, which is often the case in the present time, then one invites what is rightly criticized by serious truth seekers: the charlatanry that is so closely linked to spiritual science. It is understandable that someone who is unable to distinguish the charlatan from the spiritual researcher might object that it must all be charlatanry.

It is easy to make the transition to the moral and religious spheres. We can characterize the objections that arise in these areas more quickly because they are easier to understand.

One can say: Just look how what must be the most intimate matter of the human soul, what a person can find for themselves as faith, as their subjective belief, is blown up into an apparent science! And one can object to the spiritual scientist: If you present that as your faith, we will leave you alone. But if you want to impose on others what you present as a teaching from the higher worlds, then that is contrary to the nature and character of how the inner life of man should relate to the spiritual worlds, to religious life in general. If one then also wants to show the fruits in this respect, one can say: One looks at people who, in spiritual-scientific circles, for example, have made the idea of repeated earthly lives their conviction; one can see in them how what is the moral world view is introduced into the most blatant egotism precisely through a spiritual-scientific world view. And one can compare the results of spiritual science with the materialism of the nineteenth century by saying: There were numerous people who were able to go beyond mere material processes with their minds, and who said: I do not see my higher morality in claiming a spiritual world after my death in order to be accepted by it and to continue to live there, but when I do something moral, I do it without hope of a spiritual world, because duty commands me to do so, because I gladly give what is my own egoity.

There have been many for whom the morality of immortality was only a selfish morality. This morality seemed to them to be much less good than the one that lets everything that is done pass into general world life at the death of man. In contrast to this is the morality of those who say that it would make no sense if what they do did not find its compensation in the following life on earth. This law of karma, the opponents of spiritual science can now say, only favors human selfishness; quite apart from such people, who may even say: I recognize many lives in the future. So why should I become a decent person now? I have many lives ahead of me, and even if I remain stupid in the present, I can still become wise and clever in the lives to come. “So one could say that repeated lives on earth are an invitation to lead a comfortable and carefree life. All this shows that the idea of repeated lives on earth is that selfishness, which wants to preserve one's self, is very far removed from selfless morality.

And an objection can be raised to Friedrich Schlegel's view of repeated earthly lives, as they are assumed by the Indians: The view of the human being's life, which rushes from embodiment to embodiment, leads to man being alienated from active, direct intervention in reality, so that he loses interest in everything in which he is to develop. It is easy to notice a certain unworldly eccentricity in those who immerse themselves in spiritual science. A certain spiritual egoism, a certain unworldly doctrine is cultivated as a result. Indeed, it can be seen that such people say: After studying spiritual science for a certain period of time, I lose interest in what I used to love. This is a common occurrence, but it shows that the objection is taken seriously, that the person should work in the world to which he is assigned! It is a serious objection that spiritual science should not alienate people from the direct and strong life of reality, should not turn them into eccentrics who let everything go haywire.

And now religious life! One can say: What is the most beautiful flower, the most glorious flower of this religious life? It lies in devotion, in the selfless devotion of the human individuality, one can say, to a divine beyond the human. The self-loss of the mind, the self-sacrificing devotion of the mind to the divine beyond the human, produces the actual religious mood. But now spiritual science comes and explains to man that there is a divine spark in him, which first expresses itself in a small way in one earth life, but then is developed and becomes more and more perfect, so that the God in man becomes stronger and stronger. That is self-deification instead of selfless devotion to the extra-human divinity.

Yes, one can object with some justification, if one takes the religious view seriously, that by living in one's own divine nature, if it is realized through the various incarnations, the true religious sentiment can be destroyed, as can the life of love. If a person does not feel impelled to live in direct loving devotion, but thinks that he will make up for it in a later life on earth, then he is only loving with a view to making up the balance. And the religious man can say: In the world view of spiritual science, religious life is based on the egoism that man does not have God outside himself, but within himself. And the objection is justified: what a sum of arrogance, pride and self-deification can be established in the human soul as a result!

Those who have such objections do not need to imagine them. But it can be seen from this how dream-like followers of spiritual science can come to such pride and repeatedly to such self-deification. This is why we find such a rebellion against the existence of the divine spark in man in the Occident, against the existence of the human essence before birth. One should not take it lightly, which one can find in a serious truth researcher as such an objection to repeated earthly lives in contrast to the conditions of inheritance.

One objection, which I will read out – and I will not talk about it further so as not to weaken it – is found in Jacob Frohschammer, who can be taken as a type of person who can object to the assumption of a pre-existence of the soul in many ways:

”... The human soul cannot possibly regard itself as a divine essence or as a part of God, not so much because of the Thomistic concern for the unity of God, since they could still be moments in him without damaging his unity, but rather because of the human soul's own consciousness and testimony, which can neither regard itself nor the world as a direct expression of divine perfection or as the realization of the idea of God himself. As coming from God, it can only be considered a product or work of divine imagination; for the human soul, like the world itself, must in this case come from divine power and activity (since nothing can come from mere nothing), but this power and activity of God must, as in the creation of a model, also be effective in the realization and preservation; thus as formative power (not only formally, but also in a real way), therefore as imagination, i.e. as a power or potency that continues to act and create within the world, thus as world imagination, - as this has already been discussed earlier. As for the doctrine of the pre-existence of souls (of souls that are either considered eternal or created temporally, but already at the beginning and all at once), which, as noted, has been rediscovered in more recent times and is considered suitable for solving all kinds of psychological problems, it is connected with the doctrine of the transmigration of souls and the incarceration of souls in earthly bodies. According to this, when the parents are conceived, neither a direct divine creation of the souls nor a creative production of new human natures by body and soul takes place, but only a new connection of the soul with the body, thus a kind of incarnation or immersion of the soul in the body, at least partially, so that it is partly embraced and bound by the body, partly it extends beyond it and maintains a certain independence as a spirit, but still cannot escape from it until death breaks the connection and brings liberation and salvation for the soul (at least from this connection). In this state, the human spirit was said to resemble the poor souls in purgatory in its relationship to the body, as they are usually depicted by bungling painters on votive tablets, as bodies half immersed in the blazing flames, but with the upper part (as souls) protruding and gesticulating! Just think what position and significance this view would give to the sexual contrast, the nature of the human race, marriage and the relationship between parents and children! The sexual antagonism only a means of incarceration, marriage an institution for the execution of this fine task, the parents the minions for the detention and incarceration of the children's souls, the children themselves owing this miserable, laborious imprisonment to the parents, while they have nothing else in common with them! All that is tied to this relationship is based on miserable deception!"

If you are a fanatical spiritual scientist, you may smile at such a thing, but fanaticism should be alien to spiritual science. It should understand and truly tolerate that which the soul rebels against. For this reason, this introductory lecture was not given as a “justification” but as a “refutation” of spiritual scientific research. But what will be presented in the next lecture, “How to Justify Spiritual Research?”, will be all the more solid if we can make the objections to be justified ourselves. You may well believe that I do not want to refute spiritual research in truth!

I could only list a very small number of objections here. Many such objections could be made. Some of this can be done in the near future, and the refutation will follow on immediately. But from all that is stated, one can see how man, by undertaking spiritual research, is inwardly summoned to a battlefield, how not only the things that speak for repeated earth lives, for man's passage through a spiritual world, and so on, arise, but how all the counter-arguments can also arise from the dark depths of the soul. It is good when someone who is quietly engaged in spiritual research is also familiar with these counterarguments. Then he will also be able to show the right tolerance towards his opponents. Simply occupying oneself with spiritual science or turning a blind eye or laughing at the objections of one's opponents can never be the way of the spiritual researcher. That this does not have a beneficial effect was already shown in a particular case in the nineteenth century, which I would like to relate here.

In 1869, Eduard von Hartmann's “Philosophy of the Unconscious” was published. Even if one does not agree with it, one can still say that it was a good attempt to go beyond the sensory view. Therefore, Eduard von Hartmann had to oppose much of what had emerged as an ideal of science at the time, especially what came from the newly emerging Darwinism. Thus we find much in The Philosophy of the Unconscious that should not have become fashionable in the face of Darwinism. But the one thing that all those who, on the side of Darwinism, could not declare themselves in agreement with this book had in common was that they rose up against Eduard von Hartmann as one who had not familiarized himself with what followed from contemporary natural science. A flood of refutations appeared. It would be a mistake to think that these replies contained nothing but nonsense; some of them were written by people who are outstanding in their own fields, for example, by Ernst Haeckel, the zoologist Oskar Schmidt and others. Among these writings was also one whose author did not name himself, with the title “The Unconscious from the Point of View of Physiology and the Theory of Descent”. In it, a number of cogent arguments were put forward to show how many things in the “Philosophy of the Unconscious” could not be sustained and how its author had thereby demonstrated that he was nothing more than an amateur in the field of natural science. Many people were positively amazed at the ready wit with which this anonymous writer attacked his subject, and Oskar Schmidt, then at the University of Jena, thought that from the standpoint of natural science this was the best that could be said against The Philosophy of Unconscious. Some said: He calls himself us, because he is one of us; and Ernst Haeckel said that he himself could not write anything better against the “Philosophy of the Unconscious”.

So it was no wonder that the first edition of this work, “The Unconscious from the Point of View of Physiology and the Theory of Descent,” was soon out of print. A second edition appeared, and now the author called himself : it was—Eduard von Hartmann! Now some voices ceased that had previously said: he calls himself us, he is one of us. But the significant thing had been accomplished: a man had shown that he knew everything that the most serious opponents could bring against him. Once and for all, it has been proved that one should not believe that, if something can be said against a Weltanschhauung, the author of that Weltanschhauung could not have said it himself.

For spiritual science, this is a vital question. Today, I could not say everything that could be said. But spiritual science must know what objections can be raised against it, and it would only be desirable if some of those who believe they can summon up profound knowledge in order to refute spiritual science with this or that good scientific, exact reason could sometimes consider how much better the person against whom the objection is raised knows the matter than the person who raises it. This is the case with a conscientious spiritual researcher. Of course, he cannot bore his audience by always mentioning all possible counter-arguments. But when something is said in favor of spiritual science, and when many opponents arise, then the latter should first ask themselves whether what they are saying cannot be said by those who represent spiritual science.

The task of the next lecture will be to raise the question: How should the soul correctly relate to the counterarguments that arise from its depths? Is it really true that, because so much can be objected to spiritual science, man really has to position himself as - to put it in a somewhat figurative way - Goethe ultimately has his Faust say: “Could I remove magic from my path”? Are the counter-arguments of spiritual research the same as Faust's attitude towards the counter-arguments of magic? Are they such that a philosopher like Geoffroy de Saint-Hilaire is right when he says: In the face of world observation, there is really only the following. We see that man is weak in many respects. Why should we not admit this weakness to ourselves, and why should it not be a strength precisely when one comes to terms with one's weakness? How man must admit to himself that he is weak against wind and weather, against volcanic forces and natural disasters! How man must admit to himself that he is weak in the face of what nature inflicts on him when he plants the seed in the earth and the unfavorable weather does not allow it to ripen, which only allows a famine to arise from his diligence! If man must often remind himself of his weakness, why should he not say it, out of honesty: although the mind can rise above itself in many ways, it is also weak and limited and can do nothing about what nature imposes on it; so it can recognize nothing about what our nature is – we must resign ourselves!

