The Rudolf Steiner Archive

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In one of his works Tolstoi expressed surprise—one might almost say disapproval—that in exploring modern science he found every kind of investigation concerning the evolution of the insect world, concerning what seemed to him insignificant things in the organic body or elsewhere in the world, whereas he found nothing in science itself concerning the important, the essential things, concerning the questions which stir every heart. Tolstoi said that above all he found nothing whatever concerning the nature of death. From a certain point of view one cannot entirely disagree with such an objection to the modern scientific spirit, coming from so distinguished a source. Nevertheless from another aspect one may stress the point that, if such an utterance is meant as a reproach, it is indeed to a certain extent unjust towards modern science, and this for the very simple reason that modern science has long owed its magnitude and importance to that very sphere in which answers to questions connected with the nature of death have been sought in the main without success. On the basis of the conception of the world represented here, it is certainly not necessary to inveigh against deficiencies in modern science. We can admire in the very highest degree the splendid achievements, the truly significant successes, both in their own sphere and also with respect to their application in practical life and in human society; here the opinion has repeatedly been expressed that Spiritual Science has certainly no need to lag behind in any kind of admiration pointing in this direction. At the same time, however, the most important achievements of the modern scientific world stand on a footing that gives no foundation for those points of contact which must definitely be reached, when questions concerning death, immortality and the like, are to be examined. Modern science cannot do this, because from her starting point she has in the first place set herself the task of investigating material life. But wherever death intervenes in existence, we find, when we look more closely, the point of contact which draws the spiritual and the material together. Certainly, when these subjects are under discussion, there is no need to agree with the many cheap attacks on the efforts of modern science. Indeed, we may even say (and this, too, has been often emphasized here) that when the great questions of conscience are to be examined, we may—even as spiritual scientists—find ourselves with reference to the feeling of scientific responsibility and scientific conscience, more drawn to the procedure adopted today by external natural science—although it is unable to penetrate to the most weighty problems lying behind life—than to many facile explanations springing from dilettante theosophical or other spiritual-scientific sources. These often give—especially with regard to method—too easy answers to such questions as we are dealing with today.

Recently, indeed, some approach has been made from the standpoint of science, to the problem of the death of created beings. This has come about in a peculiar way. Apart from many separate attempts which have been made, analyses of which would carry us too far today, one investigator at least may be mentioned, who has handled the question of the nature of death in a significant book. This writer has adopted a strange attitude towards the question, so strange that we are obliged to say again, as we did in a similar case, concerning the explanations of the origin of man: as spiritual scientist one feels peculiarly placed with regard to modern natural science; for whenever one is faced with a fact, we find that precisely from the standpoint of Spiritual Science, we can fully accept this fact and can see in it strong proofs of that which Spiritual Science represents. Faced, however, with the theories and hypotheses advanced by the adherents of the present-day world conception, in a more or less materialistic or, as it is considered more elegant to say, in a monistic way, then indeed it is a different matter. Here, one feels that, sincerely as we may agree concerning the facts brought forward in modern times, we cannot always declare ourselves in agreement with the theories and hypotheses, which those who believe they are on the sure ground of natural science feel bound to construct on what is produced as natural-scientific fact.

The research worker who has written on the nature of death from the standpoint of his natural science has called attention to something very interesting, precisely in connection with Spiritual Science. This is Metschnikoff, the man who for long was Director of the Pasteur Institute in Paris. He seeks clarity—so far as it is possible to obtain it today—concerning the data, the actualities, which bring about the death of the living being. In the first place, when considering such a question, we must not take into account what are called violent deaths, though we may perhaps have occasion later to refer to these violent deaths brought about by accidents or otherwise. When, however, we discuss the question of the nature of death—Metschnikoff, too, draws attention to this—we must see it as established in natural existence, must study it as appertaining, so to speak, to the phenomena of life, must be able to bring the phenomena of life before our eyes in such a way that death belongs among them. So, then, the riddle of death can be solved only in the case of so-called natural death, which is brought about at the end of life, just as other natural processes are brought about in the course of a life. Since this is only an introduction to what is to be said about natural science, it is impossible to go into the interesting details of the arguments of the above-mentioned investigator and thinker. It must, however, be pointed out that in studying the actualities of life he calls attention to the fact that in the processes of life itself, in that whereby life is to some extent evolved and perfected, the naturalist really meets with nothing which could give a real reason why death, the annihilation of the being, encroaches upon life. By numerous examples, Metschnikoff seeks to show how whoever follows the course of life sees everywhere that death makes its appearance without our being able to give the ready explanation people are prone to give, when the span of life is drawing towards death; that this is brought about by exhaustion. This investigator calls attention to numerous facts which prove that although the processes of life continue, and continue in an unenfeebled condition so that there can be no question of exhaustion in life itself, yet at a certain point of time death intervenes; so that this investigator arrives at the—it must be admitted—extremely remarkable position in which fundamentally every death, every ending of life in the animal, vegetable or human kingdom is to be attributed to external influences—the action of certain enemies of life which, in the course of a lifetime, obtain the upper hand and which finally, fighting against life, work as a poison on it, and at last destroy it. Whereas, then, for this investigator, the organism itself everywhere shows signs that it does not actually come to an end through its own exhaustion, this individual expects to see—when death approaches—such enemies of life appearing in one form or another, as poison phenomena making an end of life. Here, then, we have before us a hypothesis of natural science—it is indeed no more than this—which, as it stands, traces every natural death to external influences, to the action of poison phenomena brought about by external living beings of the plant or animal kingdom which make their appearance as enemies of life and at certain moments destroy the organism.

Such an interpretation employs all means to come to some kind of understanding of the nature of death within the actual material phenomena. In pursuing such a course, the reasoner strives to ignore as far as possible the fact that the spiritual element may intervene actively and effectively in organic life, and that perhaps this spiritual element as such may have something to do with death as we meet it in the outside world. It is not unthinkable—although at first sight this must appear absurd to those who maintain a more or less materialistic or monistic attitude—that those very enemies which appear as poisonous forces in relation to the organism might be enlisted as necessary accompanying phenomena of the spiritual forces which permeate organic beings, strengthening and stimulating them on their path towards death. It would not be unthinkable that the powerful spirit which, on the one hand, is directed to use the organism as its instrument in the physical world, might, on the other hand, make it possible through its operations for those hostile forces to seize upon the organism and destroy it.—In any case, if we allow ourselves to be influenced by such an explanation as that just quoted, there is one thing we must not disregard; namely, that modern natural science with its interest in merely material phenomena actually makes the investigation of the death of the organism an easy matter. But in reality it should not make light of it. And this leads me to emphasize that it will not be easy for Spiritual Science—which, from our own day onwards, must make the effort to take its place in the evolution of mankind—to carry out investigations concerning certain questions so simply as those world conceptions often do which expect to be able to determine something about the great riddles of existence merely out of external material facts.

Hence, from the very outset attention must be drawn to the fact that from the way in which modern natural science observes phenomena, no real distinction is made by those who feel they are standing on its firm ground between death in the plant world, the animal world, and the human world. But what have these three in common except the destruction of an external phenomenon? This, however, they share, to all intents and purposes, with the destruction of a machine: the cessation of the connection of the parts. Looking only at the external phenomena it is easy to speak of death, insofar as this death may then be spoken of as uniformly similar in plant, animal, and man. We may see where this leads, by a case which I have often quoted to a number of the audience sitting here, but which is always interesting when the relation of science to such a question is being considered. I do not wish on an occasion like this to refer to the ordinary popular writings which make it their business to carry into wider circles the results natural science is supposed to have obtained; on the contrary, if the connection with natural science is to be established, I should wish always to point to the arguments of this kind accepted as the best. Here, then, with reference to this question, we have always the opportunity to point to a distinguished book which is at the same time easy to understand; namely, the “Physiology” of no less a writer than the great English scientist, Huxley, translated into German by Professor J. Rosenthal. In the first pages of this work the subject of death is dealt with in few words but in a very remarkable way, which shows us immediately how inadequate on the whole is the thinking—the judgment on such questions, not the research—of present-day science. T.H. Huxley writing on Physiology says something to this effect: The life of man is dependent on three things, and when they are destroyed death must supervene. Then he continues: If, in the first place, the brain is destroyed, or, secondly, the pulmonary breathing is stifled, or thirdly if the action of the heart is inhibited, man's death must ensue; yet, strangely enough (though one cannot be sure nowadays that this strangeness will be felt in those wide circles in which the habits of thought have allowed themselves to be influenced by materialistic wisdom), strangely enough, Huxley says that it cannot be stated without reserve that, if the three above-named functions of the human organism are inhibited, the death of the living human being must ensue. One might rather think that supposing the brain no longer functioned, if the activity of the lungs and heart could be artificially maintained, life might still continue for a time, even without the action of the brain. Whether this is felt to be strange is only a question of habits of thought; for, actually, we should say: The life of a man when he cannot use his brain in the physical world cannot for a human being really be called a continuance of life. It must be admitted that life is ended for a man when that for which he needs the instrument of his brain can no longer play its part. And then if by some means the activities of heart and lungs could be maintained, that might be approximately a continuance of life, perhaps in the sense of a plant existence, and, if one wished to preserve a completely open mind, one might speak of that death which must still take place when the action of the heart and lungs ceases, as of a plant death added to the former death.

To speak, then, of human death so open-mindedly can only be justified when death is imminent because the man can no longer make use of the most important instrument whereby he carries on his life in the physical world—in his actual consciousness. And the ceasing of his consciousness in the physical world, insofar as it is bound up with the indispensability of a brain, must, for the human being alone, be designated as death. How superficially such things are studied is amply shown by Huxley himself when, in those pages where he speaks of death, he draws attention to natural science having not yet succeeded in progressing in the same way as, in his opinion, what he calls “an old doctrine” progresses; namely, by following the spiritual, essential actualities of the soul, through its journeying in the further course of existence, after the passage through the gate of death. Not yet, remarks Huxley, can modern natural science follow up what it has to follow: the oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, and so on which compose the human organism, and which fall asunder when the man has passed through the gate of death.—Hence, this investigator considered that natural science could contribute something towards the problem of the meaning of death: that is, if the path could be followed which is taken after death by the materials composing the human organism during lifetime. And it is interesting and significant that, at the end of this first treatise on physiology by an important scientist, we find a reference to words which we can understand when spoken by the gloomy, melancholic Prince of Denmark, Hamlet—but which we should not have expected to find quoted when so serious a question is raised as the nature of death in the world. If we inquire into the nature of death in man, it is exclusively the destiny of the being of man that interests us. We can never be content with knowing the relation to one another of the various materials, the individual components, which have combined to form the exterior corporeality, so long as the essential soul and spirit of man made use of the external instruments. Out of his gloomy melancholy, Hamlet may say:

“Imperial Caesar, dead and turned to clay,
Might stop a hole to keep the wind away,
O that that earth which kept the world in awe,
Should patch a hole t'expel the winter's flaw.”

This the melancholic may say, and we understand it in its dramatic connection; but when the naturalist calls attention to the way the molecules and atoms once in the body of Caesar might go on living in some other being, it may be, as Huxley suggests, in a dog or in a hole in the wall; whoever is in real earnest feels in the depths of his thinking how impossible it is that such a thought should approach the great problems of the world riddles.—And this is no disparagement of natural science which has to accomplish its achievements on the material plane. It is only to point out how, on the one hand, natural science should perceive and observe its limitations, and should answer the questions about material processes and the destiny of substances, while, on the other hand, those students who wish—on what they can learn by conscientious research concerning the destiny of substance—to build up a world conception of such a problem as death, in essentials far overstep the boundaries of which they should be conscious, if they want to remain on the ground of external, material facts. As I have said, it is not so easy for Spiritual Science, because from its point of view it is necessary to examine separately the phenomena of what may be called death in plants, of what is called death in animals, and also, apart from these, what in particular constitutes death in the human kingdom.

No conception of death in the plant world can be obtained by studying plants as they are very often studied now; that is, by observing each individual plant as a separate entity. It would, of course, lead us much too far today to explain again in detail what has been already indicated in former lectures; namely, that Spiritual Science must regard the earth as a vast living being, of which the life principle has indeed altered in the course of evolution. Were we to examine the life principle of the earth throughout the ages, we should find that in the far-distant past, the earth was a completely different entity, that it has been through a process which has now led to the increased suppression of the life of the earth as a whole in favor of the individual life kingdom, in favor of the vegetable, animal and human kingdoms. But even in our present time, Spiritual Science cannot think of the earth as the merely physical combination of external substances, as it is regarded from the standpoint of modern physics, geology, and mineralogy. On the contrary, in all that is presented as the mineral basis of our existence, the ground which we tread, Spiritual Science must see something which, as the solid foundation of the whole earth organism, stands out just like, or similar to, the solid skeleton as it is differentiated from the soft parts of the human organism. As in the human being the solid skeleton inclines to become a kind of merely physical system, a merely physical aggregation of organs, so, in the vast earth organism we must regard what confronts us as physical and chemical in its action, as a kind of skeleton of the earth. It is merely separated off from the whole life of the earth, and everything which happens on the earth, everything carried out in the earth processes, must in the sense of Spiritual Science be considered as a unity. Thus, when we study plants individually, we are just as wrong if we ascribe to each plant the possibility of an individual existence as we should be if we looked at a single human hair or nail and tried to study it as an individuality. The hair or the nail has significance only, and its inner principle can only be recognized when it is studied not as an individual by itself but in conjunction with the whole organism to which it belongs. In this sense the single plant and everything vegetable upon the earth belongs primarily to the earth organism.

I must add this remark: The assertions thus maintained by Spiritual Science are to be recognized in the ways already specified in these lectures; so that we are not applying to the world around us the conclusions reached in the study of man himself. It is true it is often said that Spiritual Science presents occurrences in the universe after the analogy of processes taking place in man. We may indeed sometimes feel obliged for the sake of the presentation to make use of such analogies, because what the research of Spiritual Science perceives in the universe is illustrated and symbolized in the human organism; for the human organism primarily represents the connection of the bodily with the spiritual, and man is best understood when the connection between human and spiritual is made clear. That the earth, however, is an organism, and that what exists as a plant is embedded in the vast organism of the earth, belonging to it as hair and nails belong to the human organism, this, for Spiritual Science, is something not inferred by analogy, not at all the result of a mere deduction. On the contrary, it is the result of investigations by the spiritual scientist, along the lines described or indicated here, which can be pursued in detail in the book “Knowledge of the Higher Worlds.”—The essential in such research is that by it the investigator himself widens his consciousness, ceasing to live in himself alone, and that he is no longer influenced only by what the senses can perceive and the reason bound to the instrument of the brain can apprehend. The result of such research is that the man frees himself from the bodily instrument, that he becomes a participator in a spiritual world; then, in his own circle, in his spiritual horizon, he possesses not only what is presented to the external senses and the reason, but perceives the spiritual beings and spiritual forces. Thus, for the spiritual investigator, there exists what may be called the soul of the earth, a soul element giving life to the whole earth, just as the soul existing in man gives life to the human organism. The spiritual investigator widens his consciousness to a horizon where the soul element giving life to the whole earth comes directly under his notice. And then, for him the plant world is no longer merely the sum of the individual plants, for then he knows that what may be called the earth soul has to do with everything living and growing as a plant on the earth.

Yet the question is still: How are we to conceive that the plants begin and end their existence? How are we to picture, so to speak, the birth and death of a plant? We shall see at once that these words applied to the plant kingdom have, fundamentally, no more real significance than if we were to say, when a man's hair falls out that the hair is dead. Once a man rises to the thought that with regard to the earth he is dealing with an ensouled organism, he acquires a completely new outlook on the beginning and end of life in the plant world. To anyone not merely following the single plant individual purely externally, from seed to seed again, but rather bearing in mind the sum total of plant life on the earth, it will be obvious that here something different is at work from what may be called the beginning and end of life in the animal, or the human, kingdom. We see that the play of the elements in the course of the year is closely connected with the rise and decay of plants, with the exception of those which we count as perennials; but it is quite a different connection from that which exists, for instance, in animals. In animals we seldom find death so closely bound up with the external phenomena, as we see the withering of the plants bound up with certain phenomena of the whole earth nature when, for instance, autumn is coming on. In reality, people regard the life of a plant abstractly, detached from the fact that it is embedded in the whole earth existence; this is because they study only the single plant and do not consider the rhythmic, up and down undulation, of the life of the year, which at a definite time impels the germinating plants to sprout, brings them to a certain maturity, and, again at a definite time, causes them to wither. If we contemplate this whole process, externally sound observation, even if it has not penetrated the nature of Spiritual Science, may say: Here we are not dealing merely with the rise and decay of individual plants, but with the whole earth process, with something living and weaving in the whole existence of the earth. Where, however, do we find anything of which we can say that what it shows in its own phenomena explains how the invisible, spiritual element that we must think of as ensouling the earth is connected with the sprouting and withering of the plant? Where do we find anything at all which meets our spiritual eye so as to make this outer process intelligible to us?

Here it becomes evident to the spiritual scientist that he has something within himself to explain this living and weaving in the plant world, something which, if only it is studied in the right light, will account for the rise and decay of life in the plant world. We find in human nature what we call the ordinary phenomena of our consciousness. We know very well, however, that these phenomena can be experienced by the human being only during his waking day life, from waking up to falling asleep. The process of falling asleep, the process of waking up, are noteworthy incidents in human life. For what do we perceive? In falling asleep we become aware of a plunging of the whole inner processes of the soul into an indeterminate darkness; we are aware of the fading of our thoughts and ideas, our feelings and the impulses of our will into the darkness of sleep; at waking we become aware of the emerging of the whole of this soul content. Of this, man is conscious. Now it would doubtless be absurd to think that sleep has nothing to do with what exists as evolution of the consciousness in the whole human organism. We know how important regular, periodical sleep is for our physical life, insofar as spirit and soul live in it. We know what we owe to regular sleep. We have only to be reminded of what is constantly experienced by a man who needs a retentive memory. We say: If a man wants to avoid wearing his memory out, so that it becomes unserviceable, if he wants to keep his memory in good order, he must constantly sleep on the things to be remembered. If he has something very long to learn by heart it is clearly noticeable how much in the whole activity of remembering he owes to regular sleep. Apart from this, however, it appears quite natural that the weariness or exhaustion we notice as the result of our waking life is brought about by the life of our consciousness. By allowing the processes of our soul—our life of ideas, of feeling and of willing—to be overworked, we do violence to the delicate construction of our organism, as regards our will processes, even to the coarser parts. Quite superficial observation can teach us that tiredness of nerves, muscles and other organs is brought about solely by the encroachment into our organism of the conscious manifestations of our ideas, feeling, and will. We know quite well that if we give ourselves up to the ordinary musing of the day, where one thought gives place to another, the brain becomes less tired than if we set our thoughts to work under the compulsion of some method or doctrine. We know, too, that the muscles of the heart and lungs work throughout the whole of life without requiring sleep or rest, because weariness does not enter into this, since as a rule the organism evokes, in the unconscious or the subconscious, only appropriate activities. Only when we consciously encroach upon the organism do we produce weariness.—Hence we may say: We see the processes of the soul encroaching upon the life of the body—we see how what is active in the soul works itself out in our bodily life—in that which is evoked by the processes of the body which may be called normal—the activities of the heart and lungs and the other continuous processes of life. Here no weariness, no exhaustion, enters in. It is when conscious processes intrude that weariness enters. We become aware of a deterioration, a destruction of the organism through the encroachment of consciousness.

Here we have reached the point at which we can see the significance and function of sleep. What is worn out in the organism during the day, what is destroyed by conscious activities must, when the conscious activities are discontinued, be restored again in sleep. Here the organism must be left to itself to follow the processes inborn, inherent in it. Here we stand at the point where we can say: Again Spiritual Science coincides remarkably with what the facts of natural science tell us—even in the form adduced by the already-mentioned Russian scientist who was for many years Director of the Pasteur Institute in Paris. Now, can we not say that consciousness itself, man's spiritual life itself, causes—in order that it may subsist, that it may indeed be there at all—the exhaustion and weariness of the organism? And so, in order to throw a little light on this investigator's hypothesis, we might answer the question: Why, then, do the enemies of life described by him come into our organism? By saying: Because, fundamentally, the consciousness process always confronts what is merely organic life in man as a kind of poisoning process, and we could not rise to our higher spiritual life at all if we did not destroy the organism. In the very processes hostile to the organism lies the whole potentiality of our consciousness. When we speak of the effect of poison with reference to organic activity, we are bound to say: What we must regard as the blessing, the salvation of our life—namely, that we can be a conscious being in a physical body and can develop conscious activity—we owe to the circumstance that, with our conscious life, we encroach destructively, poisonously, upon our organism. Only, for the ordinary conscious life, this process of poisoning and destruction is by no means irreparable; on the contrary, the organism has been attacked in such a way that when the process of destruction has reached a certain point the conscious spiritual life withdraws, leaving the organism to its own activity. So then sleep intervenes; and in it, while the organism is left to its own activity, what has been destroyed through the conscious phenomena of the soul life, is restored again. The spiritual scientist is well aware of the many ingenious, more or less significant hypotheses which have been advanced concerning sleep and fatigue; one would have to speak at great length to analyze these hypotheses. Here, however, it is not our concern to explain these purely materialistic hypotheses, but to establish the fact that consciousness with its content must itself intrude destructively into the organism which contains the external instrument of the consciousness, and that the sleep condition compensates for the destructive process which is thus really repaired. Hence we may say: Sleep is the healer of those conditions which, as processes of ill health, consciousness is obliged to bring about in the organism.

Now when the spiritual scientist has come so far as not only to see what the normal, external consciousness sees—namely, that on falling asleep the conscious ideas and so on sink into indeterminate darkness—when he comes to the point of actually observing what goes on around him, even when this normal, ordinary consciousness disappears, then he also reaches the point of being able to follow the process of falling asleep and waking. It is self-knowledge in the widest sense that a man makes his own through spiritual research. And then he comes to a true conception of those processes which accompany falling asleep, and which are processes of building up, of the bourgeoning of life in the organism. Actually, through spiritual research, through all reasoning and thinking in the light of Spiritual Science, we experience something of this bourgeoning life in the mere bodily organism, every time we fall asleep; but—as it goes no farther than the mere organism—it has only the value of plant life.—What can be experienced every evening on falling asleep may be described thus: You see your own organism with the whole of your soul life; you see what has filled your consciousness during your day life sink out of sight; but as compensation you see, springing up in your own organism, processes which are restorative, not destructive—which, nevertheless, within you are only like the sprouting of plant life. Thus during sleep we have in our organism something like the experience of spontaneous vegetation. The experience of falling asleep, with the fading away of conscious ideas, is something like a springtime experience in which we see what is only plant-like in our organism emerging out of the unconscious. The moment of falling asleep may in this sense be regarded as completely parallel with the emerging of the sprouting, growing plant world in spring.

When we look at plant life in this way, we give up the idea of comparing this sprouting forth of the plants in spring with a human birth or, in general, with what can be called birth in man or in any living animal being; we come to understand that the great earth mother is a complete organism in herself experiencing in spring—in that part of the earth where it is springtime—what man for his part experiences when he falls asleep. The mistake most often made in such comparisons in usually the result of things not being viewed in their reality, but rather considered in connection with external circumstances. It will satisfy the imagination of many to be able to compare the sprouting of plants in the spring with something in the human being periodically repeated, which does not actually represent death and birth; but if a man is following his imagination only he may wish to compare the germinating of the plant world in spring with man's moment of waking. This is wrong. It is not the waking, the return of the soul content, with which the springtime is comparable; it is with the falling asleep, the fading away of the inner spiritual life, the actualities of the soul, and the germination of the merely organic, the merely vegetable in man. If, through the clairvoyant faculty, man can follow consciously at the moment of waking how his ideas and all that he remembers emerge from indeterminate darkness, then there is present again something bringing about the necessary destruction of the whole germinated inner vegetation. It is actually as if with the rising of our ideas on waking in the morning, autumn conditions had blown over everything which had grown up overnight: an inner process comparable for the whole earth with the withering of the plants towards autumn. Only, the earth is not represented as man is by two states of consciousness—waking and sleeping; while one half of the earth is asleep the other half is always awake, so that sleep always follows the sun's journey from one hemisphere to the other. Thus, then, with the earth we are dealing with a vast organism which lives its sleep life from spring to autumn, the sleep life which we are shown in the external organs, in what sprouts and grows in the plant kingdom, and in autumn withdraws into its spiritual sphere, into what is the soul of the earth; for the life of the earth is in the season from autumn to spring. Hence, we cannot speak of a real death or a real birth in plants at all, only of a sleeping and waking of the whole earth organism. As in human beings sleeping and waking is repeated rhythmically in the course of twenty-four hours, and as we do not speak in this connection of the death and birth of our thought world either, if we wish to speak correctly, should we speak of the life and death of plants. We should keep the whole earth organism in view, regarding the plant process belonging to the whole earth organism as a waking up and falling asleep of the earth. When we are feeling most pleasure in what is springing out of the earth, when we remember how men of earlier times, out of their joy in the sprouting life, kept the Feast of St. John, that is precisely the time for the earth which is midnight for man, with respect to his organism and external bodily nature. And when men prepare to celebrate the Christmas festival, when life without is dead, then we are dealing with the spiritual processes of earth. At this time man best finds his connection with the whole spiritual life of the earth; he realizes what he has indicated (from a correct instinct) by fixing mankind's spiritual festivals in winter. I know what objections external natural science can raise against this, but natural science does not consider man's correct instincts.

Now let us try to investigate what we can call death in the animal kingdom, not indeed by making judgments through analogy but rather, by expressing once more, through a process in the human being, what Spiritual Science has to give.

Now we must notice that our soul life, if we study it carefully, certainly shows a different course from that which consists in its furtherance and fructifying through the alternation of waking and sleeping. It should be pointed out that through the whole of a man's life—from his childhood, for as long as he can consciously remember—he is experiencing a kind of maturing process. Ever more and more mature does a man become through what he can absorb of life's experience. This maturing process is accomplished in a strange way. We remember—and through this alone is it possible for an ego to speak within us—all that we have experienced back to a certain point in our childhood; but we remember only the things connected with our ideas, with our thoughts. This is a very remarkable fact, but everyone in himself can follow up the statement. When you remember a painful or a pleasurable occurrence which took place perhaps thirty years ago, you will say: I can quite well recall all the details of the ideas which came into my mind, so that I can reconstruct them in my conception of the incident; but the pain or the pleasure connected with the occurrence at that time does not remain in my soul so vividly as objects of thought generally do. They have faded, severed themselves from the idea, and sunk into indeterminate darkness. We might say: We can always retrieve the ideas from the deep strata of our soul life, but—apart from exceptions—we must leave submerged our memories of what we have experienced as feelings, impulses, or passions. What we have experienced in the way of feeling remains submerged, detached from the bare ideas. Is it entirely lost? Does it lapse into nothingness? Emphatically No. For one who has not studied human life really conscientiously and in detail, it may seem to be so; but a conscientious observer studying from every point of view, will find the following: If we observe a human being at a definite juncture of his life; for example, in his fortieth year, we find him in a certain condition, a condition of soul but also of bodily health or sickness. The man appears to us as gloomily melancholic, easily depressed, or cheerful, or in some way of a phlegmatic or other temperament, easily grasping at the actualities of the world, easily absorbing what pleasure and joy can give him, and so on. The soul condition should not always be separated from the bodily; for the condition of soul appearing in a man is dependent on the way the bodily functions work. If we thus observe the soul mood and the whole disposition of a man at any age of his life, we shall soon find out what has become of the feeling experiences separated from the ideas which could only be remembered later as mental images. We shall find that what became detached as the mood of heart and soul has united itself with our deeper organization; it cannot be remembered in our inner life, but it expresses itself in the inner life, expresses itself, indeed, even as far as in health and sickness. Where are these moods lingering since we cannot remember them? They are submerged in the life of body and soul, and constitute a definite disposition in the man's whole life. Thus it appears to us that as we need memory for the whole course of our conscious life, as in sleep memory always plunges into indeterminate darkness, so our experiences of heart and soul sink down into the darkness of our own being and work upon our whole disposition.

So we have a second element at work in man. And now if we direct our gaze away from man to the whole earth organism, which we are studying as an ensouled being, we do not indeed study it as if the forces of soul and spirit at work in it are organized in the same way as the soul of man. For Spiritual Science shows us that many such beings as man dwell in the soul sphere of the earth; so that the soul of the earth presents a multiplicity, whereas that of man is a unity. Nevertheless, with respect to what has just been described, what is of a soul nature in the earth can quite well be compared with the soul experiences in man himself.—When we see how our moods of heart and soul sink down into our own organism, work on our body and come to expression in our whole disposition, we recognize a parallel to this in the sum total of processes carried out on earth, and indeed in all that finds expression in the origin of the living animal being. In ourselves, a process of body and soul is only set free through what is forced down into the darkness of our bodily disposition by the experiences of our heart and soul. For the earth, the corresponding experiences of soul and spirit are, as it were, crystallized in the birth and death of an animal being.—I know very well that a man who thinks out of hypotheses he can form a world conception which apparently stands firmly on the ground of natural science, may be disgusted by this explanation. I can sympathize with such a man. But the time will come when the direction of human thought and judgment leading to the elucidation of the processes of earthly death and birth will in the next spiritual evolution take the path indicated here; for all that we see as fact in natural science leads us to this conclusion.—Just as a man sees the moods of his soul which shape his organic disposition sinking into his bodily organism, so does he see externally in the earth organism the corresponding process of the rise of the animal world.

So, then, we find in the human being still another process: we see how out of the whole organism the so-called higher feelings and emotions emerge again in the soul. What is the characteristic of these? Whoever deals with this question without prejudice, but also without false asceticism, without false piety and hypocrisy, will say: What we may call the higher moral feelings and those moods in a man which develop into enthusiasm for all that is good, beautiful and true, for all that brings about the progress of the world, this is alive in us only because we are able, by the disposition of our heart and soul, to rise above everything originally implanted in us by instinct; so that, in our spiritual feelings, in our spiritual enthusiasm, we raise ourselves above all that the bodily organism alone can arouse. This can go so far that he whose enthusiasm is in his spiritual life sets so much store by the object of it, that it is a light thing for him even to give his physical life for the sake of what has inspired his higher moral and aesthetic feelings. Here we see that which lives as the spiritual element in this enthusiasm rise, with the suppression of our merely organic nature, in a mood which primarily has nothing to do with the course of the organic life. Thus an element in man also runs its course; that element which he sends down into the depths of his being and which there carries out its organic processes; but from the depths of his being also raise his moral and spiritual feelings, and with them the disposition of his heart and soul. These conquer, in ever-progressing evolution, what belongs merely to the organic, to the physically instinctive constitution of man.

This process, which we find in the human being divided into two elements, we find also in the world of living animals. If in our own case we let our disposition of heart and soul sink down into the life of the body, allowing ourselves to be influenced to the extent of health or sickness by our moods of heart and soul, we see, on the other hand, in all that is lived out in animal life, what constitutes a sinking down of such disposition for the whole earth. All that is feeling and passion in the whole earth organism is lived out in the animal kingdom just as our passions and impulses are lived out in our whole organization. As we look at the animal world we see in each separate form the result of the disposition of the soul of our earth. And if we consider the attraction which the earth exercises over the life of the animal world, allowing itself to be most closely linked with the external physical body, we see that this is no other than the victory of the spiritual—of what, with regard to animals we call the group soul. It is the super-sensible element which finds its representative only in externals, and conquers the external, as in man the spiritual feelings conquer what is merely instinctive. That the external processes of the earth organization always acquiesce in the power of death over the individual animal is in no way different from the victory always achieved in us by the spiritual over what is merely connected with the organic. Seeing the spiritual element in the animal from this point of view, we cannot apply the expressions birth and death to the beginning and end of an animal's existence in the same way as we apply them to man. It is certainly in animals a process of the whole earth, already more individualized than in the plant world. Nevertheless, if we bear in mind the different group souls assigned to the various animal species, we must see how, in each death which overtakes the individual animal, the external, bodily part perishes, but the group soul, which is the spiritual element in the animal, is always triumphant over the external form; just as in man the spiritual triumphs over the merely instinctive, represented not in the separate form but certainly in the organization.

