The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Someone who takes a popular or scientific book to search some instructions about the relation of the human mind and soul to the outer body can mostly find a sort of the following simile. The sensory impressions that the human being receives from the outside are as it were telegraphic news that is led to the central station of the nervous system, to the brain, via the nerves like wires and is sent out from there again into the organism to evoke the will impulses and so on. Even if for some people such a simile seems to be very likeable, one can say that such a simile should only hide the helplessness compared with the big riddle of mind and soul which one can enclose in the words which should characterise the object of the today's consideration: mind, soul and body of the human being.

Now I have already indicated in the preceding talks that the today's considerations in this area suffer from a basic lack. Just if you position yourself with such a consideration on the ground of the so successful scientific approach in other areas, you cannot get over the prejudice that throws together the soul life with the effectiveness of the real spiritual life in the human being. Today soul and mind or spirit are confused almost everywhere in scientific, in philosophical, and in popular approaches.

That is why the investigations often remain infertile today—apart from the fact that they are infertile of many other reasons—because one does not want to renounce from the prejudice that the human being can be considered without envisaging his structure of three members: body, soul and mind. I have also already indicated in a former talk that spiritual science has to build a bridge from the soul to the mind, as natural sciences have to build a bridge from the soul life to the body. It is soul experience, in the broader sense, undoubtedly—even if the soul experience is based in this case also on the body—if the human being feels hunger, thirst, saturation, respiratory need and the like.

However, even if you develop these sensations ever so much if you try ever so much to increase or decrease the hunger to observe it internally emotionally, or if you compare the sensation of hunger to the saturation and the like, it is impossible to find out for yourself by this mere inner observation of the soul, which bodily bases are the conditions of this soul experience. One has to build the bridge by the known scientific methods in such a way that one goes over from the mere soul experience to that which happens meanwhile in the bodily organisation.

However, it is also impossible to get to any fertile view of the human being as a spiritual being if one only wants to stop with that what the human being experiences internally-emotionally in his thinking, feeling and willing. Mental pictures, feelings, will impulses are the contents of the soul. They surge up and down in the everyday wake day life. One tries to deepen them now and again by going over to a kind of mystic contemplation. However, as far as one is able to go with such a mystic contemplation, one cannot get to any knowledge of the spirit by such mysticism. However, you have to build the bridge from the mere soul experience to the spiritual one if you strive for the knowledge of the spirit, as in the area of the natural sciences the bridge is built from the soul experience to the bodily processes which form the basis of the sensations of hunger, saturation, of the respiratory need and the like. However, you cannot consider the spiritual life of the human being in same way as one goes over from the soul life to the consideration of the bodily organisation. Other methods are necessary there. I have pointed to these methods already in a fundamental way. You find the details in my books How Does One Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds?, Occult Science. An Outline, The Riddle of Man, and in The Riddles of the Soul, et cetera. However, I would like to bring some noteworthy qualities of those methods forward introductorily which can build the bridge from the usual soul life to the spiritual nature of the human being.

There it concerns above all that just many psychologists of the present believe that certain things are simply impossible which spiritual science must absolutely intend. How often psychologists say today that the real soul life cannot be observed. One points to the fact that, for example, you cannot observe tender feelings because they escape from you if you want to observe them. One points out rightly that we feel disturbed, for example, if we have memorised something, recite it, and want to observe ourselves. This is shown in such a way, as if it were a special peculiarity of the soul life. However, just this is necessary to understand that that which is shown there like an impossibility must be intended as spiritual-scientific method. What the biologist what the physiologist does for the body, the spiritual researcher does for the mind, while he is anxious to ascend from the mere everyday introspection and from the mere mystic introspection to that true soul observation whose impossibility should be asserted with the mentioned tip that we cannot observe ourselves while reciting a poem because we are bothered about it. It is not necessary that you get in such exterior things, as reciting a memorised material, to a possibility of introspection, although for someone who wants to become a spiritual researcher it is also necessary.

However, it is inevitable that the spiritual researcher and psychologist attains real introspection while he faces the course of mental pictures and thoughts, also the course of will impulses, of feelings really so that he is present like his own spectator and learns to observe himself really, so that the observer and the observed completely disintegrate. Some people consider this possibility often as something very easy and believe, while natural sciences use strict methods, spiritual science is something that one can easily attain. However, to real spiritual research methodically strict, patient, vigorous progress is necessary in a way, not only as it happens in the outer scientific area, but in such a way that someone who knows both must say that compared with the often many years' pursuit which is necessary to get to serious spiritual-scientific results one can appropriate the methods of natural sciences easier.

For this true introspection, one creates a basis while one tries quite methodically to lead the will into the mental pictures. Thereby you come to meditation in the true sense of the word, not in a dark, mystic sense. In our usual consciousness we are not accustomed to such a meditative life at all, there the thoughts completely follow the course of the outer world with its impressions. Based on his experience of life or also of his worldly wisdom he regulates his inner life, his train of thought, so that he gets around to arranging his thoughts from the inside. However, all that can be at most a preparation of that which I mean here. This you have to attain in slow, patient, vigorous work. You attain it while you bring such regularity and still such arbitrariness into your thoughts that you are sure: in that, which one practices in such a way nothing works of memory, nothing of that can ascend from some more or less forgotten mental pictures, experiences of life and the like. Hence, it is necessary that someone who wants to get to spiritual research settles in such a pursuit of mental pictures which he arranges to himself in clear way, or receives from there or there in clear way so that he can really say at the moment in which he dedicates himself to this course of mental pictures, I survey how I string the one mental picture and the other how I influence the course of mental pictures by my will.

All that is nothing but a preparation of that which should happen, actually, for the mental and spiritual life. Since, indeed, this must be prepared carefully, but it appears in a certain point of development as something objective, as a reality coming from the spiritual outer world.

Only someone who dedicates himself carefully to such inner exercises for a while brings about gradually if he has led arbitrariness into the course of mental pictures and has overcome it again to discover something internally which strings one mental picture, one thought and the other together from the spiritual area, and causes a soul life, controlled by spiritual reality. As the outer observation regulates the mental pictures and thereby brings in necessity, so that they become mediators of the outer reality, the imagining life gradually becomes a mediator of a spiritual reality. You have to regard only just that which I mean here in the same sense as something seriously scientific as natural sciences are. You must not give yourself up to the prejudice that you get thereby into any speculative fiction because you get, indeed, in inner arbitrariness and realise that you can grasp something spiritually real that approaches your imagination from the other side than the side is which corresponds to the outer physical reality. It is for someone who has not dealt much with such things at first hard to imagine what I mean with these things, actually. Only these things that should form the basis of spiritual science are, like the scientific performances in the laboratory et cetera, nothing but subtler developed activities occurring in the outside world. These inner activities of the spiritual researcher are nothing but the continuation of that what also, otherwise, the soul life accomplishes to produce the relationship between the soul life and the spiritual life which is there always but which becomes conscious by these exercises.

I would like to take the starting point from something that can be more comprehensible to characterise what I mean, actually. Someone who deals with human or other living conditions is able to find differences between the representations of the one writer and the other if he gradually appropriates a sensation for it. He will find with the one author that he can be right with that what he says, that he can rather strictly use his method that he is, however, far away from the nature of the things by the way how he says the things. Against it, one can often say with another author, he is simply by how he speaks about the things a person who is close to the inner nature of the things. It provides something that brings you surely to the things. An example of it:

You can have a lot against such an art appreciation as the author Herman Grimm (18128-1901, art historian) practised it, but you have to admit if you have a sensation of it, even if you often do not agree with his explanations even if you find him dilettantish: in his explanations is something by which you are acquainted with the pieces of art, with the artists, even with their personal characters.

This atmosphere in his writings immediately leads to the being of that about which he speaks. You can put the question to yourself: how does such an author get around to differing just in such typical way from others? For someone who is not used to talking about such things in the abstract just the following can arise. You find some sentences, for example, at a place where he speaks in a very nice article about Raphael, which may probably sound irritating to pedantic, sober scholars. There he says what you would feel according to his opinion if you met Raphael today, and how you would feel quite different if you met Michelangelo today.—Speaking such stuff in a scientific treatise is for some people daydreaming from the start, isn't that so? Of course, one can absolutely understand such a judgement. You find such weird remarks with Herman Grimm at numerous places. One would like to say, he dedicates himself to certain connections of mental pictures from the start about which he knows of course that they cannot become immediate reality, and wants to say nothing special about the outer reality with such remarks. However, someone who has dedicated himself repeatedly to such lines of thought would realise—indeed, now not in this area, because in this area such lines of thought lead to nothing at all—probably in other areas that his soul forces were set in motion so that he can behold deeper into the things and can express them more accurately than others do who despise to do such “unnecessary” lines of thought.

That matters, and I would like to emphasise it. If you do lines of thought in your inside to produce these lines of thought only, to put your thinking in motion, so that it has a possible relationship with reality, and if you refrain from wanting something else with these lines of thought than to bring your thinking in a certain current of development, then your thinking, your soul faculties become nimbler at first. Then the fruit of it appears in quite different areas of consideration. You have to separate both strictly. Someone who is not able to do this gets to pipe dreams, to all kinds of hypotheses. However, to someone who has the self-control to know exactly that such activation of the thinking has only subjective meaning at first who puts the power from such activity of the thinking in motion in the soul, the fruits of it appear at another time. Taking this as starting point Herman Grimm could make historical remarks in his treatises about Macaulay (Thomas Babington M., 1800-1859, British historian, poet and politician), Frederick the Great (1712-1786, Prussian king since 1740) and others which remind of that what spiritual science has to say about the life of the soul and the mind. I do not want to say with it that Herman Grimm was already a spiritual researcher; he just rejects this. I also do not want to say with it that that what I have characterised with him is more than something that can already take place in the usual consciousness. While you develop such a thing and practise it on and on, you lead the will into the imagining and you grasp the spiritual necessity in the imagining.