If the reasons that have now been put forward were so weighty that the next lecture could not be given, there would be nothing left but such resignation, which not only Geoffroy de Saint-Hilaire, but many others feel from an honest, truth-loving soul, and who believe that they have to defend the idea that man cannot penetrate into a spiritual world. Because the counter-arguments arise not from a spirit of contradiction but from the nature of things themselves, the dispute about the nature and value of the counter-arguments of spiritual science is not merely a theoretical fact, but something that must arise out of the battlefield of the soul, where opinions wage a seemingly more or less justified war against opinions, and where only through hard struggles can one recognize which of these reasons can remain victorious there. If one faces the inner struggle of the soul openly and unreservedly and can say what speaks for and against a knowledge of the spiritual world, then one does not become a fanatical representative of this or that invented or contrived principle, but one adherer to that principle, and builds up a calm conviction on a foundation of reasons which are only then, and never before, asserted for themselves when they have driven out all opposing arguments from the field of their own soul.

When the seeker of truth seeks his conviction in this way, he may confidently go forward into the future development of spiritual life, for what the earnest seeker of truth has said is true: Whatever is untrue, however often it may be repeated, will be cast out by the ever-developing striving for truth in humanity. But that which is true and has to fight for its existence against opposing arguments, as we can see in the events of world history, finds its way in the development of humanity in such a special way that one can stand before this development of truth into the centuries and millennia and say: And no matter how many covering impressions, that is prejudices and contradictions, are piled up, the truth will always find crevices and cracks to assert itself, to assert itself for the benefit, progress and use of humanity.

In the preceding remarks, I allowed myself to cite a number of objections and refutations of spiritual research or anthroposophy. It would be a misunderstanding if anyone were to believe that today's lecture was intended to refute these refutations, for it should be stated from the outset that this is not a game of thought, nor a dialectical game with reasons and counter-reasons. The spiritual research that is to be discussed here and has always been discussed is intended to work in full harmony with the science and education of the present day. Therefore, the latterly mentioned replies have not been cited in the sense that one could easily dismiss them out of hand, but they have been cited in the sense that they do, to a certain extent, legitimately arise in the soul of today, in the soul that takes into account the achievements of our spiritual science, the progress of our spiritual culture up to the present day. They have been put forward, not as unjustified objections, but as objections that are justified within certain limits. The feeling should be awakened of the seriousness with which spiritual research would like to work and of the awareness that it can take full responsibility for itself from its sources, itself, although this spiritual research fully understands — that should be said mainly with these objections — that it is, so to speak, dependent only on itself in what one might call the main opposition of three, which it faces.

One opposition arises from contemporary science, or at least from that science which often believes that it is built without contradiction on this contemporary science. The second opposition arises from various religious denominations, and the third arises from the ordinary consciousness of the day, which instinctively rebels in many respects against what spiritual science and spiritual research has to say.

It could easily appear as if the question were justified: How does spiritual research prove its assertions against the objections raised? How does it prove what it has to say? — In the course of these winter lectures, we will hear a great deal about the content of this spiritual research, about the actual results of research into the supersensible world. In these first two lectures, I must be allowed to speak in a way that some people may find difficult to understand or uninteresting, even though it is meant to be abstract. For even if it is not possible to follow all of my remarks in the first and second lectures, it is still possible to gain the feeling that a truly good foundation is being sought for this spiritual research. Therefore, some questions may be raised today that may be found uninteresting by those who would be more interested in immediately receiving this or that story from the supersensible world. The question may be raised: Is it at all possible to apply to the foundation of a world view what is usually called proof in the sense in which it is often believed? Can proof be regarded as something that, when it is present, includes the compulsion for every person to be convinced?

Anyone who seriously professes any worldview usually believes that he can prove it, and he will certainly cite his proofs for this worldview if he wants to be taken seriously. In the face of this widespread belief, I would first like to quote a word from a vigorous, energetic German philosopher, the word of Johann Gottlieb Fichte, who says: What kind of philosophy one has depends on what kind of person one is.

If we want to get to the bottom of a saying like Fichte's here, if we want to ask in other words what he meant, we have to say to ourselves: it is not just a matter of evidence, but of which evidence one considers decisive, which evidence has the weight for a person according to the development of his soul, if he wants to gain insight into this or that. Thus, even a philosopher like Fichte points us to the human soul when it comes to evaluating evidence. It is, as it were, demanded that man, through his soul development, has acquired the ability to understand the weight of evidence. To put it trivially, I would like to say: What use is all this evidence in the end to someone who cannot believe in it? And we can see how it is with so-called proofs in many cases by studying the methods of some world-views that appear to be built entirely on the firm foundation of scientific facts.

When I say something like I am about to say now, I must, however, always add at the outset: I do not believe that anyone can have more respect and recognition for the progress of natural science in our time than the genuine spiritual researcher. And today I would like to add in particular that all the objections that were raised eight days ago are meant in such a way that they are justified, in that the spiritual researcher's immediate objections to what was said eight days ago would be unjustified. For the spiritual researcher does not deny what the natural scientist asserts, and rightly so. He fully recognizes it. This fact must also be taken into account.

Spiritual research is constantly being opposed by natural science; on the other hand, spiritual research itself does not oppose natural science at all, if one is able to appreciate the true state of affairs. But there are many scientific facts that are used by certain schools of thought today in such a way, and seemingly put in such a light, that one can fully agree with the facts, but not with the way in which certain world views sometimes want to prove something on the basis of these facts. The facts that arise from natural science are mostly confirmed by spiritual research, and it may be said that the time will come when that which is justified in Darwinism and in the modern theory of evolution will find the right appreciation precisely through spiritual research.

Thus it can also be clear, in particular through spiritual research, that the soul of man, in order to prove itself effective in the external physical world, must make use of certain spiritual functions of certain parts, certain sections of the brain, just as one must make use of other hand movements. Just as the hand is assigned to certain human activities, so certain parts of the brain are assigned as tools to the soul's experience. Spiritual research will enable us to see the true meaning and significance of this relationship, and there is no contradiction between spiritual research and the views of natural science in this respect. On the other hand, the so-called proofs that are adduced often appear very fragile to anyone who understands the value of evidence. For example, when it is repeatedly stated that certain parts of the brain are involved in mental life, and that the disease of these parts of the brain switches off the mental activity in question, and it is therefore not possible to perceive that the soul accomplishes certain tasks, such as speech, so that the speech center is switched off.

For those who understand the value of evidence, such evidence truly meets the objection of the famous, if non-existent, Professor Schlaucherl, who, as some of you may know, wanted to prove how a frog feels. To do this, he put a frog on the experimental table and knocked on the table, and lo and behold, the frog jumped away – so it had heard it. Now he pulled out the frog's legs and tapped on the table again. Now the frog did not jump away because its legs had been pulled out. But from the fact that it could no longer jump away, Professor Schlaucherl concluded that the frog hears with its legs, because if it has no legs, it cannot be shown that it can hear.

When such a thing is stated, one must, of course, apologize. But it is logically and methodically quite in line with what is often cited today for evidential purposes, which are not to be doubted in the slightest by spiritual science, which are even true. But the evidence cited will never be able to truly convince those who are able to judge conclusive human statements.

Thus it is with much of what has just been stated in the previous lecture, as it is a weighty objection that can be made in the scientific sense by serious and worthy researchers of contemporary natural science, that people in the past came up with the life force and tried to explain everything that happens in the living body on the basis of this life force. But the nineteenth century has shown that this life force cannot be used for anything and that, if one only assumes the usual forces in certain substances, one can show, as soon as one proceeds in a laboratory, how certain composite substances, which were previously believed to be produced only in the living organism by the life force, can be produced in the laboratory without this life force. So that the ideal of science must be to assume that one day it will be possible to actually produce more complicated substances of the living in this way. Now the spiritual researchers come along and claim that there is a special life body or ether body in the living organism that is necessary for the living phenomena to come about. But this is nothing more than a rehash of the old life force. It could only have come from dilettantish souls who, out of convenience, seek an explanatory principle where they do not know how to take into account the advances of true science due to their lack of knowledge.

I would first like to explain, by means of a kind of historical testimony, how this whole conclusion affects a soul that is not prejudiced by the, let it be said, justified progress of science, and which does not readily surrender to its conclusions. I would like to show it first through something historical. It is believed that the assumption of an etheric body or life body has been refuted by the argument that it must be regarded as an ideal of science to assemble the living substance from its individual substances in a laboratory ; therefore, one could no longer believe in a basis for life through something supernatural, but one must see it as an effect in the purely material when working in the laboratory and combining the composite substances from the simple ones.

There was a time when people truly believed more than today's serious scientists dare to believe, that not only a single living substance but also the lowest living creatures, even a small human being, the well-known homunculus, could be put together in a laboratory. The time when people firmly believed that the homunculus could be created in the laboratory did not take this belief at all as if it meant that the supernatural nature of life phenomena had been eliminated; on the contrary, it was precisely then that people really believed in the supernatural nature of life phenomena. This is a historical objection to the claim that it is incompatible for human thinking to believe in the supersensible origin of life and at the same time to fully support the natural scientist's view that life could be reproduced in the laboratory. The two things are compatible, and to prove that they are compatible, one must perhaps again bring forward a rather trivial train of thought, but this is no less significant for those who not only do not allow themselves to be hypnotized or influenced by a scientific world view, but who are able to respond to the whole structure of the human soul.

We see certain substances before us. We put them together. We see – we hypothesize – how living substance arises from them. Are we therefore justified in concluding that from what we have seen of the individual substances before us, the life of that substance has actually formed? No, we are not! And we are no longer justified in doing so from the moment we admit that the flies that appear after a certain time have not developed from the food remains in a room. If we see a room full of flies, we can say that these flies are there because the room is in disarray and food remains have been left behind. These food remains were the condition, but they did not make the flies. But the flies will always appear when the conditions are there, and when the conditions are there, life will appear. But no-one can claim that it emerged from this, but only that they were the cause that life appeared.

A supernatural process can also be assumed when things fit together in a laboratory-like manner. Therefore, it would be quite wrong on the part of spiritual research if it wanted to base itself on the fact that it wanted to rise in a more or less ironic or ingenious way above what science strives for as its ideal. It fully agrees with this. But that does not get out of the way what spiritual research contributes to the real, complete understanding of things.

Let us take as another example the objection raised in the first lecture against spiritual research, in so far as it explains the phenomena of sleeping and waking by saying that there is something supersensory in man that rises out of the physical body and etheric body when a person falls asleep, goes into a special spiritual world and submerges again into it when he wakes up. We have mentioned the important objection, which is absolutely convincing, that natural science attempts to explain the phenomenon of sleep by demonstrating a kind of self-regulation of the organism, by showing how the stimuli exerted by the impressions of daytime life destroy, so to speak, consume the organic substance, so that a point is reached where this organic substance, the substance of life, must be restored. While it is being restored, dullness covers the consciousness, and when the restoration is complete, the external stimuli can take effect again. So we would be dealing with a self-regulation of the organism and could say: What need is there of a special spiritual research that indulges in a special description of what is supposed to go out of a person during sleep in order to be in another world - when the phenomenon of sleep can be explained from the human body itself?

The following consideration shows the weight to be attached to the scientific description, which is true within certain limits. Even if the individual facts that I present can only be outlined, they are in harmony, if not in all details, then at least with the general spirit of present-day scientific research.