Thus we see, as it were, a vast living being composed of the individual group souls of the animals, and we see the birth and death of the living animal appear in such a way that what forms the foundation of the spiritual in the individual animal has always to fight for its victory over the individuality. Hence we have death in animals presented as that which, as the group soul, moves above the wasting and decay of the individual animal form. We could only speak of a real death in connection with an animal if we failed to bear in mind what remains after the death of an animal; namely, the spiritual, as in man the spiritual, rising above itself, triumphs over the disposition of soul as well as over what is doomed to wither away.—If Darwinism ever advances beyond its present stage, it will see how, throughout the animal kingdom, from the earliest ages, a thread of evolution runs through the apparent births and deaths into the distant future; so that the whole evolution of the animal kingdom will lead at last to a victory of what the lower, the individual animal form being overcome—will issue from the entire spiritual world, leaving behind the lower part living in the individual animals, and will one day triumph over the instinctive element apparent in the whole of animal nature.

And when in man we come to what we call the human will nature—if we then do not speak only of the ideas he has had, which can be recalled again and again, and do not fix our attention only on the soul disposition which sinks in the way described into the deeper organization—if we, rather, look to the impulses of the will, we shall see that they represent above all the most enigmatic part of human nature. How the impulses of a man's will are determined depends upon the experiences life has brought him. If we look back from any point in our life, we find a continuous path, a movement, in which each soul event is linked with one before it. We find, however, that what we have experienced flows mainly into our will in such a way that if we look at ourselves thus, we may say that we have actually become richer in ideas, and riper with respect to the impulses of our will. Indeed, we develop a very special ripeness with respect to our will. This is experienced by everyone looking back upon his life. We do something in life; how we ought to have done it we actually learn only when we have done it. And everyone knows how little chance there is of finding himself in the same situation again later, so that he may apply, at a later opportunity, what he has gained as maturity in life—what he has, perhaps, won through experience of trial and error. One thing, however, he knows; namely, that all his experiences are fitted together in the whole composition of his will, in what we may call the wisdom of his willing; this makes for the maturity to which we gradually attain. It is our will life which becomes increasingly mature; the whole of our feelings, ideas, and so on, combine together to make our will, even with regard to external concerns, increasingly mature. For, when our thinking becomes riper through the experiences of life, this is indeed only a growing ripeness in the will expressed in the fitting together of thought with thought. So we see how our whole soul life as we survey it in retrospect leads us, as it were, to the center of our being, which forms the background to our will impulses and in which this constant ripening is expressed. If we bear this in mind, we have the third element of human evolution, of which we can say that in life we cultivate it in our physical body—we grow up in this element—in it we grow beyond and above what we were when we came into this existence through birth. As in this existence we are clothed in a physical body, and this physical body is the instrument we have to use for our soul—because the soul employs the reasoning power, employs the brain—the being of our soul acquires experience and maturity in life which crystallizes, as it were, in the whole structure of the mature will.

In this life, however, we are not as a rule in a position to work out, to carry through, what is now present in the impulses of our will. This is the question before mankind: What is it in these will impulses which we cultivate as the dearest possession of our souls, which we have made our own, perhaps just on account of our imperfection, that makes us never able to bring them to expression? What we send down into the depths of our being as the content of the experiences of our soul (we have observed this in the second part of our study) leads to the whole disposition of our body and soul. It leads to the way our character is determined, to what life has made of us with regard to health and sickness, whether we are more melancholic, or cheerful, and so on. But what we have made of ourselves with respect to the disposition of our will, this is our inmost being; this is what we have become. Through this, however, we have outgrown what we were. And in the second half of our life, when we are going downhill, we notice how our body refuses to carry out what we have become through the impulses of our will. In short, we see that through our life as perceiving, feeling and willing beings we become something completely at variance with what we already are, something which recoils from what we already are. As our life ripens we feel inwardly in our souls how we clash with what, through our elements, through our bodily aptitudes, through our soul life, we have become. We feel inwardly the conflict between the whole structure of our will and mature life, on the one hand, and on the other the whole structure of our organization; fundamentally we also feel this clash in every single impulse of the will leading to action. This is because our thoughts are to a certain extent transparent, and our feelings, too; but the way in which will power becomes action is inscrutable. The will clashes, so to speak, with external life, and becomes conscious of itself only when this clash takes place. And here we may follow, in the whole of life, even in the bodily organization, what already appears in the life of the soul; namely, that what a man has become, what has given him the aptitude for his talents, must be broken and destroyed by the will, which only appears in this life; otherwise this will power will never be able to make itself felt.

Just as man can become conscious of himself only through the clash with reality, so can he only experience himself as a progressive process by his whole physical life being destroyed through the will, in the same way as the brain is destroyed by the life of ideas. But whereas the brain can be restored through sleep, a new growth of the will cannot be promoted; in fact, through the impulses of the will a continuous process of destruction enters into every life. Thus we see that man must destroy his organism; we realize the necessity of real death for man. Just as we understand the necessity of sleep for the life of ideas, so we now understand the necessity of death for the life of the will. For it is only because man's physical organization is in opposition to his will that the will is aware of itself, that it is strengthened in itself, and thus goes through the gate of death into a life in the spiritual world where it appropriates to itself the forces to build up, in a future incarnation, all that man has not attained in this bodily life. This could be developed for him only by a consciousness ripe for the next move, for something which gives opportunity for a further advance that has not been fully carried out in this life; for this he could only have a consciousness ripe for the next stage which gave him the aptitude for something further that could not be lived out in this life. This will be lived out in a coming earth life, in which the man will work at his new destiny, his new earth life, in an appropriate way.

Whereas, then, with reference to death we could only speak in the plant world of a waking and falling asleep of the whole earth nature, and in the animal world could only compare death with the ebb and flow, and the conquest of our lower life of instinct, it is only with human death that we find what points us, through the destruction of this one life, to ever-recurring lives. It is only through the destruction of this one life that we can attain to what enters into the new earth life and alone leads to the true consummation of the whole human existence. Through this it is also established that the will of man, to become conscious of itself in its entirety, needs the dying away of the physical body; and that, fundamentally, the experience it requires for the correct will impulse is only present when we pass through the gate of death, when this will impulse shares the gradual decline and dying of the external organization. For the will grows by means of the opposition it perceives in the external organization; through this it grows ever stronger and prepares itself to become that which lives throughout eternity. Hence, apart from all that you find explained in Spiritual Science about an unnatural death, it is easy to see that a death brought about by an accident, or suicide, or anything of the kind, is quite different from a natural death, which gives the guarantee for resurrection to a new life. Unnatural death in any form can indeed also be something which signifies an advance in man's total destiny. But what the will, in its general nature, would have had to experience in its victory over the bodily nature, remains in a certain sense present as an inner force, and has to follow a different path when man goes through the gate of death in an unnatural way, from the one it would take if he lived to the natural end of his life.

Thus we see that we may really speak of death only when we are referring to what we may call the development of a new type of will for a new life, and that for this reason we cannot speak of a true death with reference to other beings. As regards man, however, we must speak in such a way that not only are Goethe's words true: “Nature has invented death in order to have more life”, but also in such a way that we say: If there were no death, we should have to wish that it existed, for it makes it possible that through the opposition and withering away of the external organization, the will grows increasingly—growing, indeed, for the new life. And this makes it possible for evolution to advance to greater heights through the different incarnations, so that the life also assumes a more exalted form—even though this does not occur immediately in the next lives, even though retrogression may take place. In the whole course of repeated earth lives the advance will, however, be recognized.

Thus death is the great strengthener of the will for the spiritual life. And we see—as has already been indicated—that recent natural science, although with faltering voice, agrees with Spiritual Science in pointing out that death represents a kind of poisoning process.—Yes, indeed, all spiritual evolution goes its own independent way in devastation, destruction, of the external bodily life. What the world of ideas lays waste in man is repaired by sleep. What is destroyed by the instincts of man is restored by the higher moral and aesthetic feelings and emotions; the destruction of the bodily organization brought about through the activity of the will is restored in the whole life of man through that ripeness of will which persists through death and is able to build up a new life. Thus death acquires a meaning: the meaning whereby man is able, not only to think of immortality, but actually to experience it. Whoever considers death in this way sees it approach as the power leading the external bodily life to its dissolution; but in opposition to this dissolution, he sees the dawn of a new human soul life, the life which man maintains from incarnation to incarnation throughout eternity. Not until we understand the meaning of death for man's eternity have we grasped the meaning of death for the whole of nature. Then, however, we must also give up the widespread, foolish conception which speaks of death in relation to animals and plants; then we must know that actually there can only be a question of real death when those destinies are taken into consideration which the spirit experiences in passing through bodily existence, and when we look at the realities which the spirit must develop in the bodily sphere in order to perfect its own consummation. The spirit must abandon the body to death, so that the spirit may raise itself to an ever higher level of perfection. Keeping this point of view in mind and looking upon death in the human kingdom, our soul may tell us that through death man's spirit and soul can rise to a higher perfection. Even when looking at death in the kingdoms of animal and plant we see the spirit shining through to the ground of all phenomena—and the soul may show itself at one with these words which arouse us, not only bringing us comfort but every hope of life:

Out of the spirit all being has sprung,
Deep in the spirit are the roots of all life,
The aim of all striving is spirit.

In a brief outline of philosophical thought Lessing alluded once to the only doctrine he considered worthy of the human soul—the doctrine he then expounded, in a form suited to Western consciousness, in his masterly treatise, ‘The Education of the Human Race’. He speaks there of reincarnation, of the repeated earthly lives experienced by the human soul, and continues somewhat as follows. Why, he asks, should this doctrine, so obvious in primeval days to the soul of man and one of its earliest treasures, while the soul was still uncorrupted by all kinds of theorising—why should this doctrine be less true than many other doctrines which in the course of time have been accepted as the result of philosophical speculation? After plainly indicating how this theory of repeated earthly lives is the only reasonable one for the human soul, Lessing says we might well expect that any unprejudiced man, willing to let the true nature of the soul work upon him, would grow accustomed to the doctrine—were it not for two things. We are certainly eager to know what Lessing meant by these two things that hindered the human soul from accepting the doctrine of repeated earthly lives. Lessing, however, never finished his sentence, having presumably been disturbed. He breaks off with the words: ‘were it not for two things’, and a colon. Nowhere in his writings, moreover, do we find anything to tell us what he considered these two things to be, although all kinds of speculations have been advanced by scholars who have made a special study of his work.

Now perhaps our conscience may allow us to assume that Lessing was most probably thinking of two things generally repellent to people when reincarnation is mentioned—two impulses rising up in the soul against the idea. One impulse may be expressed thus: whatever may be maintained by any form of spiritual science in favour of reincarnation, one thing is certain—that in normal consciousness we have no recollection of having lived before on Earth. Therefore, even should repeated earthly lives be in accordance with truth, they would seem to be of no significance for human consciousness and must therefore appear to it as an arbitrary hypothesis. That, for many souls, is certainly one of the objections to the idea of reincarnation. The second arises from a sense of justice towards oneself. Repeated earthly lives require an acceptance of destiny—whether we are fortunate or unfortunate, gifted or not in worldly affairs—as a consequence of what we have done in previous lives; so that, to a far greater extent than is generally believed, we ourselves would be the makers of our good fortune and abilities, or the reverse. Many souls may well exclaim: ‘If I have to accept my destiny, if my earthly existence is indeed burdened with that, have I got to accept also that I myself—the Ego within me—has in earlier lives on Earth created the destiny in which I am now involved?’ This is what could be called a man's sense of justice towards himself.

Anyone who delves more deeply into Lessing's ways of thinking and into his whole nature, making it part of his own soul will not doubt that this pioneer of the reincarnation theory meant to indicate these two objections to it. In the course of our study of eternity and of man's soul in connection with it, it will be well to pay attention to the facts just described. So now we will once again call to mind something said by the German philosopher Hegel about eternity—how if eternity belongs by nature to the human soul, it must certainly not reveal itself only after death, but must be capable of being experienced during life on Earth. Hegel puts it like this: Eternity cannot begin for the soul only at death but must belong to it already during earthly life. If we seek it in man's soul, if we seek to know how eternity lives in us and how we can investigate it by looking into our own depths, why should it not reveal itself at once, if, in the sense of Spiritual Science, it is so intimately bound up with the soul?

Former lectures have shown that this close connection holds good between what we may call the outgoing activity of the soul during its existence from birth to death and everything contained in the idea of reincarnation and in that of karma—the working of causes from earlier lives into the present one, and of the causes we are now creating to take effect in our next life on Earth. We must think of the human soul as enmeshed in this whole web of causes, bound up during its present life with all it has experienced in earlier stages of existence, and with all it has still to experience in future lives. Hence a study of the present life of the soul can lead to an outlook on the past and also on the future. If we do not take eternity as an abstract idea, but consider the human soul perceiving in itself its own being, then we come to something which could lead us to a true perception of the nature of eternity. For—to take a comparison—are we not more likely to discover what a chain is by examining it link by link rather than in its whole length? This latter method would mean tackling directly the study of eternity as such, whereas with the first method we consider the single life of a human soul as just one of the links in a whole chain representing for us the complete life of the human being throughout earthly existence.

Now it is true that anyone who looks for an assurance about eternity generally concerns himself with the present time. The lectures previously given here have shown from manifold aspects how, when a man surveys his life of soul, he repeatedly finds that all that takes its course there converges ultimately towards one central point which he calls his ego. Indeed, when we look around, at the philosophical thinkers of today, we meet with frequent indications that the only way of coming to any conclusion about our own being is by considering the nature of our ego; for it is the ego that holds together, as at a central point, everything experienced in our soul. Does it not seem, therefore, that all we experience in our heart, in our soul, in our thoughts, feelings and impulses of will, might simply arise and then pass away again? What, then, remains? To whose destiny do all those thoughts, feelings and will-impulses belong? It is this ego that proves itself to be the enduring central point. We are quite aware that if the experiences of our soul are not related to this enduring point, we can no longer speak of being an individuality. Yet, whatever fine things may be said about the ego by philosophers and thinkers, especially in quite recent times, their speculations about its nature are all open to one fatal objection. Intimately as we may come to know how this centre of our soul-life remains the same in all our conceptions, feelings and will-impulses, yet there is something able to wipe out this experiencing of the ego in normal consciousness; and this something is a constant reminder of how easy it is to refute all philosophical speculation about the endurance of the ego as normal consciousness knows it. This refutation consists in something we experience repeatedly every twenty-four hours: sleep. It is not only our thoughts, sensations and will-impulses that sleep obliterates, but also this central point, the ego. Hence, we cannot with truth speak of permanence in connection with the ego known to normal consciousness.

Nevertheless—as we have seen in previous lectures—it is possible for anyone to speak of the ego, not by focusing his attention on this central point to which he is at the moment relating his conceptions, moods of soul and will-impulses, but by considering something quite different. Here the question arises: Do we meet the ego among all the things experienced in the external world from morning till night? Anyone who asks this question without prejudice can say to himself: No, in all the experiences that come to me from the external world and make their impress on my conceptions, feelings and will impulses, no ego can be found. From nothing in the outer world can I derive the idea of the ego, yet it is there from the moment I wake until I fall asleep. What then can it be that lives in the flow of our concepts, states of feeling and impulses of will and is always to be found there, until sleep wipes it out? Since it is not to be found outside in the world, it must be sought in our own inner world. But our inner world is so constituted that we obliterate what we have in normal consciousness as our ego. Among the innumerable concepts a man is able to form, not one will really throw light on a fact of this kind, except the idea that the thought of the ego arising in normal consciousness and not received from any external source, is not a reality; for realities do not vanish as the idea of the ego vanishes in sleep. If, then, it is not a reality, what is it? Well, there is only one way of understanding it—by assuming it to be an image, a picture, but one outside the world of our experience and comprehensible only by comparing it to someone confronted by his own reflection.

Now suppose someone had never had an opportunity of seeing his own face; he would then be in the same position regarding his outward appearance as he is to his ego, which normally he always experiences as an image, never discovering its true nature. A man cannot see his own face from outside. Standing before a mirror he sees his face, but it is only the image of his face. If he looked around him what other reflections would he see? Tables, chairs, objects of that kind; but not everything around him would be reflected. Yet if he can say that there is something not in his surroundings, something which is a reflection for him alone—for nothing out there can be reflected in our consciousness in the way the ego is—it is then our own being which must experience the ego as a reflection, although in ordinary consciousness it is never directly perceived. Since it is a fact that nothing can be reflected that is not there, so, if a reflection of the ego is produced, the ego must be there, for the cause of the reflection cannot be anything else. A glance at general facts is enough to show the truth of that. We then have to say: As the ego is given to man only as a reflection, it may vanish in the way our face vanishes when we no longer look into the mirror. An image can disappear whereas reality endures and is still there, whether perceived or not. Anyone who wanted to question the truth of that would be forced to maintain that only what a man perceives exists in reality; but on following up this assertion he would soon be convinced of its absurdity.

Hence we must say: In the idea of the ego there is no reality, but the idea enables us to assume the reality of our ego. But how do we gain certain knowledge of the ego in ordinary life? We can acquire this knowledge by living not only in the present but also, through memory, in the past. If, on looking back to preceding days, weeks, years, even decades, to the point of time in our childhood where memory can take us, we could never link in one chain, as it were, all the experiences of our own inner life; it would indeed be impossible to speak at all of ego. What certain psychologists have said is quite correct: a man loses his ego, or at least consciousness of it, to the extent that the recollection of his experiences up to the time in question is wiped out. In so far as our memory fails, our ego breaks up.

We have frequently pointed out that a man is able, especially by thinking, to increase the backward stretch of his memory. Today, however, we will consider what effect it has when anyone experiences in memory not just a picture, of his ego, but his ego in its true reality. Were we simply to remember our experiences back to early childhood, there would be no great difference between that and the emergence of the idea of the ego at the present moment. Ultimately it is immaterial whether we experience the reflection of the ego while relating to this single point our present conceptions, sensations and impulses of will, or whether we draw them from the past. In both cases the ego with which we connect these experiences is but an image. Were we merely to relate our experiences to our ego, we should never, even in memory, discover its reality, for we arrive at that only by learning to know the ego in its activity, in its creative impulse; and this experience proves to us that this creative element, unaffected by the external world, maintains its activity even during sleep. What then is it that continues to live and weave within us while we are asleep?

Anyone who practises this looking back in memory seriously and without bias will say: In life I have gained knowledge of my experiences in a way that not only enables me to relate them to my ego, for it is undeniable that I have worked inwardly on my experiences, quite apart from anything external, and by so doing I have enriched them. Whoever is alive to the ripening and enhancement of life going on in his own depths knows that this cannot be due to any external reality, but to something at work within himself. Moreover, anyone who surveys life as a whole will realise that if we are to succeed in this enhancement of life, in this inner evolution, sleep is needed. We know quite well how lack of sleep creates havoc in our ideas, and to some extent lays waste our states of soul. We realise our need of sleep as a creative element, if what we experience and perceive in the outer world is really to contribute to the ripening of our inner life. By this means we become certain how it is not the ego we observe during the day that works upon us, but that behind this image stands its reality, always at work in us, even when we are asleep, for lack of sleep proves indeed to have a disturbing effect on the soul's progress. Thus, in the enhancement, the ripening, of the life of soul, we recognise the working of the ego. By acknowledging how disorganised we become if we do not sleep at the appointed time, when the ego should be released from its connection with the bodily nature and enabled to work in freedom—by knowing the lack of sleep to be an obstacle to the ripening of life, we come to be aware of the true ego working within us. We do not then perceive it as an image but as an inner force, ceaselessly at work in our life—whether we are awake or asleep.

There we have the first indication—penetrating straight to the reality—of the force that lives and weaves within us, quite independently of the world outside. On going more deeply into this inner experience, what do we find? Many of the details to be referred to today—including the following important fact—have been mentioned in former lectures. For it is a fact that we make a certain progress in life, that we become increasingly mature. But a remarkable thing comes to light: that all that is best in this maturity—everything that enables us to make the most progress in life and by means of which we can best observe the nature of the ego—is something that we can learn from our faults and shortcomings. When we have failed badly in some matter, or have done something which shows us how imperfect, how incapable we are, our very failure teaches us what we should have done. We have become more mature. By means of such opportunities in life—whether our thinking, feeling, willing or acting is concerned—we develop our wisdom, our maturity. But we should go on to say: Through the wisdom and maturity gathered from life, which become an ever stronger inner force, we learn how—because we never meet the same situation a second time to learn once more from our faults—we must store up this all-important force, for we shall never by able to use it in this life again.

We see therefore that throughout our earthly existence we are continually storing up forces that find expression in our maturity. If a life has been well spent, these forces will have gathered their greatest strength by the time the gate of death is reached. We see that we have something living in us that cannot find an outlet in the external world. We live in our souls by being able to look back on the past: it is memory that holds together the threads of the soul. But out of this memory comes forth something that lives and weaves in us as inner ripeness of life; something appearing in earthly existence as a surplus force. The spiritual scientist need only apply a law that is valid for all ordinary science: the law of the conservation of energy. Any scientist, any physicist, will accept this law for the external world. It is universally recognised that, when a finger is drawn lightly across the surface of a table, even this slight pressure is transformed into warmth. Hence we say that energy can be transformed, can go through a metamorphosis, but can never vanish away. Once we have consciously experienced that in the ripe content of our life we have stored up forces which at first cannot be used but are tested to their utmost when we pass through the gate of death, then it should not be difficult to understand that these forces, brought about by the activity of the ego independently of the body, can never be annihilated. Hence the bodily sheath, which contributes nothing to our ripeness in life, can be cast off and revert to its elements, but these forces remain intact. Because in them we have the active ego as powerful centre, the ego is present also in the ripened forces of life when the human being passes through the gate of death. This may be contested by those disinclined to apply to the spiritual life the laws of ordinary physics; but they should be aware that they run into an inconsistency directly they rise from the truths of ordinary physics to the reality of the spirit. We only need common sense in order to follow what Spiritual Science tells us, that when we go through the gate of death there lie, deep within us, stored up forces acquired in life, forces which, exerted to their utmost, in a world differing from that of the physical body, have then to work with the greatest intensity. After death these forces have to work on in a world which must obviously be presupposed, and there these forces, that is, the inner nature of man, permeated and strengthened by the ego, continue to live when man is free of the body. Thus our ordinary intelligence gives us some idea of life after death—not only showing in general terms that there is such a life, but also describing the forces which play into it.

When, however, Spiritual Science goes on to speak in more detail about life between death and rebirth, this naturally causes laughter among those who believe they are standing on the firm ground of ordinary science. This can well be understood by the spiritual scientist, for he knows that neither their laughter nor what they say depends upon reason and evidence but upon the way they think, which makes it impossible for them to acquiesce in what the spiritual scientist, as a result of his researches, is able to say about life after death. They are bound to find it ridiculous, or altogether fantastic, the figment of a dream. You know how Spiritual Science shows that a man, having passed through the gate of death, meets first with a phenomenon only occasionally arising in life—though this does sometimes happen and has, in fact, been repeatedly observed. This first experience is a quite unemotional looking back over the course of his earthly life. I say expressly that in this survey neither feeling nor emotion has any part; the whole panorama of his last life on earth passes quickly before him as if in pictures. This can be experienced in ordinary life if anyone has a shock, such as being nearly drowned, but without losing consciousness—for if that is lost the phenomenon does not occur. Those, however, who have had some great fright, endangering their life, have experienced this backward survey. That much is conceded even by the natural scientist whose research is confined to the external world. I have already reminded you how the distinguished criminologist and anthropologist Moritz Benedikt, having been nearly drowned, spoke of experiencing this backward survey of his past life. From such a natural scientist the spiritual scientist can learn a good deal, and willingly, although today in this sphere his kindly feeling will not be reciprocated.

Now what occurs when anyone experiences this sudden fear of losing his life? For a moment, though retaining consciousness, he ceases to use the external organs of his body. During the experience he loses the power of seeing with his eyes, of hearing with his ears; he is torn away, as it were, by his inner being from the physical body and from ordinary life, but without loss of consciousness. The fact that he is able to have this backward vista of his present life is proof that, when he thus looks consciously into his own depths, all that arises in his memory must be attributed to his inner being. For he retains his memory when thus torn from his physical body. Anyone experiencing a violent shock of this kind must realise that whatever it is which fills him with memories goes with him all through life but has no connection with his outer sense organs. Hence we must say that man is united with some more delicate soul-vesture that is the bearer of his memories, although at such a moment it is lifted free from his bodily organs. Obviously he cannot be asleep, for then it would be the usual thing in sleep to have this backward survey. So it follows that during a fright of this kind he has within him something not present in sleep.

This confirms what Spiritual Science has to say—that in sleep a man goes out with his soul from the physical body, leaving behind the bearer of memories, the vesture upon which he is working throughout his life, so that his memory-pictures can be preserved. In sleep he is outside the physical body, and also that external vesture of the soul, called in Spiritual Science the etheric body, which in ordinary sleep remains bound to the physical body. At the moment of death, however, this etheric body, which is also the activator of life, leaves the physical body, and only this outer physical shell of the human being remains. Death indeed comes because the etheric body, though present in ordinary sleep, is no longer there.

Hence, for a short time after death, the same phenomenon occurs as during a terrifying shock in ordinary life—a backward survey in memory.

Now, as the facts show, this survey experience is bound up with something so closely connected to the physical body that not even sleep can break the link. After death a man takes with him something that belongs not to his innermost soul but, in a certain sense, to his physical body. Spiritual Science shows that within a relatively short time—a few days only—after the discarding of the physical body, the human being becomes free of the etheric body and is then constituted in the main as he is during sleep. But Spiritual Science goes on to show how the inner soul-being is then in a situation different from its situation during life, when every morning a man has to return to his physical body and etheric body. He is closely bound to his physical body, to everything that enfolds him, and this does not specially belong to what we recognise as the real content of his life of soul.

If we are clear that during the whole of a man's waking life he is wearing out his physical body and that life in the daytime has fundamentally a destructive effect—as indeed we realise when we get tired—it will be evident that since in the morning we are able to go on consciously with our work, the destruction can be made good during the night. So, whereas in our waking state we are working all the time destructively on our bodily organism, at night, on the contrary, we are engaged in repairing the damage by replenishing our bodily vigour. We are then carrying out an activity beyond the range of consciousness. Directly we revert to any degree of consciousness, there arise those strange dream pictures that are so closely related to life in the body. We need remember only how bodily ailments may sometimes find expression in these pictures, showing where consciousness is involved. Since after death the physical body disappears, no effects of exhaustion have to be made good. Hence the forces expended during sleep on the physical body withdraw again into the soul after death, enabling it, free of the physical body, to use them for itself; and between death and a new birth they become the soul's consciousness. In proportion as the soul is freed from the physical and etheric bodies, with everything belonging to them, so does another consciousness arise, one that is not engaged in work on the physical body and for that reason unable to be aware of itself.

All this will seem to be nothing but a set of assertions. However, apart from the fact that reference can be made to the methods given in my book, Knowledge of the Higher Worlds, life itself can draw attention to those things. For how does a man's life take its course in face of death? If we follow up the way in which thoughts and memories arise in us, what has been said becomes evident to the soul. We can precisely and repeatedly recall our past experiences as memory-images, but we remember very little of all we have gone through in the way of feelings and sensations, and in the exertion of our will. Who would deny that, when some painful experience comes back to him in memory, he recalls the pain in his thought but without feeling over again the pain itself? Many other things there are, too, experienced in our heart and soul, which are not felt again. But they live on withal us in a different form, to the point of making themselves felt in our whole disposition, so that afterwards this is made up of everything we have experienced in pain and sorrow, or in times of joy and pleasure. Who can fail to realise, on looking with inquiring sympathy at someone of an obviously despondent, melancholic disposition, that the experiences he has gone through in heart and soul have been drawn down deep within him, there to remain, though perceptible to an observer in this particularly melancholy guise? It is the same with the sanguine man and his joyful response to life. It can be said that our experiences are divided between those we can always recall and those that remain below, working on us and ultimately appearing in the very life of our body. If we look thoroughly at this, we become convinced that our thoughts and concepts are so weak, so lacking in colour and life, because the emotional shading, the particular mood of soul pervading the thought as it was experienced at the time, has been suppressed and is working below the level of consciousness, leaving thought empty of feeling.

When the whole course of life is observed impartially, however, this relationship between feeling and will on the one hand, and thought on the other, can be seen to change. Thus at a certain time of life a man will repress the feelings and impulses connected with his thoughts, whereas at another time he will keep them more together. Youth is the period when we are most apt to yield over our joys, sorrows and impulses of will to our subconscious. It is then that we are most easily inclined to send down to the subconscious the experiences of heart and soul that will eventually work into our whole disposition—even into our bodily condition. But as the body becomes more firmly knit, the elements of our consciousness come to be less and less like what they were, with the result that we are less and less able to work on the subconscious, and our feelings and will impulses come by degrees to remain bound up with our thoughts. When with genuine self-knowledge a man observes life, he feels, as he grows older, how in youth a person sends down most of his moods of feeling, so that they live on in the make-up of his body. But the more rigid and dried-up a man becomes later on, the more do these experiences and the impulses of will not exhausted in action, remain united with his thoughts. Thus we see how, in this respect, the inner life is enriched as we approach death. We see how the bodily organism gradually dries up and becomes less capable of absorbing the soul's experiences, whereas, if we continue to learn from life as though from a school, the soul will become more alive, more mature. For this reason all that in youth is connected with ideals, ideas, even with mere concepts, flashes through our unconscious being, lays hold of our blood, our nervous system, and settles there, in order later to emerge as our capability for living—or the reverse. Later on we feel that our blood will no longer be, is no longer in harmony with our enthusiasm for ideals. Because of our wrong methods of education this feeling is now to some extent repressed, but in future it will belong increasingly to the best things and blessings of life. For when we are approaching the winter of life, the feelings and impulses that in earlier years we gave over to our bodily organism will add to our strength of soul, no longer being able to pass down into the body on account of the resistance they meet with there.

Bearing this in mind, we shall say: If we look into our own inner being we find how, on approaching the gate of death, it becomes ever richer. The contention that a man weakens with age is not valid; it originates in materialistic habits of thought and prejudices. In proportion to the decline of the body, the inner life of the soul gains vigour, becoming inwardly more childlike; we see a kind of approach towards those forces which are at their highest tension when we are nearing the gate of death. This is particularly true of people who are enabled, through the training indicated in the book, Knowledge of the Higher Worlds to have some perceptive experience independently of their bodily organs. It is also described there, how, by means of meditation and concentration, we can so school ourselves that experience and knowledge of the spiritual world can become absolute reality for our souls. At the same time the soul knows with certainty that this experience is acquired with no help from eye or ear, or from any bodily organ, for it is then outside the body. In a case of this kind, feeling and will-impulses must permeate livingly a person's meditation and concentration: thought alone is not enough. In Knowledge of the Higher Worlds there is an exact account of how the person must not lose touch with his feelings and perceptions—with everything, indeed, that in youth withdraws into the depths of the soul. He has to meditate and concentrate with his mind, but his thoughts must be fired by his heart and soul, and infused with life by those impulses of will that are then not transformed into action but into thinking.