However, one has to add something else. I have already pointed to the fact that it is important in the development of the spiritual researcher that he can dedicate himself to the so-called limiting points of cognition. Du Bois-Reymond (Emil D. B.-R., 1818-1896, German physician and physiologist) speaks of seven world riddles as limiting points beyond which the human cognition cannot get. Two points form just the starting point of spiritual-scientific investigations. The one is that you feel in the inner life at first what is said with such a border issue, actually. I like to point with pleasure to persons on such occasion who really strive for knowledge. As an example, I cite Friedrich Theodor Vischer (1807-1887, German aesthetician). When this treated the important subject of human dream fantasies, he came to such a border issue. He said to himself, if I look at the relation of the soul life to the body life, it is most certain that the soul cannot be in the body, but it is as certain that the soul cannot be somewhere beyond the body. Someone who develops such a thinking which does not strive for knowledge according to common methods, but according to inner necessary currents of the soul life, has often to say to himself, you are at a point where all mental pictures which are due to the sensory observations, to the whole conscious life do not get you anywhere. Now you can stop at such limiting points and say, well, there is just a border, beyond which the human being cannot come. You are mistaken, while you say this. However, about that I do not want to speak.

The point is that you try just in such limiting points to penetrate with your complete soul life that you try to settle in a real contradiction that shows the spiritual-mental reality as an outer inconsistent reality appears if a plant once shows a green leaf, some other time a yellow petal. In reality, the contradictions also come into being. If you experience them instead of approaching them with your usual logical thinking if you approach them with the full living inner soul being if you let a contradiction live out in the soul and do not approach it with the prejudice of life and want to dissolve it, you notice how it increases, how something really appears there that you can compare to the following, as I have done in my book The Riddles of the Soul.

If a lower living being has no sense of touch at first, but only an inner surging life, and gradually stumbles against the outside world, that what was before only inner surging life changes into the sense of touch. That is a usual scientific idea. Then the sense of touch differentiates again, so that as it were by the collision of the inner life with the outside world the latter becomes inner experience. You can apply this picture of the sense of touch to that mental-spiritual experience which the spiritual researcher has to go through. He lets such limiting points of cognition live out in his soul. Then it is in such a way, as if the inner life is not confronted with a physical outside world, but with a spiritual world and a spiritual sense of touch, which then differentiates further and wants to become what one can call spiritual eyes, spiritual ears figuratively. However, it is far from any preoccupation with such border issues of cognition up to that what I have called beholding consciousness in my book The Riddle of Man. However, one can develop this beholding consciousness.

One has to consider this one thing. The other is that you find out just with such an inner spiritual-mental activity that you cannot penetrate into the spiritual world with the faculty of judgement that you have gained in the sensory world, not even in the negative sense that one says that the human cognition cannot get beyond itself at this point. You have rather to refrain from penetrating into the spiritual world, before you have prepared yourself by these and similar exercises to penetrate really into the spiritual world. For a certain resignation, a certain renunciation belongs to it. While as a rule the human being is used to putting up hypotheses and all kinds of logical conclusions about that what could be or not be beyond the physical experience, the spiritual researcher has not only to get to an inner conviction, but to an inner intellectual virtue not to use for the characteristic of the spiritual world what comes only from the physical-sensory reality. You have to appropriate this renunciation first; it must become a habitual soul quality. Then you bring yourself to the knowledge that the soul has to make itself ripe for it first to penetrate into the spiritual world. This virtue also supports the introduction of the will into the imagining life as I have described it. This brings you to the point where you can practise that introspection of which I have spoken just now, with which you can really be your own spectator, while the thoughts, feelings, and will impulses are proceeding.

Only by such true introspection, the human being develops a spiritual activity about which he knows by experience that it is performed not with the help of the body because the human being with his true ego is now beyond the body. This mental picture is quite unusual admittedly. Since everything of the other worldviews tends to deny the possibility that the human being can develop a soul life which is independent of the body. If in this way the results of the introspection are stated, one criticises them with that which one has gained in the outer. One cannot cope with it. One creates misunderstandings about misunderstandings simply because any spiritual research is based on something opposite that forms the basis of the scientific way of thinking. There the thinking and the methodical development of thinking is so organised in experiments et cetera that the human being applies the scientific methods that are developed with the faculty of judgement and the reason to learn nature's secrets. This is quite natural on the ground of the scientific way of thinking. One uses the same power of thinking and imagining to develop all kinds of scientific methods in spiritual science to prepare the soul first, so that it can observe the results of spiritual science.

This serves to prepare the soul, so that it can observe the phenomena of the soul life in a way that is free from the body. The human being can thereby advance from the soul to the spirit as he advances from the soul to the body with scientific methods. So that you can say, already the whole way of the proving and judging thinking must become different in spiritual science. It must not be absent, but what one reaches with it is the ability of observing because one has applied the methods of the outer science to the development of the soul first.

Thus in the beginning the spiritual researcher prepares himself with the same means with which science gets, otherwise, to its results, to be able to observe spiritually. Thereby that originates what I reluctantly call clairvoyant beholding of the spiritual world, reluctantly because even today one points often to older unusual soul conditions and confuses the strict serious method of spiritual science intentionally or accidentally with all kinds of pathological and dilettantish methods if one speaks of the clairvoyant beholding of the outer world. About such things, I will speak in detail in the talk on the Revelations of the Unconscious.

Now one can observe the soul life in such a way that the observation does not stop only at the soul experience, but points to the spirit. I would like to mention two quintessential points at first. While the human being gets to true introspection which is carried out beyond the body and thereby faces the spirit, he attains a view not only of the relationship of the usual wake state to the usual sleep as an immediate result of observation but above all of that what the phenomena of awakening and falling asleep are. It is still the destiny of spiritual science today that it speaks not only of unknown things, but that it has to speak in quite different way about that what is involved in the consciousness of every human being.

One has to add to this that spiritual science must use words that are coined for the usual life. This causes some difficulties because spiritual science must use the same words now and again already in another direction. It has to go back to known phenomena of life to be able to illuminate the spiritual realm starting from them. The human being knows the alternating conditions of sleeping and waking if one speaks from the point of consciousness at first, on one side as the time in which the consciousness exists from awakening up to falling asleep, and on the other side the time in which the consciousness has disappeared in darkness, in the sleeping consciousness. The spiritual researcher knows that it is so weak that one normally speaks of the absence of the consciousness in sleep. Now, these both alternating conditions are suitable to move some way into the riddle of the human being already by a realistic consideration. From the start, it must strike everybody that the real human being cannot begin with falling asleep and awakening anew. The mental-spiritual being of the human being which lives, otherwise, while awake as a consciousness must also exist in sleep. However, for the usual consciousness the thing is in such a way that the human being cannot consider himself in sleep that he cannot compare, hence, the waking state to the sleeping state internally spiritually. Externally scientifically, it is another matter. Now it concerns that one gets closer to these things if one really ascends from the usual sensory observation to the spiritual observation in such a way that one envisages thinking, feeling, and willing.

We turn our attention upon the imagining and thinking at first. The human being considers it as a rule in such a way that he knows: I am awake from awakening to falling asleep. My thoughts position themselves in my usual awake life. The usual consciousness cannot get to another judgement. It is different if the soul life has prepared itself with such exercises to a spiritual observation. Then one can observe this inner expansion world, the awake consciousness generally from awakening to falling asleep. It is strange, that here serious naturalists meet with that what spiritual science brings to light from another side. However, natural sciences can only build a bridge to the soul life going out from the investigation of the body. They refuse even today to speak about that about which I speak here. Hence, the naturalists speak another language than the spiritual researcher does. However, the things are to be found. Thus interesting investigations have appeared, for example, recently in scientific area by the researcher Julius Pikler (1864-1952, Hungarian physician, politician) who envisages the awake consciousness quite unlike one was used in biology up to now. Of course, he does not examine such a thing spiritual-scientifically. Hence, he takes something as basis that is not more than a word. Pikler speaks of a “drive of waking” which keeps the human being alert up to falling asleep, which is there, even if no special thoughts and mental pictures are there which is said to appear as such in particular in boredom. I wanted to point to it only to show that also from the other side one works on it.

Spiritual science cannot simply take any term or any hypothetical force as basis where a phenomenon exists but has to observe it. Indeed, it observes what the human soul experiences while awake. It observes the steady flow of the conscious day life from awakening up to falling asleep. It finds the way in particular if it observes the intrusion of thoughts and mental pictures in this simple waking state with its methods of observation. There arises for the spiritual researcher that the usual waking state is interrupted by a partial falling asleep in the experience of thoughts. We wake in such a way that we perpetually lower the waking state to partial sleeping, while we move the mental pictures into the waking state. We get to know the relation of the soul to the imagining life only because we can observe how the usually intensive waking state is not diminished as strongly as in the dreamless sleep and the thought which may be evoked by a perception falls into this decrease every time. We do not experience the usual waking state in a steady intensity, but it is diminished perpetually if we grasp thoughts. What exists, otherwise, more or less dulled in sleep continues into the awake life. Thereby you become able to differentiate what you usually have as a coloured succession of mental pictures while awake. What one knows, otherwise, as waking and sleeping of equal intensity, you have to learn to imagine with different degrees of intensity. You must be able to observe the complete waking state, the weakened waking state, the complete sleeping state, the weakened sleeping state and so on.