So what happens when the organism is at rest during sleep, even according to the scientific view? We have to say, according to the scientific view, that the organic substances used up by the impressions of the senses and by the other external impressions are repaired. So there is an inner process, a process that is entirely determined by the nature and the essence of the human body, of the human organism, and we can explain what happens so internally, of course, only from what lies in the laws of the human body, in the laws of the organism. But these laws of the organism can never, in the present or in the future, give us anything other than what the lungs, for example, give us for the respiratory process. Anyone who studies the human respiratory process will be able to understand it completely from the laws of lung life. But what the human being will not be able to understand is the nature and the effect of oxygen. This will have to be researched outside the lungs, it must first enter the lungs from the outside, and anyone who thought that by researching the lungs they would get to know the nature of oxygen would be greatly mistaken.

The lung process, everything that happens in the organism, can be experienced from within the life of the lungs. To understand the whole process of breathing, it is necessary that we go out of the life of the lungs and understand the nature of oxygen outside of it, and we gain nothing in knowledge about the nature of oxygen from the process of lung life. Nor do we gain any knowledge of everything that takes place in the waking consciousness from morning to evening, in which drives, passions, affects, ideals, and so on, rise and fall, by examining what happens in the organism during sleep. Just as the life of the lungs is not the same as the nature of oxygen, just as oxygen must enter the lungs from the outside, it is just as certain that everything contained in the phenomena of consciousness must unite with what comes into it from the outside, which we can study and observe internally during the sleep process as internal bodily processes.

However, it will not be possible to see through such a train of thought immediately. But if you follow it, it is not a mere analogy; it is more than that: it is a kind of educational tool for really looking at the things that we encounter in the characterized phenomenon in life together. And anyone who really enlightens themselves about the relationship between oxygen, which is outside and enters the lungs, and what happens in the lungs, will learn from such a concept, from such an idea, how to about what is outside the physical organism during sleep and about the processes that take place in the physical organism during sleep, just as oxygen must be added to the internal organic processes of the lungs if a breathing process is to occur in a truly vital way, so must consciousness be added if it is to be experienced.

The things that can be called a “founding of spiritual science” are not at all as simple as one often believes. Because they are not, it often seems as if they can be easily refuted. In the Fichtean sense, the recognition of reasons and counter-reasons in this field is really a matter of what kind of person one is, that is, what state of soul one brings with one in order to see things in their true light. How often do we hear people say: Oh, there come these spiritual researchers or anthroposophists and say that the human being, who is perceived as a unified being and for whom we have gained the insight that he is a unified being, is divided into different members or parts, into a physical body, an etheric body or life body, an astral body and an ego. Yes, everything can be categorized. But the point is not to divide at all, but to carry out such research methods according to the justified demands of a thinking that really penetrates into things. If someone has water in front of him, he will not be wrong in agreeing with the chemist who tells him: As long as you let this be “water”, you will never be able to determine what the chemical components of this water are; to do that, you have to break it down into hydrogen and oxygen.

As long as one remains in such a specific area, one will perhaps not hear the objection: You are committing a mortal sin against monism, because water is a monon. You must not divide it into hydrogen and oxygen, otherwise you become a superstitious dualist. In such a specific area, you may not hear such an objection because here the necessity for such a division is too obvious. What is the main characteristic that justifies such a division, considering not only water but the entire field of being under consideration here? The essential thing is that oxygen cannot be only in water, but, as the chemist thinks, also in other substances, with which it can combine completely, and that hydrogen can also combine with other substances, so that water can be divided, and the individual parts can enter into completely different combinations and have their special destinies in these combinations.

If the aim of spiritual research were only to distinguish between what presents itself as a human being, let us say the etheric body and the physical body, without mentioning the other, then one could say: You are just making a division. But follow spiritual research - not everything can be mentioned today - it is just the same as in chemistry, for example. We do not dissect the human being into a physical body and an etheric body because it is so convenient for us to separate the types of manifestation in this way in relation to this human being, but because we actually have to show: just as hydrogen and oxygen, when separated from their watery state, undergo different fates in different substances, so the physical body undergoes its own particular fate at death, as does the etheric body, and the astral body also enters into other connections. Just as the chemist follows water, not regarding it as a monad but understanding it as the duality of hydrogen and oxygen, and showing that hydrogen can take completely different paths from oxygen, so the spiritual researcher follows the paths of the physical body, the ether body or life body, the astral body and the ego in the most diverse areas of life. This entitles him to speak of a real division. An objection that he would thus violate monism would be equivalent to saying that anyone who separates water into hydrogen and oxygen violates monism.

It is therefore a matter of man's understanding, through real insight into the facts, the value, the justification of the objections and also the limits of the objections. One will recognize that one is dealing with true, genuine, serious spiritual science when one engages with it, that it does not lightly dismiss the objections, but that it tries to find the concepts for its results precisely by carefully considering the pros and cons. But if it has already been repeatedly pointed out today that Fichte said, “One has a philosophy that arises depending on one's nature as a human being,” then one could also say what was said eight days ago : there everything is traced back to an inner subjective source, and the power of conviction is sought, not in what is given externally, but in the way in which man could relate to the phenomena of the world. Then we come to the discussion of what was pointed out in the first lecture: the sources of spiritual-scientific knowledge. It was said that these sources arise through an evolution of the human soul. We shall speak again about how this evolution takes place, which paths the soul has to travel in order to truly ascend to knowledge and insights into the supersensible world. Today, we shall only say that the soul has to undergo inner processes that are referred to, for example, as meditation, as concentration of the inner life. What is achieved through such processes?

If someone who really wants to become a spiritual researcher wants to make his soul, so to speak, an apparatus for spiritual research, he must artificially create a similar state in himself to that which otherwise occurs in a state of sleep. That is to say, he must artificially be able to induce, through sharp concentration of will, what otherwise only occurs as a state of sleep through fatigue. He must be able to exclude all external sense impressions, must also be able to suppress all thinking bound to the brain, and yet he must avoid that state which otherwise occurs during sleep: the complete emptiness of consciousness. He avoids this by devoting himself to very specific ideas - we will characterize them later - that are suitable for concentrating his soul powers, contracting them so that they become stronger than they otherwise are. During sleep, when they leave the physical body, they are otherwise, as it were, thin and therefore unable to perceive anything of themselves or the world, their inner power of perception is too weak. Through meditation and concentration, however, they become stronger and denser. The person then withdraws from ordinary thinking not so much that he knows nothing of himself, as is the case in ordinary sleep, but so that he is able to consciously hold himself and, through the nature of this state, experiences: Now you hear nothing through the ears, see nothing more through the eyes, think no longer through the brain-bound thinking, but now you experience yourself in the pure spiritual and have a reality in the pure spiritual.

It is said that an ordinary and again justified objection to such an assertion of spiritual research is: Through such a development of the soul, for example, one can come to inner worlds of imagination, which are seen as an expression of a supersensible world. One can also have the opinion, based on the way these types of ideas arise, that they point to something real. But it can be said that it is known that the person who has hallucinations, delusions, visions also believes in these hallucinations and so on with all his might, and that it is therefore quite impossible to find a distinction in truth between hallucinations, delusions and so on and what arises in the spiritual researcher. Why should not what the spiritual researcher comes to in this way also be seen as a more refined, but still a mere hallucination? Apart from the fact that one can say that what is experienced inwardly is only subjective and cannot be checked by another at any time, as is the case, for example, in a physical experiment.

But now it must be pointed out that it is not at all in the nature of all truths that they can be found or even confirmed by external events. It may be said that the concepts of mathematics could be convincing in the extreme sense for anyone who just wants to think, because they are gained inwardly. To understand this, we need only refer to the ordinary mental image of three threes being nine. To understand this, all that is needed is an inner mental image of the soul, and it is nothing more than a sensualization when someone, for example, visualizes through three times three peas that three times three is nine. It depends on the inner development of the soul when someone has the realization that three times three is nine, and he does not need to confirm it first through an external process. He knows what he has experienced, he knows it without any external control. There is therefore an inner soul-searching for which external control is nothing more than an illustration that is exhausted in what is illustrated, and it can be seen that this inner experience is true.

In a very similar way, only at a higher level, is the difference experienced between error and truth in the supersensible world. The spiritual researcher must want to go through all the things that can lead him to knowledge: where do hallucinations, visions and illusions end, and where does supersensible reality begin? Where one ends and the other begins can only be understood in a similar way to how mathematical truths can be understood. But it can be understood. Anyone who is a genuine spiritual researcher and who knows the nature that really leads to spiritual research will not entertain the world with his visions, and if you find someone who entertains people about the supernatural world by sharing his visions, you can always assume that he is very far from being a true spiritual researcher. For the true spiritual researcher knows that all imaginary, visionary life known in the outer world is nothing but a representation of one's own soul life, that it represents nothing other than a projection of one's own soul into one's own space. And it is not in this space, not in what one actually means when one speaks of the imagination of the spiritual researcher as a non-knower, that what his science is based on lies, but in that which lies only behind this supposed space, after he has gone through the process of objectifying his soul life and breaking through the wall that first arises as a reflection of our inner soul processes.

It is precisely this that is important for the spiritual researcher: to have recognized the nature of hallucinations, visions and illusions in their connection with the inner soul life and to be able to say to oneself for a long time: what appears in this way is not to be understood as the objective determining factor, but purely as inner soul processes. And it is not so much a requirement of a true spiritual science training to use certain exercises, which can be read about in the book “How to Know Higher Worlds”, to get the soul to have experiences free from the body, to step out of the body; but it is more important that the soul gains a correct judgment about these experiences outside of the physical body, in the purely spiritual.

From a certain point onwards, the soul knows from what it experiences that it is no longer experiencing subjective processes, but that it has shed its subjectivity and is entering into an objective reality that is objective for everyone, just as mathematics is objective even though its validity can only be experienced internally. The mistake that people make who believe in their illusions is that they cannot maintain their resistance to the illusory world long enough, that they believe too soon in what they experience, that they do not say to their experiences not say to themselves long enough: This initially only appears to be a reflection of yourself, and only when you have stripped away everything subjective, as you do in mathematics, do you enter the sphere of objective reality.

This also eliminates the objection that one is dealing with something subjective in spiritual research experiences. One is dealing with something subjective just as little as one is dealing with something subjective when dealing with mathematical truths. When spiritual science is imparted, it is not actually a matter of providing evidence. If it is a matter of that, then one must understand the nature of proof above all. If it had never happened in the world that someone had seen a whale, no one would be able to prove that a whale exists. He could never prove the existence of a whale from all the knowledge he has, because a whale is a fact, and facts cannot be proved, but only experienced. This says something extraordinarily weighty about logic, but one must first be convinced of this weightiness.

From this point of view, the messages of spiritual research are not about providing evidence for the supersensible world or, for example, for the immortality of the soul, but about something completely different. Those who participate in the true work of spiritual research for a longer period of time will be convinced of this. It is not a matter of logical speculation, but of getting to know and communicating supersensible facts. When the spiritual researcher, through the already described development of the soul, has come to understand the life between death and the next birth, it is then a matter of him communicating the facts that he has to adduce for the life of the soul in the time between death and the next birth, of him communicating what he experiences in the supersensible world. In the case of the former, it is a matter of communicating experiences and facts that he encounters in his soul.

In the case of the latter, we may say that it arises from these communications. When it is shown how the soul remains enclosed in itself when the parts of the body disintegrate, how the soul then undergoes certain processes, how it experiences something in a purely supersensible world and gathers the forces for a new life in order to enter into physical existence again in a body when that is stated in all its details, then it is indeed shown how the soul lives when it has passed through the gate of death. Then reference is made to facts. It is a matter of such reference to facts, of such communication of facts, and not of abstract proof.