When a human being has developed the genuine clairvoyance appropriate for our times, he wins through to what otherwise would be experienced only after passing through the gate of death. All such clairvoyance, however, is experienced by him in such a way that he is aware of the following distinction: ‘I can certainly experience’, he says to himself, ‘a spiritual world, a world where men live between death and rebirth, for I live with them there. But all my knowledge of it I gain by simply perceiving it. The difference between me and these souls is that I perceive all this without being able to work and create in it.’ The soul is aware of this distinction, but it derives only from being closely linked to the physical body, for directly the clairvoyant consciousness is freed from it and from the etheric body, there follows a release of those forces which, while they are held in tension by the physical body, permit the seer to gain perceptive knowledge of the spiritual world beyond the gate of death. It is these forces which are pre-eminent in a man during the time between his death and rebirth. What the clairvoyant experiences is like the force of a drawn bow. He can use it only for perception, but directly the tension is released the bow springs at once into movement. So it is for the clairvoyant when he goes over from life in the physical body to life in the world after death. And he can say to himself: ‘I am able only to perceive the spiritual world, only to see what is going on there. But after death, the body having fallen away, forces are set free, just as they are with a bow when the arrow is shot off.’ These forces are available in a man's soul for other activities after his death until he is reborn. This is the period when he can look on his past earthly existence, and can then work upon his next incarnation, when he will wake to a new life on Earth. It is not only by looking at the matter in this light that we can furnish evidence for it. We can obtain satisfying evidence—though not a mathematical proof—by turning to nature. In the growth of a plant we see how leaf after leaf develops until the blossoms unfold: how these blossoms are fructified and seed develops from the fruit. Then the plant withers away. But does its force then come to an end? No, on the contrary: at this very time the forces which call the whole plant back to a new cycle of life are at their strongest. They are now inwardly concentrated at one point, as it were, and they appear again in a new form when the seed is sown in the earth. We then watch the whole plant being renewed; the beginning and the end of its life are thus united. In like manner the highly concentrated forces in ourselves when we pass through death are united with those seen at the outset of life on Earth. We see how the human being as an infant sleeps through a sort of twilight condition into life. This condition gives free play for work on the body, and this is carried out in such a way that the bodily organs harmonise with the life of the soul. It would be a sad pity if anyone wanted to maintain that the ego is not active until self-consciousness begins. No, its activity begins long before that, and afterwards the human being has only to turn its forces to the building up of consciousness and memory. Before this the forces of the ego are already working on moulding the bodily organs so that the still soft and pliable body shall be skilfully made ready to harbour the coming consciousness. Hence we see how the ego is engaged in its greatest work of art at the outset of a person's life, and this shows that he is already in possession of active forces when his memory begins to develop. if we observe the human being quite impartially, we see how he comes to relate himself to the world in his own individual way, and how his undefined features and faculties gradually take form. Finally we see how the force which had previously passed through the gate of death in a concentrated form, in readiness for building up a new body, is now actually at work on it, so that the human being can enter his new body bearing with him the fruits of his former life. In this way the ego proceeds from one earthly life to the next. By actively enhancing the life of a soul, it proves to be endowed with those potent forces which—after continuing to increase until death—maintain their activity during the time between death and rebirth in such a way that the ego can imprint them on another earthly incarnation.

Hence we see how we ourselves are responsible for the causes which take effect in our next life, since this life is the continuation of the one before; and we see how each link in the chain joins on to the next. We have only to compare this with Buddhism to see how modern Spiritual Science, speaking from an evolutionary standpoint based throughout on clairvoyance, can accept the good thought in Buddhism while rejecting the other. Buddhism is the last fruit of a primeval culture dating from the times when primitive clairvoyance was a natural gift, directly experienced, and when therefore the idea of repeated earthly lives held good. At the same time Buddhism maintains that everything working over from a man's former life, and gathered together as the ego of his present life, is merely a semblance. Fundamentally, Buddhism knows nothing of the true ego, but only of the ego we have spoken of as an image. Hence it says that our ego passes away like our body, like our sheaths, and our former experiences. All that the Buddhist recognises as playing over from the preceding life into the present one, are deeds—Karma. According to Buddhism, these deeds combine into a pattern which, in each new life, evokes the semblance of an ego, so that no real ego, but only a man's Karma works on from one life into the next. Hence the Buddhist says: the ego is mere semblance, Maya, like everything else, and I must endeavour to overcome it. The deeds of my former life, now forming a pattern as though round a central point, seem to be an ego, but that is an illusion. Therefore I have to wipe out all that Karma has thus brought into my life.

Spiritual Science says the opposite: that the ego is the concentrating deed of Karma. Whereas all other deeds are temporal and will be compensated in time, this karmic deed, that makes a man conscious of his ego, is not temporal. With ego-consciousness therefore, something enters in that we can describe only by saying—as we have done today—that its existence is rising continually to a higher level; and that when we re-enter earthly life we form ourselves again round the ego. The Buddhist, on the other hand, obliterates the ego and recognises nothing but Karma, which, working on from one life to the next, creates a fresh illusion of an ego. Adherents of modern Spiritual Science, however, for whom Karma and ego do not coincide, say: ‘My ego passes on from its present stage on Earth, with the enhancement thereby gained, to re-appear later in a further incarnation, when it will unite itself with the deeds then performed. When as an ego I have done something, it remains with this central point, and goes on with all my deeds from incarnation to incarnation.’

That is the radical difference between Spiritual Science and Buddhism. Although they both speak in a similar way of Reincarnation and Karma, it is the ego itself that progresses from one life to another and shapes our inner life of soul. When we contemplate this progress, we find it leading us back in each existence to some point in early childhood before which we recall nothing, relying on what is told us by parents and others. Then, at a certain point of time, memory awakes, but we cannot say that the forces of memory were not previously in us; they were definitely there, at work on our inner life. Evolution itself depends upon our memory arising at a certain point in our early life. Moreover, Spiritual Science shows that, just as memory awakes at a certain time in childhood, so it is possible for a man, by raising his consciousness to ever higher levels, to remember not only his immediate past but also his previous lives on earth. This is a fact of evolution which is at present evident only to clairvoyant consciousness. It is in full agreement, however, with what can be learned by other means. When a justifiable objection to reincarnation is said to be that people cannot recall their previous lives the answer is: Just as our ordinary memory is a reality, although we cannot recall our past experiences from the time before that faculty developed, so a memory that can look back to earlier lives must also be first developed. In this way memory becomes an ideal of evolution, and we have to admit: As a child I had to develop a memory for my present life: I must now go on to develop memory for previous earthly lives. Thus we arrive at the comforting fact—though narrow-minded people will certainly not be in sympathy with it—that many ideals lie ahead still for mankind, besides those derived from ordinary consciousness; and these others include a striving for the power to recall past earthly lives. But I repeat that this is not a matter on which philistine souls can be in accord with Spiritual Science. Only recently I was reading a statement by a man held in great esteem today, in which he advanced the opinion that it would never be possible for human reason to solve all the riddles of the universe—nor would this be desirable, for if all the riddles were solved there would be nothing left for us to do on Earth. Evidently he cannot conceive of evolution progressing beyond its present stage, bringing men new faculties for new tasks, nor can he imagine that what is for people's ‘good’ changes with the enhancement of their consciousness.

One of the blessings flowing from Spiritual Science is that it opens out a perspective which does not lead off into vagueness. We have no occasion to complain of looking ahead into empty time. All eternity lies before us. We can see how each link of the whole chain joins on to the next link and we can say to ourselves: You bear in you now the forces acquired in this present life, and with them you are building a future existence when there will be opportunity for you to develop these forces further. Thus, little by little, we experience how real the thought of eternity becomes, how it spreads out before the soul as a vast, everlasting perspective. One of our gains from Spiritual Science is that we no longer ask the abstract question: What is eternity?—nor do we receive a merely abstract answer, for by truly studying human life we see how eternity arises, how each link in the whole is formed, and all abstract considerations are thus driven from the field. The reality then shows—as reality always must—how everything is built up out of single parts, member by member. Thus Spiritual Science points to the nature of man's soul as throwing light upon the nature of eternity and on the way these two are connected.

If now we turn to the second objection, to which perhaps even a personality such as Lessing gave credence, someone might say : ‘On these lines my destiny becomes clear to me, but if I am to suppose that I prepared it for myself through my Karma, this makes it even more painful, for then I would have to blame my shortcomings on myself.’ In the light of Spiritual Science, however, this idea can be transformed. Before our last birth we chose to have the misfortune that now befalls us: by seeking it, and especially by overcoming it, we acquire full capability of which, previously, we could not realise our need. In our disembodied state we became convinced of our need, and only by steering our way to this misfortune do we fit ourselves for rising to a higher level. Thus, through karmic law, the school of life proves to be the bringer of good fortune; and misfortune is seen to add strength to the ideal of eternity.

There is no time now to show how our earthly bodies are continually changing their original form; and how, when the Earth comes to an end, it will be succeeded by another kind of existence. Hence our present lives on Earth do not cover the whole of human existence; they too have had a beginning. Whatever a human being has acquired during repeated lives on Earth will avail him for other forms of existence. In studying the earthly it is enough to consider the essence of the human soul. That is how we can learn that eternity does not begin only after death, for it can be discerned already in the nature of the embodied soul.

Spiritual Science, therefore, raises from the past to a new and higher level something that was foreseen to a certain extent and even investigated by searchers after the spirit in days gone by. Hegel was right in saying, that eternity could not begin for the soul only at death, but must be inherent there during its earthly existence. Here is something on which Spiritual Science will throw more and more light, with a clarity so permeated by feelings and impulses of will that it becomes the very elixir of life—something that has always been thought of as an essential part of the being, the nature, of the human soul. So I can now quote an old saying which, though not summing-up the content of this lecture, is in harmony with its character. It was uttered in the third century after Christ by the great mystic and philosopher, Plotinus, who meditated deeply upon the nature of time and eternity—upon everything, in fact, that forms the basis of what we have been considering today:

Eternity is not bound up with the soul and spirit of man's essential being as a merely fortuitous characteristic, but is a necessity for the nature of the human soul. Neither is Eternity a fortuitous characteristic of the spirit.

Eternity belongs to the spirit, is in the spirit, comes forth from the spirit.

Eternity lives through the spirit.

In the next months as already in the past winters, I would like to hold talks about objects and interests of spiritual science, the science of the supersensible worlds.

If one speaks of a science of the supersensible worlds today, one still meets many a prejudice and opposition. This is comprehensible. Since someone who knows the cultural development of the last years or decades has to admit without further ado that the cultural development was reluctant generally to accept researches about the supersensible world in any sense. If one even demanded as it happened in the past winter talks and will also further happen that these talks have a scientific character in all their appearance and make a claim to place themselves beside other scientific considerations, then these prejudices are even bigger. Indeed, one has to admit that recently within our cultural life the need has grown up to turn the sight to the supersensible worlds to receive sense and understanding of the whole human life from this knowledge of the supersensible world to gain power in our so complex life for the demands of the outer world. A growing longing for knowledge of the supersensible worlds exists.

However, on the other side one cannot deny that the present human being demands scientific justification of spiritual science in certain respect. One has to admit now that today many circles completely deny any scientific nature to a consideration of the supersensible worlds from the point of view of the present science. One denies this while one takes two quite different points of view that find, but many representatives just in our time with those who have the longing to grow out from the old traditions that are there to satisfy the supersensible needs.

What the outer science can supply today what in particular the so admirable natural sciences can deliver is enough to give the human being an satisfying view of the world someday which must satisfy any longing for a world view. Only that worldview could satisfy, one says, which simply summarises the scientific or other as scientifically approved results to get an idea about the solution of the world riddles from its totality. Others say against it, indeed, we can form a worldview on basis of modern sciences; but this view is not enough for the indelible need for knowledge of the human soul. Everything that we can know about the world with only outer science proves to us almost that this outer science is not suitable to answer the big questions of existence anyhow. Everywhere a precise knowledge of the outer science points to the undergrounds of that what this science supplies.—Within these circles there are those people again who admit, indeed, that everywhere in the world are references to something supersensible, and that the outer science is never enough to receive a satisfying idea of the solution of the world riddles that still say that the human cognitive faculties and knowledge are limited. He would exceed the limits of his efficiency and knowledge in scientific respect if he wanted to penetrate into this supersensible world.

Thus, we realise that just from that spiritual life with which spiritual science wants to be in harmony prejudices and opposition arise against it. Hence, it is necessary at the beginning of this course of talks to discuss programmatically whether the human being can get a relation to the supersensible worlds. More careful spirits have always admitted—also in the recent heyday of natural sciences—that the human being must have such a relation to the supersensible worlds, and that he is just unable maybe to penetrate with his cognitive forces into these supersensible worlds.

If one can often hear about such discussions, as they should be done here in this talks, that this is basically an unauthorised fantasy on the supersensible worlds, and if one has to find such a thing comprehensible, one can point on the other side to point also to the fact that at least more careful thinkers and researchers have always admitted that it is no arbitrariness of the human soul to conclude from that what the outer science can give that everything points in our surroundings to supersensible worlds at last.

Let me point to an older and to a recent fact out of a range of many facts and initiate that what I want to bring to mind then in the other talks by the spiritual-scientific research itself. Let me initiate with the fact that the science of the last decades did not induce those who know it really to deny the supersensible worlds. On the other hand, one can also already say for the expert of the scientific point of view that our outer science is so far that it feels already constrained to admit a certain knowledge of supersensible worlds at least in a limited measure. This strict science also disproves most seriously, what many popular worldviews present as a materialistic or monistic worldview.

I would like to point to an older fact at first: to a researcher who stood within the glamorous activity of modern natural sciences who performed a lot in a narrowly defined specialty, but kept open his look to everything that outer science cannot offer. This researcher once said the following unforgettable words: the view is admirable which natural sciences can give in their theories of that what underlies the material effects and the natural forces as diverse nuclear effects. However, this researcher was of the opinion that it would be a fatal illusion to believe that something is included in the scientific views and theories that would exclude a metaphysical need, that is a need for a knowledge of the supersensible world or at least of the assumption of a supersensible world. It would be a fatal mistake if one believed that everything that natural sciences can give is only something that corresponds to the outer view. One would always have to found it on something exceeding this view.

The naturalist concerned pronounced this in a time, when the less strict thinkers, so the daredevils of modern natural sciences celebrated those thoughts which wanted to exclude any idea of the human being of a supersensible world.—I do not tell the saying of a naturalist which was possibly sickened by any mysticism, which would have been burdened philosophically, or which would have been done possibly in a mystic meeting. The statement that I have just mentioned was done in 1867 in the dawn of the materialistic natural science of the last century in the Vienna Academy of Sciences by the famous clinician and pioneer of medical science Karl von Rokitansky (1804–1878). Someone admits that who knows the entire being and the essence of natural sciences.

I would like to mention another fact. Who could believe that today a science owes its greatness more to outer experimental researches of those thinkers who founded it upon these outer researches and experiments than physics? On one side, what could one bring in more than the physical achievements of our time as typical for the scientific thinking of the present? On the other side, one brings the achievements forward repeatedly if one wants to refute the possibility that the human being might have to deal with matters of the supersensible world.

However, if now a physicist came and said, you have to say goodbye to the physical thinking of the present, or at least many facts and research results are there that you have to say goodbye to an idea with which so many hopes were connected just for the purely scientific approach?—For example, to the materially imagined ether which one regarded, so to speak, as a kind of magic cure for all outer natural phenomena long time. Since phenomena like light, heat, electricity and so on should be explained only by the fact that one assumed the so-called ether as the subtlest material hypothetically behind that what our senses perceive. While one imagined this ether materially, one did not hesitate to attribute to it also that in some processes of that material ether, which fulfils us, the spiritual, the supersensible experiences of the human being would have their origin. For everything that one attributes, otherwise, to a spiritual, supersensible world this material ether became a kind of magician and explainer. What happens, if now a physicist came and said that certain things within the physical research make us assume such a connection of the natural forces, which allows us imagining that without the requirement of a material ether the rays of light would pass through the space? What happens, if this physicist said, one must already suppose from certain facts today that the light waves travel through the space without a material medium?

If this physicist said also, indeed, this violates any kind of mechanical explanation of nature, but if the physical facts require this, just the mechanical view of nature is hopelessly lost. If then he still went on and said, what has to replace the ether? Then something would have to replace it to which above all one has to attribute no material quality. Now something strange has to replace this ether.—I must stress repeatedly: for the purposes of modern physics, something strange has to replace the ether, namely purely mathematical equations. These are thoughts, structures of thought. What continues as structures of thought, this should continue not through matter, but—as one says academically—through the vacuum, through the empty space. This one considers as necessary with respect to the light that is not bound to any material substance.

If some time ago anybody had said this, one would have probably assumed that this man is a tricky representative of a spiritual worldview, because only such can state that the light flows without material medium through the space. But no mystic said this, one did not say this in a meeting where one can dish up all possible things to the people, but the physicist of the Berlin University said this, Max Planck (1858–1947), in September, 1910 on the 82-nd Conference of German Naturalists in Königsberg (now: Kaliningrad). This fact is still much more important than the just mentioned one, namely because we only have not heard here what we have heard from the clinician Karl von Rokitansky: the fact that nature herself points everywhere to a supersensible world,—but that in the thoughts of the physicist which he really writes with mathematical signs on the paper something is included that is not bound to any material medium. That is we have not only admitted that pure thoughts, spiritual effects, are somewhere in the unknown, but that physics must recognise this in its real knowledge what is not only material what carries something supersensible through space.

With it, we see science at that gate where it must not be content to say only, there may be a supersensible world, but the human knowledge cannot penetrate into it.—But now it concedes that the thoughts which science makes not only refer to the outside world which consists only in the materials and is impregnated by matter, but that the knowledge which one has refers to something spiritual, to something supersensible! With it, the evidence is supplied from the conditions of our time for someone who knows the development of science really that today it is out-of-date to say that supersensible knowledge cannot claim any validity within science. Then perhaps one may consider it not so fantastic if the spiritual scientist says that with such concessions only science just gains a path which must lead on and on, because the things develop for the moment from their beginnings to the recognition of the reality of that which the human being can survey with his cognitive forces regarding a supersensible world.

If the human being wants to penetrate into the supersensible world, he turns to the contemplation of thoughts of the world at first. We do not apply the word philosophy; the essentials are a contemplation of thoughts. Since this becomes soon clear to a human being that he cannot come to the depths of the things by the mere outer view—it may be scientific ever so much.

There the human being turns to the contemplation of thoughts and tries to get an idea of the solution of the world riddles within the thoughts. Someone who wants to draw a picture of the world out of material facts only depends also on the way to make a view of that which underlies the world. From thoughts, everything also originated what, for example, Ernst Haeckel contributes to a worldview, although he rests on the outer scientific knowledge. Whether somebody rests more or less on the outer science or whether science comes to an idealistic or spiritual worldview, in both cases one has to apply thoughts. The thought has a peculiarity if we dedicate ourselves to it. Which characteristic this thought has, this proves the fact that many people regard the research of thoughts, the philosophical reflection as unpleasant or at least as uncomfortable.

Since the Greek period, there have always been philosophers. Not only students in the sweat of their brows delve into that by necessity which the reflection about the world riddles wants to supply, but also many people who want to get clarification about life out of the whole warmth of their hearts, who maybe want to receive peace and harmony in their souls regard that as rather dry and sober and also as abstract and uncomfortable what is brought forward about the solution of the world riddles in theoretical books, in philosophy. Someone who is full of life who stands as a practitioner in life and feels attracted by that what life gives directly feels easily repelled from the sobriety and abstractness of many writings and talks that want to penetrate by work of thought into supersensible worlds.

Nevertheless, this is something that one probably gets to know with many people. However, as brilliant the philosophical systems about the world riddles appear to those who can pursue them by the preconditions of their lives, as unenjoyable such ways are for practical persons standing in life. Still those people who created such systems of thoughts from a serious thirst for knowledge felt in such a way that they said, with this work of thought a picture is given of the supersensible facts, actually, underlying the world.—Somebody who is able to admire what these thinkers have done knows how much ingenuity and dedication was applied to penetrate on this way of thinking into the world. Then he also knows which deep satisfaction one can feel about the solution of the world riddles in the philosophical systems of great thinkers. They are by no means only abstract, but the thinkers put their hearts and souls in their systems even if those seem abstract.

If it concerns such philosophical systems, one cannot deny one thing which, but someone does not feel who is a born philosopher or can experience his joy and satisfaction in abstract thoughts who is attached to such a system of thoughts with warmth, with his humanity and with the deepest need for an intrusion in the supersensible world. What such a thinker feels, I would like to bring to mind at the example of a thinker who experienced a tragic destiny then who dealt with the big questions of the conceptual solution of the world riddles in the time when he spoke about that perceptively and insistently of which the talk should be now. I mean Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900). We can completely disregard what he became later.

You find that what I want to characterise here in the early years of his work where he worked out lectures at the University of Basel that one published in his posthumous works. These were lectures on the Greek thinkers under the title Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks, that is, before Socrates where the great thinkers interest us like Thales, Heraclitus, and Parmenides particularly. We are interested in them because you can realise how from a lively thinking, from the Greek worldview and culture, which stood really in life and were full of immediate life, the system of ideas of Parmenides emerged. It intended to penetrate into the supersensible worlds, but ascended from the old full-juicy Greek world to the abstract thoughts of “primordial being” and “primordial non-existence.” A human being gets goose pimples who stands, otherwise, in the practical life if anybody grasps such abstract concepts like “primordial being” and “primordial non-existence” to reach the supersensible worlds. Even somebody who is used dealing philosophically with the questions of existence says to himself: it makes my blood freeze in my veins if I notice that a human being ascends to such thoughts from which all life seems squeezed like the juice from a lemon which appear too sober, dry and abstract to the other human beings. This chapter was interesting to Nietzsche because it shows how a thinker rises directly from life to an abstract world of thoughts. Nietzsche felt the thoughts of Parmenides so colorless, soulless, so completely bared of that what the heart longs for. Nevertheless, someone who deals with spiritual science understands Parmenides when he speaks of it so that it makes your blood freeze in your veins due to these dried up abstractions and if he shows that even in the most marvellous edifice of ideas something is contained that appears sober to us. There we get the feeling: how do you want to grasp the depths of this world, which faces us so lively, with the spider's web of your thoughts? However, in such a sensation is just the starting point of that what must exist in the human soul if one should attain the relation to the supersensible worlds.

Even the greatest philosopher—who spins out systems of thoughts with certain ease who can climb up to abstractions and says to himself, in these abstractions you have the truth of the things—gets only around to painting nothing but a picture with such thoughts even if they are ever so thin like cobwebs and ever so abstract. However, you must say to yourself, such a picture can never completely exhaust the wealth of that what must form the basis of the world. Somebody who puts such a worldview in thoughts as a thinker may feel satisfied in a way, but somebody who stands in the full life has a right to say to himself, such an edifice of ideas can never exhaust the full life and with it also never the depths of life.

Someone who wants to go the path to the spiritual worlds has to strengthen this edifice of ideas in a particular way and he has to pursue it until its ultimate consequences. You find all other details in my book How Does One Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds?

Here it can concern only of giving the most important points of view about the way that the human being must take if he wants to attain real knowledge of the supersensible world. One must say that everybody can feel if he gets involved with mere edifices of ideas that he gets cold spiritually that he feels in such a way as if he had not approached the world, but would have gone away from the full-juicy existence as if he had really expressed the juice from existence like from a lemon.

However, one has to feel something else, namely enthusiasm for the crystalline clearness, the wonderful architecture of a system of ideas, so that one can say in a way: what is apparently so abstract is still the greatest achievements of thinking which the human being can experience, and which show how the conceptual creating prevails in the universe.—Thus, one has to bring enthusiasm into the worlds that can appear so empty because of their abstractions. Indeed, a thinker who only thinks and cannot feel enthusiasm for the thoughts weaving through the universe can never penetrate into the supersensible world.

This is only one side of that what one must feel if one wants to set up relations with the supersensible. The other side is an experience of the spiritual researchers: namely the fact that you have ascended to thoughts, but that you feel, as if you has lost the firm ground under your feet and you hover over an abyss. As long as you have pleasure in the thoughts and you feel firm in the thoughts, you cannot ascend to the supersensible world. Not before you feel something in pursuing the thoughts that has a double comparison: as if we lose the ground under our feet and have to hover in the emptiness, or as if we see the extending blue vault of heaven, and we recognise that the blue vault of heaven is no blue vault of heaven, but you yourself whose faculty of sight does not reach so far surround the universe with a blue vault of heaven. In truth, it extends into the infinite, and you have to ask, where is a firm point? Not before you feel that with an inner uncertainty with which you nail up your glance and cause the inkling of an infinite at the same time and then imagine this sensation increased, you can feel something of that which someone has to feel strongly who creates thoughts about the world connections but wants to penetrate through them into the living feeling of spiritual facts and beings. Then he feels, as if he nails up the way with his thoughts where the spiritual beings live where the spirit is working.

What I have told I have not fantastically thought up, I have also not taken it from thoughts. It is an experience of all those who have searched the way into the supersensible worlds. This can become an experience, as I have described it in the book How Does One Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds

What I characterised that way as a sensation increases in a way and increases with that who goes the path of knowledge up to a feeling like fear, a feeling of uncertainty. One could characterise it as a state where one does not know where one is. However, this feeling must not develop completely, it must remain in the depths of the soul; and then only we can penetrate into the supersensible world. This feeling must be illuminated straight away by that what you can compare with the feeling of courage, of energy, of willpower. The human being has to become aware of something in himself during the slow, patient progress if he gets on it repeatedly: you do this not only, or you decide not only to do that for which you have an outer cause, but you put the ideal to yourself to do this or that from your own thoughts and not to lose the thought of it and the undeterred intention for it.

If we do this repeatedly in life and develop it systematically, it gives us an idea that we can receive from no outer world and no outer view, which we can get out of the depths of the soul. If we can develop this feeling when we rise to pure thinking which is free of sensuousness and not taken from the outer world, then something forms in us that you must experience that you can also experience, but as you experience a physical or chemical experiment. In the self-experiment of the soul, you experience that you become free from any view and knowledge that you can attain only with the tools of the physical body. We become free from the physical body and penetrate into that world about which we can spin, otherwise, only webs of thoughts. Then that not really exists which many people know solely about such coming-out-of-oneself, which they know from an experiment destroying the human consciousness, but it means becoming free from the sensory existence and the sensory view. The human being penetrates with his own being about which he knows that it has an independent reality compared with the physical body, into that world which is a supersensible one because he experiences it as a supersensible one. If anybody said, you can imagine this, one could give him only by logical reasons a view of what one experiences in the supersensible worlds, and what the human being is as a supersensible being. However, somebody who penetrates into the supersensible world knows that he comes on this way to a reality of supersensible kind whose reality he recognises and about which he knows that it is nothing fantastic, as he knows this about the outer sensory world.

What I have described of the supersensible world that way is only one direction to which we must go if we want to gain a relation to the supersensible worlds. There is something else. I have described the way through the thoughts what we call meditation spiritual-scientifically, delving into inner experiences of thoughts. This is one direction. The other direction is that by which the human being can experience something that differs from all experiences of thought. All experiences of thought are in such a way that they have something abstract and impersonal. One must feel this to bring such feelings, as I have just characterised, into the mental deepening, into meditation, and you discover that if you ascend with thinking to the spiritual being you arrive at the supersensible world. Nevertheless, the question must arise, can the human being come only on the way of thinking into reality?

In order to answer this question, I must point to another side of the relation of the human being to the supersensible worlds. As well as the human being wanders in the universe, in spatial spheres on the just characterised way he can also penetrate into his own being. But then he comes to something that leads him away also from the thought as the just characterised way has led him to the thought, because the materialistic science of thought like that of which I will at once speak leads away from the thought. Materialistic science of thought shows that the thinking is bound to the cerebral process that one finds that thinking everywhere in the world which is bound to the brain.

But when the human being returns from thinking to himself and gets clear about himself and realises how the thoughts and his whole intellectual life rise like foam bubbles from the depths of the sea of his soul life, then there is something to experience where from the thought arises. Indeed, there a deep dissatisfaction comes into being if the thoughts should be only foam bubbles on the surface of the surging sea of the soul life. Since if they were this, the world would be pointless. This is an emotional experience for that who understands the meaning of life. But now I want to characterise how one gets to something by another direction that is relieved from the abstract thought which refers us to ourselves, and which is free from thought which lacks what I have just described as the abstract and sober of rational knowledge.

The other direction gives us the mystic experience. The human being who submerges in his emotional world and strives for true self-knowledge who is able to turn the eyes away from that what surrounds us in the world comes to where the great mystics have come. If we look at these mystics, we hear from them that they experience the highest in their inside which they imagine as divine that prevails in the universe. Inside of the human being a divine spark also lives. You find this, for example, repeatedly in such mystic discussions, with Master Eckhart, Johannes Tauler and many others. This is an immediate mystic experience.

However, this mystic experience always shows something typical that the opponents always put forward. For this mystic experience has something individual. A mystic who can experience the divine spark in his soul who informs us about the world and its innermost being, and just that who experiences this strongest says: it is an inner experience of such deepness that human concepts, as one applies them, otherwise, to the things and facts, cannot transmit the experience.—The deepest mystics agree just with the fact that they can bring this experience by no means in thoughts or even in words if they feel one with that what pulsates through the world as something divine. The mystics say that you can experience it, but you cannot bring it in thoughts. Hence, one can transmit it not in the common mental pictures to others, but every human being can experience the world riddle only personally.

Usually you believe to have thoughts. However, that means again that you do not attain the divine world contents. You can read that with all mystics who described it. The soul meets inner enemies there. Then the human being can no longer say, if I feel this or that ascending, feel this or that passion, experience this or that and so on, then I am master of that.—No! Then the human being feels, as if inner enemies seized him and he cannot become master of them at first, but he must become master of them, if he wants to break down what separates him from his innermost being and with it from the inner being of the world. There one starts feeling that in our inside that comes up what is more than that what we know by thought what pours forth about our self. Then it becomes necessary to search forces with which we overcome it. There certain feelings must penetrate the mystic again. Since when the mystics only stressed: you only need to penetrate in yourself, then you experience God, then that would be again a complacent contemplation, as the complacent life in thoughts and ideas.

If one wants to come to reality, one has to experience a particular way of feeling which one can define in the following way. Some of you have certainly found it confirmed in the everyday life. We all know pains and sufferings. We start from a suffering at first that you can get to know most simply. Everybody knows how agonising physical pains and sufferings can be. But he also knows that maybe if pain increases more and more it reaches a strength where it can change over to a certain stage of bliss, even of desire. This was used where one tormented people whom one wanted to give an understanding of the sources of existence, so that the pain became so strong that it changed over to the opposite. There are such stages in which one feels something in pain that appears like a kind of desire and bliss. Someone has to feel something similar, but not identical, who immerses himself in his inside where he overcomes everything with his whole power that is hostile to him. You get an image of it if you read the mystics who describe how they exerted themselves to fight against all temptations of passion, of egoism. Besides, egoism, passion grow bigger and bigger. It is a low level of contemplation if one does not feel passion and egoism growing as our enemies.