Thus, you get to know gradually what one does not consider, otherwise, in the consciousness. Thereby one can also envisage the waking state independently by observation to which the spiritual eye must be created first. Then you need no proofs of what you see, but you just behold it. There you become able to regard a view as right, as given by experience about which the present psychology speaks exceptionally seldom. However, once a psychologist spoke very nicely, whom one appreciates too little.

Here you are at one of those points, which are so interesting for the development of spiritual research. This is not something new, but something that should be built up only in a systematic roundup for which the beginnings have already appeared with those who struggled with knowledge. Fortlage (Karl F., 1806-1881, German philosopher) speaks about it once, and Eduard von Hartmann (1842-1906, philosopher) reproves him, that, actually, the usual consciousness is dying perpetually. It is a weird, courageous assertion, which is to be confirmed scientifically, although natural sciences interpret the concerning facts wrongly; read, for example, the investigations of Kassowitz (Max K., 1842-1913, Austrian paediatrician).

Fortlage realises that that by which consciousness originates is not only based on the growing life, but that just if the conscious life appears in the soul this life must die in the human organism, so that we carry death through our whole conscious life partially in ourselves. While we form mental pictures, something is destroyed in our nervous system that, however, immediately regenerates again. Development follows destruction again. The conscious soul life is based on destructive processes. Fortlage says, if the partial death that always appears in a part of the body, in the brain, while forming the consciousness, seized the whole body each time as the physical death does it, the human being would have to die perpetually. As to Fortlage the physical death only expresses itself as a whole once what the consciousness is perpetually based on.

Hence, Fortlage can hypothetically conclude because he does not yet have the spiritual beholding that we deal with a partial death each time, if our usual consciousness appears, that the general death is the merging of a consciousness into other conditions, which the human being develops for the spiritual world after death. There appears like a silver lining in no uncertain manner what spiritual science develops more and more exactly. Science shows that the whole nature of the human being that is considered rightly from the viewpoint of evolution today must not only considered from this viewpoint. Now I do not expand this consideration beyond the human being; we shall thoroughly speak later about nature where we can enter into such questions.

If one stops at the human being, one has to consider him in such a way that one knows that a development of growing life takes place, but perpetually also a destructive process, a retrograde development. The organs of this destructive process are mainly in the nervous system. The mental consciousness intervenes in the human being while it lets the processes of growing alternate with destructive processes. The whole awake life from the awakening up to falling asleep is based on the fact that with the awakening the mental-spiritual that has separated with falling asleep from the body immerses in the body and that what is progressive development from falling asleep up to awakening changes into retrograde development in the nervous system.

While the human being is thinking, he has to destroy, he must cause death processes in his nerves to make way for the work of the spiritual-mental. Natural sciences will confirm this more and more from the other side. The spiritual researcher advances from the spiritual-mental to the bodily and shows that, while with the awakening the spiritual-mental flows into the bodily, destruction takes place, until the destruction has advanced so far that the progressive development must appear with the beginning of sleep again. The evenly progressive waking state is based on the fact that by the mental-spiritual in the human body repeatedly a proper, a legitimate destructive process takes place, contrary to that current which lives in the usual waking which is active in the forces which let us as children grow and thrive. If we put the imagining, the thinking in the usual waking state, we work the other way again.

There we bring parts of development, partial states of sleep into the destructive process from the bodily development, so that we can say: it is weakened by processes which represent quite weakly what exists in the growth, that state which extends about the usual awake life because it is destroyed. The spiritual researcher realises now that this destruction, this continuously progressing process from the awakening up to falling asleep is the effect of the spirit in the human being. Spirit destroys, and within this destruction, those activities of imagining and thinking assert themselves in which the soul uses the constructive processes to put them in the spiritual destructive processes. Here we see mind, soul, and body intertwining. The spiritual researcher does not want to speak about the spiritual-mental in a dilettantish way and to disregard that what happens in the body, just because he himself observes that the spirit does not work in such a way that it expresses the processes of growth, of development, which are wholly physical processes, but these contrary processes. While the spiritual researcher gets to know that what the mind accomplishes on the body, he also gets to know again how the soul uses the bodily processes to diminish the spiritual processes, while it moves the mental pictures into the destructive process that the mind performs.

As well as the spiritual researcher on one side recognises in the mental pictures which are involved in the usual waking state a partial falling asleep, he learns to recognise on the other side that every time a will impulse positions itself in the soul life, this appears like an increase of the waking state. Thinking, imagining is like a reduction of the waking state, the will impulse is like an awakening of that state which prevails from the awakening up to falling asleep in relation to the will life that is so vague that one can call it a sleeping life even if one is waking. What does the human being know, while he carries out any will impulse, what proceeds in his arm? It is like an awakening every time a will impulse emerges.

With it, I have indicated how the real observer who has ascended to the true introspection can understand the work of the human soul forces and mental powers in the spiritual. While he advances with his methods further, he can get to know that ego that he experiences in this introspection with which he just does the introspection. This ego does not reveal itself to philosophical speculations; one can only experience it. If it is experienced, one gets to know by immediate view what I have now characterised sketchily. The human being with his usual consciousness cannot help believing, envisaging the forces of growing only, that gradually from the bodily developmental processes that develops which is expressed in the mental as ego. Someone who gets to know the ego by true introspection realises that this is a fallacy—but it is a necessary fallacy for the usual consciousness.

There you learn to recognise that that what happens in the body in the ongoing developmental processes relates to the true ego as the lung to the air. As little the lung produces the air, as little the human body creates the ego anyhow. Only as long as one does not know the real spiritual-mental, one commits the necessary fallacy that this ego has anything to do with the body.

However, the spiritual researcher leaves the body with his methods while investigating the ego, as well as that who wants to look at the air has to leave the lung. Thus, the spiritual researcher recognises by real observation that this self, this spiritual-mental of the human being, enters the physical body at birth, at conception respectively that he gets from the line of heredity. He recognises that this ego, which descends from the spiritual world, receives the body that the body inhales this ego, and the human being exhales it again if he dies. This is a pictorial expression how the spiritual-mental that descends from the spiritual world is connected with the physical-bodily.

Just then, however, an essential differentiation of the spiritual and the mental arises for the spiritual researcher also with the transition of the human being to the mental-spiritual surroundings in which he lives with that part of his being that goes through birth and death which is the everlasting, immortal in the human being compared with the transient body. This difference of the mental and the spiritual arises because we learn to recognise something in the mental which breaks away from the human being that is as it were only a died away keynote of that which you experience, otherwise, as thinking, feeling and willing. I would like to express myself as follows: we take a chanted song. We can regard the words of the song as a poem at first and can continue this consideration in listening the chanted song. However, we can also refrain from the contents of the words while singing and can pay attention to the music only. You can grasp the whole experience of the human being in thinking, feeling, and willing in such a way that you can also grasp an undercurrent there if you do not go into the contents of thinking, feeling, and willing.

To express myself even more clearly, I would like to characterise the matter still from another side. You all know that certain Asian people ascend to the spiritual-mental by methods about which I have said in my talks and books repeatedly that they are not applicable to our western cultural development in the same way that here we have to apply other methods to the conscious spiritual research. However, I may adduce something as comparison. You know that the Asian human beings get to a certain cognition of the soul because they recite mantras over and over again. One laughs in the West at the repetitions in the speeches of Buddha and does not know that for the Eastern human beings this repetition of certain sentences is a necessity because thereby just a certain undercurrent is attained in the inner absorption of the matter, disregarding the immediate contents. One hears music living in the soul with these mantras. The soul puts itself in such a thing. In my books, you can find that we do that in the Western spiritual development in a more spiritual-mental way that we do not resort to such a repeated singing or speaking of mantras. However, what is attained there in other way can be explained by the fact that one points out that one witnesses an undercurrent in thinking, feeling, and willing.

If one resorts to the full introspection, maintaining the contents of thinking, feeling and willing, as you have it in the usual awake consciousness, you discover the work of the spirit the easiest. Against it the mental is something more intimate, it often escapes from you. You have to do quite difficult and lengthy exercises if you want to find out it. While you can find out relatively easily that the spirit is destructive in the ongoing waking state, you have to apply subtler, more intimate exercises to observe that the emerging mental pictures are partial sleeping states. However, if you get to this more intimate experience in the soul, you also get from the mere subjective soul life to the objective soul life. Then you do not pursue the spiritual-mental only in that spiritual realm in which the human being lives between death and a new birth, now in a wholly spiritual experience, but you can pursue the mental in its state before birth and in its postmortal state. As strange as it still sounds to the modern human being, one can find out these things. Due to this experience which the Oriental develops just in a way which is so close to the intimate soul life he realised sooner than the Westerner did that the whole human soul life takes place in repeated lives on earth that the repeated lives on earth really result from observation.

It is an observation result of the mental experience. To experience the imperishable that goes through births and deaths in its spirituality is something else than this mental experience as it appears in the repeated lives on earth. It is like a specialisation of the spiritual experience.