Now one could say: But then such a becoming acquainted with the corresponding facts would only have a meaning for someone who can see into the spiritual world, who has an evolved soul. Oh, such an objection looks extremely convincing, and this should not be denied. But anyone who knows the real life of the soul will also have a completely different relationship to this objection than many believe. Here we must ask the question: Are we at all convinced in our souls in ordinary life by someone's providing abstract proofs? Let us take an example. Let us take a picture, for example, the Sistine Madonna. Someone who has no idea of what lies in such a picture stands before it. Another person stands beside him and begins to prove to him what is in it. Yes, the listener does not understand at all what the other person is talking about. He can “prove” at length that there is something special about this picture; the listener cannot believe in his proofs. Because the fact that one provides proofs is not yet the essential, but the essential is that the listener has the possibility to believe in these proofs. Another stands before this picture; a second person comes up to him and speaks to him, and the listener now has the opportunity to perceive something that is to be expressed by the picture. Then, through what he has recognized, the other person stimulates in him what he believes is in the picture. He may not speak in a demonstrative way. He only describes what is working in him, only describes what is speaking in him, and once the listener has grasped in his soul what the other person is talking about, and then looks at the picture, he sees the other person in the picture, and it works in such a way that he knows: it is inside the picture. It does not depend on an abstract proof, but on the fact that someone approached us who knows what is in the picture, and that we can really absorb what is in the picture if we want to gain an insight into what is in it.

This is how it is when a person encounters the world and human phenomena, and the spiritual researcher approaches him. If the spiritual researcher were to want to use abstract arguments, then someone who is incapable of reliving in his soul what the spiritual researcher says could never be convinced by any argument. The spiritual researcher, however, proceeds as did the interpreter of the picture, of whom I spoke last. He explains what has arisen in his soul, which he first made an instrument for spiritual truths, as standing in the background of spiritual and human life. He gives the facts that he has experienced. And if the other person is able to absorb these concepts and facts into his entire soul life, he will now see the world in such a way that what the spiritual researcher has to say emerges as his own soul content through what the researcher has to say.

Of course, this cannot always be the case. If the spiritual researcher or student comes to the listener with very distant assertions, which may be truths of experience for himself, if he tells him - and no matter how much he has experienced in the spiritual world - what kinds of beings there are and what they do, then of course the listener, when he hears it for the first time, does not have the slightest inner obligation to believe what he hears. He will not and cannot believe it. Why can he not believe it? Because the distance between what is experienced in the soul and what such a spiritual seer has experienced in the soul is too great.

It would be equally unjustified for someone to believe that they could say that in thirty years a new world savior or a new world messiah would come, who could be waited for and who would impart very special great truths. Such a claim could only be made by someone who had no respect for the human soul and the achievements of human culture, and would only be made to someone who was not prepared for it. But there is a way to do everything differently, by taking up what really everyone with an unbiased soul can follow in a certain way. Therefore, it must be said again and again that the objection is unjustified that spiritual research only applies to those who, through their developed soul, can enter the spiritual world themselves. That is not true. One can only research the spiritual world if one transforms this soul into an instrument of perception in the spiritual world. But what one experiences there, one is, as it were, obliged to cast into such concepts that can be understood by any unbiased soul, according to the relevant period of time, if one just devotes oneself to them impartially and does not resist them through anything, for example, through a supposed or false erudition. Therefore it matters much more how the facts of the clairvoyant consciousness are communicated to some age than that such facts are communicated at all.

For example, anyone who has only read a book can be seen to believe that through spiritual research he has gained a judgment and is justified in saying: these spiritual researchers always begin to use the word “esoteric” when they run out of terms. But perhaps it could also be that when someone says something like this, the word esoteric always results in a kind of emptiness in his concepts, so that the word esoteric has a concept-erasing effect on him. So when someone resists in this way and does not call upon what is in his soul in order to let the results of spiritual research take effect on him, then, as we saw eight days ago, it is natural for the most fundamental objections to spiritual research to be raised. But when the soul devotes itself to spiritual research with an open mind, then common sense, healthy unprejudiced thinking, is enough to experience — not what is lost on the untrained soul, but what can be understood by it. For how does every human soul relate to the soul of the spiritual researcher, who has formed an opinion on certain concrete facts of the supersensible world because he has entered into them? Every soul relates to the soul of the spiritual researcher as a germ of life does to a fully developed life. And just as the germ of life, for example an egg, already contains the complete living creature, so every soul contains within it what only the spiritual researcher of that soul can ever say. Just as it can be shown in the undeveloped germ of life how the individual emerges from it, so the individual soul, when it receives the results of spiritual research, can gain insight into the spiritual worlds in a germinal way, but with complete conviction and insight.

Therefore, it is never justified to reproach the person who does not rely merely on his intellectual power of logical reasoning, but on his entire soul strength, for having to be a gullible person when he embraces what the spiritual researcher has to say. The intellect alone will not be able to comprehend it; but the whole soul will be able to accept it. Therefore, a real examination of spiritual research is possible, has always been possible and always will be. It is not a matter of accepting authority.

It should be noted that I did not call today's lecture “How to Prove Spiritual Research?” but “How to Justify Spiritual Research?”, that is, where to get it from and how can the human soul gain a relationship to it? This relationship will indeed be difficult for many people to find, for the reason that many objections to this spiritual research seem to carry weight. How could it not carry weight – and here I come back to a point where I have to speak in more abstract and uninteresting terms – when someone says: The spiritual researcher claims that in his supersensible consciousness he can follow the soul back to the time after birth or conception, how it lives between death and the next birth, and how it then lives into the present life. Now, it can be shown, so it could be objected, how certain peculiarities that the soul develops during life are prefigured in childhood or prefigured in the mother's womb before birth! Perhaps among the objections to spiritual research, there is nothing of such weight for many as such an objection. Those who have often heard such lectures will know that I myself also make such objections, for example, that so and so many great and minor musicians have lived in the Bach family, so that one could point out with a certain justification how the human being receives purely in the physical line of inheritance what makes him a musician. Thus one can point out how, through inheritance or through appropriation during one's lifetime, that which a person later displays as his special characteristics and as his individuality comes to him. Oh, such an objection is very significant when one occupies oneself with it, when one surrenders to its suggestive power, and every spiritual researcher will understand that there are people who cannot get away from such objections, who are extremely strongly affected by the force of the facts that can be adduced.

But there is something else involved in surrendering to such a force of evidence, namely, to recognize that causes, right causes, can be present and yet not really be the cause, not really the occasion for something to actually come into being. I am saying something seemingly very paradoxical, and for anyone who lets the weight of the spiritual-scientific facts work on his soul, it is not at all necessary to go into it. But here it is a matter of entering into it in relation to the age, in order to point out what can show from the philosophical point of view that causes can be there and yet cause nothing.

Why does a chicken, when it comes into being, have feathers, a beak or this or that bodily characteristic? Someone can certainly say: it has inherited these from its parent chicken, and for the particular shape of the beak and so on, the inherited characteristics are the causes that we find in the chicken from which the one in question descended. But now one must recognize that something special is needed if the properties of having feathers, of having a certain beak, and so on, which are present in the mother chicken, are also to appear in the daughter chicken: something can be a completely correct cause, but it is necessary for a certain germ to arise under certain things in order for the causes to become “causes”. What is important is not that we point from the following to the definite causes, but that we show how the causes can also become causes.

We have now reached the point where spiritual science can use its own facts to develop a relationship with, for example, Darwinism. No one who is not a curious but serious spiritual researcher will dispute the facts and serious arguments of Darwin and the Darwinians. He will even agree when Darwin asks: Why does the kitten snuggle up so when a person comes near it? The scientist points out that it is already snuggling up to its mother on her bed, and from this one can see how the later is connected to the earlier. One can point out the causes of how a person has this or that characteristic, which he may have received from his mother before he was born. One can point this out, but nothing has been said about how the causes have now become causes. Everything that can be said of a world view that appears to be firmly based on science, that can be explained by inherited traits and so on, is readily admitted by spiritual research, and those who raise objections from that point of view usually live under the assumption that they will not be admitted. They are admitted, but the other does not go into the fact that causes must first become causes, so that it is therefore something much deeper than he has in mind. This is generally the case today, that what spiritual research seeks to draw from the depths of existence is always judged only according to the surface that one is able to survey oneself. If this did not always happen, then, for example, a feature article such as the one that appeared in the “Berliner Tageblatt” last Sunday could not be written. I would just like to ask what will be said to a person who has formed a final opinion about chemistry, for example, based only on a single book? But that is what our contemporaries do. It may be said that spiritual research still has weighty reasons to feel vindicated in the present.

For those who have listened to these lectures for a long time, I may well say that much has been said here from the philosophical development. Those who are familiar with this may perhaps come to the conclusion that many philosophers have provided evidence for the immortality of the human soul. I myself must confess that I have never felt entirely comfortable with the proofs of the immortality of the soul or of a supersensible world that have been brought forward by philosophers, for what philosophers usually have in mind are only the concepts of things. Thus, even of the human ego, philosophers have only the concept of the ego. But it should be as clear to everyone that nothing real can be inferred from the concept of the ego as it is clear that a mere painter cannot paint a picture. Likewise, it should be clear that the image of the ego says nothing to the ego itself. Anyone who engages with spiritual science will see that conviction of the reality of the ego is gained through something entirely different, namely through the whole way in which the ego lives on after death.

Thus, one cannot feel comfortable with what well-meaning philosophers bring forward in this direction. But from what those who, as opponents, often really rail against, the one who sees things more deeply gains quite good proof of the nature of the ego. For there are indeed philosophers who say that they can only grasp the ego as a summary of all possible physiological, etc. activities. Then we see that these investigators adduce all kinds of evidence, but what they adduce cannot be related to the I. In this they are in the same sense, only in reverse, as the school of thought that seeks to explain the phenomena of life by the life-force. For just as the vital force is the fifth wheel on the wagon, so the explanations that are provided for the soul life not only explain nothing, but are even quite superfluous when it comes to truly exploring the soul. It is then seen that such explanations really leave the soul untouched and do not approach it at all, so that the soul remains on its own and proves to be something that external explanations cannot approach. Only when the feeling arises in the consciousness of the times that spiritual research cannot be judged superficially, but only by going deeply into it, only then will no judgment that comes from outside of spiritual research be able to be decisive.

The same applies to the objections raised in the first lecture from a moral or religious point of view as to the scientific objections raised against spiritual research. If, for example, it is said that it is infinitely more valuable when someone, out of pure unselfishness, does good even at the prospect of being destroyed in death, only out of the insight and the will that it passes into the general good – as if he did it with a view to making up for it in a future life, then such a judgment is absolutely true and should not be denied. It is true when it is said that a person only does a good deed out of selfishness, if he believes that karma will then reward him with a good deed in his new life as some kind of retribution, or if he refrains from evil because it could manifest itself as a kind of punishment in his new life. It is certain that such an assertion can be seen as justifying selfishness, and therefore it may be said with full justification: So it is precisely through what spiritual research has to say about man that selfishness among men is fostered.