If you have then the power to overcome these inner conditions of temptation, then you penetrate into the depths of the soul where the sub-sensory soul-life begins what exceeds the mere sensory life. However, you must not understand the described things in the trivial sense. There one can easily say, these are subjective experiences by which one attains no true knowledge.—But if they are understood in such a way as I have meant them here, one knows: if you descend in your inside and must call the strong forces of overcoming, you get to something that does not apply only to the one or the other human being, but that everybody can experience with the entry into the supersensible world.

If the human beings have come once by such a way to the supersensible world, they know for sure that the human being has a relation to a world that reaches beyond the senses, the usual mind, and reason. They also recognise that the human being is rooted with his whole existence in a world that does not come into being and does not pass like the sensory world, but is everlasting.

Today it mattered to describe the relation of the human being to the supersensible world. In the next talk, I speak about the topic how the human being can attain a scientific knowledge of the most important problems, of the longings and of everything that is close to us in life, of death and immortality. In the course of the talks we shall realise that such ways, such relations of the human being to the supersensible worlds, as I have described them today, are scientific in the same sense as a physical, chemical, or biological science are scientific. Since if one alludes to the impossibility of such knowledge of the supersensible, one argues:

If we examine the forces that the human being has for science, for cognition, we realise that his cognitive faculties are limited that he is unable to penetrate in a supersensible world.—However, no serious spiritual scientist who states there that the supersensible worlds are recognisable in the same sense as the sensory world will say that the usual cognitive forces—if one speaks of the inaccessibility of the supersensible world—can lead into this world. What the philosophers and naturalists understand by the cognitive forces if they say, the cognitive forces of the human being must keep away from a world that could lead only to speculative fiction,—about those forces the true spiritual researcher must also say, these forces cannot lead into the supersensible world! If you ever so strictly examine philosophically what the human being is capable of with his usual cognitive forces, even so, one will always have to answer: these cognitive forces are inappropriate to lead into the supersensible world.

If you consider the whole course of the today's discussion, you realise that I have nowhere claimed that the human being can penetrate with the usual cognitive forces into supersensible worlds. However, I have said that the human being must only go through a way from the point of view where he stands to another point of view. He has to ascend from those cognitive forces of which one rightly says that they cannot lead into a supersensible world, to other forces that are suitable to reach the supersensible world.

As little it is right to state that a blind person sees colours, it is right that a blind person if one operates him can use his eyes and can see the world of colours.

As much of Kantianism is right that the usual cognitive forces are insufficient for the knowledge of something supersensible, it is as true that the human being can get cognitive forces with which he is able to penetrate into the worlds that seem so distant. Spiritual science does not start from the use of the usual cognitive forces, but from those, which one has to attain first. This means at the same time that the human being grows into the supersensible world.

On one side, the human being can find the way into cosmic distances and depths of space and get connection with the supersensible worlds. On the other side, he can also come by that what is deeper than the usual consciousness, by his own spiritual, breaking through the usual layers of the soul life, in that which is supersensible or sub-sensory which coincides with that which he finds outside.

Since that which the human being finds in such a way is related intimately with him. If the human being finds the way by meditation to cosmic distances and distant worlds and takes such sensations and emotions along as I have described them, he meets, indeed, strange spiritual worlds, but he meets those to which he is related and in which he has his origin.

If he finds the way through himself, he enters into spiritual worlds that one cannot grasp with the usual consciousness that yet exist really as his spiritual subsoil. There he finds himself again. If he compares what he finds by immersing in his inside, and what he finds by expanding his consciousness outward, it is the same: the true spiritual being of the human being and his real origin. He opens himself to worlds which are spiritual and in which the human being has his origin as the old mystics said.

Then the human being can find deepest satisfaction from these worlds if he makes them accessible to his knowledge to satisfy the highest longings in his soul that wanted the question answered: what is the best in myself that has to exist in a sense quite different from that what is as a material world round me?—But then the human being also finds what he needs of working power, joy of life, yes, possibility of life and health of life. Since this results from such a deepening in the world if we penetrate ourselves with forces which are brought up from the deepest depths of our soul, which were brought from cosmic distances to stand firmly on the ground on which we can work and recognise a sense of existence. If I may summarise what the today's consideration should give what like a tonic has to sound through the whole series of lectures about the supersensible worlds, I would like to do this with the words:

In cosmic distances
Recognising human being,
In soul depths
Experiencing world forces,
The human being attains
Right world knowledge
By true self-knowledge.

If I speak about death and immortality today, it may seem, as if at first such a consideration is caused in the personal needs of the human soul, which have little do with knowledge, with science. If you survey the series of spiritual-scientific talks that I have held, you yet realise that I applied a scientific standard to the considered objects already, even if a spiritual-scientific standard. Hence, the today's consideration does also not start from that what we find within our emotional life, within our longings and wishes towards a life that exceeds the life of the physical body. It will rather concern this: how has human knowledge to position itself to the questions of death and immortality completely in the sense, as this knowledge positions itself to other objects of our knowledge? Since if we abstain from the longing for a life which exceeds the bodily if we abstain from that what is to be understood possibly in the sense of concepts like fear of death and the like, we have the question of the nature of our whole human individuality in it as something that remains for the human knowledge regarding death and immortality.

But it may seem today, as if in case of all considerations of spiritual life these important questions of death and immortality are disregarded. Since if one takes one of the official psychologies, you find, indeed, the phenomena of the soul life discussed in detail. However, as far as they face us in the everyday life, for example, the question of the development of concepts, the question of memory, of perception, of attention and the like, but you will look in vain for a discussion about the real being of our soul life. Yes, you can find the prejudice just in most scientific circles this soul life that someone must be a dilettante who wants to put these questions as scientific ones.

But this scientific thinking has now to turn to roads different from the usual ones if it wants to consider issues like death and immortality. There that psychology is no longer enough which one calls “psychology without soul,” a psychology with which only the phenomena of the soul life should be considered, without looking at the real being of that what rests in our own individuality and whose expression the phenomena of the soul experiences are. Now spiritual science or anthroposophy is an unusual point of view regarding these as well as other questions.

Indeed, the questions of death and immortality have emerged like from dark depths of spirit already since more than one century from the Western cultural life. One has interpreted it always as a dream of single persons if it appeared with a great spirit, as for example with Lessing. One regarded it as a meaningless dream if it appeared with such men whose names are called less within the cultural life of the last decades. Concerning the questions of death and immortality spiritual science is also not in any opposition to natural sciences. Only the opinion is often spread, as if natural sciences must reject what spiritual science has to say for its part. Thus, we can experience that whenever something new appears, as it happened, for example, in the last decade with the problems of life, one points to the fact that the assumption of a real spiritual life that exceeds the only bodily, material life must be overcome gradually and completely. Spiritual science is not forced at all to deny something that appears, for example, in such discussions like in that by Jacques Loeb (1859–1924, German-American biologist) at the First Monists' Congress (Hamburg, 1911) about the problem of life. However, spiritual science has to hear repeatedly, as well as at that time, that it is over now with a spiritual-scientific consideration. For one can hope that one will succeed, finally, in the laboratory in producing life under outer material conditions.

Compared to all such matters I would like to remind you of one thing. There were times when one did not doubt really that one could once create life in the laboratory. People who have thought something to themselves with the representation of the Homunculus in the second part of Goethe's Faust and have remembered that this representation of Homunculus was really a kind of dream of the physical research of the Middle Ages and earlier times. That means that the creation not only of subordinated living beings, but also of the highest, the human being in the laboratory was a dream of the naturalists once. People who cherished this dream intended by no means that then the spirit had to be abolished from any consideration of humanity and the world.

No spiritual consideration of life contradicts the hope of producing life from the composition of outer substances. No, only the direction of the habitual ways of thinking matters. The habitual ways of thinking that develop with someone who immerses himself more and more in spiritual science show a view of a certain factor exceeding the material in the development of the human being and humanity.

The purely materialistic view of the human life says: there we see a human being entering the earthly existence, and we observe how the material processes happen this and that way, and we see the human being gradually growing up from a clumsy being to a human being who familiarises himself with life, can accomplish tasks of life. Moreover, we see descending processes after ascending ones as it were which lead gradually to the dissolution of the physical body or to death.

This materialistic consideration of life turns its attention solely to what one can reach with the senses and with methods of thinking and researching which are based on sensory views. There one is probably forced to exceed that what is given with the moment of birth or conception, because one cannot explain everything that appears in the human being if one pays attention only to those factors that prevail between birth or conception and death. Then one speaks of hereditary factors. However, as far as one remains within the purely material approach, one believes that all factors, all elements that should explain the human life consist only of that what one can observe between birth and death, or what comes into the human life by the inherited qualities of the parents or other ancestors.

However, as soon as people investigate this heredity, they realise that it is rather superstitious to lead back everything that the human being can realise in his life possibly to hereditary factors. Just in the last decade a brilliant historian, Ottokar Lorenz (1832–1904), tried once to examine families whose descent relations were known to what extent the qualities of the parents, grandparents and so on can be recognised in the lives of the descendants. However, he could get on this way of the purely experiential observation to nothing but to say, if one looks up in the line of ancestors, one finds that among the twenty to thirty ancestors whom everybody can count upwards human beings are who were either genii or idiots, wise men or fools, musicians or other artists, so that one can find all qualities, which are found with any human being, and that one does not come far in the reality if one clings to the prejudices of scientific theories if one wants to explain these or those hereditary factors, this or that expression of the human character, this or that quality.

Spiritual science adds a spiritual core to that what one can find in the line of heredity as conditions of the human life, which we cannot find in that which we search with the parents, grandparents and so on, but which we have to search within a supersensible spiritual world. So that in the course of the incarnation process something combines with the physical factors that is not physical that is of spiritual kind. This spiritual that one cannot see with physical eyes is that being that we carry in us as the result of our former lives on earth as one says. As it is true that we lead back our physical origin to our ancestors, we have to lead back a spiritual origin to a spiritual lineage, that means, to ourselves. Spiritual science is just forced to speak not only of one life on earth of the human being, but of repeated lives on earth. Indeed, one has to go far back for reasons that may become obvious in the course of these talks if we want to search our being in our previous life. So we say in the spiritual-scientific sense: we bring our essence with us from a former life, we have experienced this former life, and we have gone through death and then through a life between death and our appearance in this life.

Spiritual science is also forced to imagine this essence going through death and a supersensible life between death and a new life on earth. This essence is not a product of the material existence, but collects and forms the matter as it were, so that we receive this physical corporeality. Hence, we speak in spiritual science of repeated lives on earth. This idea of the repeated lives on earth faces us necessarily from the Western thinking first with Lessing (Gotthold Ephraim L., 1729–1781) in the work which he left as his testament, in the Education of the Human Race. There he says about this teaching: “even if it is the oldest one what the human beings have confessed to, must it not appear again at the summit of the human development?” In his Education of the Human Race Lessing also answers to some questions that can be objected the repeated lives on earth. Indeed, if such things appear with an excellent person, then people who judge this excellent spirit normally say: he performed great achievements, but later he became addicted to this strange dream of the repeated lives on earth, and one has to grant the great Lessing that he could also commit this strange mistake.—Thus, every little spirit feels called to condemn the great spirits with their “terrible mistakes.” Nevertheless, this idea did not let single persons of the nineteenth century rest, and even before the recent Darwinist natural sciences approached, the idea of the repeated lives on earth appears as a necessity of the human thinking again. Thus, it faces us in a book by Drossbach (Maximilian D., 1810–1884) about human rebirth, a somewhat confused book from our standpoint, but an attempt that allows itself just compared with scientific thinking to represent this idea. Soon afterwards, a little community was to be found which put a prize on the best writing about the immortality of the soul, and the prize winning writing by Widemann (Gustav W., 1812–1876) which was published in 1851 dealt with the problem of immortality from the standpoint of reincarnation. Thus, I could still state many a thing how the thinking has gradually induced many persons to consider this idea of reincarnation.

Then the scientific view of the human being came that was based on Darwin. At first, it considered the human being materialistically, and it will consider it still this way for a long. But if you take my book Theosophy or other books which are written in the spirit of spiritual science and natural sciences at the same time, you will realise that the scientific thinking—thought through to the end—imposes the necessity to the human being to think of the idea of incarnation. Nevertheless, it is not only this. I would like to show not only a logical consequence, but also that, indeed, the human being must come to the idea of reincarnation on basis of the same principle which prevails in natural sciences, namely of the principle of experience. However, another question arises there, is anybody able to collect experiences of that what should come in from supersensible worlds what should produce the human body and leave this body at death again?

One can realise cursorily still without spiritual-scientific foundations that something mental works on the outer body of the human being; but one does not like such considerations particularly today. If the human beings looked more exactly at the physiognomy of the human being in its different sculptural forms if one also looked at the facial play, at the gestures, which are individual with every human being, at the creative spirit, one would soon get a sensation how the spirit is internally working on the body.

Observe a human being who has been working on the big questions of life for about ten years, namely in such a way, as one does it in the outer science or philosophy where one reflects on these matters without having to say a lot. On the other side, observe a human being who has dealt with these issues so that they have become inner problems to him, so that they have taken him in states of the highest bliss, but also to the highest pains and the deepest tragedy. Consider a human being who deals with the questions of knowledge, and look at him, after he has led such a soul life for ten years, and you will realise how this work expresses itself in his physiognomy, how, indeed, the humanely mental works into the forms of the body. May one pursue now by certain methods such working on the outer physical body further to that point where not only certain forms of our face are changed in such a way that into them the character of the soul life is pressed, but where the indefinite form which the human being has at first becomes his completely elaborated figure?

It is necessary that the human being leads his soul life beyond the point where it is in the everyday life today. He has to learn to seize the supersensible in himself, that which is accessible to no outer observation. Then every human being can find both points by mere reflection, so to speak, where our life directly finds the supersensible.

These two points are the transitions from the wake state to sleep and again from sleep to the wake state. Since nobody should think so illogically that the human soul life stops with falling asleep and comes again into being with awakening. Our soul life must be in any state of existence in sleep, it must be somewhere to put it another way. The big question emerges which maybe the child puts that is justified for someone who gets involved with the questions of knowledge, namely the question: where does the soul go when the human being falls asleep? We see also other processes stopping, we see, for example, a burning candle going out. May one also ask there, where to does the fire go? Then we say, the fire is a process that stops if the candle goes out, and which begins again if it is kindled again.—May we compare the bodily process of the human being to the candle and say: the soul life is a process that goes out if the human being falls asleep in the evening, and is kindled in the morning when he awakes again? It seems perhaps to be in such a way, as if one could use this comparison. However, this comparison becomes impossible if, indeed, one could prove that not for the usual perception or sensation, but for a sensation to be attained by careful soul preparation that can face us which leaves our body with falling asleep and visits us with awakening again. If this is in such a way that while falling asleep not only a process takes place like a going out flame, but if we can pursue what leaves the body in the evening while falling asleep and visits it in the morning again if we can prove this process in its reality, then a supersensible inside the human being exists. Then one asks us this supersensible: how does it work within the body?

Even the famous naturalist Du Bois-Reymond (Emil Du B.-R., 1818–1896) pronounced the thought that one can understand the sleeping human being from the standpoint of natural sciences, but not the waking one in whom impulses, instincts, passions and so on surge up and down. You can read that what I have outlined today only briefly, more in detail in my writing How Does One Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds

I have described the methods there which we want to touch now briefly by which the human being gets around to getting to know the reality of that what leaves the body in sleep, and what with the awakening goes into him again. At first, we want to ask attentive soul viewers who have got a certain ability to listen to these important moments like falling asleep and awakening.

There we hear them saying what spiritual science can confirm absolutely that at first that changes what exists with sharp contours in the surroundings into something nebulous, into blurred forms. Then the falling asleep feels, as if his whole inner being is extended and does no longer depend on the forms of his skin; this is connected with a certain feeling of bliss. Then a strange moment occurs in which the human being can feel everything like in a brief vision that he has accomplished as satisfying moral things; this faces him vividly, and he knows that these are contents of his soul, he feels being in them. Then a jerk happens as it were, and the human being still feels: oh, this moment could last forever!—Some people just have this sensation who pay attention to the moment of falling asleep. The consciousness has disappeared.

The human being goes over to an inner essentiality at such a moment where the outer body plays no role, because the daily strain tires him. One feels as if the reality of the mental is scurrying. All methods of spiritual science which we can call experimental ones spiritual-scientifically consist in nothing but that the human being receives the inner power to keep that which is disappearing so that he can experience the moment of falling asleep completely consciously. The consciousness is kept. Since why does the consciousness dwindle while falling asleep? Because the human being cannot unfold that inner strength and willpower in the usual life to experience something else when the outer senses leave him. Let us ask ourselves, how much we experience in the usual life within the soul what is not stimulated by the outer impressions? There is a little left with most human beings surely. No wonder that the inner strength does not exist which can penetrate the soul-life and that is left by any outer experience at the moment, when it steps out while falling asleep. Any spiritual development is based on the penetration of our soul with the strength that the soul needs to receive the consciousness unless it receives it from the body. Meditation, concentration, and contemplation are experimental means to advance farther with the soul life than one can come in the usual life. I would like to bring in one example only.

Assuming that a human being can put a thought of benevolence or of something else in the centre of his experience and can exclude all the other thoughts, also those which one can get with the senses, to hold on this one thought only. Since the thoughts fly to the human being at such a moment as the bees fly to the flowers if one stands within the usual life. However, if one can have the strength to exercise concentration of thinking repeatedly, to practice meditative immersion, as soon as one can become free of the mere outer impressions, and delves repeatedly into pictorial thoughts which express something allegorically, then such a thought can startle the human soul-life, so that it becomes a stronger force than the human being normally has. Then such a human being falls asleep consciously, that means he experiences consciously that he grows with his soul life into a spiritual world. This is no dream, also no self-deception or self-suggestion, but something that is accessible, indeed, to every human being, but is to be reached only with care and energy. The human being can free himself completely from his physical corporeality. As he frees himself, otherwise, in sleep unconsciously from it, and as every human being is in sleep beyond the physical body, he will consciously live by such exercises in that what exists usually unconsciously beyond the human being. Briefly, the human being can experience a relief of his soul from the physical corporeality with soul exercises.

Indeed, one can always hold against such a representation that is based on inner experience: this is based on deceit! Nevertheless, whether it is based on deceit or on reality, this can be decided only by experience. Hence, I have to say repeatedly: what the human being believes to experience this way can absolutely be self-suggestion, for how far does the human being go self-deception! He can go so far that if he thinks, for example, only of a soda he already has its taste on the tongue. Something may well give the impression, as if it were perception of a spiritual world, but still it can be self-deceit. Hence, someone who does such exercises and makes his soul the experimenter must take all means to eliminate illusions. Nevertheless, in the end only the experience decides. Certainly, somebody can suggest the taste of a soft drink to himself, but it is another question whether he can quench his thirst with it.

There is the possibility to experience as reality what is in sleep beyond the physical body. How does one experience it? So that the human being makes his soul more and more independent and gets to know a quite new supersensible world. Indeed, he starts getting to know a world of spiritual light. Then something particular turns out there. The human being who otherwise does not consider his thoughts and mental pictures as realities takes them along when he leaves his body with his soul really. He loosens his conceptual life from all materiality, and this conceptual life experiences a transformation when the human being becomes free of his physical body. What I say now appears to materialistic minded people like daydreaming, even so it is reality. Our mere thoughts change into a world which we can compare—but only compare, it is different—with a propagating light with which we find the underlying cause of the things. So you get to the world in which you detach the thinking that is bound, otherwise, to the tool of the brain and submerge with your thinking in a newly appearing world. This expresses itself in the way that you feel more and more enlarged. You get to know a world of which the outer physical-sensory world is only a revelation. Spiritual beings, not atoms, form the basis of the outer sensory world, and we can penetrate as human beings into this spiritual world. So we are accepted by such a spiritual world as it were if we carry out this self-experiment in our soul.

We only attain a complete knowledge of the relation of this spiritual world to us human beings if we can also spiritually experience the moment of awakening. This is possible when the human being contemplates a lot about his inner life in meditation and concentration. For example, he can review that pictorially every morning or evening what he has experienced during the day or the day before to consider it contemplating or he contemplates his moral impulses and takes stock of himself. Then the human being gets around to experiencing the reverse moment consciously by such exercises where we submerge in our bodies that we experience, otherwise, unconsciously while awakening.

Then he experiences something that I can characterise only in the following way. You all may know that a healthy quiet sleep depends on our emotions. If the human being has thought ever so much, has exerted itself ever so much in his thinking, he falls easily asleep. But if anger, shame, remorse, and in particular a troubled conscience gnaw at him, he tosses and turns sleepless in bed. Not our thinking which we can carry over to the big spiritual world but our emotions can drive away the sleep.

Our emotions are associated with our soul life in the narrower sense. We share our thoughts with the world. The way in which our emotions just affect us is something intimately connected with what we ourselves are. Somebody who has learnt now in such a way to free his soul consciously from his body, also gets clear from immediate observation how he carries his emotions into the world into which he enters if he has become free of body. As blissful it makes us on one side to submerge in a world of spiritual light, free of the body, as much we feel chained in this world to our emotions gnawing at us. With it then we go into the spiritual world and have to carry it again into our body. However, by the mentioned exercises we find our emotional world again while submerging in our bodies. It faces us as something strange. We get to know ourselves submerging in our emotional world, and thereby we get to know, while we pursue it now consciously, what works in truth killing on our organism. I note here that I speak about death in a later talk that has a quite different meaning considering it with plants or animals than with the human being. Spiritual science does not take the easy way out to find these phenomena identical in the three realms if we pursue that consciously what has become the possession of our soul that it settles in our physical body and can work destroying in it. Then we get to know how our innermost being really forms the body while it combines with that what comes from father and mother and from the other ancestors as hereditary factors. There we see the human being entering in the physical life, we see him entering clumsily at first. He cannot yet speak; then we see the forms becoming more and more certain and see him becoming an active human being gradually.

Considering the whole development of the human being spiritual-scientifically, we realise how an inner essence develops and this forms the human being working on the body from the spiritual from birth or conception on. We find the same essence that works creatively on the body if we can pursue how it leaves the body and penetrates into a spiritual world. There we find two things: an element that enables us to pour out our own being like in a spiritual world of light; but we also find something in this essence that we must bring into this spiritual world, namely our emotional world, that is everything that we have got to know in life. In these two things we have on one side what is creative in the human being what leaves the body as our spiritual essence, goes through death and appears again in a new body after an interim and on the other side we have our emotions which we get to know by the spiritual-scientific view as a real being as that what destroys our body and leads to death.

Therefore, we realise how our spiritual essence enters in existence, builds up the body gradually, and we see this essence working the strongest in the first months where we do not yet have an inner soul life where we do not yet think. There we see the human being entering existence sleeping as it were. If we try to remember, we can come back to a certain point, not farther. We have slept into existence as it were. Only from the third, fourth years on the human being can feel as an ego. The reason is that the spiritual essence of the human being is busy forming the body at first. Then he comes to a point where the body has to grow only, and from then on the human being can use what flowed once in his body for his soul life which works within the physical body constantly in such a way that we take up the necessity of death at that time, where we start saying “I” to ourselves, up to which we can remember later where we begin an inner life.

What do we receive with this necessity of death? We receive the possibility to take up the outer world, to enrich our inside being perpetually, so that we become richer in life every day. In that part of our being that we carry in sleep into the spiritual world that forms our soul being everything is contained that we get as joys and sorrows, as pleasure and pain. While we live and develop a consciousness, we have the possibility for our inner essence to enrich it perpetually. We take this enrichment along if we go through death, but we can have it only because we had to destroy our bodies throughout life. Our body is built as it has developed from the preceding life. However, we absorb something new perpetually that enriches our soul life. Nevertheless, this new can no longer penetrate completely into our physical body, but only up to a certain degree. That expresses itself by the fact that we feel the fatigue of yesterday removed; but it cannot completely penetrate into our body. What penetrates into our body cannot develop completely in the bodily.

We take the former example once again. A human being works on questions of knowledge for ten years. Thus, his physiognomy has changed after ten years if this activity has been a matter of his heart. However, his body limits this change. The desire to develop internally further may still exist; but, the later absorbed can no longer work into the body. Hence, we see, because the body puts a border, the richer inner life beginning when the soul has poured forth into the body. First, we see the physiognomy of such a human being changing—of a thinker, poet or artist; then only we see the rich spiritual life developing. Not before our outside world limits us, we develop so surely, but we can no longer carry into our physical bodies what we develop in ourselves because our body is built up according to that what we have got in a former life on earth. Therefore, we have to carry through death what we still get internally. This helps us to build up the next body, so that we have built only in a body of the next life what must destroy our present body.

A view presents itself there that fits into the scientific thinking, a view of what death and immortality means what the repeated lives on earth mean. There we realise if we change our physiognomy how the human being has built that into his body what he has got in former lives on earth. We see the results of our former lives in the developing body, and we see in that what we get now what stands in the way of our bodily, so to speak, as a spiritual, the developing elements of our future life.

Spiritual science regards the earthly life as something that is between something former and something following. The later considerations will show how our perspective increases to the times of our existence which the human being spends free of body in the supersensible worlds. In order that such matters would not remain pipe dreams, it is necessary that we look at the methods that enable the soul to perceive even if it lacks the physical brain. Only because the human being enables the soul to perceive that in the supersensible what must remain, otherwise, a mere assertion it becomes a proven reality.

Today we stand strictly speaking only at the beginning of a science that deals with such matters. Just many people consider themselves as the best experts of the matters, as the most enlightened ones and regard these matters as fantasies. I would not be surprised if anybody said, this is daydreaming that completely contradicts any scientific truth!—Nobody will find it more comprehensible than I do if anybody says this. But while the human beings become engrossed more and more in spiritual science, they realise that we can prepare our souls by meditation so that it can know about itself, can develop inner forces by which it can still know, can still perceive if it leaves the body and can no longer perceive with the organs of the body. This has to be found experimentally—one may say, it is to be found spiritual-experimentally—that the soul is something that one can experience if it can no longer use the bodily organs. It goes through births and deaths and works in such a way that it builds up the body that goes through death and collects new forces to build the body during the earthly existence. With the questions of the nature of the human being, you attain answers to the questions of death and immortality at the same time.

Goethe said once in an essay that nature invented death to have much life. Spiritual-scientific research proves such a notion to be true saying, in any life, the human being enriches his soul life; he must die because his respective body is built as an effect of his former lives on earth. While killing his body, he creates the possibility to work into in a new body what now he cannot work into his body and into the world.

Such a worldview influences our lives deeply. If it penetrates our whole being if it remains not only a theory, we feel such a truth only as a truth of life. Since we say to ourselves when we have crossed the middle of our lives when our hairs begin becoming grey and our faces get wrinkles: life is going downhill!—Why is it going downhill? Because that what the soul has got cannot be brought into the body. However, what we have gained internally, and what must destroy our present bodies is worked into a new body. Someone can argue easily: you spiritual researchers state that the human being becomes weak in old age, so you say that just with the body the mind dwindles away!—As this objection is a given, it is a given that one only admits that such a man does not think about that: from what is our present brain built?—It is built from our former lives! We must destroy our bodies and our brains with our thoughts. But the thoughts, which kill the bodies, are those, which use the brain. It is obvious that something must stop that is bound to a tool like the brain. However, our spiritual being does not stop with it. That is why it occurs that we do no longer find the tools in ourselves to realise what we have appropriated in the present life if the human being moves in downward direction. Then this yet works in a soul life which is not bound to the brain, and which cannot be expressed by cerebral thoughts. This prepares itself to act creatively in the next life. One says it not only in Goethe's sense that nature invented death to have much life—but we have also to say, death is there to work out that in new forms what we acquire internally in life. In this sense, we can say if we see the age approaching: thank God, that life can go downward, that death can be! Since if it did not exist, we could not take up what flows towards us from the world in such a way that it forms us. We need death, so that we can make that what we experience the contents of our own being. Hence, we regard death as that by which just life can advance. Hence, there is no better adviser than spiritual science; it is not only a comforter towards the fear of death, but it gives us strength, while we are walking towards death and see the outside dying. Since we know that then the inside grows. Spiritual science will raise the whole life to a higher level at which life seems meaningful and reasonable.

From the following talks will arise that life does not proceed endlessly forward and backward, but that also reincarnation has a beginning and an end. Now I would only like to point to it. From that which spiritual science has to say about death and immortality arises that we have the effects of our present life in a following life.

The complete human existence disintegrates into the existence between birth and death and into that between death and a new birth. There we see what Goethe felt in terms of the simple life extended to the whole life while we look back not only at the little yesterday, but also at the big yesterday where we made our present life. We look there at the joys or pains of life and feel: joy strengthens us for the future; we must experience grief for overcoming obstacles to strengthen ourselves also for the future. There we see a big contrast expanding in the future life and think of the Goethe's verses:

If yesterday is clear and accessible,
If today you work freely and strongly,
Then you can hope for a tomorrow
That is also fortunate.

Happiness and optimism flow to us from the internally conceived spiritual science showing us: indeed, the spirit forms the material and survives while the material life is destroyed to reveal itself always anew, and which applies the newly acquired. I would like to summarise this for the purposes of the today's evening with the words:

While living the spirit shows
Always its power only,
Dying, however, the spirit shows,
How through all deaths
It always survives to higher life.

During a nice September day of this year, I drove with some friends from Zurich to the neighbouring town Einsiedeln. There a Benedictine Abbey was founded in the early Middle Ages and acquired a certain notoriety through diverse circumstances. At that day, just a pilgrimage day took place. Einsiedeln was prepared to welcome many pilgrims. At that time, I myself also wanted to do a kind of pilgrimage, but not directly to that place Einsiedeln, but from there to an adjacent site. A car was taken to drive to the so-called “Devil's Bridge.” Finally, on a quite rough way, uphill and downhill, we arrived there and found a quite modern inn that was built relatively short time ago. In this inn, a board is found: “Natal site of the doctor and naturalist Philippus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim, called Paracelsus, 1493–1541.”

This was the goal of my pilgrimage at first: the birthplace of the famous, in many respects also infamous, Theophrastus Bombastus Paracelsus von Hohenheim. At first one saw meadows with many flowers and grazing cows all around in a strange place where many ways crossed. One could feel something particular by the peculiar of nature as you can hardly find it in Europe anywhere but in the Alpine regions. Nature has something there, as if the plants have an own language, as if they wanted to say anything, as if they could become rather talkative. This site is also suitable to grow together with that which the spirit of nature can tell you.

There the picture of a boy emerged before my soul who grew up during the first nine years of his life in that nature who really had his birthplace in a house which stood once there, and which was replaced with the new one. Since the old doctor Bombast von Hohenheim lived in the fifteenth century at this place, and his little son was the future Paracelsus. I tried to put myself in the situation of that boy about whom I knew that he had grown together with the whole nature already from his earliest childhood. I tried to imagine this boy in this nature talking intimately with the plants. In a certain respect, the outer configuration definitely shows what that boy Paracelsus let speak to himself from the early morning to the late evening, except those times in which he went with his father on the ways that this undertook to the adjacent places. One can consider as sure that the father could exchange some interesting thoughts about the interesting questions with the little boy in the midst of nature at that time, questions that that child could already put about what the experience of nature directly shows. Something that matured in that boy that we may come to know in the life of Paracelsus faces us in a childlike figure if we have the picture of the old honest-good, but very expert licentiate, the old Bombastus von Hohenheim taking the inquisitive boy by the hand.