As one sees the imagining being involved in the single human being as partial sleeping, one can observe in the outer world how in that spiritual realm, which one discovers as a scene of the everlasting spiritual in the human being, the mental is involved, while it specifies the general-everlasting spiritual life in repeated lives on earth. Those have begun once and will end once. I speak about that in the next talk.

You attain that by the real development of the mental abilities that not everybody needs to appropriate. However, every human being has the sense for truth. Unless prejudices cloud your sense for truth, you can agree with that which the spiritual researcher has to say, also before you yourself have become a spiritual researcher. Since the seer differs from other people as someone differs who watches the watchmaker from that who sees the clock only. He who sees the clock knows that it has originated from the intellectual activity of the watchmaker; he does not need watching the watchmaker. While the spiritual researcher describes from his research by visionary observation how that comes about what is in the everyday life, someone who observes this immediately will find the said confirmed everywhere, even if he himself is no spiritual researcher.

Even if this appears as something paradox in the general cultural development how the spiritual researcher has to think about body, soul and mind of the human being, that will also arise to spiritual research in the course of time—while natural sciences work from the other side on that what spiritual research has to say—what has arisen for natural sciences slowly and gradually. Consider only that there was a time when certain prejudices prevented the emergence of modern physiology and biology. In a similar way one has a prejudice to build the bridge from the human soul life to that what proceeds in the human body, while the soul life takes place. The study of anatomy became also only possible in the course of the Middle Ages. Before a prejudice was an obstacle to add that what happens there in the body to that what the soul can experience inwardly. Today spiritual science is in the same position. Even if one does not believe it, the today's prejudices are of the same value and come from the same causes. As in the Middle Ages one did not want to permit that bodies were dissected to recognise that what happens in them as a condition of the soul life, the most serious scientists are reluctant even today to investigate the spirit with spiritual-scientific methods. As the Middle Ages got around gradually to releasing the scientific investigation of the human body, the cultural development will also involve that the investigation of the spirit which is not identical with the soul is released to spiritual science.

Whether one goes to scientifically minded human beings, whether one goes to other psychologists and comes with spiritual-scientific results, one experiences the same, only in another field, what the biography of Galilei tells.

Up to Galilei's times the prejudice prevailed which continued by an ambiguous conception of Aristotle during the whole Middle Ages that the nerves arise from the heart. Galilei said to a friend that this were a prejudice. The friend was a strictly religious follower of Aristotle. He said, what I can read in Aristotle is true, and there you can read that the nerves arise from the heart. Then Galilei showed him at a corpse that the nerves arise from the brain, not from the heart that Aristotle had not recognised this because such anatomical studies were not yet usual. However, the follower of Aristotle remained unbelieving. Although he realised that the nerves arise from the brain, he said, indeed, the appearance militates for you, but Aristotle says something different, and if a contradiction is between Aristotle and nature, I do not trust nature but Aristotle. This happened really.

Still today, it is this way. Go to those who want to found psychic research in the old sense from a philosophical viewpoint, go to those who want to found psychic research scientifically, they state that one has anyhow to explain that from the psychic only which forms the basis of the soul phenomena coming from the mind or the body. If one points ever so much to facts of spiritual observation, one answers out of the same spirit, if a contradiction exists between that which Wundt (Wilhelm W., 1832-1920, philosopher, physiologist, psychologist) or Paulsen (Friedrich P., 1846-1908, German philosopher and educator) or any authority say and that which spiritual science shows by spiritual observation, then we do not trust spiritual observation but that which one can read in the books to which we are accustomed in this time without authority. Since today one does no longer believe in authorities, but—indeed, in such a way that one does not notice it—in that which is officially labelled anyhow. Spiritual science will struggle through as well as natural sciences struggled through concerning the investigation of the body.

Naturalists like Du Bois-Reymond and others state that where the supersensible begins science must stop. I have already pointed in a former talk to the fallacy that happens there. Where from did it originate? Indeed, one felt—and Du Bois-Reymond felt rather clearly—that the human being is rooted in something spiritual. However, one must recognise this spiritual only by development of spiritual-scientific methods as the ground from which the mental of the human being originates. Modern science wants to make the things clear, while it envisages that what one can perceive with the senses; since the roots in the spiritual ground escape from it. Science does it like somebody who digs out a tree to face it clearly. Then he faces it clearly but the tree withers. Thus, modern science has dug out the tree of knowledge. However, just as the tree dug out from its ground dries up, knowledge also dries up which one digs out of the spiritual ground. Such a sentence like that of Du Bois-Reymond that science stops where the supersensible begins will be linked up to the contrary conviction in future. One will recognise, if one does not want to recognise the supersensible down to the natural phenomena, one removes the tree of knowledge from its topsoil and makes knowledge dry up. One does not say in future where the supersensible begins, science stops, but one experiences if one wants to found knowledge in the way that one takes out it from the spiritual ground that where in the human spiritual life the supersensible stops science cannot prosper that there a real science cannot originate beyond the supersensible, but that where the supersensible stops a dead science will only be.

The American science writer Carl Snyder (1869-1946) who has written a book (New Conceptions in Science, 1903) about the present scientific worldview speaks in almost mocking way about a talk, which Alfred Russell Wallace (1823-1913) held once. Wallace stated, although he was a naturalist, that after his view the human immortal soul has not only that significance which one can observe here in the life between birth and death, but that it extends with its hidden supersensible effect about the whole universe. Of course, a man like Carl Snyder can express himself from his more materialistic thinking about such a quotation only almost mockingly. Now one has to point out if one wants to envisage the cultural-historically interesting of this fact that Wallace got to those epoch-making ideas of evolution, even somewhat before Darwin, which Darwin popularised then. However, Wallace belongs to those who finally worked their way up to a view that just appears in such a quotation.

Indeed, Wallace tried to get a confirmation of his conviction by the experimental method of spiritism. You may say that this pursuit to find a confirmation of a truth that refers to the spiritual world with such experimental art is a fallacy, because in this case one has to ask: could the outer experimental method, the spiritistic one, offer anything to Wallace for his conviction of the everlasting, universal significance of the human soul?—Today I would like to note about this question only so much: someone who has a spiritual insight of a physical process, and knows which results an experiment can deliver, is clear in his mind that such an outer experiment—even if various things may happen which remind you of spiritual manifestations—cannot deliver more about the everlasting significance of a being than any other magnetic, electric or other experiment. What appears in the sensory world can only give some indication of the sensory world. With this attempt, Wallace was indeed in error. However, his conviction could not be generated or confirmed with such an outer observation. Someone who knows the human soul knows that such a conviction must rise from below from the depths of the human soul that the process that leads it to such a conviction must be spiritual and has nothing to do with outer experiments. That is why one has also to suppose that Wallace, although he stood firmly on scientific ground, pronounced a knowledge emerging from the unconscious, from the depths of his soul, which referred to this everlasting significance of the human soul.

Here I would like to remark the following only: somebody who tries to bring the will into his imagining so that it really proceeds under the influence of his will discovers something spiritual in the imagining. You have to say, the right method of meditation leads to the spirit in the usual imagining which is, otherwise, only a soul activity, as well as the naturalist finds in the sensation of hunger that expressed what forms the basis of hunger in the body as chemical or physical processes. Meditating means to let rest a very clear mental picture in the soul in which nothing subconscious, no memory is involved, so that you develop the power of imagining, of thinking as the contents of the mental picture. If you remain in such an activity over and over again, and feel the soul as it were in this activity of meditation, then something objective reveals itself gradually which does not depend on the own will. The own will can withdraw as it were from the activity of imagining, and you have lifted this activity as far into the consciousness as it is not lifted otherwise. You have thereby to begin the way to the spirit. You thereby get around to discovering that the spirit is involved in the imagining, while you tear the imagining away from the bodily more and more.

This is only one of the ways at first, which the spiritual researcher has to go; others are similar to it. The point is that the activity of the human soul becomes so strong that it really tears itself away from the bodily. If you practise the appropriate exercises, you become gradually able to say what is the spiritually active, actually, in the human soul. You do the important, internally stupefying discovery that you get with your thinking to a point where you notice: now I cannot come through with my habitual way of thinking. It is with the thinking just in such a way, as if you see a weight lying there and think wrongly at first that you can lift it, and notice after that hands and arms are too weak to lift it. Here in the outer life it is obvious that the physical organs are too weak. The spiritual researcher can meet something quite similar, transferred into the spiritual-mental, if he has brought the thinking by meditating to the point that it is spirit-filled. Then he feels that he cannot advance, he feels that the brain is not ready to grasp a spirit-filled thought that he wants to grasp now.

You must have experienced once how the brain or the body resists to properly appreciate the dependence of the usual consciousness on this body on one side, and to find out once on the other side that the body can be too weak to maintain a thought which is grasped in spirit. If you do such an experience that the body can be too weak, that the thought can be too strong, you know that there is something immediately experienceable spiritual that is independent of the body. Indeed, you get gradually to the immediate view of a spiritual world because you are with your soul activity beyond the physical body. You learn to recognise what it means to be fulfilled with the spirit in such a way as you are fulfilled, otherwise, in the usual imagining with bodily activity. You learn distinguish the soul life that is supported on the body and the soul life that is supported on the spirit.