Schopenhauer once said, and you know that I do not agree with him on everything: “It is easy to preach morality, but to found morality is difficult.” What does it mean to found morality? It means to bring about a state of mind in which a person can act morally. Anyone who is familiar with the life of nations knows that preaching morals is not only easy, but mostly very useless; because one can very well know quite good moral principles – and act quite badly. If it were just a matter of listening to sermons, there would certainly be many more moral people than there are.

Someone might say, for example, that a couple would do everything they could to ensure that their children become decent and hardworking people. Because, as the parents say, if we make them into proper, hardworking people, they will be able to support us in our old age and we will be able to get everything we need from them. If the parents educate their children from this point of view, it is undoubtedly a highly selfish point of view. But let us now assume that the children turn out well, so that they are hardworking people when they grow up. Then the parents have indeed done something selfish, but they have not preached morality themselves, but they have justified morality, and it could turn out that if they make the children into good people and the latter then later show something quite different from what they had imagined, they may still come to a quite different ethical view. Then morality would also be justified for the parents, not preached.

Let us assume that a person has no opportunity to calculate the compensation for bad actions for his next life on earth. But by committing acts under the influence of such a view of karma, a moral world view will gradually develop. It will be based on human nature. Someone who is still at a lower moral level will certainly act from a more selfish view of karma. But he who has attained a higher point of view and therefore also has a higher conception of karma will fulfill within himself a selfless moral demand.

Thus, the point is not to point to something abstractly by calling a karma idea selfish, but to show how it leads man upwards to a higher development. This could be further explained and shown how spiritual research goes to the real, the actual, of human nature. If someone were to raise the other objection that many could say to themselves: I have later lives ahead of me, so I only need to become a proper person in later lives; now I still have time, now I can still be an improper person - that would be an objection that can also be refuted theoretically. But to take the right attitude towards it, you need to know the practical circumstances. You have to know that someone who thinks he does not need to be an orderly person in his present life, that he wants to become one only in the next life, has worked this into his next life through such an intention. If he does not decide now to become an orderly person, then he will not have the necessary foundations for this in the next life either. So he is already depriving himself of the ability to be a decent person later on; he is robbing himself of the strength to do so. In this way, the justified moral objections could be discussed piece by piece.

The religious objection has also been taken into account. It is said: Here spiritual research must explain that there is a spark of the divine in every soul and that from life to life the human being develops this divine spark more and more. So the spark of the divine is placed in the human breast.

How one feels about this matter, when one knows how to put it in the right perspective, I tried to show in the first scene of my mystery drama 'The Trial of the Soul'. Of course, one could say that in such a view, what can be called the religious principle is lost, the feeling of dependence on the divine, outside of which man stands, the childlike looking up to this divine that is outside of him. But now take what is to be said from the other point of view, that man fully realizes that the Divine has placed a spark in him, which he must experience and bring to fruition; that he is actually able to realize: You carry a divine spark within you, and if you leave it undeveloped, you allow it to wither away! This being-together with the divine, and yet again the necessity of having to develop this spark first, that is an impulse of an infinitely greater strength than any other religious impulse.

Anyone who engages with spiritual science will see that it is not opposed to any religious belief. Because religious beliefs are so quick to turn against anthroposophical spiritual science, people believe that spiritual science will now turn against religious beliefs. But just as with the scientific objections characterized earlier, it is precisely with this religious objection: spiritual science does not come into the way of any religious confession, because it has to do with the relationship of the human soul to the supersensible worlds, while religion has to do with the relationship to the individual soul.

Those who are truly able to see will see how it is quite possible for a person to pursue spiritual research while remaining fully within a religious belief that is natural to him. But the true foundation of spiritual research, when it is accepted by the world, will be able to give man what can be called a deeper understanding of the life of the soul, both of the individual life of the soul and of the life of the souls together. Anyone who can be even a little convinced that all external human coexistence can only be an external image of how the souls relate to one another will understand the enormity of what arises for the soul when it comes to the realization of how the individual soul relates to the other, how the individual soul can relate to the other when it has correctly grasped what the destinies of the individual soul are in relation to the other soul in the life between death and the next birth, what the destinies are for the individual soul, what it means to be separated from another soul, what it means to gain a new relationship with the departed soul, if the soul that remained here can know something of the supersensible world. New light will be shed on all human knowledge and on all other aspects of human life if what can be brought from the depths of the supersensible world for each individual soul can be sunk into the soul. A living into, not just a thinking into, belongs to the recognition, to the beholding, to the understanding of spiritual truths.

This has not only been recognized through the spiritual research of modern times, but has basically always been recognized wherever one has spoken from a real knowledge of the spiritual world. I do not want to say what I have to say about the position of spiritual research in relation to those who reject it without really knowing it, but I would like to say it about Johann Gottlieb Fichte. If there is much that is serious, perhaps even hurtful to some, in this statement, one should bear in mind that it comes from a man who, full of enthusiasm for spiritual research, wanted to vent his anger at all those who, without really wanting to gain insight into spiritual research, reject it and feel they have to fight it. To them Fichte cries:

"They cannot help but furiously resent that shameful conviction of a higher self in man and all phenomena that seek to confirm this conviction; they must do everything possible to keep these phenomena away and to suppress them; they fight for their lives, for the finest and most intimate root of their lives, for the possibility of enduring themselves. From the beginning of the world until this day, all fanaticism and all furious expressions of it have originated from the principle: if the opponents were right, then I would be a miserable person. If this fanaticism can achieve fire and sword, then it attacks the hated enemy with fire and sword; if these are not accessible to it, then it has (one must also say this latter for our present time) “the tongue, which, even if it does not kill the enemy, can very often strongly paralyze its activity and effectiveness outwardly. One of the most common and favorite tricks of this tongue is to attach a generally hated name to the cause that is hated only by them, in order to defame it and make it suspicious. The store of these tricks and these names is inexhaustible and constantly growing, and it would be futile to strive for completeness here. I will mention only one of the most common and hated terms: the saying that this teaching is mysticism.

Note here, first of all, with regard to the form of this accusation, that if an unprejudiced person were to answer: Well, let us assume that it is mysticism and that mysticism is a false and dangerous doctrine. He may still present his case, and we will listen to him; if he is wrong and dangerous, this will probably come to light on that occasion, — they, who, according to the categorical decision, with which they believe to have thereby rejected us, would have to answer: there is nothing more to be heard; already a long time ago, probably since one and a half human lives, mysticism has been decreed as heresy and banned by the unanimous decisions of all our review councils.

Thus Johann Gottlieb Fichte. Fichte's words are still more or less applicable today when considering the relationship between spiritual research and, say, those who only want to trust their senses and who want the world to be organized according to what their senses tell them. Fichte compares such people — although this comparison is perhaps not entirely justified — who only want to trust their senses and do not want to admit that there is a closer knowledge of the truth, with deaf-mutes and the blind-born, who also do not want to admit sounds and colors when they are spoken to by the seeing. Now, one cannot compare those born blind and deaf with those who do not want to accept what can be given through clairvoyant research, because every soul is capable of relating to supersensible truths. But Fichte says:

"The fact that the deaf-mute and the blind are also taken care of and that a way has been devised to bring them instruction is worth all thanks – from the deaf-mute and the blind. But if this method of teaching were to be made the general method of teaching, including for the sighted, because there might always be deaf-mutes and blind-born among them, and then one would be sure to have taken care of everyone; if the hearing person, without any regard for their hearing, were to learn to speak with the same effort and to recognize the words on the lips as the deaf-mute, and the seeing, without any regard for his sight, read the letters by touching them, this would deserve very little gratitude from the healthy; regardless of this, the institution would of course be made as soon as the institution of public education was made dependent on the opinion of the deaf-mute and the blind-born."

Perhaps one could say, if one wanted to object to this statement by Fichte, that it would not even be like that for the blind and deaf-mute. But if it were up to those who rely only on their senses and reason to determine how the world should be shaped, they would not shape it in the way that the seeing perceive it. They would indeed rail against and rebel against all spiritual interpretation of the world by others, but they would declare themselves infallible with regard to what they know about the world. They would laugh in scorn if it were demanded that only those who know about a matter should speak about it, and that those who know nothing about it should say nothing about it. The main reason for all those who deny spiritual research is only that they know nothing about it. Logically, the first requirement would be that only those who know something should speak about a matter. But such reasons for denying something one knows nothing about are only used to reject a spiritual scientific world view in our time. |

But anyone who can relive in their soul what was said in the first lecture, who does not need to wait for the objections that they can experience within themselves and are able to understand in their spiritual life, will always find a way to justify spiritual research, so that what I also said in the first scene of “The Test of the Soul” and can summarize in the whole constitution of consciousness what knowledge of the supersensible worlds can give us, can give for our hope in life, for our strength in life, for our security in life, for everything we need for a dignified human existence. Everything that can be said, that can be said as rising in the soul, as experienced and felt in the soul, can be summarized in the words: You are not alone with your thinking, feeling and willing. Just as you live with your body in the substances that are spread throughout the universe, so you live with your thinking, feeling and willing in something that is spread throughout the cosmos, in the vastness of space. That is, the saying that I said at the designated place in my mystery drama can become conviction:

"In your thinking live world thoughts,
In your feeling weave world forces,
In your will work world beings.
Lose yourself in world thoughts,
Experience yourself through world forces,
Create yourself from will-beings.
Do not end with what is far from the world
Through the play of thought-dreams;
Begin in the expanses of the mind
And end in the depths of your own soul:
You will find divine goals,
Recognizing yourself within yourself.

The spiritual science referred to in these lectures is not something that arises from the arbitrariness of this or that person, or is based on the subjective ideas of one or more individuals. Rather, it is a spiritual world view that, with a certain inevitability, arises from the needs and demands of our time, insofar as this time emerges as a recognizable product of the developmental history of humanity. Only when a world view is, as it were, demanded by its time can it claim with a certain justification the trusting words that were spoken in the first lecture of this winter. Only under such a condition can it say: No matter from what quarter it may be opposed, if it contains any element of truth it may rely on the fact that truth will always, however much it is buried, find the cracks and crevices through which it will spread in the spiritual life of mankind.

We shall now try to show, not with generalities but with specific facts, how in the course of the last few centuries and especially in the very last period up to the present day, the seeking human soul has developed more and more into what the spiritual science meant here wants to be for this seeking human soul.

Who could not, if compelled by his own mind and the needs of his soul to seek explanations of the riddles of the world for the strength and security of his life, not be tempted first to turn to natural science, which is certainly not underestimated by spiritual science but fully recognized in its triumphs and achievements? Today, countless people believe that whether a world view will emerge from a synthesis of these scientific facts and laws, which will open up vistas for man beyond what he can perceive with his senses, grasp with his mind, and with which he feels connected in his existence, but which he strives to recognize so that he can know what the destiny of the soul is, and indeed the destiny of its work in the world.

In the face of such longing and such hope, however, it may well be pointed out that in the course of human evolution, the relationship of the soul to what external science can be has changed completely, and precisely the example that we can give here in relation to soul questions in relation to science may show us clearly how our time, in one respect at least, may be characterized not only by the trivial and hackneyed expression, a “time of transition,” but how it is a time that, in the highest sense, demands a new epoch in spiritual research. We need only recall the example of a great personality, who, like many others of his kind, has contributed to advancing our spiritual culture: Kepler, who is the real great formulator of the Copernican world view, on the basis of which, nevertheless, many questions of our present-day world view arise.