While this picture emerged in my soul, I remembered another picture which I already had many years ago when I stood in Salzburg in front of a house where a board displayed that in this modest house Theophrastus Bombastus Paracelsus von Hohenheim died at the age of 48 years. Between these two pictures this eventful, this unique life is enclosed to me.

If we look a little closer at his life, we find, indeed, still completely with the character of the fifteenth, sixteenth centuries, a deep knowledge of nature arising which became then medical science and philosophy, theosophy. A knowledge of nature, which originates from deeper clairvoyant soul forces whose true figure I have already suggested in the talks of this cycle. What waked up these deeper soul forces and enabled Paracelsus to look within nature behind that what the outer senses and the outer intellect can recognise only, was really caused by the intimately adherence with nature, by feeling his soul forces related to that what germinates, sprouts and blossoms in nature. When the nine-year-old boy moved with his father to Carinthia into a similar nature, he could also feel related with the spirit of nature.

Paracelsus growing up in such a way advanced further and further just in an individual, in a quite peculiar and personal view of nature. How could this be different? Everything was connected that took root in his mind with the forces peculiar to him and with the abilities, with the way as he stood to the things how they were talking to him. Hence, he also especially appreciated throughout his life to have grown together so intimately with nature. If he wanted to stress to his enemies that his inside was related to nature, he often pointed to it later. These were his words: “Give ear how I justify myself: I am not spun subtly by nature, it is also not the habit of my country that one attains something with silk spinning. We are brought up neither with figs, nor with mead, nor with wheat bread; but with cheese, milk, and oat bread, this cannot make subtle fellows. Those are educated in soft clothes and in women's rooms, and we who grew up in pine cones do not understand each other well. This is why someone can even be considered as rude who believes to be subtle and gracious. The same applies to me what I regard as silk, the other call it drill.” He is of such a type, he thinks, as the human beings are who have not completely separated themselves from the topsoil of natural existence but are intimately connected with it. He takes his power and wisdom from this connection. That is why his motto was throughout his life: “Let no man belong to another who can belong to himself.” This penetrated his whole character; it shows us this man mental-plastically. Hence, we can understand that when he came to the university later he could not familiarise himself with the way how he should continue scholarly now what he knew about medical science naturally, only encouraged by the conversations with nature and with his father. He could not cope with this at first actually.

In order to realise what he had to withstand there, we have to look at how at that time medicine was done. There it was authoritative above all what one could have in the old traditions and documents of the old doctors Galen (131-~200 AD), Avicenna (AbÅ« AlÄ« al-Husain ibn AbdullÄh ibn SÄ«nÄ, ~980–1037) and others. The lecturers dealt preferably with commenting and interpreting what one could read in the books. This was deeply antipathetic to the young Philippus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim, and he probably thought above all that a big distance was between that which one could get directly and intuitively from the spiritual work of nature and what had gone away so far from it as scholarship, as mere intellectual concepts and ideas. Hence, he wanted to go through another school. He went through this other school thoroughly. We soon see Paracelsus leaving the university and wandering about in Germany, Austria, Western and Southern Europe, Poland, Holland, Lithuania, and Scandinavia, with the intention to get to know something from the way everywhere—to speak with Goethe—“how nature lives in creating.” Since he had the thought in mind, actually: indeed, the whole nature is a uniform, but she speaks in many languages, and just because one learns to recognise how one and the same thing changes its form in the different regions, one advances to the being of the inner unity, to that what underlies as something spiritual everything only sensorily discernible. However, he wanted to get to know not only how any ore, any metal directly results from the configuration of the mountains and of its source to get such a picture how nature lives in creating, he wanted to get to know not only how the plants assume other shapes depending on the climate and the environment, but he had something else still in mind. He said to himself: with its surroundings, the whole human organism is connected. One cannot understand the human body and soul as the same everywhere; at least one does not recognise the human being if one looks at him only at one place.

Therefore, he wandered through the different regions that were accessible to him to recognise with his look deeply penetrating into the spiritual how the human being is related with nature, depending on the different influence of climate and region. Not before one experiences this different influence everywhere, one gets to that what informs us about the nature of health and illness in the sense of Paracelsus. Hence, he was never satisfied to get to know any illness only at one place, but he said to himself, the fine substances are different which compose the human organism, depending on whether the human being lives, for example, in Hungary, in Spain or in Italy, and nobody recognises the human being who cannot pursue the finer substances with penetrating look.

When one reproached him that his “high school” was vagrancy, he referred to the fact that the divine spirit does not come to anybody who is sitting on the fireside bench. He realised that the human being has to go where the divine spirit works in the different shapes of nature. A clairvoyant knowledge developed in him that he could have only because of his connection with nature.

However, Paracelsus also felt that this knowledge had so intimately grown together with his soul that he became more and more aware that, actually, one could bring to mind only by an intimate way of pronouncing what he had learnt directly on the high school of nature. He called nature his “book” and the various areas of the earth the “single pages” of this book which one reads walking on them. He despised those increasingly who studied the old Galen, Avicenna and others only and removed from the book that spreads out with its various pages as the “book of nature” in front of him. However, he also felt that that what he could learn in such a way in his high school could be put only intimately into words. Hence, he wanted to use another language than Latin that had become foreign, actually, to the immediate soul life, which was used in those days only at the universities. Since he believed that he could not succeed in bending the words and in formulating so that they could immediately express what flowed out of all being. Therefore, he felt the urge to express in his mother tongue what he wanted to express. Two things resulted from that. Once, that he had a high self-confidence of the value of his knowledge not because of boasting or arrogance, for he was a humble nature strictly speaking. That is why he said that one could not learn anything from medical science, actually, but one must approach nature directly again while renewing medical science.—Hence, his proud words: “Who wants to follow the truth has to go to my kingdom. Follow me, you Galen, Avicenna (AbÅ« AlÄ« al-Husain ibn AbdullÄh ibn SÄ«nÄ, ~980–1037, Persian polymath), Rhazes (AbÅ« Bakr Muhammad ibn ZakarÄ«yÄ ar-RÄzÄ«, 854–927, Persian polymath), Montagnana (Bartolomeo da M., ~1380–1452) and Mesue (YÅ«hannÄ ibn MÄsawayh, ~777–857, Assyrian physician), I do not follow you. You from Paris, you from Montpellier, you from Swabia, you from Meissen, you from Cologne, you from Vienna, and from the regions of the Danube and Rhine rivers, you from the islands, you from Italy, you from Dalmatia, you from Sarmatia, you from Athens, you Greeks, you Arabs, you Israelites. Follow me and I do not follow you ... I become the king, and the kingdom will be mine, I lead the empire and gird your loins!” Not from arrogance and haughtiness, but from the consciousness that nature speaks out of him, he said, the kingdom is mine.—With it, he meant the kingdom of scientific and medical knowledge of his time.

The second thing that resulted was that he was soon by such a disposition and such a knowledge an opponent of the official representatives of his discipline. First, they could not stand at all that he expressed himself in German what they regarded only as possible to express in Latin language. He was a complete innovator of that. They could also not understand that he walked through the lands and wanted to learn. They could not at all believe that someone who was connected with the whole nature had a living sensation of the fact that the human soul-life is everywhere a fruit of natural existence in the region and that one has not only to observe the plants blossoming and the animals thriving there. Hence, Paracelsus appreciated farmers, shepherds, even knackers who worked in and with nature. He was convinced that in their simple knowledge something would be included of a real knowledge of nature from which he might learn something, so that he learnt as it were as a vagrant from vagrants. Hence, he says about himself: “I followed the art at the risk of my life and was not ashamed of learning from vagrants, headsmen, and barbers. My teaching was tested sharper than silver in poverty, fear, war and misery.”—One could not forgive him this. When he was appointed later at the university of Basel—as it were like by an error of the representatives of his discipline—, one of the scholars noticed with horror that Paracelsus walked in the street not in the costume of the professors, but like a vagrant, like a carter. This was not acceptable; this violated the reputation of the entire profession.

Therefore, it happened then that he encountered the contradiction of his colleagues where he wanted to apply what he had learnt from the big book of nature, and experienced what those have to experience who have to experience envy and opposition the worst. However, what one could least forgive him was that he was successful with his deep insights into nature where others had no success where they had applied everything that was in their power and could reach nothing. It is true if one offered resistance to him there or there he was not sparing with rude words, but if one considers the conditions with which he worked, one knows that it was completely justified. Where he was urged to discuss this or that medical problem with these or those colleagues, the debates became heated. There, for example, the others talked in Latin that he understood rather well, then he shouted back towards them in German what he regarded as proofs, they regarded, as follies. A picture of the whole way resulted how he collided with his contemporaries.

We can briefly explain in the following way what he gained as insight. He said: the human being, as he faces us as a healthy and ill being, is not a single entity, a single species, but he is placed in the big nature. One can assess health and illness in a certain respect only if one knows all effects that originate from the big world, from the macrocosm to pull the human being into their circles.—Thus, the human being appeared to him at first like a single entity in the macrocosm. This was one direction as he looked at the human being. Then he said to himself: someone must attain an intimate knowledge of all events in the big nature outdoors who wants to assess how all phenomena which happen, otherwise, outdoors in wind and weather, in rising and setting of stars and so on flow through the human nature as it were, work into them.—Because Paracelsus did not confine himself to the special knowledge of the human being, but let the clairvoyant gaze wander over the whole macrocosm, over physics, astronomy, chemistry, and collected everything that he could get hold of, the human being was a part of the macrocosm for him.

However, besides the human being appeared to him as a being independent largely, while he processes the substances of the macrocosm and by the way, in which he processes them, he lives either in connection or in opposition with the macrocosm. As far as the human being is a part of the macrocosm, Paracelsus looks at him as the lowest, most primitive, purely physical-bodily human being. But as far as the human being receives a certain circulation of substances and forces in his organisation and develops independently, is active independently in them, Paracelsus saw something included in the human being that he calls the “archaeus” that was to him like an inner master builder whom he also called the “inner alchemist.”

He draws the attention to this inner alchemist who transforms the outer substances which do not resemble what the human being needs as material inside as he changes milk and bread into meat and blood. This was to him a big riddle. In it expressed itself what he saw working as the inner alchemist who adapts himself harmoniously in the universe or opposes it. This was to him the human being in a second direction who can have such an inner alchemist in himself who transforms the substances into poisons destroying the organism, or into those means furthering and developing the organism.

Then he distinguished a third one: that what is the human being apart from the outer world. There Paracelsus realised that the human organisation is so designed that in the cooperation of the forces and organs a little world, a microcosm, an image of the big world exists. Notabene: this is something different from the first viewpoint of Paracelsus. After the first viewpoint, the human being is a part of nature. As far as with his third viewpoint the single parts of nature co-operate, he finds a likeness of the mutual relation of sun and moon in blood and heart, in the nervous and cerebral systems and in the interactions of them. In the other organs, he finds an inner kingdom of heaven, an inner world edifice. The outer world edifice is to him like a big symbol that recurs in the human being like a little world. In a mess that can originate in this little world, he sees the third way in which the human being can become ill.

He saw the fourth viewpoint in the passions and desires, which exceed a certain measure, for example, rage and fury. They react then again on the physical organisation.

Finally, he still saw the fifth viewpoint that is by no means admitted today, in the way, how the human being is integrated into the course of the world, and how to him from the whole spiritual development the causes of illness can result.

Paracelsus developed five viewpoints this way which he demanded not theoretically, but which he realised from the nature of the human being in immediate view of the relation of the human being to nature. Because he saw the human being placed in nature, and did not intellectually but clairvoyantly consider the way in which the single parts co-operate Paracelsus could position himself in a particular way to the sick human being. Strangely enough, he related not with one, but with all soul forces to the whole world. Hence, his nice sentence: with the mind we learn to recognise God the Father in the world; by faith we learn to recognise Christ, the Son; and by imagination, we learn to recognise the Spirit.

As the knowledge of the healthy and sick human being results from these three aspects, he wanted to put the human being before his soul. However, he wanted to look not only at the human being, but he wanted to observe how the single things are related in nature with each other and with the human being. Something peculiar could thereby happen: if he faced a sick person, he beheld how nature worked under the just cited viewpoints; the irregularity of the substances and of the organs resulted to his intuitive sight. He had the whole human being before himself.

He could not dress in abstract words what he experienced in front of the sick person, he could not formulate it; but he settled in the sick person. He needed no name of the illness, but while he was like submerged in the illness, he realised something quite new: how he had to combine the substances that he knew in nature, so that he could find means against this illness. However, it was also not only the mental in which he submerged, but also the moral, the intellectual and spiritual. Call him a vagrant if you want, as one did; maybe call charlatanism what he did. Nevertheless, stress also that he was bared of all means that he had to run up debts and so on. But then do not forget that he unselfishly became completely one with the illness he faced.

Hence, one could say, if he used everything that nature gave him for the sick person, the most important remedy would be love above all. Not the substances heal, he said, but love.—Love also worked from him onto the sick person, because he completely saw himself transported in the nature of the other human being. The second what had to arise from him by his especially intimate relation to nature was that he beheld the effective means in any single case that he applied; he beheld it developing its forces in the human organism. From it, the second arose to him: confident hope. He calls love and hope his best healing powers, and he never set himself to work without love and hope. The man who walked around as a vagrant was completely filled with the most unselfish love. However, he often had weird experiences. His love went so far that he cured those free of charge who had no money. However, he also had to live on something. Some people often cheated him out of his fee; then he went on and did not care. However, also collisions happened with the surroundings. Thus, the following occurred to him, for example.

When he was in Basel, because he was later appointed city doctor, also like by a kind of error, he accomplished some famous cures. Once he was called to a Canon Lichtenfels who had an illness that nobody could cure. Paracelsus had stipulated a fee of hundred thalers if he cured him; the canon agreed. Then Paracelsus gave him the remedy, and after three or four times the illness was cured.

There the canon meant if this was done so easily, he also does not pay the hundred thalers,—and Paracelsus was left with nothing. He sued the canon to set an example; but he did not win his case at the Basel court: he should keep to his rate. Then he distributed, as one said, bad flyers against the court and especially against the canon. This bred bad blood. A friend drew his attention to the fact that his stay was no longer safe in Basel. Then he fled in the dead of night from Basel. Had he gone half an hour later, he would have been imprisoned.

Someone who knows the peculiar life of this person understands the impression deeply penetrating into our hearts originating from the picture that comes from Paracelsus' last years: a picture that shows a face in which a lot of spiritual is expressed. He experienced a lot, but at the same time, the life badgered this soul and this body badly. On one side, you notice the suffering, relatively young man with the old features, wrinkles, and baldness and which struggle and striving which essence of the whole time evolution were in Paracelsus and on the other side, how he had to experience the tragic of a human being who confronted his time this way. Even if it is a legend, what should have happened in Salzburg that the Salzburg doctors would have decided once to incite one of his servants to precipitate Paracelsus from a rock who thereby met his death and was carried to his house. Even if that is not true, the life of Paracelsus was already in such a way that one must not split his skull; one worried his life out so that we understand his early death completely.

Such a man like Paracelsus made a deep impression on all who searched the way to the spiritual worlds in the next time. Someone who knows Goethe's life feels that Paracelsus whom Goethe got to know soon made a deep impression on him. Goethe had grown together like Paracelsus as it were with the surrounding nature. On another occasion, I have already told that Goethe showed this emotional attachment as a seven-year-old boy while he built an altar, rejecting everything that he has as religious explanations about nature from his surroundings. He took a music stand, laid minerals of his father's collection and plants on it, waited for the sun rise in the morning, collected the sun beams with a burning glass and lighted a little aromatic candle, which he had put on top, to light a sacrificial fire which was kindled in nature itself, and offered a sacrifice to the God of the big nature that way. This affinity to nature appears with Goethe so early and develops later into the great, also clairvoyant ideas about nature. We see in Goethe who is already in Weimar this way of thinking working on in the prose hymn To Nature: “Nature! We are surrounded and embraced by her, we are unable to escape her, and unable to penetrate deeper into her. Uninvited and unwarned she takes us along in the circulation of her dance until we are tired and fall from her arms ...”

Also in another way, we see a lot of resemblance between Goethe and Paracelsus. He becomes a true student of nature in botany and zoology. We realise how he tries to recognise the being of the objects of nature on his Italian Journey spiritually observing how the single appears in its variety. It is nice as he sees the innocent coltsfoot transformed which he knows from Germany. There he learns how the outer forms can express the same being in various way. Thus we realise that he wanted to recognise—everywhere searching the unity in the variety—the uniform as the spirit. It is significant what he writes from Rome to his friend Knebel (Karl Ludwig von K., 1744–1834) in Weimar on 18 August 1787: “After I have seen many plants and fish near Naples and in Sicily, I would be tempted if I were ten years younger to travel to India, not to discover anything new, but to look at the discovered in my way.” He wants to behold intuitively spiritually what spreads out in the sensory world. Paracelsus headed for the spirit in nature, Goethe headed for the spirit.

No wonder, hence, that Paracelsus' life appeared beside Faust's life vividly in Goethe's soul. If we open ourselves to Goethe's life especially, his Faust stands not only as the Faust of the sixteenth century before us who was a kind of contemporary of Paracelsus in a certain respect, but Paracelsus himself stands before us as he worked on Goethe. We have something in the Faust figure in which Paracelsus played a part. Why did Goethe resort to Faust?—One tells in the legend of Faust that he laid the Bible behind the bank for a while, became a doctor of medicine, and wanted to study the forces of nature.

Indeed, we realise that Paracelsus remained loyal to the Bible and was even a Bible-expert, but we see him laying the old medical authorities, Galen, Avicenna and others “behind the bank,” even burnt them once and went directly to the book of nature. This trait did a big impression on Goethe. And further: do we not see a similar trait when Faust translates the Bible into his “beloved German,” so that that which comes from it can directly flow into his soul, and when Paracelsus translates that into his beloved German which natural science is to him? We could state some other traits that would show that in Goethe something of the reappeared Paracelsus lived when he created the Faust figure. Yes, one would like to say, one sees in the Faust—Goethe translates it only into the ideal—what often happened between Paracelsus and his honest father when they were together, where Faust tells how he had contact with his father. Briefly, we can look at Paracelsus if Faust works as a figure of the Goethean creating on us.

While we have both figures beside ourselves, something faces us that shows in peculiar way how Goethe could make something quite different from the Faust figure as from the Paracelsus figure of the sixteenth century. If we look at the Goethean Faust, he is dissatisfied about what the different sciences, medicine, theology and so on can give him. However, Goethe can present this Faust not in such a way that we see the immediate settling in nature. Goethe could do it, but there had to be something for him, why he did not do it. Why did he not do it?

There it is remarkable at first, what is not only an outer fact that Paracelsus died with a harmonious soul that has grown together with the spirit of nature in the years in which we can imagine Faust saying the words:

I've studied now, to my regret,
Philosophy, Law, Medicine,
and—what is worse—Theology
from end to end with diligence ...
(Verses 355–357)

What now Faust further experiences, he experiences it in an age which Paracelsus did not reach in the physical world. Therefore, Goethe presents a kind of Paracelsus as it were from the age on in which Paracelsus died, but a Paracelsus who could not settle in the living spirit of nature.

How does he present him? Although he shows that Faust found a deep understanding of nature, also a kind of feeling related with nature, it is different than it was with Paracelsus. We feel this, when Faust speaks to the spirit of nature:

Spirit sublime, all that for which I prayed,
all that you now have granted me
you showed your face to me, but not in vain.
You gave me for my realm all Nature's splendour,
with power to feel and to enjoy it. You grant
not only awed, aloof acquaintanceship,
you let me look deep down into her heart
as if it were the bosom of a friend.
You lead the ranks of living beings past me,
and teach me thus to know my fellow creatures
in air and water and in silent wood.
(Verses 3217–3227)

Faust grows together with her in a way, because he was separated from nature before. Nevertheless, Goethe cannot show that Faust penetrates so vividly into the details of nature as Paracelsus penetrated; he cannot show that this happens at once, while he speaks to the sublime spirit of nature. Goethe cannot show how Faust would grow together with nature, but he must show an inner soul development. Faust has to go through a merely mental-spiritual development to reach the depths of the creating of nature and world. Thus, we realise with this way of Faust, although he often reminds of Paracelsus, that everything that Faust experiences is experienced in the moral, in the intellectual, in the emotional life, and not like with Paracelsus with whom as it were the feelers reach nature. It had really to happen that Faust could ascend to unselfishness, to the intimate love of the spiritual at the end of the second part, not while he grows together with nature, but goes even farther away from her. Goethe lets Faust go blind:

The darkness seems to press about me more and more,

But in my inner being there is radiant light.
(Verses 11,499#8211;11,500)

Faust becomes a mystic, he develops the soul in all directions, and he faces the resisting Mephistophelean forces. Briefly, Faust must develop purely inside his soul, has to raise the spirit in his soul. When this spirit is raised inside, the manifest to the senses is destroyed even with Faust because he goes blind: “But in my inner being there is radiant light.”

Faust realises—we recognise this at the end of the drama—that the spirit working in nature forces up the inner soul forces if the human being develops them. If this spirit is developed enough, the human being directly attains what penetrates as something spiritual the human being and nature.

Thus, Goethe let his Faust experience an inner soul path so that his Faust comes to the same goal to which Paracelsus came. If one thinks about what induced it, one realises that the powers of time cause the successive epochs of development, the historical life.

One recognises then what it means that the year of Paracelsus' death is something before that big revolution which the work of Copernicus caused for the outer natural science. Paracelsus' life still falls into the time in which it was right that the earth was stationary in the universe that the sun walks around it, and so on; this still worked beyond Paracelsus. Only after his death, the quite different kind of the view of the solar system and the world system prevailed. People literally lost the ground. Someone who regards the Copernican world system as a matter of course today gets no idea of that storm which broke out when the earth “was set in motion.” One can say, the ground under the feet faltered literally. But that also caused that the spirit did no longer stream immediately like an aroma into the soul as with Paracelsus. If Copernicus had confined himself to that which the senses perceive, he would never have put up his world system. Because he did not trust in the senses, he could put up his world system, while he exceeded the sensory appearance with intellect and reason. The course of development was this way. The human being had to develop his mind and his reason immediately. The times since the sixteenth century have passed not without effect.

While Goethe had to lift his Faust out of a Paracelsus figure of the sixteenth century to a Faust figure of the eighteenth, he had to consider that the human being could no longer be connected with nature in such an immediate and primitive way as Paracelsus was. Hence, Faust became a figure that could not discover the forces of existence, the sense of being by the immediate connection with nature but by the hidden forces from the depths of the soul.

However, at the same time the essentials appear that in the human being the stream of existence does not pass by insignificantly. Paracelsus is a son of his time as a great, superior figure. Goethe created a figure in his Faust poetically, which he made the son of his time in a certain direction which learnt to use reason and intellect in the natural sciences of his time, and which could work out the mystic. Hence, one has to say, because Goethe felt pressured into presenting not a Paracelsus figure but another figure, the deep caesura appears in the development of the European humanity in this period. The importance of such a caesura even appears in the greatest geniuses, and in the difference between these both figures. It is interesting for someone who wants to get to know Goethe to the highest degree to look at his creating in the Faust figure, because his Faust informs us about Goethe more than his other figures.

If we look at spiritual science from these observations, it can feel intimately related with Goethe, but can also feel intimately related with Paracelsus in another way. How with Paracelsus? Paracelsus could receive the deepest insights into nature from the developed forces of his soul by immediate contact with nature. However, this time in which one was able to do this is past since Copernicus, Galilei, Giordano Bruno and Kepler. Another time has begun. In his Faust Goethe showed the type of this time in which one has to work with the hidden soul forces, so that higher sensory forces come into being from the depths of the soul. As the eyes see the colours as the ears hear the tones, these higher senses perceive the spirit in the surroundings and that which one cannot behold as spirit with the usual senses.

Thus, the modern human being has to experience the deeper soul forces, while he does not grow together with nature as Paracelsus did but while he turns away from her. However, if he gets around to bringing up the deeper forces from his soul, to developing an understanding also of what lives invisibly as a spiritual and supersensible behind the visible, behind the sensory nature, if the human being works out the Faustian from himself, then the Faustian becomes the clairvoyant insight into nature. In a way any human being can experience developing the inner spirit that he can say indeed—even if he cannot believe to have solved the riddles of the world by what his eyes and outer senses teach him: “But in my inner being there is radiant light.” This can lead us to the spirit that prevails in everything.

Thus, the way from Paracelsus to Goethe is extremely interesting if one sees reviving in the Faust figure from Goethe's soul what for Paracelsus what also for Faust is the essentials is: the fact that the human being can penetrate into the depths of the world and into the laws with which the everlasting immortal spirit of the human being is related not by the outer senses, but only by an immediate connection with nature, as with Paracelsus, or by a development of higher senses, as Goethe poetically indicated in the continuation of the Faust figure of the sixteenth century. That is why for Paracelsus that became more and more a principle that then Goethe stressed for his Faust with the words:

Nature, mysterious in day's clear light,
lets none remove her veil,
and what she won't reveal to your mind,
you can't extort from her with levers and with screws.
(Verses 671–674)

With it one does not mean—neither in the sense of Paracelsus nor in that of Goethe—that one could not investigate the spirit of nature, but that the spirit reveals itself in nature, indeed, to the spirit woken in the soul, but not to the instruments which we have in the laboratory, not to the levers and the screws. Hence, Goethe says: “What she won't reveal to your mind, you can't extort from her with levers and with screws.” But to the spirit she can reveal it. This is the right interpretation of this Goethean word. Since Goethe agreed absolutely with Paracelsus, while he created a reflection of Paracelsus in his Faust, and Paracelsus together with Goethe would have regarded the spirited words as valid:

to understand some living thing and to describe it,
the student starts by ridding it of its spirit;
he then holds all its parts within his hand,
except, alas! For the spirit that bound them together.

Goethe adds, namely, when he conceived his Faust first, because he himself was still in high spirits in a juvenile way and did not belong to the “extremely clean and superfine” people in the sense of Paracelsus:

which chemists, unaware they're being ridiculous,
denominate encheiresin naturae.
(Verses 1936–1941)

However, this wants to say that nobody who wants to approach nature without developed higher cognitive forces can recognise the primal grounds of nature and cannot recognise how the immortal spirit of the human being is connected with nature, or to speak with Jacob Böhme where it comes into being (German: urständet).

If one covers the way from Paracelsus to Goethe as we have tried to outline it today, then you realise that Paracelsus and Goethe are living confessors of the other principle, not of the principle of those views of nature and world which they wanted to meet with the Goethean saying:

To understand some living thing and to describe it,
The student starts by ridding it of its spirit;
He then holds all its parts within his hand,
Except, alas! For the spirit that bound them together.

No! Paracelsus and Goethe approach nature and the human being in such a way that for them counts:

Who wants to recognise and understand some living thing,
looks for the spiritual light in primal grounds.
There he holds all its parts within his hand,
And never will he misjudge
The truth of the things within the spiritual tie.

What spiritual science has to say about the origin of the human being must be of the highest interest to all those persons who are interested in spiritual science out of the big questions of worldview. Since one met the question of the origin of the human being with immense interest from all sides in the last decades that has been enkindled in particular in the second half of the nineteenth century by the big, admirable progress of natural sciences. One can understand that with the powerful way with which natural sciences have tried to rise as the worldview the question of the origin of the human being had to be repeatedly put.

Now in case of a superficial consideration it may appear, as if just compared with this question that worldview, which wants to stand on the firm ground of natural sciences, and spiritual science would face each other with the starkest contrast. But if one considers the conditions within the scientific development, as they still existed few decades ago or maybe still before short time, then it may seem plausible to accept such a stark contrast. Since one has only to think what it signified in 1864, when from the scientific views of Darwin which already began seizing the broadest circles, on a German naturalists' meeting,—before still Darwin had expressed the question of the origin of the human being—Ernst Haeckel (1834–1919) applied Darwin's principles to the science of the human being. He represented not only the relationship of the human being his form and life conditions with the higher animals, but he energetically represented the immediate origin of the human being from the higher animal world.

At that time, one probably had to suppose that the coming discoveries of scientific research would confirm more and more what Ernst Haeckel had pronounced in 1864 like a courageous program of research that the proper use of the scientific principles would lead to the fact that one might recognise how from the animal orders the order of the human being has gradually developed. If that which Haeckel announced at that time like a kind of program that yet counted to himself already as irrefutable truth had proved to be true if the scientific research had really followed this path, today the mentioned radical contrast would certainly exist between natural sciences and spiritual science. But now this did not happen that way. Natural sciences themselves produced quite different results and have taken consequences from them, in particular in the last decades, as one had assumed at that time. The fact that one has ever so big difficulties in our days to see clearly in this realm if one tries to show the relation of natural sciences to spiritual science, is due solely to the fact that the popular spreading of scientific knowledge does not keep abreast of the discovery and production of this knowledge. We stand there even today compared with the popular consciousness in such a way that with many people like a firm dogma, in particular in the popular literature, the view is spread, as if really only someone stands on the firm ground of scientific knowledge who completely accepts the assertion that the human being has externally developed in the course of time from animal forms which are directly next to him. This faith is widespread, so that one simply says to someone who wants to counter something to this dogma: you know just nothing about that what arises as worldview if one really stands on the firm ground of scientific facts.

Most people, actually, know nothing about it, because the popular literature shows everything in such a way that one can know nothing about the fact that this belief has become rather fragile during the last years. Since what natural sciences delivers as facts our question is for the materialistic-monistic worldview already in an alarming proximity of that what spiritual science has to say. Since one would like to say: natural sciences have developed with our question during the last years in such a way that everywhere one has to doubt the old views of a direct origin of the human being from the animal order bordering on him. If we outline the development of science only briefly, before we come on the spiritual-scientific things, it will become obvious that spiritual science contradicts the facts of natural sciences, actually, much less than the scientific theories and hypotheses which are still held by a materialist-monistic worldview.

We turn back to the views that could find quite comprehensible spreading, for example, in the sixties, seventies of the nineteenth century. Which view has formed when Darwin (Charles Robert D., 1809–1882) published his brilliant book The Descent of Man in 1871 after his book On the Origin of Species had appeared in 1859 with him and his followers? There the view has formed that once in a bygone time the human being has gradually developed from the forms which belong to the simian species, from forms, indeed, which did not comply with the forms of these animal species which have survived until today, but which were externally related in a way to them. One regarded a kind of being as ancestor of the human being which had four limbs which were shaped more of the same kind, a kind of a four-handed being with which also the today's feet of the human being were like hands. Thereby the human being would have been a kind of a haired four-handed climbing animal with an imperfectly developed brain and with an accordingly different developed skull. Then such a pithecoid being would have developed to the today's human being in more or less straight line by the adaptation to the relations and by everything that has arisen in the struggle for existence. One has gone so far that one has not only dedicated himself to the view, as if the outer forms and the living conditions of the human being belonging more to the animal had gradually developed from such animal-like forms, but as if also all spiritual activities of the human being only showed a higher developmental level of the mental activities in the animal realm.

One has in particular tried there to show that the human thinking, feeling and willing only turn out as a perfection of simpler, more primitive mental activities which are also found in the animal realm, which were so transformed then just as the outer forms of the brain or the limbs. It would be important that such a view would have to lead to the assumption that everything that the human being experiences today as his spiritual, as the contents of his soul life, actually, is only the product of a physical-bodily life which can be traced back to times in which there is, actually, only a still animal, bodily life where it does not make sense to speak of such spiritual processes or spiritual contents as they were found in the human soul today. The human spiritual life would have developed like a kind of superstructure of former lower forms, so that one would not be entitled to connect the human spiritual life to a spiritual world reaching to our physical world.