Then you can realise how the human being can become addicted to materialism by scientific views. Since one has to say this: on the way to the spirit the spiritual researcher can absolutely stop at materialism because he experiences that he is dependent with the usual consciousness on the body. If he is not able then to get to the real beholding of a supersensible consciousness being, then just the way to the spiritual puts him at the risk to become addicted to materialism. Someone who has never experienced this tremendous temptation to become addicted to materialism also does not stand with full energy in the spiritual world. Since you have to know on one side that this consciousness which accompanies us between birth and death is a soul activity, indeed, in its original force that it requires, however, the outer physical body in any smallest part of its activity, and that one can be detached from this connection with the physical body only for the purpose of spiritual research. Then there you discover that in this human being who lives between birth and death really a higher, spiritual-mental human being lives who goes through births and deaths. You get to know this spiritual-mental human being how he lives in an objective web of thoughts if he himself develops consciousness.

Certain mental pictures that natural sciences can approach only hypothetically gain a real significance. Certain riddles of nature approach the human soul in a new form. I will point here at first only to one riddle in nature that has prepared so much brainwork for the naturalists because they approach it only from the outside. I mean the ether that the naturalists search as a subtler element of physical existence. It is strange how just in such areas the naturalists to be taken seriously come close to spiritual science from the other side. For you could hear from a very significant physicist recently: if one wants to ascribe qualities to the ether, these may be, in any case, no material ones. Today a physicist already says this; that means he moves the ether into that world in which non-material existence is to be found. However, to the physicist like to the naturalist generally this ether must remain a hypothesis. He can conclude it from the other physical processes. However, if the human being as spiritual researcher treats his soul as I have indicated it, he gets around to perceiving the being of the ether in himself at first and to noticing that an etheric body, a supersensible body forms the basis of his physical body. To this supersensible body that is immediately related which arises by true introspection. The mental experience is substantially an interaction of that human being with the ether who pulls himself out of the body and who can live in the sea of thoughts. Only via the etheric, while the etheric works again on the physical body, the soul works on the physical body, too.

On one side, you discover this way that this etheric body that I have also called the body of formative forces in the magazine Das Reich forms the basis of the physical body and is an essential element of the higher human being.

On the other side: while you have strengthened your soul capacity that you can clearly perceive this etheric body, you get to know the subtle figure of the human being in the etheric and find out also that the human soul is richer than that what he experiences in his everyday self-consciousness. This everyday consciousness is bound to the body; hence, it shows only a part of the general spirituality. In this general spirituality, you submerge like in a sea of thoughts, and thus you experience what forms the spiritual basis of the human body at first. However, because you have left this human body, you also get to know the spiritual bases of the physical-sensory surroundings.

If you have advanced to this knowledge, something like an empirical fact appears that you cannot find any right sense in the search of the concealed beings of nature that you have to search another sense of this research. If you consider scientific research, you always find out, actually, that you do research in such a way, as if you had spread out that like a net before yourself which the observation of nature delivers, and then want to find something behind this net that is the essential basis of the externally observed, may it be in philosophical sense the “thing in itself” or the world of atoms. One always requires if one exceeds the only sensory facts that one can penetrate as it were this web of sensory facts. To the spiritual researcher who has got to know the spirit by immediate beholding seems such an aspiration to find a thing in itself or a world of atoms behind the sensory observation in such a way, as if anybody looks into a mirror, sees his picture and that of the surrounding objects in it and then breaks through the mirror to find out where from this picture comes.

He will convince himself that behind the mirror nothing is that causes anyhow what he sees in the mirror. If you get to know the spirit really, you discover that you get to nothing by the penetration behind the sensory world. If you want to search the cause of that which appears there in the mirror, you have to look before the mirror, you have to search it in the living together with the world. You have to penetrate vividly into the world with which you live together before the mirror. It is with the riddles of the nature this way. If you get to know in the described way in what way you stand in the spiritual world, you know: what you recognise as the spirit in which you live is also the cause of the natural phenomena. Only the outer human organisation is responsible that we see these natural phenomena like a reflection spread round ourselves. Thus, the spiritual research gets around to speaking about the spirit if it generally wants to speak about something essential behind the natural phenomena that it gets to know as that into which the soul enters if it frees itself from the body and gets to know its own everlasting nature in the spiritual world.

It is of big significance not to be held by scientific prejudices from looking at the relation that arises to the observer of the spirit. It is that what arises in such a way only brought up from the soul, while the soul submerges in the spiritual world. What can be brought up from the soul itself can be also rejected if this soul has prejudices. What should become a soul property can be taken away from the soul, while prejudices cloud the free view of the spiritual environment. The fact that somebody gets around to admitting such a thing depends on whether he does not develop opposite scientific prejudices in his soul. He who thinks in such a way that our physical-sensory world is the producer of the usual consciousness—that is true and spiritual research also confirms it—, and who possibly leads back this physical-sensory world in Kant-Laplace way to a mere primeval nebula, for him this speculative scientific worldview can become such a suggestion that it takes away the possibility from him completely to progress to the spirit.

Maybe just because the scientific worldview has worked in the course of the last centuries so suggestively on humanity, humanity is less inclined to want any spiritual view. Indeed, from that what I have shown you see that you can advance to the being of nature only if you advance to the spirit. Since you find it then also as the essential in nature. However, you find not only generally that the spirit forms the basis of the natural phenomena, but you find this also in detail. That is why spiritual research cannot be represented in a readily comprehensible worldview, but it is to be represented gradually and slowly like any other science.

If you learn to look at this etheric part of the human being that is integrated in the physical-sensory body, then this etheric human being is of quite different nature. Indeed, it is supersensible, it is similar to the mental, it is between the material and the mental, but it is not as differentiated as the physical body is. The physical body has the senses separated out of itself. The etheric body is not divided in this way, but while it faces the etheric world, it forms, stimulated by that which it faces, in such a way that the spiritual eyes, the spiritual ears are generated only if anything should be perceived in the spiritual world. Thus, one discovers another inner agility of this body of formative forces. One discovers above all that the body of formative forces is not dependent on the immediate physical surroundings. One finds out gradually that this etheric body is dependent from the whole universe, so that for it the vertical or horizontal directions mean something. It means something for it whether it is within the light mass that goes out from the sun or under the influence of the earth mass if it is in darkness, and so on.

One notices that this etheric body is on a level where it is even more dependent on the whole universe, while the physical human body has this developmental state already behind itself and is now immediately dependent from the earth. It is a more ideal dependence on a more enclosing whole which this body of formative forces has than that of the physical-sensory body. Thus, one discovers the strange truth that the inner human being is a supersensible, spiritual being that creates its image here in the physical body that, however, this supersensible is on a higher level in certain respect than the physical-sensory, is still on a former developmental level.

It arises immediately that the human being as a spiritual researcher says to himself, in you something lives that outranks, indeed, the whole outer nature because it is just spiritual-mental. However, as something spiritual-mental it is more imperfect than the outer physical, as something spiritual-mental it will be differentiated only in a later developmental state as the sensory-physical of the human being already is.

Hence, if you want to find the spiritual-mental in an image in the physical life, you have to search it in the world of the lower organisms. The lower forms of the organisms appear in such a way that you say to yourself, they develop that materially what the human being develops mental-spiritually on a higher level. You see, the things are not as simple as the scientific view regards them. This inner agility and firmness of the formative forces of the etheric body by which it follows the vertical or the horizontal directions and directs his organs, or follows the light, or the gravity, and directs his organs correspondingly, this inner characteristic of the etheric body has to do nothing with the speculation about the outer physical existence. Now one would have to state, after one has convinced himself that this supersensible body has the qualities which I have just described, that just with the lower living beings something similarly undifferentiated would have to be found. It would have to turn out that they are mental-spiritually lower, indeed, than the mental-spiritual of the human being, that they are similar, however, in their physical configuration not to the physical body of the human being, but to his etheric body. Now it is strange that the further natural sciences progress with their quite different methods, they can give the best evidence of that which spiritual science has to require. That is the course that spiritual science says first that one has to find the material image of that in nature which is discovered in the supersensible world.

Now you can just find a tip to very interesting scientific investigations in such a research context as it corresponds to the more materialist disposition of a man like Snyder, as Jacques Loeb (1859-1924, American physiologist) did, for example, who played a big role in all kinds of monistic unions in Europe once.

There you find a quite strange experiment cited—I do not talk of whether it is humane or inhuman whether it is moral or immoral to carry out such experiments; this comes less into question for “science.” The researcher Loeb took the substance of lower organisms, of hydroids, and cut out cubes of their substance arbitrarily. What happened? Upwards “feelers” grew in the head; downwards “feet” grew in such a way as the hydroids have them. No matter which form one cut out: upwards head and feelers grew, downwards feet. Now Loeb turned the substance, so that the feet were on top. There grew out a new head and feelers and downwards feet. There you have the quite undifferentiated; there you have that materially developed in the lower animal, in this case with the hydroids, what the spiritual researcher discovers on a higher level of existence for the human-mental in the body of formative forces. It is similar with another genus. One cuts with the razor at a certain place into the lower animal being; then there forms even a mouth with tentacles. There you still have the undifferentiated substance as an image of that what lives spiritual-mentally in the human being on a higher level. There you find the connection between that which was discovered in the spirit whose participant the human being is on a higher, supersensible level, and that which expresses itself on a lower level in the matter.