Who today, if he has no heart or mind for actual spiritual science, might not even be able to say: Through achievements such as Kepler's, humanity has succeeded in learning about the movements of the heavenly bodies through pure objective natural science and its laws. And how can man say — could man say — that alongside this, the belief persists that these movements of the heavenly bodies are regulated in some way by spiritual beings, to which spiritual science wants to point, by spiritual beings that stand behind the material and its laws, since everything can be explained in a mechanical, physical way! Why is there any need for spiritual forces behind these physical laws?

Such a statement looks extremely compelling, and it can be pointed out that it was precisely the liberation from long-held prejudices of the old spiritual worldviews that allowed people like Kepler to explain the movements of the heavenly bodies in space on the basis of purely physical laws. But if we approach Kepler himself objectively, without time prejudices, and study his spiritual peculiarities, we find the remarkable thing that everything that Kepler's gaze directed out into the heavens, what actually gave him the inner impulses to discover his great and powerful laws was the consciousness of being embedded with his soul in the spiritual depths of existence, in the activity of spiritual beings that fill the spaces and work throughout time. He was clear about the fact that what he ascribed to the planetary movements as 'laws' could only be given to him because the laws are the thoughts of divine spiritual beings. If we investigate the source of such impulses in Kepler, we must say that they were based on the fact that the whole course of human development has always kept the human soul in connection with the spiritual-soul, and that what was spiritual-mental was taken for granted, was still there in Kepler's time, was there in tradition, in the general belief, was there to inspire the soul, to inspire and awaken thoughts in it.

But who could deny that this background of Kepler's creative work has gradually disappeared in the course of the last few centuries, disappeared through what has been has been created out of it, so that today the human soul can easily believe that Kepler's laws and everything that has come into being in this way could be invoked as proof against the assumption of a spiritual-divine world. If we go from Kepler through the centuries up to our time, we see how that which is still born out of the consciousness of the connection between man and the Divine-Spiritual, more and more eliminates this consciousness itself, and how a time is approaching, great and powerful through its scientific achievements, great and powerful through the creation of momentous insights in the field of natural science, a time in which the human soul is gradually incapable of truly rising to the spiritual from the abundance of this scientific material, from the abundance of what has been recognized in the material field. One could say that the course of our intellectual development in recent centuries is characterized by the fact that the more it has brought is immense, great and admirable, but that the human soul's ability to see through to the spiritual from these achievements has been impaired, even destroyed, precisely by the abundance and nature of the scientific achievements.

This becomes clear to us when we consider, for example, the way in which Goethe, with his way of researching natural processes, was still part of the overall direction of the world view of his time. It is interesting to see how Herman Grimm, for example, this brilliant and at the same time profound connoisseur of Goethe, feels compelled to characterize Goethe's place in the natural scientific directions of his time. Herman Grimm asks: How did the centuries preceding the age of Goethe still conceive the relationship of man to nature?

Anyone familiar with these centuries will agree with Herman Grimm: they differed so much from later ones that, when looking at the nature of animals, plants and other things, man stood on the earth and believed himself authorized to see in man something like a kind of conclusion to all the rest of earthly creation, indeed to the creation of the world; that he felt authorized to say: There is such a meaning in the whole development that one can recognize when looking at stones, plants and animals, how an inner essence has gradually developed, already having man in mind, developed upward, in order to present everything else to man and his goal. Whether one still wanted to cling to the old Mosaic creation story in the process is not important. But this conviction was there: to see in all world empires something like an impulse that already includes man and makes everything else only in preparation for making man, who has been there spiritually from the beginning, the summit of all this creation.

What emerged more and more in the face of this? First, as Herman Grimm also believes, astronomy began. The Earth was made into an insignificant world body in the universe and man was placed on Earth as if he, without having been predisposed from the outset in the other realms, had finally surrendered like a natural necessity, so that he would not be entitled to connect his mind to the whole course of events. Geology assumes that an enormous period of time elapsed before man appeared on earth, and that, in the sense of natural science, this would by no means show the traces that everything else would be there to prepare man later. In a certain way, Goethe may be called a radical naturalist. Here I have often mentioned how he endeavored, through his own scientific discoveries, to eliminate from his views on the external structure of the human being anything that might distinguish him from the other organisms on earth. One may call Goethe a descent theorist, a development theorist before Darwin and the other development theorists of our time. But Herman Grimm rightly points out how Goethe did not refrain from seeing something 'spiritual' behind the material processes, which are seen by Darwinism as nothing more than material processes, and which develops spiritually in all material processes, so that man is indeed placed there.

We have a remarkable saying from Goethe that can really draw attention to how hard he tried, even though he was so scientifically minded, to present man as the pinnacle and crown of spiritual existence. He says: After all, what are all the millions of stars in the world for if not to be looked at and absorbed into our being by human eyes at last? And not without good reason. It would take a great deal, of course, to prove the right to ask the question, if we go through all these scientific facts and laws. Where do we find anything outside of man that could give us a clue that spirit reigns in all living and non-living things? Where do we find, when we scientifically consider man himself, after the realization has been gained that mental life is bound to brain processes, where do we find a hint to think of the soul's existence outside the bounds of birth and death?

Today, one need only open one of the more important and famous philosophies, for example that of the world-famous Wundt, and one will find everywhere that when such philosophers start from scientific research, certain conclusions, certain results are the facts of natural science, and that the philosophers everywhere approach, for my part, the spiritual, but that they are forced to stop at the moment when it would be a matter of grasping the spiritual. Why is that? For the simple reason that the whole way of thinking, as it has developed in dependence on the research of natural science and follows the facts of natural science step by step, offers no possibility of finding the way out of matter and its laws into real spiritual happenings and their nature, because everywhere the thread of thought breaks off. Why did it not tear Goethe away? Because Goethe was still imbued with impulses that had emerged as ancient ones in the development of humanity, because something of what had remained historically, of the ancient spiritual views, still lived in him — which we will get to know -, and because his soul had not yet been emptied of what had come to the soul by direct spiritual paths over the millennia when that soul looked out at the things of material events.

But our time developed quickly, and therefore, in its rapid development, those who based their thinking on scientific research have hardly retained what was still present in Goethe. Hence we have seen that although Darwin revealed the connections of living beings in more detail and more forcefully than Goethe, he nevertheless stopped at the whole meaning and nature of his research. But whereas in this whole way and meaning of research Goethe saw the spirit everywhere behind the phenomena, the Darwinians — not Darwin himself! — have had to regard as an obstacle to somehow arriving at the spiritual that which did not prevent Goethe from arriving at the spirit.

Therefore, we can understand that those who place their hopes for a worldview in contemporary science must see these hopes disappointed in many cases. However, something that has existed in humanity does not simply disappear. We can see even in modern times that serious researchers who only want science do not at all agree that science should only present external facts, but could very well serve to prove the continuous course of a world wisdom that lives in things. It is interesting that even a historian from the school of Ranke, Lord Acton, in a momentous university speech at Cambridge in 1895 as a history teacher to his students, could say: I hope that the completely objective description of historical facts will reveal the workings of a divine world wisdom. Yes, even in those days Lord Acton spoke of the working of the “Risen One” in history.

Thus we see that even in our time there still remains from the times when the existence of a spiritual world was taken for granted, something like a carrying of research, like a carrying of all scientific thinking was carried by such an attitude, just as the soul is still permeated by the spirit through this carrying from ancient times. But it is equally true that he who today completely embraces the habits of scientific thinking and, for example, follows how the individual soul activities have their corresponding expressions in brain or other nervous processes, that such a person, precisely by pursuing fact after fact, can easily say to himself: Yes, for what a person is able to think, feel and sense in material life, there are clues for the researcher everywhere; but what might lie for the soul before or after that, science tells me nothing.

How widespread is the error that science, because it cannot get beyond the consideration of facts and their laws to the spiritual, must therefore also reject the spiritual! And again, it is characteristic of the general situation of world-views in our time that even those who hold the view that we can only arrive at a world-view by summarizing the facts and laws of natural science, always warn ed against hasty conclusions, against the making of hypotheses, which always wants to group a few facts together in order to draw conclusions as to how the life of the soul is bound to this or that, what the whole cosmic connection is like, or the like.

Such a warning was recently given again in a significant place. At this year's naturalists' meeting, the very important naturalist Wettstein gave a speech on biology, on the science of life, in its usability for the world view, and he warned against drawing general conclusions for the world view from the facts as they are. But many people still believe that we should therefore wait with regard to the riddles related to the life of the soul until natural science has come to the end of its facts. What has been presented here, namely the assertion that a person who wants to penetrate the secrets of the soul and spirit in order to come to conclusions about soul and spirit must have gone around all the scientific facts in the world, reminds one of a beautiful saying by Goethe: “To understand that the sky is blue everywhere, one does not need to travel around the world.”

But I would like to show in concrete terms how the path of the human soul to its secrets in the spiritual realm is, to a certain extent, independent of what the individual laws of natural science, what the individual laws of learning can give this human soul. To substantiate this, I would like to point out the following fact: In the nineteenth century, we had an important philosopher in Munich, Moriz Carriere. He was one of those who, with a wealth of not only ideas but also of real scientific learning, tried to understand the world and its phenomena. Through his great work on the cultural development of humanity, Carriere proved how he had compiled fact after fact from ancient times in a scholarly manner in order to understand the path of the spirit through world development. From all such processes, Carriere has now formed a worldview, which I mention all the more gladly because it was formed well before the development of an actual spiritual science. It is a worldview that came to the insight of the connection between the soul and a spiritual world spread out through space and time, just as there is a connection between what is physically in the human body and the substances and forces that are spread out in space and that work in time.

One day, Moritz Carriere was shown the manuscript of a simple man, a man who was not at all learned, who had none of the wealth of learning through which Moritz Carriere had come to the view of the connection between the soul and the spiritual that has just been described. This simple man's name was Zeuner, he was born in 1813. Due to a series of events that cannot be described here for lack of time, Zeuner was forced to spend many, many lonely months in prison. He had allowed himself to be carried away by the revolutionary movement, and this had landed him in prison. But he was, without being a scholar, a highly-natured soul. In the manuscript that he showed to Moriz Carriere in the 1870s, he recounts how he brooded and brooded in his lonely cell, filled only – as was the spirit of his time and the people who had surrounded him until then — with materialistic views, but how his soul had become desolate in solitude, how it had suffered from the hunger to have something in which to believe. Then he continues to tell how he once heard a strange song from his cell, which reminded him of experiences from his early childhood and connected him with other experiences, how this again sparked a spark of joy in the soul, and how this impulse, given to the soul as a result, an impulse of inner freshness and activity of the soul, triggered thoughts in this simple, unassuming soul, thoughts that Zeuner then wrote down. And he later sent this manuscript to Moriz Carriere. When you read it – Moriz Carriere had it printed later – you have to agree with Carriere: Zeuner, in abandoning himself to the solitary soul that imperiously struggles to emerge from his breast, has found something that represents the connection between the soul and the world spirit in the same way that Carriere was able to represent it after a lifetime of learning and a lifetime of science.

You don't have to travel around the world to understand that the sky is blue everywhere. The path to the spiritual must be found in a different way than by merely summarizing scientific laws or by drawing consequences from scientific research. Rather, the debate with science must be a different one. No world view can exist today, and no world view may exist - because the needs of the human soul would sweep it away - that would contradict science. Therefore, in the first two lectures, it was necessary to emphasize so sharply what can be said by natural science against spiritual research and how spiritual science has to react to it. And it cannot be emphasized often enough that one should feel misled with regard to any spiritual-scientific knowledge if it comes into conflict with a justified result of natural science. But if one then again looks at this natural science and if one has a sense and a heart for the necessary authority that must emanate from natural science, then one will all the more have to point out what can mislead the soul, what must mislead it precisely through the abundance of what is available, if it wants to set out on the path to the spirit. I would also like to substantiate this with examples.