For even more distant times of the past would arise that the animal life has developed from lower forms and that the mental of the animals must be led back to an existence in which there have been only those processes and beings which the human being regards today as if they contain nothing spiritual. However, with it the spirit would be, so to speak, an appearance for this worldview, a mock substantiality which develops from the bodily, and everything spiritual would have to be led back to something sensory-physical.

One knows quite sufficiently that in the second half of the nineteenth century worldviews mushroomed which were completely invigorated by the just characterised spirit that saw their greatness to break with all old views of the origin of the human being from a spiritual world and of an acceptance of the human being in a spiritual world when he dies. One may say that just the fairest sense of truth and sharpened intellectual conscience have led to such a worldview with the most manifold personalities in the course of the nineteenth century. To a worldview which had at that time by no means a materialistic attitude in the background, but which absolutely wanted to act and think in harmony with a noble and real idealism which said to itself, no one can hope that he belongs to a spiritual world immediately, but only that the spirit which has developed from the material existence finds a more or less long existence in the human soul. Even the human culture will further the spiritual in the course of development, but that what one himself could do in the spiritual,would not survive in a spiritual world, but can live on with the entire erasing of his individuality only in that what the human race produces as culture.

Nay, one is allowed to say that even with many persons much soul heroism was mixed in such a view, and that one cannot state any contrast to moral worldviews just with the leading persons. Since many people have said to themselves, it is just that what the soul has to strive for that it works unselfishly based on that what it can gain in the world, and then dedicates itself unselfishly again, knowing that it is extinguished, and that only its actions live on. One repeatedly stressd that it is, actually, egotistic to search immortality in any form.

Spiritual science is generally not inclined to belittle things that have arisen from a real sense of truth and an intellectual attitude, but it has to understand how such views form. Spiritual science could never get involved with the depreciation of worldviews pointing to the morally fateful that must arise from the characterised worldview. Nevertheless, it is something different if an objective view of the world, a deeper knowledge proves everywhere that such a worldview is fragile. There one has to say, everything that has been done in such an admirable way by developmental history, by comparative anatomy, by palaeontology and geology and the other natural sciences and what seemed to be decided to confirm such a worldview has led just more and more to the fact that it has become impossible to stop on basis of the scientific facts at such a worldview today.

Hence, certain researchers got around to fighting against ideas that have developed on basis of former assumptions and hypotheses just because the most advanced scientific knowledge has brought facts to light which do not comply at all with certain hypotheses and views. I would like to point to a person like Kollmann (Julius K., 1834–1918) because he is typical for the views that we find in various nuances also with others, namely, because they have a basis in the facts. Kollmann had to conclude from that what arose from the observations of developmental history, from the observations of the prenatal human being, of the human embryo and the animal embryos, and from that what appeared to him in palaeontology that one could not suppose that the ancestors of the human being were formed in a former time is such a way as, for example, the orthodox Darwinians have assumed and assume still today. One cannot assume the figures of the human beings in such a way that one may notice a low sloping forehead, a still undeveloped shrivelled brain, so to speak, and a figure that reminds of the today's figures of apes. On the contrary he saw himself repeatedly forced because of his discoveries to suppose that one has just vice versa to assume a cerebral configuration exceeding the today's unity of the human brain and the brains of apes from which then the today's brain of the apes would have developed from an original form which must have been more similar, actually, to our brain than to the present brains of apes. So that one would have to regard the present brain of apes as degeneration of a form which does no longer exist today, and which one has to assume as the original form of the human brain because it has become more definite in its formation. In addition, the same researcher had to assume that one cannot derive the human being from the forms of the higher animals but from small Pygmy-like beings. Hence, he looked everywhere for rests of such an old, dwarfish human race.

If you open yourself to such a hypothesis, you will say to yourself, the question is soon solved, actually, why palaeontology, geology, cannot show any documents of such a prehistoric man assumed by Kollmann, and why everything that can be found of fossilised apes and human beings differs from this prehistoric man's form.—You can soon realise this. If you consider the today's earth conditions, you must say to yourself that it is impossible that such a prototype which would be that of the human being and of the apes at the same time would be capable of surviving today that it could exist under the present earthly living conditions.—However, from that follows that today the earth must have conditions quite different from those of former times that we must look back at former times that had quite different living conditions, and that we could find on no earth that already had the present living conditions the original form of the present human being. Thus, we would have to go back to such conditions on earth that would differ much from that what we have as ideas of the present earth. Such a scientific hypothesis points to the fact that, actually, our earth must have had another figure in prehistory and all conditions must have been different from those of today.

However, with it the whole question is generally shifted. Why did it happen that the naturalists advanced to such a worldview? Because they had to break from their ideas by their sense of truth and their intellectual conscience with the old view, for example, with that of Linné (Carl von L., 1707–1778, Swedish botanist and zoologist) after which the single forms of the living beings would have been put as it were side by side in the world. This view was not abreast with the scientific research to accept arbitrary acts of creation that had put the single forms of the animals and of the human being on earth. If one goes into it, why this view did not seem scientific, one must answer: it rightly seemed not scientific if one considers the principles and formative conditions of the living beings, because positioning the animal forms and human forms side by side cut across the physical principles. If on the other side the scientific facts themselves forced to assume quite different conditions of the earthly existence in former times, then the basis is no longer valid. Then one cannot say that it is difficult to imagine the single forms of the living beings in such a material independence of each other and to understand a spiritual dependence of each other only.

However, the mentioned naturalist is only one type. Of quite special importance is that what such scientific thinkers like Klaatsch (Hermann K., 1863–1916) and Snell (Karl S., 1806–1886, mathematician and natural philosopher) have to say from particular scientific results. They realised and pronounced it in the clearest way that after that what can be observed as scientific facts generally there can be no talk that the human being is directly related to higher, pithecoid mammals.

Today I cannot go into the results, for example, of haemotology of the last years, although it would be interesting. Today I would like to go into the figure. However, one could say about Friedmann's research (Adolph Hermann F., 1873–1957, The Convergence of the Organisms. An Empirically Founded Theory as Substitute of the Theory of Evolution. 1904) completely the same what I have said about the morphological development. These last-called researchers thought that one cannot speak of the fact that the human being has developed from higher mammals because a conscientious study of the results of palaeontology forces us to realise that the formative forces and conditions of the higher mammals can be only understood in such a way that they go back to basic forms which are much more similar, actually, to the human being than to the present pithecoid mammals. The present monkeys would be much more unlike the original forms from which they would have to be derived than the human being is compared with this original form.

This is an exceptionally interesting turn which has come especially from Klaatsch in the development of zoology that the researchers saw themselves forced to the view: if one observes, for example, the human hands, it is impossible to believe even a moment that they have changed from the limbs of the present higher mammals, but one has to assume original forms in primeval times which were much more like the present human hands than to the present limbs of the higher mammals.

That is why, Klaatsch said, for example, if we realise that the gibbon, this strange species of apes always adduced because of its humanoid appearance, has limbs which are most like the human ones, one must say, it lacks them, because the human form has developed from its form, but because it has kept the prototype best of all apes from which also the human being is descended and which he has kept best of all.

Thus, this researcher got around to assuming a kind of living being in primeval times whose constitution the present human being has kept best of all, and that those animal forms show the most divergences which have developed then beside the human being from these original forms of primeval times. Thus, the human being would have kept an original life form best of all that existed for this researcher long before not only our apes but also the other mammals existed. A prototype that goes back to those times in which our mammals did not yet exist. It is interesting that Klaatsch almost says, one must think this prototype of the animals more related to the old dragons about which geology tells than the present mammals and monkeys. So that all mammals are descended from a prototype which they would have distorted to caricatures, while the human being has kept it best of all.

We find out not with the help of spiritual science which scientists regard as fantastic, but which we find within the scientific research in such a way that the researchers who feel urged by that what they realise to assert such matters. But now one can say that such researchers do strange leaps and that one can argue a lot against it. But if one imagines that strange living being from which the human beings and the mammals should be descended, one must say to himself, under the present conditions such a living being is still quite impossible, it cannot exist at all today.

The human being has just adapted his form of that time gradually to the present conditions. It is interesting now that a researcher like Klaatsch feels pressured by the development of that prototype of the human being, what even nothing would have to do with the principles which produced the different figures of the mammals, into assuming places of development from such a prototype just where the human being would be in the least disturbed by the Darwinian struggle for existence. Since he says, if the human being had to fight against predators in areas where predators were especially spread, he could never have survived this fight; he had to be saved from it in regions that were away from this struggle for existence.—Thus such a researcher tries to show—because he has still always a materialist-monistic thinking in the background—how the present human foot has formed from a limb of the primeval beings, supposing that the second pair of the limbs was used for climbing. This prototype of the human being would have stayed—of course, this is pure hypothesis of the researcher—in regions where it lived on high trees. It was not a climbing animal, indeed, but adapting to his climbing because it could rest upon trunks it could form the delve of the foot and the peculiar sharp position of the big toe. Since when the human being became a being, Klaatsch thinks, that walked on the ground, he had to have already formed the foot for it; he had to form this foot from other conditions that way.

However, this is a weird conclusion and a strange hypothesis. For one can raise the justified objection that the feet when it was still a climbing hand had to be adapted to the conditions of that time. The materialist-monistic thinking is not enough. Nevertheless, it is interesting to observe how such a researcher gets around to rejecting that Darwinian principle of the struggle for existence for the creation of the human being from a primal being so that he wants just to keep away the human being from this struggle for existence. How could one say there that the present scientific facts confirm the programme of worldview that was designed in the dawn of Darwinism so daringly? The extremely interesting fact seems to turn out to us that naturalists felt pressured into pointing to forms as original forms of the human being that do not exist today that are only hypothetical forms, so to speak, for the naturalists. This goes so far that, for example, Klaatsch can say, compared with all ideas that the human being has developed by the struggle for existence from higher mammalian forms during the ice age, this is a childish idea which could not at all be maintained today. Of course such an idea called childish by this researcher will still be represented everywhere in the popular literature, and still enough writers of this popular literature say that they state facts, while these are only hypotheses which fail compared with that what other researchers state as facts. That is why the scientific thinking completely leads out of what is often given even today as a scientific worldview.

How is the course of the scientific research from former times up to now? During the seventies one said: look at the higher mammalian forms, there you have a picture how the human being has looked in distant past. One says today, in these mammalian forms you have animal forms which have originated only from the fact that they have deviated completely from a primal human being, what cannot be found in palaeontology for which there is no outer evidence, but what can be constructed today only from that what is found by geology. Natural sciences themselves lead back to creations that do no longer exist today. Thus, the human being is connected in primeval times to forms that are surely different from that what one still believed before relatively short time that the human beings are descended from it.

This way shows that it must flow directly into that which spiritual science has to say about the origin of the human being. In what way does spiritual science differ from scientific-materialistic monism the question of the origin of the human being?

Spiritual science has to assume that the present human being goes back to a past that we are led to former embodiments at first. What lives today as mind or soul in the human being, we must look at this after that what has arisen in the last talks in such a way that it can have not only a life within the physical body in which it faces us in the sensory world at first, but that it can also have a life in the so-called disembodied state, so that the whole human life consists of the part, which is spent in the time from birth or conception to death, and of that part, which lasts from death to a new birth where the human being lives in a purely spiritual world and uses and transforms the forces that he has got in the physical body.

The human being then goes through a new birth to existence in such a way that he attains, indeed, the outer forms of his body from the line of heredity in such a way that that what is hereditary does not enclose the real human essence. Since this is in a spiritual world before the human being enters existence. In this spiritual world, he has equipped himself with corresponding forces from former lives, and he can experience plastic formations and transformations then by this spiritual essence, in so far as he has inherited forms as body forms and is composed of physical materials, that he is transformed that way and that he is organised in the first years of childhood individually, so that the body can become a useful tool for the spiritual-mental that enters him as something independent. Hence, we consider the spiritual-mental as something independent, as something first in spiritual science which works on the human being so that he takes over the material basic scaffolding of his figure from heredity, but that he works the subtler, more individual configuration into this according to the spiritual-mental conditions. But we do not see the spiritual-mental essence working on the human figure in such a way, as if it shapes the whole human being, but in such a way that within that physical body still so much mobility remains that the spiritual-mental essence can work into it.

If we trace back the human being to former times, we realise that the life in the spiritual is attached to the life in the sensory world between the last death and the birth of our present life but that then a previous life on earth is attached and then a spiritual life again and so on. Turning back with the means of spiritual research to the former existence of the human being, we realise that the embodiments stop once in this primal time, so to speak, that there the spiritual-mental essence of the human being existed but different from now where he enters the physical existence by birth, but came from the spiritual world also as now he also comes out if he combines with the conditions of heredity. However, we would realise that he came originally from the spiritual world in distant primeval times in such a way that he found earthly relations that were completely different from the present ones.

Spiritual science shows that this spiritual-mental found such earthly conditions in primeval times that at that time much more was to be transformed of that what was given as body to the human being as a spiritual-mental being. In the end, we come back to such primeval times in which the human spiritual-mental did not yet depend on finding a ready body in which it had only to form the subtler formations of the brain, of the glandular system et cetera. We come back to primeval times in which the spiritual-mental of the human being found such conditions that without the processes of the present heredity and reproduction the material conditions and principles of that time could be directly transformed by the spiritual. Thus we are led back not to a hypothetical form which should have had a sensory-physical existence once as Klaatsch assumes it for the time of the dragons, but we are led back in truth to a spiritual prototype.

In the first embodiment of the human being we have to see the directly formative working out of the physical body, and then under the advancing conditions of the earth the more solid formations of the human body were transferred, so to speak, more and more to heredity, and the possibility remained for this inner, weaker and weaker growing spiritual essence only to form within the line of heredity. That is why today the spiritual-mental only organises the subtler relations: the structures of the brain, of the blood circulation, of the glandular system. It finds the physical body given by heredity. But if we go back to the primeval times, we find there quite different conditions on earth and quite different conditions of the body in which the spiritual does not only transform the rest of the physical substances as it is the case today, but it formed the whole human being immediately from itself. In the spiritual-scientific sense the present human form crystallised from the spiritual as we can see a salt cube crystallising from a salt solution. As it is not necessary that the salt cubes which all resemble each other because of their inner structure are descended from just one, just as little it is necessary to remember that a bodily blood relationship exists with the animals if that what the human being has today in his forms, in his skeleton and in the construction of the other organs reminds of the relations and the functions of the animals which have similar forms. We have to lead back the similarity of the forms to the form principle that we can recognise even today as something immediately spiritual-mental. I have explained this in detail in my Occult Science. An Outline.

As spiritual science leads the human being to a spiritual prototype of the human being which is interspersed so strongly with forces that it still masters the matter, this idea should be presented. Besides, I wanted to show how natural sciences can only form the prototype to which they are led there, and which is not pithecoid from the hypothetical idea. But natural sciences still think that this prototype must have worked as a material being in primeval times. It has not worked as a material being in primeval times, just as little as today, for example, the sleeping human being adjusts certain conditions of production as a material being during the time from falling asleep up to awakening. While today the spiritual-mental works more during sleep than during the waking state, namely removes tiredness, we have to imagine that what is there creating in the human being what removes tiredness during sleep, so increased in primeval times that it could cause the forms of the whole human being. If then one asks himself, which sense does the whole evolution have, so one has to say, already the present human being shows not in daring hypotheses, but by a consideration without prejudice in what the sense of such a development is contained. If we look at the human being in his life how he remembers his childhood with his consciousness, the thread of memory breaks off once, and for the usual consciousness we can only hear from our parents, or from our brothers and sisters how we were there before this time, but we would have to set our origin much later. Did now the mental-spiritual not exist in these times that we cannot remember, in the hazy like sleeping life of the child? It existed; it was even stronger in the first years of childhood than later in relation to outer effectiveness.

Before the ego-consciousness appeared in the human being, this dreamlike-active human being worked just on the subtler formations of the brain and the physical body, and because it sent his forces into it, an inner human soul being with ego-consciousness did not yet come about. When then the human being had developed the subtler formations of his body from his soul, this force working on the human being from without transformed into a conscious inner soul life. That is why we see the creative power of the spiritual-mental becoming weaker and weaker for the outer figure, so that it can appear as consciousness. Hence, it is not absurd if spiritual science goes back in time and looks at the spiritual-mental in such a way that it created the human figure first, and then it has assumed shape that was kept by heredity through the generations. The spiritual-mental forces could withdraw to an inner life, to a human soul life becoming more and more conscious. Thus, this spiritual-mental essence of the human being has only become weak in truth with the outer creation, but that which it has lost and which it has delivered to heredity appeared in the forces of consciousness that develop in the cultural processes on and on.

Now it must interest how compared with this human creation one has to think the origin of the animal world. There I can say something only briefly that I have further explained in the Occult Science. One can say that the earthly conditions with which the human being had to familiarise himself developed sooner than the human body. The human being entered the sensory world from the supersensible world at a certain time, so that he as a purely spiritual prototype worked the spiritual-mental into the bodily so far that he could appear as a bodily being. We have to imagine that that into which he worked was quite different from the later forms of the body, namely flexible, plastic in itself.

The human being formed this plastic material in a time in which it was possible for the human forms, because the animal realm spiritual science has to assume that it formed in the sensory matter in a substantially earlier time that it could not wait, until the conditions had arisen which gave the human being his present form. The human being waited as it were, until the earth was ripe so that he could impress that in the plastic organic matter as the present form of the human body that was reflected in his spiritual. The animals attained the body forms earlier and under other conditions, and that caused—while with them the prototype is spiritual—that this spiritual-mental of the animals working in much narrower conditions appeared in other forms in the animals. Hence, we have to consider the animals as beings which the human being sent ahead as it were to the earthly existence and which we have to consider—because they did not embody themselves in the conditions in which the human being embodied himself—as embodied in old forms which were not adapted to the later conditions on earth.

If spiritual science wants to think strictly in the sense of natural sciences, it does not only want to think its logic completely in the sense of natural sciences, because you will have realised that the just done explanations are not only thought strictly scientifically, but that also the facts of natural sciences completely point to that what I have said today: that simply those forms which the naturalists imagine from the facts as material-sensory prototypes must be transformed into spiritual-mental forms which only led to the present human form because they have embodied themselves later in the earthly conditions than the animal forms did.

Nevertheless, natural sciences show their results not only with hypotheses, but also with experiments. Spiritual science does also not stay behind natural sciences in this respect. I have already pointed in previous talks to the fact that the human being can develop further in relation to his spiritual-mental, that he can work by intimate soul processes—meditation, concentration and the like—on his spiritual-mental in such a way that it becomes much stronger in itself than it is in the normal life. Today I can point only to the fact that the thoughts must be generated in the meditative life from human arbitrariness if they should educate the human being to a spiritual researcher, while all the other thoughts are formed from the surrounding relations. If he begins with full perseverance, dedicating himself to such a meditative life if he puts certain images, feelings, and will impulses consciously in the centre of his soul life, he can separate his spiritual-mental from the bodily. Then he can advance to an inner life, even if one laughs and mocks so much at this, where he knows: now I live in my spiritual-mental essence and I am directly connected by it with the spiritual world. I experience not by my senses or by the mind that is bound to the brain, but I experience a spiritual-mental human being in myself, who has emerged from his physical body, even from his cerebral instrument.

I have mentioned that the human being has the feeling in the first stadia of such an advance if he has not yet advanced far enough: now you experience an inner spiritual life, but you cannot transform it into concepts.—This is a transitional state that can seem rather doubtful to you. It is true, while you consider yourself, otherwise, as a reasonable person if you can form concepts of your experience, something is there now, if you cannot conceptualise the things, so that you cannot consider yourself as a reasonable person but as an idiot. You experience something, but you cannot understand it!

As strange as it sounds, you become a kind of idiot in a certain higher sense for a certain time. But if you then advance, you transform this spiritual-mental essence in such a way that it receives even stronger forces to take part consciously in that what the spiritual-mental essence does what is usually unaware. While you work in the first childhood unconsciously on your outer configuration, you notice now that the spiritual-mental essence is so strong that you create an organ now consciously, while you work on your cerebral organisation, so that you can understand what you could not understand before. The communicability of spiritual science is based on that. What you can behold in the first times of spiritual-scientific experience is so uncertain, so completely an experience in a new element of existence that it has no conceptual contours. However if it remained only in such a way, you would not be able to inform of spiritual science. You can inform of it, now you can lead down these experiences into your consciousness and can conceptualise them. However, you are able to do this only with the brain. Therefore, the spiritual researcher has to transform his brain consciously; that is why he feels his brain first like a block that he has to transform.

Thus, we can positively experience the work of the human being in this higher spiritual development out of his spiritual being as an experimental work on the organisation of the matter.—Higher spiritual knowledge proceeds always in such a way that the human spiritual life that exists only in the spiritual is worked into the matter. There we see the human soul, which becomes aware of itself on a certain step continuing the process that we see taking place at the beginning of the human development from the spiritual world, and then it points to that which the human being experiences as a spiritual researcher, to the spiritual origin of the human being. As the former states appear in memory to him in his everyday life, in the life between birth and death, so that he knows if he has become fifty years old what he has experienced at the age of twenty, thirty years et cetera, and his consciousness is extended backward, the human consciousness is extended by meditation and concentration backward beyond birth into regions which are completely hidden to us usually if we adhere only to the brain in the earthly-bodily.

There we have a matter that is still far from the today's consciousness for which an understanding will be there in relatively short time if civilisation has been fertilised by spiritual science. An area is touched in which the human consciousness crosses the border of the brain and the senses. We thereby attain an extension of our memories beyond the present life, an extension of the consciousness for mental and spiritual processes. Then, indeed, these mental and spiritual processes present themselves in such a way that one can say: one does no longer work only with logical conclusions as one does it in geology, palaeontology, comparative anatomy and other sciences, but one works with facts which face us spiritually like recollections of the former times of our earth days. The spiritual beholding increases. Then you experience that spiritual original state of your life on earth, while the spiritual-mental essence is developing, which is conjured up before the spiritual eye in which then not the forms of the beings are included as they are round us, but those beings that have not yet assumed forms, that look like crystals that have not yet assumed forms and are suddenly materialised.

Briefly, we learn to recognise what is in the human being, apart from the bodily formative forces, without considering the bodily which is hereditary. One gets to know him spiritual-mentally, and then we can imagine how the human being was in his place of origin when he worked himself formatively into the bodily and embodied himself in the sensory world the first time.

With it, I have stated a result which every human being can check if he uses the necessary perseverance and courage to such a self-experiment. If the human being experiences his spiritual-mental essence in himself, he does not experience, before he understands it, anything that faces him as something completely strange, although it is not born out of the sensory environment, but as something quite new. He feels, it is related to your whole innermost nature what you feel as the innermost impact; you yourself are this as something everlasting that forms the basis of any outer bodily formation as the first.

There one feels that one faces the whole human being now not with the senses, but spiritually. There we find a strange possibility of comparison with that what faces us in the everyday life. The spiritual researcher experiences that he cannot say, what I develop is connected with my brain or with my eyes et cetera, but he has to say, it is connected with the whole human being.—It is as if we consider a child in the usual life. There we see a child laughing and crying different from the adult human being. It is different, indeed. The child laughs and cries with the whole body. That what comes about with the adult only by the outflow of the lachrymal glands goes into the whole organism of the child. It feels shaken by what expresses itself in crying. The same applies to laughing: the child laughs with the whole body where maybe the adult turns up his mouth only.

The whole human being is seized at first by that what seizes the soul, and then only it seizes the lachrymal glands or the laughing muscles. The influence specialises in a particular organ. Pursue how you feel something like a tension in the breast with an emotion in a certain time of life, later in life this concentrates upon a quiet feeling in the larynx that the human being can notice if he pays attention to it. The spiritual-mental works its way out of the whole human being and then it specialises in single parts.

The spiritual researcher exactly experiences the same process. There he feels the second human being developing in himself. He feels that this inner human being works only to a lower degree on the arrangement of the organic than he has worked originally at the beginning of the earth evolution.

I have stated single facts which can confirm the assertion that still today the human being would not come—as natural sciences still believe—if he is led back to the original place of his earth existence, to an original life form, which is, indeed, different from the today's form, but it is still a sensory human form or animal form. However, we realise that we are led back to a spiritual-mental prototype and that generally, before the first embodiment was possible in a physical human form, the human being existed as a spiritual-mental being. The human being is also in this respect that being which creates itself from his innermost spiritual-mental essence and gives itself its forms after the conditions that it has in the spiritual-mental. However, the spiritual-mental is also for the human being in the past the original. The spirit is the actually creative, and later the material life appears in the outer world developed by the spirit.

Today it should concern only of showing you this special chapter about the origin of the human being back to the point of his development, when he not yet was a sensory but a spiritual-mental being. If natural sciences further pursue the ways that I have indicated today, they will meet with spiritual science. Someone who considers the matters without any prejudice has to say, it has only seemed, as if one can lead back the human being to animal original forms, as if one had to consider the spiritual-mental as an arrangement of physical forms. It is vice versa: that what one has believed that it was the result of the sensory turns out to be the original, the creative, and the sensory is a result. Everywhere the human being is led to the spiritual where he can perceive with the senses and think with the mind. If he recognises the eternity of the spirit, he feels protected in the spiritual-mental of the world that we must consider as everlasting.

Everything originates from the spirit! This is the knowledge of spiritual science. Because everything originates from the spirit, and the material existence is only a transitory state in which we should appropriate forces which we cannot appropriate somewhere else, we feel the material existence as a point of passage again to a spirit-filled life in future. As the earthly embodiments of the human being have started by the fact that he has arisen from a purely spiritual being, they will end if they have fulfilled their task for the human being: to give him that what impressed itself in the human being to take it with him into the spiritual world. As the human being returns after every death to the existence on earth to develop what he could not yet develop as we look back at a beginning of incarnation, we see approaching an end of incarnations in the future, but with it also the return of the human being to the spiritual world.

Everything originates from the spirit. The human soul lives in the spirit that feels powerful in it. It returns to the spirit if it has accomplished its goal on earth and has got what the bodily can give. From the spirit—through the matter—to the spirit! Spiritual science has to give the big important answer to the question of the origin and of the determination of the human being.

It is a prominent trait of the human being to want to orient himself in the human development to get a certain view of the position of his own personality within the present life. The human being has often to put questions to himself how the past was from which everything developed that surrounds us in the present, which life guilt we have incurred and which life work we have accepted, what according the course of the human development may originate from his desires and longings, from his hopes and ideals for the future. It is certainly healthy to put these questions. Since the human being differs thereby from the other, earthly beings that he recognises the position that he has got within the development not only as such from its conditions and from its causes, but that he can also influence it from the consciousness of his task. We realise this way that for the purposes of modern time the consideration of the human development accepts a form that starts from the mentioned viewpoints.

We realise, for example, that at the beginning of the modern cultural direction Lessing (Gotthold Ephraim L., 1729–1781) writes his Education of the Human Race as the ripest document of his mental development. He tries to show there that a certain continuous plan exists in the development of humanity. One can distinguish an old period in which humanity had to follow moral impulses and commandments which were given from without, while the continuous education by the spiritual-divine forces intends that humanity gets around more and more to grasping the good as an own impulse of its being to do the good from the mere concept—doing the good for the sake of the good.

We also realise how Lessing comes from such a consideration to the necessity to accept repeated lives on earth for the human soul because for him the human development is advancing. So that for him the question had to arise: if a human soul lives in a former period and takes up certain impulses during it, how does it comply with the sense of human development if this soul had died for the development forever when it dies? Only thereby he could connect a sense with the development while he said to himself, the soul returns repeatedly to the life on earth and in these lives, the soul is educated by the leading powers to the summit of development. This is Lessing's basic idea when he was stimulated to his Education of the Human Race. Then we see again how from a profound insight of nature and human being Lessing's successor, Herder (Johann Gottfried H., 1744–1803), tries to show humanity as a whole in his Ideas on the Philosophy of the History of Mankind (1784–1791) and to show how in certain times other factors have worked on the human being than in later times, so that Herder also realises a sensible plan in the development of humanity. Actually, the deeper human consideration of the following times has never again left the ideas that Lessing, Herder and others stimulated. But the trait of the nineteenth century which was only directed to the outer appearance also seized history, so that that what one has thought and reflected about the continuous plan of human development stayed more in the background with those who directed their attention upon the spiritual, while the official science of history was not courageous enough to investigating the real effective forces and factors in the human development.

Of course, spiritual science tries again to recognise the concrete, actual sense of human history. However, there one has to say that in various fields prejudices tower up repeatedly which are not due, indeed, to the present research results, but to the present thoughts about these research results. This happens in particular if one wants to investigate the big laws of human history and that what should arise as a force for the present and as hope and as ideals for the future. One likes very much to regard the nature of the human being as something that could have experienced no inner development in a certain respect, but that it has been, actually, always in such a way as it is today.

At most, one admits that the present human being has experienced a development his animal nature. One traces back them either really up to those prehistoric men whom we have dug out of prehistoric graves or other places of finding, who show less perfect figures than the civilised humans of today who show such only with the outer physical form. One can trace back the descent of the human being hypothetically even further and believes to have something in any animal form from which the human being could have developed. The fact that a sensible consideration of the usual history already shows that the human soul life has changed since millenniums very much, one wants to pay little attention to it in the present, and one hardly admits that three, four, five millenniums before our calendar the whole spiritual condition was quite different from that in the present. One has to mention one fact only at first that should just strike those who academically consider the development of the human soul whose basic significance one does not properly appreciate.

Today one speaks of the fact that the human being has to think logically that he has to connect his concepts, his mental pictures logically with each other, nay that he can only judge in logical way. With it one proves that one has the view that the formation of mental pictures is subjected to inner logical laws, and that one can reach truth as it were only by logic. But now one also knows from the historical development that the Greek philosopher Aristotle founded this logic as science only few centuries before our calendar.

One may say: if one really knows the spiritual development of humanity, one has also to realise that the human being became aware of the logical laws, actually, only after the time when the Greek philosopher Aristotle had brought these laws into a certain form. Would it not be a matter of course and appropriate that one thinks about such a fact and asks himself, how does it happen that the thinking about logical laws has come into the human development only in a certain age?—If one thought appropriately about this fact, one would come to the result which absolutely corresponds to truth that the human beings have developed their consciousness relatively late in such a way that they could realise the logical laws in their souls. So the logic originated only in a certain time because before the whole constitution of the human soul was in such a way that it could not become aware of the logical laws. Humanity has developed only gradually to logical thinking, has developed towards the Greek-Roman age.

However, the present human being has if he does not want to get involved with the deeper results of spiritual research, only one possibility to gain a mental picture of that which is, actually, a consciousness that is not filled with logic laws. If the human being wants to form a mental picture of a pre-logical consciousness by the outer materialistic observation of nature, it can happen only in such a way that he turns to the instincts of the animals.

What can he learn from these instincts of the animals? I have repeatedly drawn your attention to the fact that it would be quite impossible to speak of the animal instincts in such a way as if in the life and activity of the animal realm logic, inner reasonableness did not exist. Everything that happens in the life of the animal realm makes us aware of this reasonableness. We see that insects live under certain conditions that make it to them impossible to get to know the circumstances under which their descendants have to develop in the first time of their existence. Although the full-grown insect lives in quite different conditions than the caterpillar needs them, still, we realise that the insect lays its eggs with big wisdom where then the hatching caterpillar finds the proper conditions. There we see that reason really works in it. Everywhere we see reason and logic in the realm of animals prevailing with which we cannot speak of the fact that they have something of it in their consciousness. If we see the miraculous dens of the beavers and other performances of the animals, if we look at the whole instinctive life of the animals and see, for example, that animals feel treacherous weather, earthquakes, volcano eruptions and other elementary events partly long ahead and behave according to them—but this is only a metaphor, because it happens by the reason prevailing in the animals that they “foresee” such things—we have to say, the instinctive life of the animals shows that the animals are enmeshed in a kind of logic and reason that everywhere objective reasonableness and objective laws interweave the environment.