You see that the lower organic world is based on the fact that it retains that in the matter what the human being develops spiritual-mentally on a higher level because his higher developed organism can serve him as basis. You realise just there how spiritual science acts towards that what comes from natural sciences from the other side so that the spiritual and the natural meet in the middle. While you penetrate into such things, you get to know thoroughly that the usual consciousness does not hinder you from appreciating the everlasting, the immortal human soul.

Since you get to know the possibility that the human being lives not only in this form of consciousness but also in other forms of consciousness. If one does not know other forms of consciousness, one can also not attain any idea of the constitution of the human being when he passes the gate of death. However, if you learn to recognise by spiritual research that the usual consciousness is only one of various forms of consciousness, you also learn to recognise that already the sleep is another form of consciousness.

Then you open the way for yourself to penetrate into the spiritual-mental, while you take account of the eligible requirements of material research. Then you say to yourself, the further natural sciences advance, the more riddles they reveal, the more they urge to acknowledge the spirit and its science. They will acknowledge more and more that the usual consciousness needs something material of a lower level as basis, and that spirit and soul of the human being penetrate this lower element in supersensible way. Someone who does not figure this relation of spirit and nature out will be horrified about the unsubtle materialism if today a naturalist, namely with a certain right, says the following: what is, actually, the human cerebral mass? It is an organic matter, and the stimulation which appears in the usual consciousness with the help of this organic nervous substance is real nothing but a tendency of this organic matter to coagulate; and this coagulation of a phosphorous, fat-like substance which appears in our cerebral nervous system if we think, imagine, or perceive, can be compared with that which proceeds if, for example, a jelly prepared by the housewife becomes concrete by cooling.

There the naturalist gets gradually around to thinking rather vividly materially, to saying rather clearly to himself—and the scientific view heads to this rightly: while in the soul the most different processes happen, the natural basis of which is the tendency of the nervous mass to coagulate.

The spiritual researcher does not need to oppose this scientific approach what would be dilettantish because the legitimate scientific method must lead to such knowledge. However, while one recognises which simple material processes happen, while the spiritual-mental is active, one just thereby explains the independence of this spiritual-mental. You gradually find out for yourself not to think about the manifestations of nature as today, unfortunately, most people still think that they explain the essentiality of nature with some material bases, but one will recognise that the essential of nature is to be searched in the spiritual. While one figures this relation of the spiritual to the natural out, one recognises that the spiritual is active in nature everywhere, and that one has to look as it were at the physical facts like at the characters of a writing. If one describes them as characters, one does something right, but does not have something complete. You have to be able to read that what is expressed by the characters which are joined to words; you have to learn to read in nature, so that you understand the facts of nature gradually in such a way that you say to yourself: what the naturalists recognise leads rather to questions than to answers.

The answers can be given only if one figures the spiritual bases out. Today one expects just if a natural philosopher writes about things and processes of nature that he gives answers. You will be right if you say to yourself, what one observes in nature induces the human being to put questions; the answers must come from that what can be grasped only spiritually. Thus, we could point to the most common processes that the spiritual must give the human being the instinct to treat the physical facts in the right way as questions. An everyday fact is the succession of sleeping and waking. Very interesting scientific theories on the nature of sleep exist by Johann Crüger (biographical data not available, Outline of Psychology, 1887), Ludwig Strümpell (1812-1899, philosopher, psychologist, On the Nature and Origin of Dreams, 1877), Preyer (William Thierry P., 1841-1897, physiologist, On the Causes of Sleep, 1877) and many others whom I would like to ignore now.

All these investigations are very interesting, but they suffer above all from the fact that one does not know how to consider the basic facts that one can find only spiritual-scientifically that the alternating states of waking and sleeping really belong to the human life as the pendulum deflection. If you recognise that the human being is a natural being and spiritual being, you also recognise that he swings back and forth with his real self between the physical existence and the spiritual existence. In his awake life, he uses the physical body for the performances that he carries out with the usual consciousness. His physical body is more perfect because it has a longer development behind itself than his spiritual-mental being has which is on a higher level, but is more imperfect. Then he sleeps over with his spiritual-mental in another state of consciousness in which he is not yet able to perceive between birth and death in which he will only perceive when he has crossed the gate of death because he is different connected with the spiritual world without his physical body. This swinging back and forth is a fact that you have to regard as an inner necessity of life. Also in this respect, quite interesting scientific investigations are available. If you are able to go, for example, into some interesting explanations of memory and feelings which the Hungarian researcher Palágyi (Menihért P., 1859-1924, philosopher, physicist) did in his Lectures on Natural Philosophy: On the Basic Problems of Consciousness and Life (1908), you realise that also their natural sciences already approach that from the other side, what spiritual-science recognises. Indeed, I have to say that just the facts brought forward with reference to sleep research that are in the outer nature are not treated correctly as questions.

How does one treat them? A much-respected naturalist of Haeckel's school (Preyer) wrote in a popular writing also about sleep. He states like other naturalists, too, that sleep happens, because the human being is tired, sleep follows tiredness. This is quite right; we will further immediately go into the matter. However, to indicate that the human being can no longer activate his senses, this naturalist points to what must happen, actually, that the human being falls asleep. This respected naturalist states that the tiredness of the senses causes that the human being discontinues because the sensory life stops, until the sensory life has rejuvenated by self-controlling. One considers the human being as a wholly physical being. Therefore, he states the following: what do we do if we fall asleep? We try to lock out the sensory stimuli possibly. We cover the windows of our bedrooms with curtains, so that it is very dark, we lock out the auditory stimuli, so that it is noiseless around us.—He even points out that also the temperature does not let us fall asleep if it is too warm or too cold in the bedroom, and so on, briefly, he wants to show that, indeed, the causes of falling asleep are not to be found in swinging forth and back of life between body and spirit, but in the outer surroundings.

May one put this question correctly this way? Does one regard the outer scientific facts correctly? Then something would not happen, for example, that I have observed numerous cases in my life where people do not at all produce noiseless surroundings or the most possible darkness covering the windows with curtains and so on, but where they fell asleep in bright halls after five minutes, even if the speaker spoke loud. There are not the conditions that the naturalist demands, and sleep still happens, of course only with single persons.

It is just not the point that one has only right conditions complying with the facts, but that one can put these facts into the whole coherence to which they belong. If you know that the alternating states of waking and sleeping are based on the fact that the human being is thereby embedded in the spirit, and that he enjoys this body from without as long as he is not connected with the physical body, then you can also understand that you can exaggerate this enjoyment too. One gets to know the sleep as an independent, in itself founded demand on life, as another state of consciousness as it is which one has in the physical body. Now this state of consciousness has a certain significance for the physical body. You bring that in the physical body also which you experience enjoying from falling asleep up to awakening. Tiredness is thereby removed. This is quite right, but this is something different if anybody says, tiredness is the cause of sleep. It is something else to say, sleep removes tiredness, rather than, tiredness causes sleep. Indeed, if one considers the sleep spiritual-mentally, it may seem comprehensible that the human being longs for sleep if he is tired. There it is necessary to go over in the spiritual. However, tiredness does not cause sleep there but the desire to remove tiredness causes sleep.

You see that that is trend setting for the solution of the riddles of nature what you can find in the spiritual. I would like to bring in an example that I have already presented in the appendix of my last book The Riddles of the Soul. The point is that normally if one speaks about the connection of the soul life with the bodily life today one says almost generally that this soul life is connected only with the nervous life. Those listeners who have listened to me many a time know that I pass personal remarks only reluctantly.

However, here the personal is connected with the objective. Hence, I may say, just this problem to fix the relations of the spiritual-scientific with the scientific also externally has occupied me for thirty to thirty-five years for which I am able only now to find the right words; since spiritual research is not easier than the scientific one. What has arisen to me from spiritual research in the course of this time while perpetually considering and comparing the relevant scientific facts, has confirmed everywhere that one has to characterise the relations of mind and soul with the body unlike it often happens. Indeed rudiments are everywhere, so that I would not like to say that that what I have to pronounce here is original. However, today in this context natural sciences do not yet figure it out. It is the point that one can think soul and mind not only in a relation to a part of the body, to the nervous system, but that one has to imagine the whole spiritual-mental that enters the human body from the spiritual world at birth being connected with the whole body in the following way:

We can divide the spiritual-mental first into perceiving and imagining, secondly into feeling and thirdly into will impulses that materialise then in actions, so that the spiritual-mental as it appears in the usual consciousness consists of this tripartism. The spiritual-scientific facts cause not to relate the imagining, perceiving life to something else in the body than to the nervous system. It is interesting that Theodor Ziehen because he relates the emotions only to the nervous system has the expression “feeling tone” for the emotional life only, as if the emotions were not anything independent in the soul, as if they were only tones of imagining. He denies an independent will life all the more.

All these investigations are right if they relate only this part of the spiritual-mental, imagining and thinking, directly to the nervous system, to the brain. Indeed, natural sciences do not yet have concepts of these nervous processes generally because they do not consider them properly. I will speak about that in the talk on the Revelations of the Unconscious more thoroughly. Then, however, the emotional life is the second member of the spiritual-mental life. This emotional life is only indirectly related to the nervous system. It is directly related to the rhythmic life of blood circulation and respiration. If we pursue the nervous processes in ourselves, we have the bodily counter-image of perceiving and imagining. If we want to have a bodily counter-image of the emotional life, one has to envisage the rhythmical life as it happens in the interplay of respiration and blood circulation. Only because this rhythm approaches the nervous system it is generally possible that we also imagine our feelings. While we imagine our feelings, a direct relation of the emotional life with the imagining life comes about. However, there also a direct relation of that what forms the basis of the emotional life in the body as rhythm to the nervous system comes about.