Let attention be drawn to two researchers who were both grounded in the history of development, in the field of natural science. Both researchers understood the origin of individual living organisms in the same way as the Darwinians, but they only excluded the human being. They were clear about the fact that the laws applicable to the animal world could not be applied to man, but that, just as one had to derive one's physical from the physical, so one had to derive one's spiritual-mental from a spiritual-mental. Both were completely clear about this. They were equally good naturalists and spiritualists, but their thinking habits were those of the scientific direction. They thought like a true scientist thinks. How did one of them, Mivart, and how did the other, Wallace, a contemporary of Darwin, think about the actual processes of evolution?

Wallace said to himself that man could not simply be placed in the animal series. Not only because there is a considerable difference between man and the most highly developed ape in the external structure of the brain, even if we only consider the savage, and because the ape's brain is far too imperfect compared to the brain of the savage if man is supposed to have developed from the ape in a straight line of evolution.

The other researcher, Mivart, found that the cultural level of the wild man was not outwardly different from the developmental stage of the most highly developed ape. But if you look at the mental activities of the savage and, in contrast, the activities of the most highly developed ape, you have to assume that the brains of the two are so similar that man therefore does not belong in the animal series. If you look at the brains again, you can clearly see that the human brain has not developed from the ape brain through adaptation to external tasks, but that civilization develops all possibilities in such a way that it only appears as if everything is already predisposed so that it could one day become the tool of civilization.

So because the ape brain and the human brain differ so greatly, one man, Wallace, believes he has to assume that there is no relationship between man and the animal kingdom. And it was precisely the similarity of the mental characteristics in both that was proof for Wallace of what he said. For Mivart, his contemporary, the opposite was the case; he was of the opinion that if one compares the mental characteristics of wild man with those of the highest-standing ape, such a great difference emerges that one cannot assume any ancestral relationship between the savage and the ape because of this difference.

We see, then, two naturalists, both accustomed to scientific thinking, both assuming what is their opinion for opposite reasons; one because the characteristics of the savage and the highest ape are so similar, the other because they are so different. If now two researchers, both of whom tend to derive man from the spiritual, can be so misled with regard to their evidence by the abundance of facts, how much more so should the who is even more prejudiced in the habits of merely materialistic thinking, not be even more incapable of arriving at the spiritual from these facts and laws themselves through the abundance of facts!

Natural science only leads us from fact to fact. If we have spiritual science, then precisely the natural science can be grasped and put into the right perspective from this spiritual science. But the laws of spiritual science can never be found from natural science in any way. Therefore, the human soul would be deprived of all its spiritual nourishment if it were to rely only on what natural science produces. Natural science itself will achieve its greatness and importance precisely by keeping within its limits.

But anyone who takes even a slight interest in the life of the soul will soon find that the soul needs answers to questions about the spirit for its security, strength and work in life. In ancient times, as we have shown with reference to Kepler and Goethe, and as we can show with reference to others, the answers to these questions were already contained in the soul's entire view of the world. Today, however, they are not, and a new task arises, which we have already been able to characterize and which we will still characterize in its essence: the task of spiritual science. What has been lost through the greatness of natural science must be found anew by spiritual science in its own right, showing the way by which the human soul can reach its spiritual home. Whoever understands the age correctly will grasp how, after the course of events has been described, a strong need, a strong longing, arises to understand the world more and more from the spirit and to establish an independent spiritual science alongside natural science.

If we go into details, even into the law of repeated lives on earth, which is perhaps rejected by many spiritual believers today, we see it slowly and gradually emerging and becoming part of more recent culture, for example in Lessing's treatise on the “Education of the Human Race”. Again and again we see, even if little is known about it today, how in the nineteenth century, inwardly consistent soul researchers are led to the only appropriate law for the human soul: repeated earthly lives.

The more natural science celebrates its great triumphs on the material plane, the more the spirit yearns to go its own way. And again with a concrete example, I would like to show how the whole course of spiritual life in our time is such that it naturally leads to what spiritual science wants to be today. I would like to draw attention to a thinker, to a researcher, whom I will discuss more in the course of these winter lectures, who is interesting precisely with regard to a longing for spiritual science: Herman Grimm, the art historian. A comprehensive spirit, he shows us precisely how, in modern times, the soul has been pushed out of a mere natural scientific view of events, especially in human life, and how the soul is being held back again by the impulses and forces of the time from taking the last step of pushing out, from pushing into spiritual science.

Anyone who carefully studies the writings of Herman Grimm will see that he is looking for a world principle, not a dead world principle, but a creative law, which, for example, the practical historian can hold to, and which must be something other than the so-called historical ideas. Ideas can create just as little as — in the image of the last lecture — a painter can paint a picture. Ideas are dead. Only something living can be effective. Herman Grimm sought for the living element in history, that can powerfully create from epoch to epoch, that once in the primeval epoch of humanity created the form of the human soul for impersonal reasons and then from people to people, from age to age conjured up the individual achievements out of itself. And what did he think he had found as such? The creative imagination.

A German philosopher, Frohschammer, also believed that imagination was the creator not only in historical development but also in nature. Herman Grimm could not get around to showing – which he wanted to do – how imagination is really a kind of divinity that lives in the will and brings about deeds in human history, just as the individual human being brings about the deeds of his soul out of himself. He created what he did in the light of this view, that behind historical becoming stands the creative imagination, that everything has come about through the creative imagination. But what is imagination for him? Do we not see in the urge of a researcher to understand the facts the approach to something spiritual, but which is not spirit? For the creative imagination remains only an abstraction, which is indeed more alive than the ideas of history, but for the realist it is still only an abstraction.

One would like to say that a researcher like Herman Grimm has reached the gateway of spiritual science. He cannot stop at the external material 'facts' and external events, he sees behind all external events what the imagination creates and objectifies it in world events. But no one can recognize in the imagination something real and creative. It remains an abstraction, and only when one penetrates behind it to what is no longer an abstraction, what is spiritual, what is as real as a real sensual, only when one approaches the spiritual facts, which are not circumscribed ideas but are essential, can one understand how what is around us really happens in the world. Therefore, we see from such a profound thinker how the yearning of our time for the spiritual is approaching, and how the obstacles created by time are so formidable that people cannot enter through the gate to the spiritual. Do we not see the urge to approach this spiritual science? Do we not see how this spiritual science has tasks for the present and the future that correspond to the longing, the urge, the demands of the time?

Let us take a closer look at the reasons that hinder the souls of today! From the longing for the spiritual, we can clearly see that people cannot help but long for the spirit and its laws when they look clearly into the conditions of the times, but that they cannot penetrate into the spiritual and are now, so to speak, waiting for a spiritual. Wherever you look, you see the urge for what is still unknown. But from the nature of the urge itself, you can see quite clearly that a time will come, not so far away, when people will understand: spiritual science is the answer to the longing, to the urge they have.

Not long ago, a book could be seen at the booksellers in every train station that was truly not written by a man who would easily indulge in every single enthusiasm. This book does not come from a lonely brooder and a person who does not know the spiritual needs of the time. If spiritual science wants to show its legitimacy, then it must not rely on the often peculiar enthusiasts who, in their sectarian nature, want to understand what can help humanity; but it can refer to what in the book 'On the Criticism of the Times', by Walther Rathenau, which has been written by a man who is in the thick of industrial and commercial life and who knows the workings of our time.

Not that I would agree with everything in it. Objections could be raised against every page of this book, but what could be called the urge of the time for spiritual knowledge is symptomatically demonstrated by such a book. What does Walter Rathenau represent? He represents precisely what I tried to explain in more detail in the spirit of the development of the last century. In Rathenau's case it is as follows: Through the progress of natural scientific development, a mechanization of life has generally resulted. Whereas man in former times sought to explain that which presented itself to his senses out of the spirit, today he explains it out of the mechanical. But the relationship of man to man has also become mechanized. 'Mechanization' is what has come about through the great progress and significant achievements of the time. And one can feel – and Walther Rathenau feels it – how the soul within the thinking and social mechanism becomes desolate, how it gradually becomes empty under such goals, how one can indeed take away its nourishment, but cannot satisfy its hunger through mechanization.

What many of the best connoisseurs of the time have said has also been said here: one pushes back what the soul spiritually desires, and one will be able to see, even if the soul is satisfied with something superficial, that the hunger in question will show itself all the more. — So we see how a person who is completely immersed in his time writes:

It seeks its soul and will find it; admittedly against the will of mechanization. This epoch had no interest in developing the soul in man; it aimed to make the world usable and thus rational, to push back the boundary of wonder and to obscure the otherworldly. Nevertheless, we are surrounded by mystery as much as ever; it comes to light beneath every smooth surface of thought, and from every everyday experience it takes a single step to the center of the world. The three emanations of the soul: love of creature, of nature, and of divinity, could not be taken away from the individual by mechanization; for the life of the whole, they are evaporated into insignificance. Humanitarianism sank to cold pity and the duty of care, and yet it signifies the ethical summit of the entire epoch; love of nature became a sentimental Sunday pleasure; love of God, covered by the regimentation of mythological-dogmatic rituals, entered the service of interests in this world and the next and thus became suspicious not only to ignoble natures. There is probably no single path by which it would not be possible for man to find his soul, even if it were the joy of flying an airplane. But humanity will not take any detours. No prophets will come and no religious founders, because this over-anesthetized time will no longer perceive a single voice: otherwise it could still listen to Christ and Paul today. No esoteric communities will take the lead, because a secret teaching is misunderstood by the first disciple, let alone the second. No unified art of the world will bring its soul, because art is a mirror and a play of the soul, not its creator.

The greatest and most wonderful thing is its simplicity. Nothing will happen except that mankind, under the pressure and urge of mechanization, of bondage, of fruitless struggle, will cast aside the obstacles that weigh on the growth of its soul. This will not happen through brooding and thinking, but through free understanding and experience. What many people talk about today and a few people understand will later be grasped by many and ultimately by everyone: that no power on earth can withstand the soul.

In so far as such words express longings, and in so far as our time demands the spirit, one can certainly agree with them. Only one must add: there is here a complete knowledge of what the time requires, but a complete lack of knowledge of what can satisfy these longings and needs. There is also a clear judgment that the justified individualism of our time is no longer suited to receiving a single religious founder or prophet, or to founding secret schools on any sectarian side that wants to call itself “esoteric”.

True spiritual science will want neither the one nor the other. True spiritual science knows how true esotericism is justified when it does not want to become exoteric but remains within itself. For it is not a matter of what wants to become established as esoteric, but of what wants to become established in our time in such a way that it can be absorbed by the healthy mind. In this respect, the authority of some prophet will not suffice for the age, but only the truth that is completely independent of man and his subjective individuality, to which the human soul can surrender if it only wants to. In this respect, what was meant here by spiritual science has been aptly expressed in the words of this practical man, Rathenau.

But why is it so difficult for our age to return to spiritual science? Why does something like an insurmountable wall arise between the urge of the time and actual spiritual science?