Thus, the human being can get an idea how that what happens by him can still happen in another way. It needs not only to happen beccause the human being if he wants to do this or that says to himself, this is my goal, it has to look that way, and the tools have to look that way. But something similar can develop without doing these conscious considerations out of other forms of consciousness, out of subconscious forms in the world coherence as human conscious reasonableness develops in the human being. Spiritual science now points to the fact that our kind of reasonableness has developed only gradually that by no means the human being was an animal being with only animal instincts before but a being which had a form of consciousness different from the present logical consciousness but also different from the animal instinct. If you look at this what I have already said here about the possibility to develop slumbering forces of the human soul and about a kind of clairvoyant consciousness, then we can turn our view to the possibility to educate ourselves to forms of consciousness different from the today's only logical consciousness that sets itself only reasonable goals.

I have drawn your attention to the fact that by meditation and concentration someone who wants to become a spiritual researcher and wants to behold deeper into the undergrounds of the soul has to attain another consciousness, so that spiritual research aims at another kind of consciousness that is developed educationally from the present form. Such a clairvoyant consciousness can perceive in the spiritual world independently from the body and its senses. It becomes also apparent that in former times humanity had a form of consciousness different from the present logical, intellectual one. Our present consciousness has only developed since the Greek-Roman age. The human being had to be educated for it at first. We have now exceeded the Greek-Roman period, and today spiritual-scientific research shows that the form of our consciousness can be further developed to higher forms. The hypothetical idea may arise from it at first that that consciousness which Aristotle brought as it were in laws has developed again from other forms of consciousness, so that we would discover other forms of consciousness, of the soul life going back in human history.

Those who believe to stand on the firm ground of science, but stand only on their own prejudices cannot yet search such different forms of the soul life. Since they cannot imagine that at the starting point of humanity, with the primeval human beings a consciousness existed different from the instinctive consciousness like that of the present animals. But if we trace back the development of humanity not only up to a point where the human being would have been an animal and would have developed animal forms only, but if we trace back him to that point where he existed only as a wholly spiritual being, then one can no longer look for such forms of consciousness which are similar only to the animal instinct. Then we come to such forms of consciousness that correspond to an old human form that we have to imagine more and more as a spiritual-mental one, the further we go back. So that we have to imagine the human development in such a way that also the soul life was involved more and more in the material. Thus, we have to ascend in the development of humanity to forms of consciousness that correspond to a more spiritual inwardness.

Now not only the facts of spiritual research but also the outer facts show that we get to another kind of soul-life the farther we go back, even to prehistorical times explorable in historical way as it were. We do no longer find such mental pictures as we develop them today, by which we reflect the outside world if we go back beyond the Greek-Roman age. Not without good reason the Western historical philosophers have always begun their histories of philosophy with Thales five to six centuries before the Christian calendar because they recognised that one can generally only speak of a reasonable, logical reflection of the world. Only our present has managed to break this. Today where one measures everything with the same yardstick, one also wants to begin the history of philosophy far in the oriental thinking not paying attention to the fact that the soul conditions of experiencing the things was quite different within the pre-Greek cultures than it has become later from the Greek culture on. It needs the superficiality of the “profound” beholders of the East, for example, of Deußen (Paul D., 1845–1919, German Orientalist and Sanskrit scholar) to lead the history of philosophy beyond Thales. This can happen only if one has no notion of the development of the human soul, and that the oriental spiritual life has contents different from that what begins from the Greek-Roman age on for the inner life of human history. If we examine what faces us in ancient times, we have to say, the human being felt pressured more or less into thinking vividly about the world, not in the intellectual forms in which we live today, but in thought structures facing us as myths. That faces us as Imaginations what the human being takes up in his soul to get any explanation of the world. Images are contained in the myths. The strange appears that we find images on the bottom of all cultures very soon if we go back to the pre-Greek times, and the farther we go back, the more a kind of Imaginative worldview faces us.

Someone attains a kind of Imaginative knowledge as the first level of clairvoyant knowledge who makes his soul an instrument of spiritual research by that self-education which I have characterised in my book How Does One Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds? Someone who opens himself to this Imaginative knowledge which presents itself again in a kind of images in his soul, says to himself, if I compare this Imaginative knowledge to the miraculous imaginations of the Greek and pre-Greek myths, something faces me that, on the one side, is the same or similar, but, on the other side, is totally different.

If the modern spiritual researcher rises to Imagination, he keeps his logical thinking in his Imaginations that reflect the spiritual processes that are behind the sensory phenomena, he keeps it and aims almost at the logical thinking.

That means that he brings all connections of reason, the whole character of the present consciousness into it and an Imaginative knowledge would not be right which could not give some indication in what way the images are connected, in what way everything forms a whole within the Imaginative world. Just in this respect, I made a rather strange experience quite recently. In my book Occult Science. An Outline. you find the attempt to show not only the human development on earth Imaginatively, but also the former embodiments of our earth in other, preceding heavenly bodies. You find everything that was shown in this respect represented in such a way that it corresponds to the logical consciousness and the facts of sensory life. Now a theologian who had read this book said to me once, what I have read there is absolutely logical and rational, so that one could deign to remember that the author got around to writing this book completely out of the today's cultural life only by logical conclusions.—This made me wonder and I said to myself, then the whole representation has not come about maybe by clairvoyance but by mere logic.—He said this, although he had to admit that he could not find by his own logic what is given in this book as knowledge. One meets this fact often today that such representations are put up by mere logic, even if the results are pieced together from trains of thought to make them comprehensible. However, everything that you read in the Occult Science is not found by logical conclusions. It is hard to find these matters by logic. However, after they have been found, they are interwoven with logic. They are found of course also not without logic, but not at all on the way of logical conclusion, everything does absolutely correspond to Imaginative knowledge.

I have given this as an example what one can aim at by self-education of the present consciousness as a kind of Imaginative knowledge that can lead us to the undergrounds of the things. If we compare such a knowledge to myths and legends, we have found that it is important to recognise these clairvoyant experiences that the human beings had in the undergrounds of natural existence. However, it was necessary that they were cleverer than the human beings of the logical epoch were to be able to express what they investigated by such tremendous images. Since compared with some myths of nature or creation is that what our modern science is often only bungle and dilettantism, because an Egyptian or Babylonian myth about the work of good and evil outranks the modern monistic interpretation of the world. One feels in the thoughts of those human beings that they lived together with the forces of nature that the modern human being visualises laboriously in mental pictures. However, one realises that neither mind nor usual imagination but Imagination formed the myths, as they appear great and full of sap evenly in a certain respect with all peoples on earth. Only not that Imagination about which we talk spiritual-scientifically but an Imagination that was still free of the intellectual element. It was an original clairvoyant, not yet completed Imagination, no mere imagination. It did not resemble something animal even if it was dark and dreamlike, but it was not yet impregnated with logical thinking. Thus, we see the peoples intimately connected with that what prevails in the depths of the beings and expressing the immediate co-operation with the everlasting existence without applying logic in the great tremendous pictures of the myths. That is not academic in the modern sense, but it was the science of ancient times.

In this sense, we come to the rise of our present intellectual human attitude in the Greek-Roman culture. We see another kind of soul life preceding it which—because it was not yet logical because it was still dreamlike, but at the same time was more intimately connected with the spiritual basic facts of any working—could now vividly express this working. Hence, one can maybe find no other word that characterises the being of the immediately preceding culture of the Egyptians or Chaldeans than with the term culture of revelation. Against it, we can characterise the Greek-Roman culture in such a way that it experiences a kind of gradual dusk of the old culture of revelation. Indeed, in the older time of the Greeks, the revelations still arose vividly from the things, but then, in particular with Socrates, the intellectual culture dawned, and those things gradually disappeared which originated from the old culture of revelation, so that the human being made that the contents of his soul life which presents itself to him by his senses.

Before the human being had looked at the things, so that he saw the rushing spring that he saw what happened in wood and meadow. Everywhere he turned his glance to the things, but from every plant something emerged that spoke spiritually to him like a revelation. He formed this then in the images, for example, of the nymphs et cetera. What worked in the depths of the things what was shown to the old dreamlike clairvoyant consciousness disappeared gradually and a full, wholehearted recognition of that what the human being perceived with his senses replaced it. The culture of perception appeared where the human being positioned himself with that what he is and what he perceived in the world. He grew fond of it because of his whole physical organisation in such a way that Hellenism was like penetrated by the saying which is delivered to us by a great Greek who says there, I prefer to be a beggar on earth than a king in the realm of shades.

In the old culture of revelation, one could not have said this way. This was only possible when the world had advanced up to the culture of perception, to that what the senses see and what the intellect develops on basis of the senses as an intellectual view, because one only knew that behind the sensory world a spiritual world exists. One could speak only that way after this spiritual world had disappeared which is behind the sensory world.

One also felt this dawning of a quite new age. In the Greek-Roman epoch one felt the impulse that prompted the human being to produce an intellectual culture from himself.

Once one felt secure in a being of revelation to which one felt spiritually related. But now one felt that one entered into a new element where one was on his own. For that who observes the finer nuances of historical development this trait becomes especially clear. It becomes even clearer if we think that, indeed, such a life in a culture of revelation showed to the human being that he was secure as a spiritual being within the spiritual world, which he perceived clairvoyantly, but that at the same time he was less aware of his ego. Only a people of the culture of perception could completely shift for its own personality. Hence, in the Greek-Roman age with the possibility of processing the perception internally with this intellectual element, the reflection of the human being about his ego arises at the same time, which at first one experienced only in the mind as a concept, as an idea, as something invisible within the usual reality. Hence, one less appreciated the ego in the ancient times. Someone who investigates the ancient cultures deeper always recognises that the old myths and legends speak of gods, and if the human being did his work, he was aware that a god worked with this activity, another god with that activity, and motivates him.—The human being felt penetrated with spirit, but not yet with an ego. The human being attains the ego-consciousness only by the intellectual culture.

Even in the language development, we can prove that something gradually appeared that did not exist in the cultures of revelation where the human being considered himself as a vessel of the gods. The Greek had to experience the big tragedy at first that his view darkens and he had to say to himself, this is the tragic. I prefer to be a beggar on earth than a king in the other world that is uncertain to me.—However, it has become uncertain only in the Greek-Roman age. Because still in this strange age the old mysteries played a role, one could think about this transition of the soul still mythically while a quite new consciousness came into being.

What would have the human being said who already thought quite intellectually at that time if he had turned his glance to this important point of human history where the soul was torn out from the old culture of revelation to be educated to the ego-consciousness? He would have said to himself, in ancient times the human being was in the body in such a way that he beheld the spiritual-mental everywhere.—He did not behold an ego in this spiritual-mental, but he beheld the spiritual beings outranking him and would have said to himself, they live in my actions; they live in my perception, in my life, everywhere.—Now, the human being turned his glance to the world, and asked himself in this time of transition, “who I am?” The answer to this question fulfilled him with shudder, so that he had to say to himself, I do no longer receive the answer that gods are penetrating me, but I feel penetrated with an isolated ego.

A human being would have said this to himself who was penetrated with the intellectual consciousness. However, someone who would still have brought over something from former times who would have imagined from the point of view of the ancient consciousness would have said, the river god Cephissus and a nymph had a son, called Narcissus. This appears in the human soul as a picture. Narcissus saw himself in a spring in the Mount Helicon. One had forecast to him that he must die when he sees himself. That means, the human ego loses its connection with the divine when he realises his connection with the divine. There Narcissus sees himself and is condemned with it to death. The transition of the old culture of revelation is described to that of perception only in another way.

Somebody who would have imagined the transition to the new consciousness still in the way of the old consciousness would have said to himself, if the human being once looked at the environment, he beheld spiritual-divine forces everywhere, indeed, with his old Imaginative view. This old Imaginative consciousness gradually disappeared, and what last remained, actually, were the worst forces of the spiritual, spiritual beings that worked outdoors. The human being who imagined the new in the old kind became aware of them as Gorgons. There the new human being, Perseus, rises, mutilates the Gorgons, the Medusa, that means that consciousness which existed like the last rest, shown as Medusa's head with poisonous snakes in place of hair. Then it is shown how from the mutilated Medusa two beings originate: Chrysaor and Pegasus.

I am no friend of the allegorical-symbolic interpretation of myths. I mean it—also not in the sense of an allegorical-symbolic interpretation—in such a way that someone who has experienced the rise of the new to which humanity should develop with the old consciousness has still clairvoyantly beheld the birth of Chrysaor and Pegasus by Medusa. What did he behold? Chrysaor is the image that the human being received as an instalment for the lost old clairvoyance. Pegasus is the personification of imagination. Since the imagination is caused because the old Imagination disappeared, and the human beings do no longer have the power to enter the new epoch with a force of the old consciousness. They replace the old Imagination which beheld the spiritual reality by something that does not go into the spiritual reality but into the everlasting working of the human soul and that wants to show the new constitution of the human soul. Pegasus is nothing but the ego-culture. This develops further. Hence, we hear how that what has led to the ego-culture, Chrysaor, marries Kallirrhoe. Geryoneus originated, the modern intellectual culture of which the Greek felt that it led the human being from the old clairvoyant culture, but that it had to do this, because he would never have been able to attain the self-consciousness otherwise. Again the figure of Chrysaor has something tragic in itself, it characterises what the intellectual culture experiences. Someone who felt this the deepest, the poet Robert Hamerling (1830–1889), said about this intellectual culture, we see the conscious intellectual culture developing in the course of the human evolution from the ancient unconscious mythical culture. However, this culture leads like every development to its death. If the mere intellectual culture advanced in its way only—Hamerling and everybody who is able to assess the peculiar intellectual culture—recognises that it would dry out, would extinguish any liveliness and energy.

While spiritual science draws the attention to the fact that the intellectual culture must not remain an intellectual culture, it shows that humanity had to get necessarily to the intellectual culture to develop the ego-consciousness, but that it can get again to something that can be more than an intellectual culture. What does the intellectual culture give to the human being? It gives a picture of the world. What does the human being care about today in particular? Take the highest ideal which people have in mind that the concepts do not all deviate from the outer reality. They call everything impossible that does not comply immediately with the sensory-material reality. However, for spiritual research the intellectual culture is not only something that can depict reality but something that can educate the soul that brings up the forces of the soul. The humanity of the future will thereby get again to an Imaginative culture by which it is connected with the spiritual backgrounds of the things.

Thus, the intellectual culture is the necessary element to form the human ego in the course of human history. We see that the old clairvoyance had to be blunted by the intellectual culture, so that the ego flashes and can settle in those incarnations which the soul had in the Greek-Roman culture, and which it has and will still have for some time. Then we realise how in the future a new Imaginative culture is kindled with which humanity again is taken up in the spirit and in the spiritual life. Thus, the present is connected with the past, and the present teaches us what has to develop for the future. The consciousness of this transformation of the consciousness faces us greatly at a place of human history. However, I would like before to draw your attention still to the fact that with the old culture of revelation also a certain epoch of humanity was reached. The culture of revelation is completely penetrated with an old Imaginative life. If we went back even farther, we would meet an old culture which points everywhere in the Near East not to the culture which is described in history as the Persian one, but to a much older one from which the Persian culture originated. This older culture for their part followed again the ancient Indian culture. That is why we find the ancient Persian and the ancient Indian cultures as the precursors of the culture of revelation.

If we survey these cultures, we find the language that had arisen from the spiritual, but from the not yet conscious spiritual that is not penetrated with reason and logic. As even today the child learns speaking, before it learns thinking, humanity learnt speaking before thinking. From the deep undergrounds of the Imaginative consciousness, not from the animal instincts, a language developed from a clairvoyant consciousness that was still a higher one than the revelation consciousness of the ancient Egyptian culture. Beyond the ancient Indian culture the element of language developed. The language is a pre-conscious creation of the human mind. This points back to even older times in which the language gradually developed from a still subconscious spiritual activity.

Then we see that ancient Indian culture maturing which we admire just because we can call it a culture of unity in the best sense of the word. This is not the culture of the Vedas. These are an echo of the real ancient Indian culture only and originated not much longer before our Christian calendar than we live today after its beginning. One may characterise this ancient Indian culture while one says, the ancient Indian did not yet generally feel the difference of the material and the spiritual when he looked at nature. He did not yet see the spiritual separated from the material, he did not see at all the colours and the forms as we do today, but for him the spiritual bordered directly on the material. He saw the spirit as real as he saw the outer material colours: a culture of unity. He still saw the spiritual just as the material.

Hence, he felt the supreme spirit everywhere in the things that one later called Brahman, the world soul that one felt prevailing everywhere. However, this culture, which faces us in primeval times as a starting point of human history, did not enable the human being to be active in the material, to develop his forces in the material really. Hence, in the north in the area of the later Persian empire another culture spread out which was completely penetrated by the attitude that the human being belongs, indeed, to the spiritual world, but has to work on the material here on earth.

The ancient Persian people were a diligent working people compared to the ancient Indian people. They wanted to combine with the spiritual forces to impress the spirit in the material configuration of the earth by own power and work. Hence, the Persian felt united with his god of light and said, he penetrates me, because the human being lost the connection with the divine only in the time of the culture of perception, in the Greek-Roman epoch. The spirit of light, Ahura Mazdao, lived in the ancient Persian. Against it, he considered that which he had to overcome as the resisting matter, as interspersed with the forces of opposition, Ahriman, the dark spirit. Thus before the revelation culture that is connected with the Persian which we can call the culture of Mithra enthusiasm. We can imagine Ahura Mazdao who is symbolised by the sun in the following way: while later the human being still felt spirit-filled, and even later ego-filled, an enthusiasm in the spirit existed in these ancient Persian times, really an existence in God and a working of God by the human being. The ancient Ahura Mazdao culture was an enthusiastic culture preceding the culture of revelation.

One can observe such a thing just by spiritual science wonderfully as the poet especially feels, for example, when Robert Hamerling imagines something similar at the end of his writing The Atomism of the Will. He does not yet recognise spiritual-scientifically but with elementary intuitions that humanity has developed from an elementary connection with the spiritual forces of nature, that humanity formed language and myths on this elementary level. However, the intellectual culture is destined to lead the human being to a point where he completely realises his ego, his central spiritual-mental essence.

Another culture pointed to that magnificently. At that time, one pointed to it when one knew prophetically: a time comes, when that lives consciously in the human being—but it develops only in his innermost core—what lives and weaves in the world as the highest spiritual-divine. However, this time must be expected, it will come. Then something enters in the human being that penetrates his core spiritually. The spiritual forces approach as it were to prepare this impetus of the human ego. However, we are not yet allowed to speak of that now which still exists in the human being in such a way, as if the highest divine-spiritual already penetrates him. The divine is still unpronounceable. The ancient Hebrew culture felt that way; it felt the ego-culture, the intellectual culture approaching, while it possibly said to itself, the God who lives in the human soul can be characterised only with an unpronounceable name.—Hence, their view of the unpronounceable name of Jahveh. Jahveh or Jehovah is even a substitute with the unpronounceable name of the divine, because what was composed with these letters, indeed, is not to be vocalised, is not to be pronounced, because as soon as one pronounces it, it becomes something different from that what develops only in future as the spiritual being of the human being. The human being had to descend to the sensory-material world in the course of development, whereas he rises to the spiritual again in future times.

Then the Christian culture entered with necessity into that age which has produced the ego-culture. It regards the Christ impulse as that by which the human ego receives the impulse to settle in the spiritual in future again as the human being has once descended from the spiritual. Someone who can realise why Plato, Socrates and others were possible only in Greece, and why at that time the ego-consciousness emerged in a determining point, also understands why the Mystery of Golgotha had to take place just in the Greek-Roman culture as the main focus of the whole human development. Only someone who does not think about these connections and does not know what human consciousness means and how it changes can also not realise how the Christ impulse—characterised from another viewpoint in the previous talk—positions itself in the course of human development from the past through the present to the future. Just in the ancient Hebrew culture, the being of that appears what appears in the human ego. Now one can go into the details if one surveys history that way. Philosophers often stated that the Greeks said, any philosophy begins with marvelling.

Yes, it has to begin with the astonishment, as well as it has appeared in Greece. We can prove this if we look at history and at present in the right light. There something of the old clairvoyant consciousness has remained that does no longer work in such a way as it worked once. This is the dream. The dream is the last, decadent heirloom of the old clairvoyance, because already the conditions of the ego-consciousness work on it. What does the dream lack? Pursue the visions how they surge up and down, you will realise that one thing is absent. We would never accept the way they come and go in the awake consciousness. Why? Because the human being cannot be astonished in the dream, because astonishment appears only with the ego-consciousness in the culture of perception, and because something is contained in the dream that comes from times without ego-consciousness. The Greeks gave what appears as an ego-worldview with a miraculous characteristic saying, it begins with marvelling. However, the dream still lacks another thing. While dreaming we can do the most unbelievable things, and never conscience torments us. Conscience belongs to the ego-consciousness. It appeared only when the ego-consciousness developed. One can prove this, while one compares, for example, the dramas of Aeschylus and Euripides. With Aeschylus there is never talk of conscience, but with Euripides the conscience already plays a role. Conscience appears together with the ego-consciousness in the human development, and the dream lacks conscience, it is only an heirloom of the old clairvoyant consciousness.

We realise, while human history changed into the present, how from the old clairvoyant consciousness—from which language and myths have arisen—the intellectual consciousness gradually develops which is now at a climax of its development.

That is why spiritual science appears anticipating the necessary forces for the future in our time. It has to point to the fact that humanity has not to die away as awfully as Robert Hamerling may show the killing of a mere intellectual culture, but that the intellectual culture opens a new way of familiarising ourselves again with the spirit. Spiritual science knows what a poet and philosopher of modern time expresses so wonderfully at the end of his work where he pronounces his pain about the intellectual culture that has darkened the old elementary being together with the world undergrounds, but let the ego arise. There the poet says, “The divine kingdom, the golden age that is set in the legends at the world end to be aimed at, only means the withdrawal of any life into the spirit that can be also carried out individually.” Thus, a work of Robert Hamerling closes in hope for the future that any life develops back to the spirit as any human life arises from the spirit. Past, present, and future move together, so that the ego-consciousness is in the middle, in the present, which he did not have before. However, he will keep this ego-consciousness as an heirloom and take it with him into spiritual heights, so that we can speak again of a spiritual age of humanity. No oppressive future ideal arises if we understand human history spiritual-scientifically. How are we put in life that often is so full of suffering and pains how can we relate to the world goals in our ideas? We can answer this big human question in such a way in particular from spiritual science with certainty which gives us vitality and confidence for all human future at the same time, as the poet about whom I have just spoken answers it anticipating and with imagination.

In 1856, he inserted nice words in his Venus in Exile that touch past, present, and future of humanity, which, indeed, he did not yet speak out of the consciousness of spiritual science. But that what the human soul expected and is renewed later in another form faces us in the old myths and legends so wonderfully. What spiritual science can say reasonably, the poetic mind expressed it in an anticipating way:

Why did I throw myself in the abyss of earthly being,
Threatened by grief and death's fury,
Why do I float in the sea of coloured appearance,
Why do I swim through waves of pain to the goal?
I do not know it. One thing is only certain to me:
In my deepest inside the voice sounds
That consents joyfully to the lot of life
And shoulders this earthly destiny.
(Literal translation)

There are people who regard the deed of Copernicus as the biggest of the cultural revolutions which humanity has ever experienced as far as the historical memory reaches. One has to admit that the impression and the influence of this spiritual revolution was so significant for any outer thinking of the human beings that, indeed, hardly something more effective can be compared with it. One can bring to mind also easily what it had to mean to the world of the sixteenth century, the earth on which one believed to stand firmly resting in the universe, not only to have to retrain the relation of the own residential place, of this planet, of the sun, of the whole universe. The human beings literally lost the ground of their view. What they had regarded as firm up to then that the sun and the whole starry heaven circles around this firm earthly residential place, and everything that is spread out in space exists only because of this earthly residential place, one had now to assume that the earth is something that hurries with big speed through the cosmic space. They had to imagine the sun as something that does not move in relation to the earth and the earth even as something moving.

Even if the time is relatively short, since this spiritual wave descended upon humanity, one does not at all realise today, which change of thinking was necessary to submit to the new way of thinking in this area. But it is also necessary to realise that hardly any idea of humanity seized the whole human education and culture in such relatively short time and settled down that we have to think today that the human being has to learn the Copernican world system as one of the most elementary teachings and knowledge already as a child at school. If one looks at its significance and effectiveness, it becomes twice interesting to ask oneself: how does this progress position itself generally in the whole development of the human spirit?

In the last talk, I have spoken about Human History, Present, and Future in the Light of Spiritual Science. What appeared to us as the biggest event of human development presents itself just in a nice special case if we look at the action of Copernicus. What happened, actually, at that time in the sixteenth century when already after the death of Copernicus his great work On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres appeared before the educated world? Copernicus had yet believed that it complied with his position as a Catholic canon so that he dedicated it to the pope, and was, still, on the index of the forbidden books of the Catholic Church up to 1821.

Only from the whole attitude of his time one can understand the action of Copernicus, actually, only if one takes the fact into account that in the centuries up to the appearance of Copernicus in the cultural life, Aristotelism prevailed in science. Since those medieval thinkers and researchers who preceded Copernicus stood on the ground of that what Aristoteles had produced as a scientific spirit centuries before the Christian calendar. As far as these philosophers and researchers of the Middle Ages were Christian, they connected the Christian doctrines harmoniously with that what they had taken up as a scientific way of thinking from Aristotle.

The teaching of Copernicus is a break in a certain respect, one would have to say, not with the teaching of Aristotle, probably, but with that what had arisen from Aristotle by the Christian researchers. These called Aristotle a precursor of the Lord, of Christ the things of the natural world order. For them the whole worldview disintegrated into two parts: in a part which could originate only from the Christian revelation, from the tradition of the scriptures. This part dealt with that what is generally inaccessible to the human reason but only to faith. They took the second part of their worldview from Aristotle, and they penetrated everything with Aristotelian attitude that the human being can attain by research and science. If one sees Aristotle having an continuous effect on the intellectual culture of the Middle Ages that way, and if one sees him then replaced by Copernicus and his great successors Kepler, Galilei, Giordano Bruno and others, then one has to ask oneself, how was the original Aristotle, and how was his teaching which the Christian scholars of the Middle Ages regarded as Aristotelian?

If one becomes engrossed in the comprehensive, magnificent work of Aristotle, one realises that Aristoteles has summarised the reflections of the preceding culture epochs. But they face us with Aristotle in a strange way. Of course, in this context I cannot dwell on the teachings of Aristotle, I would like to draw your attention only to one thing that is necessary just for spiritual science to understand the action of Copernicus and the character of his age.

With Aristotle, you find that logically and reasonably processed and brought in ideas what he had taken over from old times. If you only wanted to refer to that which his reason could understand, we would realise that the ideas of human reason cannot enclose everything that we find in the teachings of Aristotle. There we find the idea that universe and nature are ensouled, are spirit-filled. He pronounces distinctly that not only the human physical body, but also the spiritual-mental of the human being are born out of the universe. The human body because the matter is spread out in the universe. But the spiritual-mental has arisen from the universe because he imagines the universe as spirit-filled, as ensouled. What we see in the stars is for Aristotle not only an accumulation of matter, but also the material embodiment of a soul being, and the passage of a star through the universe is for him not only the result of mere mechanical or physical forces, but also the expression of the will of the star's spirit or the star's soul.

If one goes deeper in detail, one everywhere finds something quite peculiar shining through. With his wholly logical, abstract explanations, one finds an old knowledge shining through which was still delivered to the Greeks, and which Aristotle brought in rational ideas. One can understand Aristotle only properly if one takes that as a basis, which I have said in the last talk, the whole human development proceeded in such a way that humanity originated from a consciousness different from the present one which is organised mainly to the intellect.—Against it there was on the bottom of every human soul a kind of innate clairvoyance in olden times which we can achieve by instruction today as I have explained it in the book How Does One Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds

Humanity has developed from this clairvoyant knowledge which existed in ancient times and which became weaker and weaker in the course of human development. Humanity could behold in that which is deeper in the things than that which only the senses and the reason can understand. Everywhere one finds an original knowledge hidden on the bottom of human cultures, a knowledge by Intuition, Inspiration, and Imagination. But this original knowledge had to get lost gradually, because only on this condition humanity could develop the intellectual culture.

The main concern of scientificity and scientific worldviews could develop only because the old hazy clairvoyant knowledge gradually changed into our knowledge. Since the old clairvoyant consciousness lacked our logical thinking completely. What one knew at that time what the originally clairvoyant human soul gained was continued up to the Greek times. This old knowledge of humanity still shines strangely through with Plato, the teacher of Aristotle. We find this old knowledge in the form as the modern human being can no longer attain it for himself, for example, in the Oriental cultures, mainly in the ancient Indian culture. It is interesting to realise that in the Indian culture from the ancient culture of humanity, which was able to behold in the spiritual world, something similar originates as we find it with Aristotle. In the Indian culture something arises at last that the human beings gained as it were by the education for millenniums, by the internalisation up to the logical thinking which has now to get to a world explanation without clairvoyance purely by itself. We realise that this old culture maintains its knowledge, but educates the soul in such a way that that which is delivered is grasped in logical, reasonable ideas. With the Indian culture, we see the interesting fact that the humanity of the East stops on that level beyond which it does not get, a level that resulted since centuries before our Christian calendar.

With Aristotle, we see that the logical culture, the intellectual culture assuming another character while it develops from the old clairvoyant knowledge. We realise that still the teaching of the ensoulment of the world sounds through. But while humanity develops from the old clairvoyance the culture of the thinking, the logic arises with Aristotle as a kind of separate science that can become now again the instrument of a quite different disposed research.

If we compare Aristotle and the Indian culture, we have to say: the Indian culture comes to a dead point, it comes as it were to a dead end where the thought always when it wants to recognise something positive has to turn back to the ancient culture and its clairvoyant results.

Against it, with Aristotle we see the ancient culture ending, indeed, that, but the thought is so maintained that it can seize something else. One does not understand Aristotle properly if one does not see his whole philosophy related to his psychology. Since for Aristoteles it would be absurd that the human soul was only a function, a result of the activity of the human body. He was clear in his mind that the physical body is gifted if the human being enters the world directly from the spiritual world with the spiritual-mental essence. He would never have believed that the human being arises only from heredity, but he derived the spiritual-mental from that what he called the world of God from which he let the most significant inner core of the soul arise.

Just as little, Aristotle let the spiritual-mental essence of the human being stop at death, but he was clear in his mind that that what lives in us and works and uses the body as tool lives on after death. However, he was also clear in his mind that the physical life is by no means superfluous or useless, but that the soul must submerge necessarily in the physical life because it can only there attain that what it has to bring into the spiritual world after death. It is interesting how Aristoteles imagined the destiny of the human soul core as bound to the destiny of the life, which it experienced here between birth and death. He lets it be bound to the life on earth so that the soul relieved of its body lives on after death in the spiritual world, but has to look back at a world in which it was. While it turns the spiritual view down, it sees its former physical body. It realises the good or bad, nice or ugly, clever or silly actions, sensations, or thoughts he had in life. Thus the soul is bound in this retrospect of the physical life to this view, while that what of it lives in the spiritual world is dependent from its corporeality.