I know very well that now because there is an experimental psychology this relation of life rhythm to the emotional life is already indicated. However, it is not indicated correctly because that direct relation of the emotional life to the rhythms of life is not searched as one searches, otherwise, the direct relation of imagining to the nervous system. I know well that one can argue much against that what I have stated. I would need a lot of time to refute these objections. They all can be refuted. I want to point only to one thing. Anybody could say, look at the musical-aesthetic feeling, it comes about just by perceiving, imagining. - Thus, one could put many rebuttals forward. These things are just very subtle, and of course, they may be apparently refuted very easily if one looks at them as one often does it today. The true process of the musical-aesthetic feeling is that that which happens in the rhythmic life approaches that—the psychologist knows how this happens—which happens in the brain, while the tones are heard, and that only while the tone settles in the rhythm of the whole body the musical sensation, the aesthetic enjoyment is caused.

A third element is the life in will impulses that materialise in actions. Just in such a way as imagining is connected with the nervous system, the emotional life is connected with the rhythms of respiration and blood circulation, the whole will life is attached to the metabolism. A metabolic process forms the basis of every will process. The things are confused only because everything in the human being interacts in a way, that, for example, the will is involved in the imagining, and thereby the metabolism is involved in the nervous system. However, one is allowed to relate that what happens there as metabolism to the imagining; quite different nervous processes form the basis of that, but one has always to relate it to the will.

Thus, one has related the whole spiritual-mental—thinking, feeling and willing—to the three life processes in the human organism. Since if one goes into the human organism, its whole life exhausts itself to nothing but nervous processes, rhythmical processes and metabolic processes. The whole body is directly connected with the whole spiritual-mental. One can confirm this connection with many facts that are already recognised scientifically that are not put correctly as questions and, hence, one does not find the way to spiritual beholding with them that can only bring order in the scientific riddles. If you familiarise yourself with that in current physiological books what is known in natural sciences and disregard the prejudices which are brought in theoretically, then that is highly confirmed scientifically everywhere what spiritual science has to say. However, natural sciences do not apply their methods comprehensively. They specialise. That is why one does not transfer that which one properly applies to one field to another field.

Does, for example, science understand the position of the magnetic needle physically in such a way that the directional forces work in the magnetic needle only? Rather science says rightly, the earth itself is a big magnet, the magnetic North Pole of the earth attracts one end of the magnet needle, the magnetic South Pole the other end. One puts the magnetic needle with its directional force in the whole universe. Imagine once if one transferred this on the organic science! In the organic science, one goes forward in such a way, as somebody would do who would look for the directional forces of the magnetic needle only in the magnetic needle. There one does embryology and observes how the egg of the chicken develops, one looks for its origin only in the chicken, or at most at its ancestors. If one transferred the physical method on embryology, one would recognise the developmental forces of the egg, of an embryo in the whole universe just like that. Spiritual science has to point to that.

It will show more and more that the scientific facts already confirm today what spiritual science has to say. How can somebody like Loeb cut the substance of hydroids, observe how there on one side head and feelers form, on the other side the feet and so on and completely disregard the fact that there a similar inner relation of the formative forces to the universe exists, as it exists with the magnetic needle to geomagnetism? How can one overlook that miraculous confirmation of the fact which is found spiritually in the spiritual-scientific area that that which lives in the human being in supersensible way as a body of formative forces is integrated in a similar way in the whole universe that thereby cosmic forces are led into the human nature, so that the human being lives, indeed, in the imperishable everlasting universe at the same time? However, it should be talk of it in the next talks where I speak about the everlasting nature of the human being and about the destiny of the soul after death.

It was my task today to show that spiritual science, while it leads to the spirit, also leads to the being of nature that it can really grasp the riddles of nature. Then one does not look back at a Kant-Laplace primeval nebula, but says to himself out of real spiritual knowledge: now you know what is connected in the human being with the whole universe what the higher being is in his wholly outer natural existence what forms the basis of the sensory body.

Now you have to trace back this body how it was in primeval times on that level on which today the spiritual-mental is to advance then to other developmental levels. I can only indicate this. However, it becomes obvious from the whole sense of the today's explanations that one gets around not to imagining the primeval Kant-Laplace nebula as the initial state of the earth, but something spiritual-mental, so that you recognise the transition of the earth and of the human being from the spiritual to the material. Thus, you do not get to the lifeless primeval Kant-Laplace nebula but to the spiritual-mental origin and to the spiritual-mental final state of the earth. You really combine with the outer existence, not hypothetically. You have to grasp thoughts in such a way that they are realistic.

I would like to point here to a very interesting lecture which Professor Dewar (Sir James D., 1842-1923, physicist and chemist) held at the beginning of this century. He calculates that after millions of years the state of the earth will be as follows: there at least a temperature of below 200 degrees centigrade would be; however, at this temperature quite different conditions prevail. Then the atmosphere of the earth will be liquefied. Then the current lighter gases form an air circulation, certain substances that are liquid today become solid as for example the milk. It becomes not only solid, but if it is exposed to light for a while, it will become luminescent. Hence, if one coats the walls with this lacto protein, one can read newspapers with this light! He also describes that one can no longer take photos because at this temperature the chemical forces of the beams of light will have got lost. Briefly, you could continue the picture completely after scientific methods rather well. The spiritual scientist who has learnt to think realistically knows where he has to stop with his thinking. Such research is just in such a way, as if you take any human organ, for example, the heart: you observe its changes for six to seven years and then you infer quite scientifically how the heart will have changed after 300 years. There you have the same method that Professor Dewar applies. While he extends the slow changes of our earth during a reasonable time to millions of years, he gets to the final state of the earth as one would get to a state of the human being after 300 years if one takes the change of an organ or of the total organism as basis during some years for the calculation without regarding the fact that the human being is dead then long since. Thus, the earth does no longer exist at the time, which Professor Dewar has calculated. One would like to ask who yet reads newspapers then at temperatures below 200 degrees centigrade, with these luminescent walls lacquered with lacto protein, which cows will give the solid milk and so on! Already a superficial consideration could point out if one has connected his thinking with reality that, as soon as one stops thinking with those thoughts that the physical reality gives, one has to proceed to the spiritual.

Thus, spiritual science really delivers the ground from which a realistic approach emerges which is coming up to meet a healthy human thinking. It is still noteworthy how a healthy thinking is so designed which does not stand, indeed, on spiritual-scientific ground which faces, however, reality in healthy way, and how it relates to such thinking which is quite scientific which does not notice, however, that this scientificity stops at a certain point being in reality. As a sound feeling cannot defer to such scientific thinking, I would like to point to the explanations that Herman Grimm did about the Kant-Laplace theory, in his Goethe book, about the relation of this theory to Goethe's sound view. He says there:

“The great Laplace-Kant imagination of the origin and future fall of the globe had already gained ground in his youth. From the rotating primeval nebula, the central gas drop forms from which the earth originates that experiences all phases, as a solidifying ball, for unfathomable periods, included the episode of the habitation by human beings, to fall finally as a burnt-out slag into the sun. It is a long, but for the public comprehensible process for whose realisation no other outer intervention is required than the effort of any outer force to maintain the hot temperature of the sun.

One cannot imagine any more futile perspective for the future than that which should be forced upon us in this expectation as scientifically necessary today. A bone of a carrion around which a hungry dog creeps would be a refreshing appetising piece compared with this last excrement of creation as which our earth would become subject, in the end, to the sun again. It is the thirst for knowledge and a sign of ill imagination with which our generation accepts such things and believes them. Future scholars have to use a lot of astuteness to explain it as historical phenomenon.”

If anybody says such a thing to us, it is a given if it is a usual human being, a fool, if it is Herman Grimm, a witty person who was misled, however, just by his imagination and could not penetrate because of his imaginative idealism just into the strict, exact method of natural sciences. Well! However, in the end, someone who applies correct scientific methods still needs the possibility to recognise where he leaves reality with his thinking, which is taken from the completely physical processes, and where he has to enter into the spirit to remain in reality. Then he convinces himself that the biggest riddles of nature, the initial and final states of earth lead to the spiritual that one does not have to regard the Kant-Laplace primeval nebula, Dewar's state of congelation, but the spiritual-mental origin and goal are the opposite ends of the earthly development. This spiritual-mental-physical earth corresponds to the spiritual-mental-physical life of the human being at the same time.