This, too, can be shown, and the real obstacles can be identified. What would someone say, for example, about a science that wants to be a “science” and prove itself to be responsive to the needs of the human spirit, if the person who wants to be a scientist only ever answered every question about the connection between the physical human body and scientific facts by saying: “There is this or that organization in the physical body of the human being; this corresponds to what is also outside in nature.” Can anyone imagine a serious natural science that only ever answers everything one asks it with: “That's nature!” Nature is behind the movements of the stars, nature is behind chemical processes, nature, nature, nature. Just one word! Can you imagine someone who would do such a thing being taken seriously as a naturalist?

Now one can say again: the impulses of the human soul to enter into the spiritual world have become so weak in recent times that the urge to do so, which is very much alive, is expressed in our time only in what would be quite similar in spiritual science as in natural science, where people would only ever cry: nature, nature, nature! Let us see weighty voices raised, vigorously advocating that the scientific study of our time must lead man to the soul. But they do not get any further by demanding this orientation towards the soul than by emphasizing: “Man has a soul, there is a soul,” and so on; “soul, soul, soul - spirit, spirit, spirit,” they say, just as the less than satisfied naturalist would say: “nature, nature, nature!”

We see – and not insignificant, but quite significant facts are cited – how an important man of the present day, at a celebration of Harvard University in America, gave a speech about how a general worldview that leads to the spiritual must be born out of science, Dr. Eliot, a man who stands firmly on the ground of science, who is a close connoisseur of contemporary science. I would like to quote again from a speech delivered at an outstanding place on earth. Dr. Eliot said:

"Men have always assumed a soul different from the body, although inherent in it. No one is willing to be absorbed in his body. On the contrary, everyone now believes, and all men have believed, that there is in man an animating, ruling, peculiar essence or spirit, which is himself. This is something just as real as the body, and more characteristic... This spirit or soul is the most effective part of the human being, it is recognized as such, and this has always been the case.

Dr. Elliot says nothing more than that he points to the “soul,” analogous to how someone would always point only to “nature, nature, nature.” We have not yet reached the point in our time when our thinking about the spirit would be as comfortable as it is with nature. In natural science we distinguish oxygen and hydrogen in water, and we do not say: oxygen and hydrogen belong to 'nature'. There we are dealing with the details of nature. Likewise, spiritual science must come to the point where it can relate that which lives in the soul as forces and as activities not only to a “general spiritual reality”, but to a spiritual world, to a concrete realm of the spirit, which is distinguished and described in the same way as the individual facts of natural science.

Only when spiritual science is able to approach the observation of the individual facts of the human soul in the same way that natural science approaches the observation of the individual facts of nature will it be able to give the human soul what the soul desires. The next lecture is intended to show what these paths are like. But above all, it should be explained how, in our time, there is a desire for something whose meaning and essence is not yet clear, and how spiritual science in our time has the task of bringing knowledge of the spiritual, just as natural science brings knowledge of natural facts. And just as natural science regards it as its task to trace a substance that is also found in the human body in its development out in the world in order to recognize the whole context, so spiritual science will regard it as its task to trace any activity of the human soul back to the spiritual powers and the spiritual principles of creation out in the universe.

From this, however, it will also recognize how that which lives in the human soul relates to the whole universe, to space and time. Only in this way can it arrive at the answers to the riddles of immortality and of the fate of man between death and the next birth. Not the abstract pointing to “spirit” and “soul” in general can lead to anything useful. This will only lead to doubt about the true answers, for example, to the question of immortality. Only when one sees how something completely different is linked to it, which is not subject to transience in the course of time, will it be possible to answer these questions from spiritual science.

If we consider this, we may say that the tasks for spiritual research in the present and future are similar to those that arose for natural science at the dawn of modern scientific development. Just as the old traditions were overcome at the time of Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler and so on, and the human spirit itself was directed towards scientific facts, and just as a certain abundance of scientific scientific achievements has come into being, so it must be the most serious task of our time to establish a spiritual science in a comprehensive way and to show the paths that the soul has to take to the individual spiritual entities and the individual spiritual facts.

Natural science has not had an easy time of it. It has also had to fight against obstacles, as we are again facing today in relation to spiritual science. I have often pointed out such obstacles. For example, Galileo tried to make it clear to the people of his time that it had been believed throughout the Middle Ages that the nerves of the human body emanated from the heart, whereas he wanted to show that they emanate from the brain. A friend said to him: “That contradicts everything Aristotle taught.” – Apart from the fact that Aristotle did not mean it that way, people still believed that the nerves of the human body emanate from the heart. The entire Middle Ages did not look at nature itself, but only preserved old traditions and prejudices. When Galileo showed his friend the corpse to convince him that the nerves go out from the brain, the latter replied: “When I look at it, it looks as if the nerves of the human being go out from the brain, but that contradicts Aristotle, and if I come into conflict with Aristotle, I believe Aristotle and not nature.

That is how strongly people's prejudices can pile up. And when, later, in the Galilean sense, Francesco Redi overthrew the prevailing prejudice that living beings could develop from something inanimate, that lower animals, worms and the like could arise from river mud, when he uttered the sentence: ” only from the living, and that it was only an inaccurate way of observing when they believed that worms could come from river mud in which there was no germ, he only just escaped the fate of Giordano Bruno.

And so, when today the spiritual scientist says: If you believe that everything produced by the soul of a developing child is determined solely by what it has inherited from its parents and their ancestors, then you are observing inaccurately; it has its origin rather in a spiritual germ which already went through an earlier life on earth and then underwent a life in the spiritual. If spiritual science points to a spiritual germ, as Francesco Redi pointed to the material germ, then the prejudices of the time stand in its way. Even if they do not burn people anymore, they have other means of rendering such heretical assertions harmless or at least ridiculing them. The way in which the times treat their people changes from epoch to epoch, but the essence of prejudice always remains the same. In a similar way, the time for research into spiritual needs today stands in the same relation to the time of the dawn of scientific development as it did to the scientific needs of that time. And if science has brought an increase in external culture to humanity through its fruits, the fruits of spiritual culture will be quite different. Above all, they will be fruits for the life of the soul.

How many people today suffer practically from scientific prejudices! There stands a person, and if he is a scientific believer and rejects the spirit, he may well say to himself: There is a certain kind of individuality in me; I look up to my blood relationship and have to recognize how I am the result of the inheritance from my blood relationship. Then depression, a lack of energy and an inability to fight against fate descends into many a soul. For if it were the case that man is only the result of heredity, then it would be just as impossible to stop the bad effects of heredity as it is to stop the lightning that flashes towards a person. But if spiritual science does not remain a mere theory, but becomes a force of the soul, so that we know: there lives in us a soul-core that carries what the line of inheritance has given only as an outer shell and must seek ever deeper and deeper forces within itself. Then courage, hope and energy will grow to control and improve what shows up as weakness in the external physical existence through the spiritual. There will no longer be a moment in a person's life when one cannot gain certainty with regard to the spiritual forces in the person to overcome external obstacles.

This is the case in many areas. So mere belief in the material world, in which the life of the soul is supposed to be harnessed, can depress our happiness and energy, while spiritual science, on the other hand, when it becomes the living inner power of the soul, can give us security against all mechanization of life. This is another task of spiritual science: to create the possibility in all fields of facing life with security and health. Dr. Eliot also promises a healthy science in his way. He, too, knows the soul's urge toward the spirit, but he acts like the naturalist who would speak only of “nature, nature, nature” in everything. He says: such a new science will not speak of death and mourning as the old one does, but of life and joy.

I readily believe that the soul longs for a worldview that strives for “life and joy,” that wants to reject and not let “death and mourning” come close to it, to which many old worldviews went back and which above all presented the mystery of death to people. I readily believe that people want to reject death and mourning. But death and sorrow come of themselves. No matter how much people may resist and say that they want to reject death and sorrow in their worldviews, they want to have life and joy. But death and sorrow come of themselves, and then one must come to terms with them. But one can only cope with them when one knows the living spirit, which continues life even where outer nature sets in death and mourning, and which also knows the creative principle in pain, suffering and sorrow. We shall yet see that spiritual science, as it is meant here, is able to regard what appears to be an obstacle to development, evil, that which contradicts life, as something that advances the world and serves life.

One could say: What the truth of spiritual research, as it follows not from the arbitrariness of an individual, but from what man can recognize today, if he correctly interprets his environment through the paths of the soul to a spiritual knowledge , what this truth can mean in the context of the whole world, can be seen in the way the spiritual-scientific researcher relates to the natural-scientific world-explorer in the dawn of modern times. Let us look at Giordano Bruno, in whom Copernicus's world view is most succinctly expressed! How does he stand in his time? He takes up the laws of Copernicanism and looks out into the vastness of space. Before that, there was a worldview that relied only on the external sense perception. When we hear today that everything is uncertain that has not been investigated by conventional science, we might object: But look at the time of Copernicus and Giordano Bruno! As long as we relied on what meets the eye with regard to the starry sky, we did not have the right view of the external world system. It was only when we went beyond the external sense perception and devoted ourselves to thought that we found through inner energy what we now recognize as true.

Only when Copernicus and Giordano Bruno had progressed so far as to overcome the delusion of sensory appearance were they able to point out how erroneous was the previous belief of men that the earth was something fixed in space, around which the moon, sun and planets revolved, then came the sphere of fixed stars, and behind that was, as it were, the so-called eighth sphere, which limited everything. Giordano Bruno stood up and said to the people: When you direct your gaze into the celestial space, there is no “eighth sphere” there, you make it yourself; but there is the blue firmament, and the spaces are filled with worlds like ours, and we see out into a sea of infinity if we are only able to overcome the boundary that we have set for ourselves! It was this conquest of the barrier of space that constituted the greatness of the Copernican and Giordano Bruno world views, in that it was recognized: because man's gaze did not reach further, he believed in an eighth sphere, whereas in truth the expanse of space is unlimited.

Today, humanity is on the same ground in terms of spiritual science. Just as Giordano Bruno showed that the blue vault of heaven is only there because the human eye does not reach further, so spiritual science shows that human life between birth and death is only limited because the gaze of the ordinary person only goes so far. Just as the firmament is no limit to the contemplation of the universe, so birth and death are no limit to the contemplation of man, which we erect only because the ordinary man's view reaches only so far. Just as the spatial limitation of the world was removed by natural science and space was opened up, so today the limits of birth and death for the human being are removed by spiritual science, in that it teaches us to direct our spiritual gaze into the life of the soul in its eternal duration, just as natural science in the dawn of modern times has directed our gaze into eternity or, better said, into the infinity of space. Exactly the same today as then, only in a different field!

Just as the natural sciences, which have turned to the external life of man and to the external knowledge of man's life, have brought infinite advantages and achievements, so too will the soul's view of what it needs for its life, expanded beyond birth and death, beyond the temporal, bring infinite values to the human soul. For spiritual scientific research, when pursued correctly, will pass over into the human soul and will become life there, will become strength and confidence, will place us in the whole social context and bring the soul what the souls, which are only beginning to understand a little, long for so much.

Absolutely true, not only in theory but in life and in strength, spiritual science will do what I have already tried to summarize in a few words, with which I also want to conclude my reflection today, which should show what the spirit and meaning and goal of spiritual science is, and what this spiritual science of the human soul should be. The meaning and goal of spiritual science, we can grasp it something like this:

Man's mind speaks to man:
Things in the vastness of space;
They change in the course of time.
Recognizing, the human soul,
Unlimited by the vastness of space
And unperturbed by the passage of time,
Penetrates into the realm of the spirit.