There Aristotle had the sombre idea that the soul experiences for all eternity what it has—bound to the physical body—to experience. Since Aristotle was too far away from the original, human culture that still knew something of repeated lives on earth. That is why he could not show how the soul appears after death in a new human body again and uses the sight of its last life on earth during its existence in the spiritual world so that it transforms the experiences of the previous life on earth and uses them as an opportunity to compensate in a new life on earth what it did wrongly or imperfectly. Concerning the imperfect the only consolation is that the soul gets a new stimulus to make the defects more perfect in the next life. Aristotle did not know this because he did not recognise that at his time the human culture had come to that point where the human being did research by the instrument of the brain that exists only between birth and death. Only that way Aristotle could become the founder of the logical, scientific thinking while he clouded the view of repeated lives on earth and the life in a spiritual world for his time. He did not go so far of binding the spiritual-mental to the bodily, although he had lost the view of the repeated incarnations of the spiritual-mental. The fact that this is in such a way is proved in particular in a book that has just appeared and belongs quite certainly to the best works of the literature on Aristotle if it is not generally the best about the worldview of Aristotle. The book that I recommend very much is Aristotle and His Worldview (1911) by Franz Brentano (1838–1917).

I would just like to read out the words of this excellent expert of Aristotle to show what he writes about the destiny of the soul after death out of a deep penetration with the whole way of Aristotelian thinking: “But how? Is the idea of retaliation not completely shattered?—One could mean it, and then it would be explained, why Aristotle did not refer to retaliation in the beyond in the ethics in contrast to Plato. That is not the case. We remind of the difference to which I drew the attention with the spirits of the spheres in the comparison with the godhead. Similar differences exist also here, and if the dead look at the world and feel intertwined into it with their lives on earth, then the one recognises himself as identical with someone who accomplishes good actions, and another with someone who accomplishes shameful actions. This knowledge, which they attain, is at the same time an everlasting, glorifying, or condemning Last Judgement, a Last Judgement that takes place as such in front of everyone for all eternity. Should one not regard this as retaliation and as completely adequate to the true merit?”

We realise here at the same time that not only the religious confession, but also the science of Aristotle have assumed an everlasting connection of the soul with this one life on earth. Here we have an explanation why one has also spoken of everlasting reward and punishment so stubbornly where the medieval doctrine wants to be scientific. As an old tradition, Aristotle had his spiritual view and his conviction that something spiritual penetrates the human being and lives in him. His mission was to lead out the old culture from a spiritual culture.

Now not a deep understanding, but strictly speaking only the outer tradition of Aristotle remained the whole Middle Ages through beyond Copernicus; one swore on the works of Aristotle. Everywhere one taught at the schools what one had found in them. But the instrument of reason matured, hidden to outer observation, in the human souls. What Aristotle had to tell of the old spiritual teachings of wisdom was misunderstood and interpreted sophistically, so that those who came then, Kepler, Galilei, Giordano Bruno, could not help scrapping that what one had taken over of the belief in Aristotle. What Aristotle had delivered as contents got lost. But an inner soul culture developed, the culture of the intellect, of the reason. Reason, thinking is empty in itself if it has no object of research. We still find the old spiritual wisdom with Aristotle as the object of research. But it gradually disappeared. The Middle Ages had, so to speak, only for that more talent which one can see with the senses and understand with the intellect. Copernicus was that man who now turned the glance to the world in such a way that he understood the world coherence in space, as this could be understood with the mere outer reason at first that summarised by logic and mathematics what spread out in space. Because the spiritual original culture was anxious, above all, to understand the human being, as he is on earth, in relation to his spiritual-mental and in relation to his origin from the spiritual-mental of the world, the old teachings considered the outer spatial conditions only a little. The old teaching simply accepted the sensory appearance, because it did not give something to understand space and time but to recognise what lives in the depths of the human soul and is born from the spiritual-mental depths of the universe. Only when the reason felt alone with the thought, it got the urge to understand the outer reality. We can characterise the age of Copernicus even better with someone who is even greater than Copernicus is although he did not work in the scientific area so impressively on humanity as Copernicus did.

Imagine a spirit who is put into the fifteenth, sixteenth centuries when the greatness of the old spiritual culture had disappeared from the general consciousness longtime ago when in the human soul the possibility developed to grasp the outer sensory reality greatly with the forces of the strong human personality. If we imagine a human being who is just endowed with this tendency we have the older contemporary of Copernicus, the genius Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) who was able to grasp the immediate sensory reality in such a depth that his Communion in Milan, even if it is disfigured, still takes our deep fancy. Leonardo da Vinci is a person who created this completely from the depths of his soul as an artist; he was not only a painter and sculptor, but also an engineer and architect, he was scientifically active in a comprehensive sense. His scientific records have a great effect on us if we study them. He is the greatest representative of the time that developed to the sixteenth century; he was a man in whose inside largely and immensely all forces had become fertile which Aristotle had directed to the consideration of the world. What was abstract with Aristotle became immediate, lively, spiritual reality with Leonardo da Vinci. He also faces us that way where he grasps the world as a scientist.

The canon Copernicus is also endowed with that what humanity could learn as culture, as self-education from Aristotle. He investigated in all silence, during four times nine years, as he himself says, not some outer facts—this is the typical that he did not investigate outer facts—, but that he accepted that what the senses, the outer reason knew about the outer facts of the solar system. That who appears compared with Copernicus as “half-advanced,” Tycho de Brahe (1546–1601), seems virtually pioneering with the investigation of sensory facts, whereas Copernicus contributed nothing to the investigation of outer facts. What did Copernicus really achieve? Someone who intensely studies his writings knows that he did not apply the culture which humanity could gain by Aristotle to the old spiritual culture like Aristotle, to the knowledge of the spiritual-mental of the human being and of the universe but to the outer sensory reality.

Let us grasp the inner relation of the stars to the sun not in such away as the medieval science and Aristotelism have grasped it, but let us assume that the sun is in the centre, and that the planets circle round it. What would result from this assumption? Copernicus possibly asked himself. He could say to himself, we have obeyed a methodical, a logical principle of Aristotle more than those do who want to explain the sense-perceptible in their way. They have to assume complex movements of the single planets, and put up laws that constitute the solar system at last. But an old principle that can make sense to the human beings just by the logic of Aristotle says that we should never use a complex thought if a simple thought can explain the world coherence.

Copernicus used the simplest thought, not by a special intention. Because he took the view to summarise the outer sensory facts, he put the sun in the centre of the system and let the planets circle round it. That which one could only explain in complex way once, the place of a star, when it was seen, arose easier. Thus, Aristotle gave the impulse, although those did not understand him who believed to be true Aristotelians in the Middle Ages, which brought humanity on that level on which it grasped the idea inside Copernicus to apply the idea of simplicity to the outer universe.

That which Aristotle still applied to spiritual wisdom originated from the old culture of the humanely mental for science. But that what has originated from the old spiritual culture as an instrument begins spreading over the sensory world and surveying it lawfully. If then we realise how the action of Copernicus keeps on working in Kepler, Galilei, Giordano Bruno, even still in Newton, it becomes clear to us everywhere that the age of Copernicus gave humanity the mission to add the culture and science of the sensory world to the old spiritual culture and science.

However, it was also necessary for it that the human habitual ways of thinking, feeling, and willing were directed to the immediate physical outer reality. This also appears in a strange way that it combines with the action of Copernicus. We still see souls like Leonardo da Vinci and those who belong to him arising from the Renaissance culture, which breaks with the medieval avoidance of nature and which brings joy of the immediate reality to the human beings. This was necessary to be able to understand the outer reality also immediately with the scientific reason with Galilei, Kepler and Copernicus.

It is interesting to realise that it becomes more difficult to the human beings, so to speak, in one area and easier in the other area to familiarise themselves to the quite new way of thinking and to apply the new mental pictures to the universe. We realise too that it becomes difficult to humanity to accept the outer reality at first as the basis of an intellectual culture in the origin of the Faust legend in the sixteenth century that also has a historical background. There we realise that the human beings felt the new thinking as something by which they lost the old coherence with the spiritual of the world. As far away that what is connected with the Faust figure seems to be from the feeling that the human being is torn out from the spiritual culture and is a slave of all mistakes and errors that arise from his personality. Nevertheless, it is reflected in the popular education of the sixteenth century as the consciousness, while it tells about Faust that he laid the Bible behind the bank for a while and became a worldly man and doctor The latter represented a researcher in the outer nature. It is interesting to observe that a naive person like Copernicus felt: you have only brought the thought of simplicity on the solar system up to the inward-looking human soul.

As a devout man, he had to say to himself, recognising the laws of the universe in their true form, I contribute, actually, to the knowledge of the divine thoughts working in the world.—In his naivety, he could believe that it was right to dedicate his work to the pope. But friends had kept him from publishing his work, so that he received the correction of the first sheet only on his deathbed, because he believed that it was not right to keep it longer from fear. Now, but we realise the peculiar that the time culture had to position itself to it. The work was published only after his death. The publisher weakened what Copernicus wanted to say in a preface in which he said in a careful way that this work would be not something that counts on the facts of the world directly, but it would be a possible hypothesis among other hypotheses. Now we have to be clear in our mind that the action of Copernicus is the starting point of a cultural epoch within which we still are, because it is a straight progress from Copernicus to our days. But that peculiarly presents itself which in his naivety Copernicus regarded as well founded on the Christian faith. It appears in a peculiar way what he did at that time if we compare it to that what was connected with it in the course of the centuries. One knows it well. Copernicus himself still escaped from any persecution because he saw his world-revolutionising work only on his deathbed. Those who kept on working in his sense Galilei, Giordano Bruno, experienced another destiny. This is known to all world. We realise exactly here what arises from the action of an ingenious human being, how everything that becomes later common property of humanity can only assert itself by opposition. Really, one has to confess that one feels it as something quite peculiar if one looks at the action of Copernicus as a necessity just in such a way, as we have done it today—and realises now that this action keeps working as, but also the opposing attitude keeps on working.

If one looks at the time of Copernicus in this cultural-moral sense, the following arises. He himself believed that this action did not at all contradict his confession that he believed to have as a man devoted to his church. Since when the action of the Copernicus took place, and the culture of the outer sensory world seized humanity, there still enough existed of the culture of the old times with which humanity connected that what is spread out in the universe as a spiritual and formed the contents of the Aristotelian teachings. It would be not at all possible at the time of Kepler, Galilei, also of Newton, to count as a reasonable person if one stated that possibly only from the cooperation of the material processes the human soul rises in its activity, as the flame comes into being from the material processes of the candle. Just for the greatest spirits, this would not have been possible. Although his doctrine worked so world revolutionising later, Copernicus remained firmly founded on the belief in the spirit working in the universe.

Kepler, his great successor, still worked as an astrologer beside that he was a great astronomer. This is important for the characteristic of the age of Copernicus that Kepler worked as an astrologer. Only from this viewpoint one has to consider that he was convinced—although he inserted three principles named after him in science—that something spiritual-mental works in all mechanical processes of the universe, so that one could get to know something of the human destiny from the constellations of the stars.

Galileo also felt that the human soul was embedded in the spiritual-mental of the world. Since Galilei was of the view that one was not allowed to stop at a science of paper but has to advance to a science of reason after Copernicus and after he had invented his telescope with which he had discovered the Jupiter moons and the fact that the Milky Way was composed of single star formations. Galilei was, as others of his time, an opponent of Aristotle but only of the misunderstood Aristotle. Against it, he was penetrated by that what one can call culture of thought, internalisation of the thought up to the logical conception of the outer reality. But he had never become estranged to the idea that the human mind can understand by logic at successive times what is spread out in space and time. But compared with this human reason, which can recognise the secrets of the universe successively by the consideration of that what the senses perceive, Galilei saw the divine spirit working and interweaving in the world and of which he felt reverentially that it pre-thinks the universe in one single moment and does not after-think it as the human being does. So for Galilei the divine spirit formed the basis of all world phenomena which the world thought creates within one moment on its own terms whose image the world is which then the human mind and intellect can maybe understand successively, at least through many ages.

For the age of Copernicus, the consciousness was not yet lost generally that the human soul is based on the spiritual-mental of the universe. Even with Newton, we still recognise that he imagines—although he believes to have explained the forces of the outer universe as mechanical ones by the principle of gravitation—that the spiritual-mental of the human being is so firmly based on the spiritual-mental of the universe that he became an interpreter, a commentator of the Apocalypse at the same time. Just the principal documents of this age were still filled with that what had, indeed, disappeared of the old science which still went on sounding with Aristotle, and which knew that the spiritual-mental is connected inside the human being with the spiritual-mental in the universe outdoors. The old knowledge had disappeared, but the traditions were still there to which one could dedicate himself quietly, because in the human heart something lived that wanted to dedicate itself to them quietly. Nevertheless, something different was the habitual ways of thinking. We see the thought on its own becoming impoverished. Where these spirits wanted to advance to an understanding of the spiritual-mental life, Kepler, Galilei, Giordano Bruno, Newton, all traditions still could live in their souls. But if they wanted to understand the soul life with the principles attained with their reason, these soul forces turned out to be incapable, even if they were alive ever so much. As to the shine of a past old wisdom Galilei tended to the reason of his God, as he believed it, and as it existed in the tradition of his faith.

However, those who wanted then to look for a lawful connection of the human soul with the spiritual-mental of the world in similar way, as they had looked at the time of Copernicus for a lawful connection of the earth with the stars, the spatial universe, faced the impoverishment of thought put on its own. With one of the most enthusiastic spirits of the Copernican age, with Giordano Bruno, we see this impoverishment of the thought that had brought itself to interpret the world in the sense of Copernicus. He points to the fact that where one had supposed the so-called “eighth sphere” behind the fixed star sphere according to the previous view nothing exists everywhere but worlds as the earth is, it is only a small world in the big one. One has only to remember his miraculous and astute worldview that breaks down a lot of that what had remained to humanity from old times, and then one recognises that just Giordano Bruno wants to enliven the consciousness of the spiritual coherence of the human soul with the spiritual world. He is clear in his mind that if one looks at a physical being like the human being, one has to imagine that it arises from a spiritual universe that the spiritual of the universe concentrated in a human body as it were to extend again at his death and to concentrate later again. He imagines the repeated lives on earth this way. But his thought does not become full of contents, not internally rich.

The thought that had showed its momentum and its fertility towards the outer world shrinks with Giordano Bruno and later with Leibniz (Gottfried L., 1646–1716) whom we can consider as a successor of Giordano Bruno to that which both called a monad. What is a monad? Something of which one imagined that it is born from the spiritual world. As to Leibniz even a monad includes something like a reflection of the whole universe. But this view did not bring more than the dry abstraction that the monad is a reflection of the universe. Thus, one may admire the strength of Leibniz's philosophy as an effect of the action of Copernicus. But if we penetrate into his philosophy that imagines the world composed of monads, we realise that it cannot say a lot about the human soul, because it is surely only a little if one says that the soul is a reflection of the universe. We see nothing but abstract descriptions, if we look at the philosophy which goes back directly to the action of Copernicus. Strictly speaking, this philosophy remains poor. The old spiritual science of Aristotle which had the traditions of the old culture and an uncertain consciousness of it still speaks of the human being as composed of different members of his being, It understands him as a harmonious arrangement, relates the different members to the different outer states and facts, still connects what drops from the human being at death with that which comes from a spiritual world and goes to a spiritual world, and gets concrete mental pictures full of contents about the spiritual in the soul that way.

We still see a real science with divine contents with Aristotle. We still see the spiritual described as one really describes something spiritual today again. But it shrunk to the miserable monad in the age of Copernicus. The same Giordano Bruno who finds the most enthusiastic words where he points to the greatness and infinity of the universe finds the poorness of the monad for the soul only. Now a few concepts, pieced together, should show the human soul, its conceptualised being.

There we realise how the ages work how the human missions work. Humanity would never attained its today's culture unless Copernicanism had come, but we realise at the same time how spiritual science had to become impoverished inevitably at first. Now only in our time, we realise that something appears that will show again that now, after the human thought wanted to be only an instrument of understanding the outer sensory world for a while, this human thought also becomes means to get to an inside world exceeding the mere thought. Since wherefore the thought was used since Copernicus up to now? It was used for understanding the outer sensory world; it was the instrument of the outer facts, which the eyes see and which can be grasped, with the instrument of the brain. The thought had to offer an objective, clear image of the sensory world. After this kind of soul condition has hardened, the thought may now become again something else, something that educates the human soul in itself. The human being must no longer use the thought only as an image of the outer reality, but he has to separate it in such a way that it does not depict the outer reality, but works if the soul excludes all appearance in meditation and concentration, so that the thought becomes internally creative, and that the soul gets contents different from the contents of the shrivelled monad.

In the Copernican age the thought received its mission to be an image of the outer reality, it will go over to preparing the soul, will bring up inner hidden forces from the depths of the soul by which this can look at that which forms the basis of the old Aristotelian culture. These will be no old, traditional thoughts that are the most fertile ones. No, these will be the thoughts that are found by the age of natural sciences. Just the thoughts that are built up on the age of Copernicus bring out those soul forces, which let the soul behold itself and then the spiritual-mental of the universe. Now the human soul has to develop the thought for the other mission to take the thought as a means of education of the soul for a culture of the higher self, for a beholding in the spiritual world.

We stand at this turning point today, and this turning point in the human culture has to take place. If we understand the necessity by which the age of Copernicus came into being, we can also understand the necessity that the time has to change into a new one in which the thought exceeds itself and in which we get to the nature of the soul if we no longer talk about the soul in abstractions, but in real descriptions of its actions, qualities, and characteristics. If one considers spiritual science in such a way, those will not maybe come to their own who run after everybody today who states anyhow that he knows anything of spiritual science.

We live not only in a critical age today but also in an age where many people without examining run at once after every prophecy et cetera. Just as today a part of humanity is too much critical, the other part is too much gullible and takes everything as a revelation of spiritual worlds. Real spiritual science wants to have to do nothing with what arises from such a need. Since it is not possible today that spiritual science can bring the human beings to an understanding of our age unless one tries to understand the lawfulness of humanity and of the evolution generally. Hence, it also happened when once a spirit, Lessing (Gotthold Ephraim L., 1729–1781), intended to survey the development of humanity in the same way as Copernicus had surveyed the principles of space that he got to the hypothesis of the repeated lives on earth. How will it be then with those who take spiritual science seriously?

Just there we can also learn a lot from Copernicus. I have already stated once what Galilei experienced with a real follower of Aristotle. One of his friends believed due to the no longer understood Aristotle that Aristotle had taught that the nerves of the human being originate from the heart. Galilei who stood on the ground of real sensory observation said to the person concerned, I want to lead you to a corpse and show you that Aristotle was not right, because the nerves of the human being originate from the brain.—Really, this follower of Aristotelism also looked at the corpse and said then, if I look at nature, it seems to me, as if the nerves originate from the brain, but from Aristotle I know that the nerves originate from the heart, and if nature contradicts Aristotle, I believe in Aristotle and not in nature. This is no fairy tale; this is a fact that shows that the big facts have to be accepted in the human culture in spite of all opponents.

Hence, we must not be surprised if anything appears in our time that one could characterise in the following way. Anybody could want to show to another with the whole development of the child that not everything that the human being bears in himself can originate from mere physical heredity. This could happen in such a way that he says to the other. have a look at everything that spiritual science has said about this field.—Then there one could imagine that somebody of the quite clever people would answer, yes, if you spiritual scientists talk in such a way, it seems, as if from a former life on earth that came over which appears as effect with the adolescent human being. But monism says it different. If the spiritual observations contradict monism, I believe in monism and not in the spiritual observation.

Maybe such a thing could also recur in our time like that what took place when the age of Copernicus appeared in humanity. Many people could say today, we have to regard the teaching of repeated lives on earth as a hypothesis that explains the human life reasonably, but we cannot yet convince ourselves of it. Indeed, one says that those who have developed the inner beholding behold the soul in a state where it belongs to a lawful spiritual world that it reaches beyond birth and death. But what does it avail us who cannot observe the human soul going through the repeated lives on earth and if we must accept the teaching of the repeated lives on earth as hypothesis?

Someone who could say this from a materialistic-monistic way of thinking would give evidence of the fact that he is not yet so far as the Catholic Church is with the Copernican teaching with which it was also not yet careful some decades ago. Since as what had people to regard the Copernican teaching? Copernicus had done nothing but grasping a thought as simply as possible and had taken it as basis of the phenomena. With this thought, he had worked hard for a proof, not by investigations, of that what takes place. If one takes his thought, one can say, that's right.

The same applies completely to those today who cannot do the way to the spiritual beholding of the human soul and its immediate nature or do not want to do it. Since spiritual science shows that everything that presents itself as human destiny, as human work and as laws of this work is only explicable if one accepts the principle of the repeated lives on earth and of karma. It is shown that today one can have the same certainty the spiritual-mental of the human being as Aristotle could have certainty by his logic compared with the contents of his teaching that came from the old wisdom, and as the followers of Copernicus had certainty of his teaching in relation to the outer phenomena in space.

In 1543, the work of Copernicus was published. In 1851, a real proof of the Copernican teaching was possible only because then Foucault (Léon F., 1819–1868) showd the rotation of the earth on its axis with the pendulum experiment which showed the rotation of the plane of oscillation of a long and heavy pendulum. From the constancy of the pendulum rotations one could find inner evidence of the Copernican teaching only in 1851.

Thus, it happens with outer facts. In relation to reincarnation the human being can start the way any time which leads him to the spiritual beholding, and which shows where from the living comes which goes from life to life. The inner evidence that was given for Copernicanism only after centuries can be offered for reincarnation any time. But as little as it was necessary for the acceptance of the principle of reincarnation and karma that somebody has this spiritual beholding as it was for the acceptance of Copernicanism that the inner evidence would have already been given with Foucault's pendulum experiment. I said, someone who would reject the teaching of reincarnation and karma because of the given reasons would turn out to be even more intolerant than the Catholic Church was which did not wait until 1851 to withdraw the work of Copernicus from the List of Prohibited Books, but it withdrew it already in 1821.

However, we who stand on the ground of spiritual science can learn with Copernicus, Kepler, Galilei, and Giordano Bruno, how that what has to settle in the human culture will settle in spite of all opposition. Since today the attitudes that opposed Copernicus, Kepler, Galilei, Giordano Bruno and others are also there, even if by those who regard spiritual science as daydreaming, as speculative fiction, as follies, although they belong to the “enlightened” people. Indeed, they do not write or print a List of Prohibited Books, but they ban spiritual science as the Catholic Church banned the teaching of Copernicus.

Indeed, they can brace themselves against the human progress, but they cannot prevent it. Those who call spiritual science daydreaming have to withdraw their edicts just as the edicts against Copernicanism were withdrawn. Spiritual science, filled with its truth, can wait for the year “1821” of the materialistic monists, and it will wait. It waits while speaking to those who understand already before that spiritual science opens their eyes again towards the spiritual worlds with which the innermost being of the human nature is connected in such a way that the human soul gives itself hope, confidence, and strength.

The soul can say to itself about the connection of its forces with the universe what I tried to express in my second mystery play The Soul's Probation the feeling together with the spiritual of the universe:

In your thinking cosmic thoughts do live,
Within your feeling cosmic forces play,
Within your will cosmic beings work.
Abandon yourselves to cosmic world thoughts,
Experience yourself through cosmic forces,
Create yourself anew from cosmic will.
End not at last in cosmic distances
By fantasies of dreamy thought beguiled;
Begin in farthest spirit-realms
And end in the recesses of your soul.
The plan divine then shall you recognise
When you have realised your self in you.
(Somewhat changed translation by H. Collison and others)

From an awareness that was as much borne of rich experience as of deep artistic experience, Goethe coined the eloquent word:

When nature begins to reveal her secrets, one feels an irresistible yearning for her most worthy interpreter, art.

A true understanding of what is meant by such a statement makes it difficult to want to talk about art. Goethe also said that art is the mediator of nature's secrets, but that one should not talk about it through words. On the other hand, one must talk about what can flow from the artistic. I don't want to talk about it the way official science talks about it, but rather like one talks about a dear friend, where one has the need to say what one has to say out of sympathy, out of love.

The artist has an aversion to art history or even to art criticism. When you try to penetrate it, it becomes all too understandable that the artist is afraid to have what he experienced with art burned or singed. If you assume a moral original sin, then you have to assume two original evils for art. One is the taste to create in art only for the senses. Those who do this will reject the spiritual in art. The other is that an equally unrefined taste wants to represent the abstract, the merely conceptual. This symbolic art is no more supported by the artistic than the sensual is. The art of ideas leads to a straw-like, papery representation of the ideal. Both are aberrations from true art. What leads to true art must be grounded in something in the human being. It must also be something that arises from human freedom in human will.

Many see art only as a luxury, not as a condition of daily existence. I would like to recall what I said about the dream life eight days ago, about the relationship between the dream life and the imagination. During sleep, the soul is separated from the body. Through spiritual science, the otherwise dormant consciousness can become so strong that the person perceives the spiritual world, that he not only experiences dull things during sleep, but also undergoes the most diverse entities and experiences. One can say that the dream life comes from the soul approaching the waking life, but not absorbing it.

The polar opposite of the dream life is the soul's inclination towards artistic imagination and artistic creation. It is incorrect to assume a direct relationship between the two, but one can point from one to the other. In the dream it is the soul removed from the body, in artistic creation the soul is in the body – thus the other way round. Here the soul seeks a relationship with the spiritual; it wants to reach out to the spiritual, to the eternal, the imperishable, as in a dream to the corporeal, the temporal. These are two polar opposites. Just as the soul half awakens to the physical body in a dream, so too to the spiritual in artistic fantasy.

Just as sleep can be without dreams, so the artistic element can be added to ordinary life out of freedom, but it can also be left out.

There are moods in life. You visit a friend, are received in a red room, he does not come right away, you expect something; then he comes, tells all sorts of banal stuff, you are disappointed because you were expecting something solemn; that's how it is in the subconscious. Or in a blue room, you are disappointed in the deepest sense of the word because you find that he talks like a wheel. In your subconscious, you expect him to leave you alone in a blue or violet room. But he talks. I'm deliberately choosing grotesque examples. Or at a banquet where the dishes have a reddish tint, you expect that when people eat, they are not only hungry but also gourmets. If the dishes are blue, you expect them not only to eat, but also to have a pleasant conversation. Or you meet a lady on the street who has a frizzy head and are disappointed if you find that she is not snappish. From a lady in a pleasant blue dress, you expect her to be measured; if she is not, you feel lied to. These are inner secret moods, undertones that permeate life. There is a sensual, supersensible element that, in our emotional life, is comparable to dreams and remains hidden from our consciousness, just as the activity of the sleeping person's will includes the element of will.

A supersensible essence is integrated here, and it does not matter whether it is called the connective tissue or the etheric body.

The individual organs differentiate the human being in such a way that the supersensible connecting element no longer resonates so uniformly. The human being experiences as a whole human being what is only seen through the eye. This does not come to light in ordinary consciousness. We can give it nourishment, which satisfies it, like the senses. This is particularly evident in music.

I have shown that the life of imagination is bound up with the nervous system, but the life of feeling is bound up with the whole rhythmic experience. This is more closely related to the sense of hearing than to the other senses, to the sense of feeling, even to the sense of imagination, to thinking. There is an inclination in man to keep focusing on the sense of hearing.

In every healthy, complete human nature, there is a constant urge to bring up in a healthy way what leads to vision, not to physical vision. The vision wants to come up, it appeals to free will, it does not exert any force, but it is there. The artist has a constant tendency towards the visionary, which wants to be satisfied. But it remains latent. What can satisfy it? It is always present, even if a person has only sensory perceptions. But it cannot be satisfied with that. When the musical element strikes the ear, the whole supersensible person takes it in, and so the visionary urge is satisfied.

The same applies to Goethe's theory of metamorphosis, which can lead one into deep, natural secrets: the green leaf transforming itself into the petals of a flower and so on.

When we look at the human being, we can see it falling apart in different ways, for example into the head and the rest of the organism. This can become the head. Just as Goethe sees the whole in the leaf, we can see the whole in every part of the human being; the whole can emerge from every part.

The moving life in nature wants to be grasped by the visionary power.

Music cannot recall anything that is in external life; everything must be demystified by music. In the other arts, everything that belongs to the senses must be accounted for, but music does not need that.

The whole person must first be demystified. All artistic creation is like a demystification. You have to get life out of the surface, you have to bend once or twice what is otherwise dead in the surface, as in life only demarcates itself, [in the painterly the color], for example the red-yellow. A barbarian says: How does it remind us of what is, when the blue-violet merges into the line? But that's how you get into the form, through the red-yellow into the movement, also into the movement in the limbs. Red and blue are not just colors, they desire something. All barbaric taste says: What does it represent? But the artist only reveals something that was in the soul. Everything artistic has an expressionistic element in it.

What stands before us as nature we cannot achieve by imitation; it stands before us only as a larva. Critics are like someone standing behind us as we eat and saying how the food tastes.

The “Group” in Dornach is the artistic expression of the theory of metamorphosis. Here, the attempt has been made to depict the representative of humanity asymmetrically, and to show how the rest of the organism wants to become entirely head. This cannot be achieved by merely caricaturing a head, but only by doing so from the inside out.

Another approach has been tried, in which the head seeks to become the rest of the organism, in which the head pours itself out over the whole organism, a dissolution, a harmonization. Such things evoke a slight horror today, as the Copernican worldview did until 1827 among an influential authority. But that cannot stop the course of development.

A change has taken place with regard to art, for example, in relation to the position of the works of art by Raphael and Michelangelo. One no longer tries to resonate with them, one has a kind of awareness that they must be related to a bygone era and a different consciousness. What one does with regard to today's artists is more closely related to the soul. One would like to accompany Raphael and Michelangelo back to other times, where they were different as artists; one would like to accompany today's artists directly. Such artists have a feeling, as Goethe had, that if one seeks truth, one must seek it in art. If you want to paint a lady today as she is, she will look like a lady in a state of trismus, which is what every photograph looks like. You have to kill and then recreate with what you might call humor, an inner drama; you not only have to kill a pretty woman, you have to abuse her. Perhaps it is part of the artistic essence that the pedant is appalled, that the philistine condemns it as unnecessary. It already sounds so terrible when one says, as if in a civil servant's office, that art should be put in the service of life.

Art is so integrated into the education of life that art is not a servant of life, but is meant to beautify it, and since it is the path to the spiritual, it also imbues life with reality.

One is only able to intervene correctly in social life if one approaches it as the artist approaches his material. New forces constantly want to be incorporated into life; an artistic element should live in everything. When deficiencies arise somewhere, it is because the artistic element in man has been lost. People believe they have found program points and consider them to be the most divine ideals. But all this social talk is of no use, has no foundation, cannot fertilize. Nowadays, people found associations, give them statutes, take up excellent program points, and believe that they can master life with them. But it is all abstract. It is much more important to put the right person in the right place, only then one must not always think that the nephew is the right person.

What wants to gain strength in life is what is in the underground, that wants to be demystified. You can't do that in the abstract. Art can only fertilize life if you strive to find life in art.

A sensual-supernatural lies in art. A person who does not dream does not know about the connection. A life without art resembles pedantry and philistinism. Art must not correspond to necessity, but to human freedom. People do not take into account that the human being has a say in this, that there is a freedom. Man must say: Nothing external can push me towards art, but I myself declare that it is necessary.