Careful, serious naturalists already feel what spiritual science wants. However, there one is little inclined even today to deal with the things seriously. At Darwin's centenary a significant naturalist of the present, Julius Wiesner (1838-1916, Austrian botanist), wrote about the negative and positive aspects of Darwin's theory. Among the rest, you find a place in it about aberrations and the negative aspects of Darwin's theory that has evoked so much materialistic nuances in issues of worldview. Wiesner says the following: approximately the true naturalist is well aware of the borders of his scientific approach and knows that natural sciences can deliver, indeed, the stones of a worldview, however, never more than the stones. The picture is almost appropriate because one can explain it even further. Natural sciences really deliver stones only. If one takes stones, one cannot build a house with them. One has to take the laws of building a house from the outside, from the relation to gravity, from the relation to pressure, from everything that is not in the stones, the stones must comply with other laws. Indeed, then you realise that, while you have built the house according to the laws which are not in the stones themselves you have expressed something in the relations of pressure and gravity, of harmony of the house that can lead back you again to similar relations in nature from which the stones are quarried out. However, the house can only be built if you subject the stones to laws different from those, which are in themselves. Wiesner is completely right, natural sciences can deliver stones, but they must be subjected to laws different from those, which can be found in the sphere of physical existence. Where from the laws are taken with which spiritual science builds while it uses the scientific results investigating the spiritual life? Just in such a way as the architect has carried out the plan of the house and the house itself, just the spiritual scientist builds the worldview of natural sciences with that what refers to the spiritual in nature according to the laws which he has observed spiritually. As you can find something in the structure of the house that leads back to the structure of nature from which the stones are quarried out, we are again led back to nature by spiritual science. Spiritual science can lighten the physical life, but it must not believe, and natural sciences must also not believe that with the stones and their laws, with the immediate scientific results, a worldview can be developed for natural sciences.

The today's considerations might justify it that I summarise them at the end with the short quotation: it becomes obvious just if one observes and considers the riddles of nature correctly that natural sciences themselves lead to the spirit, and that in the consideration of the spirit also the elements are given to solve the riddles of nature. Thus, you can formulate as a mnemonic:

Nature cannot clarify itself but only the light that you attain in the spiritual world can lighten the processes and beings of nature. If you want to recognise nature, you have to take the way through the spirit. The spirit is the light that lights up its own being and can light up the riddles of nature on its own accord.

In this time where so many people have the comprehensible need to orientate themselves about the earth-shaking events you often hear, history “teaches” this or that. One means that one could judge about any fact of the present because of similar facts of history. If we ask ourselves, which possibilities present themselves to the human beings to judge this or that on basis of historical experience, then, however, you get to a somewhat dubious judgement about what history “teaches.”

I would like to point only to two things, but I could increase them a hundred times. I would like to point to the fact that at the beginning of this world disaster many people were of the opinion that these critical events would last four, in the extreme case six months. One regarded such a judgement as completely entitled. You cannot say that these human beings had not applied all logical precautions to deliver such a judgement. Now, the facts themselves have taught such people rather thoroughly the opposite of that what they have believed. Just at this example, one also sees how narrowly that which history should teach is associated with the judgement of the social or other world relations, so that you can expect from a consideration of the historical life of humanity that also some light falls on the judgement you have to exert for the social and economic living together of the human beings.

However, I would like to bring in another example of the limited validity of the sentence, that history “teaches” this or that. An ingenious personality received a professorship of history at a German university more than hundred years ago. Really, from a brilliant conception of that which history gives and which one can apply to the human life, this man spoke the following words approximately: the single nations of Europe have become in the course of the human progress, as history teaches, a big family whose single members are still feuding, but can never tear each other apart. - Really, a significant personality believed to be able to judge in such a way out of his insight into the course of history at his inaugural lecture. This man was Friedrich Schiller (1759-1805). He spoke these words in the eve of the French Revolution which contributed so much to that what one can call the tearing of the European nations, and particularly if he could see what happens in our present. It seems to me that from such facts Goethe got the sensation, which he pronounced in a wonderful sentence: “The best that we have from history is the enthusiasm which it excites.” It seems, as if he did this quotation just to reject the other fruits of the so-called historical knowledge and to appreciate that only which can arise as enthusiasm, as a certain positive mood from the historical documents.

Today we want to examine which position spiritual science has to take towards two opinions: history can be the great master of life, and the other: the best what one can have from history is the enthusiasm that it excites. At first it will be interesting just in case of the consideration of the historical life of humanity and the consequences which can be drawn from this consideration for the judgement of the social life to which view one has come in the present about the historical evolution beyond spiritual science. Since the historical life of humanity is attached to that what goes through every single person because every human being is cocooned in the historical evolution. And really, just in the present it is important to look at this judgement of the contemporaries because the judicious viewers of history think that also the judgement is in a crisis how one should found history. I would like to talk not in abstractions, but to attach my considerations to realities. There one must comply with examples that of course are single examples out of many.

I would like to comply, for example, with the judgement about history, how it should be anew founded in the present, which the famous Professor Karl Lamprecht (1846-1915) has done. You can find that which one can feel from his monumental German History (1891-1909), in a comfortable way summarised in his lectures What is History? Five lectures on the Modern Science of History (1905) which Lamprecht held partly in St. Louis, partly in New York at invitation of the Columbia University. There he tries to summarise what has arisen to him about the kind how history should be taught out of the requirements of the present. It is even more comfortable to get an idea of that what this famous historian wanted to say, actually, by the fact that he treated a segment of the historical evolution of humanity exceptionally clear in the second of these lectures. Lamprecht briefly told the whole development of the German people from the first Christian centuries up to now to the Americans. He told that in such a way as he meant that science of history has to become according to the requirements of the present. Now you can judge such things, actually, only properly if you can compare them anyhow. There just a lecture by Woodrow Wilson (1856-1924) offers itself which he held on the development of the North American life, so that you can compare two spirits who are emotionally and spatially far from each other how they look as historians at the history of their peoples in each case.

Forgive if I let—not by courtesy but for stylistic reasons—the considerations of Woodrow Wilson precede. None who knows me more exactly states that I overestimate Wilson. I am also allowed to point to the fact that I already made my judgement about Wilson in a series of talks, which I held in Helsinki before the war, indeed, at a time when Wilson was already president of the United States (1913). At that time I already said that it is very unfortunate that at a position from which so much depends for humanity a personality is who is so frightfully narrow-minded in his judgement. Since although in those days still numerous people worshipped Wilson enthusiastically, for example, because of his books The New Freedom (1913) and Mere Literature and Other Essays (1896), one could prove that his independent judgement flowing from his personality is very much limited internally. Without being swayed by the present political events, I stress what I said before the war about the so misjudged, that is overestimated personality. I have to say this in advance, so that one does not doubt the objectivity of that which I still want to say about Wilson as a historian.

It is very strange if one compares how Wilson considers the history of his people with that what Lamprecht says about the history of Central Europe. One detects that he finds out the most succinct point almost instinctively to answer the question: when have we become, actually, Americans, and how have we become Americans? How has this happened in history? There he makes an exceptionally appropriate distinction between all those who were sooner in the union whom he considers, however, as “Not yet Americans” but as “New Englanders” who are because of their whole disposition, their mood “New Englanders,” and the later “real Americans.” There he distinguishes to a hair's breadth a prehistory of the union and lets the union start its historical becoming when the population crowded together on a narrow space in the east expands to the west of America when the people develop that disposition which he calls the disposition of the frontiersmen. Now he shows how America's history consists externally and mentally of the fact that the east expands to the west, and he shows rather obviously how the regulation of the land distribution, of the tariff question, even the regulation of the slave issue which he ascribes not to some principles of humaneness but to the necessities which arose from the settlement and the conquest of the west. All these questions are put in the development of modern America. The essentials of this talk consist in the fact that he shows how the historical becoming has grasped a sum of human beings from an outer situation, and that that which goes forward with these human beings can be understood strictly speaking from that what they had to undertake under the influence of the described conditions.

Various things are interesting if one pursues just these considerations of Wilson, and that what Wilson has performed, otherwise, as a historian. Just to get some thoughts on various things that are associated with the topic of the today's talk, a comparison of that what Wilson says about the most different historical objects with that which the Europeans say is very useful.

It has exceptionally astonished me at the most different places of Wilson's explanations that there is a strange correspondence—to me already strange because I would have preferred it would not be this way—of the contents of sentences, of the contents of thoughts what Wilson explains about the most different objects, and of that what, for example, the spirited Herman Grimm, often mentioned by me, said about various things of the historical course of humanity.

If one considers Herman Grimm as brilliant as I do and Wilson as prudent, as I must do, it may be quite unpleasant to someone if he reads Wilson sometimes and says to himself: it is peculiar, there I read a sentence that I could also read with Grimm. Although this is in such a way, although I have tested it with judgements that Wilson and Grimm made about the same personalities, like Macaulay, Gibbon and others, nevertheless, in spite of the often almost literal accordance, without having any relation to each other, it is obvious that in reality the attitudes of both men are completely different. Just on such occasion it becomes obvious that two persons can say the same but they do this from quite different mental undergrounds. In this case, it is particularly interesting because the colouring that the judgement receives in the one and the other case is associated with the roots of the one or the other personality in his respective national character. Just while one notices such resemblances, one discovers that the one is American and the other is German.

It can strike you quite externally, which difference exists there. There is a volume of essays by Grimm that contains as frontispiece a picture of Grimm as this happens today so often. The German issue of Wilson's essays Mere Literature also contains a picture of Wilson. One can compare the portraits. Already this proves something quite strange to someone who knows to judge such a thing. If you look at Grimm's portrait, after you were engrossed in what he says as a historian, then you can realise that every feature of his face expresses that every sentence and every turn is connected intimately with everything that this man has wrested from his soul. Then you look at the portrait of Wilson, after you have also read his book first: it seems as if this man could not have been present at all with that what was judged there in the book; a certain foreignness appears. If you realise this, a riddle of the way dawns how in this case two persons consider history, and you can ask yourself in what way is this resemblance and the strongly felt basic difference caused? Then there appears something very strange. Just that what Wilson says about the American people makes sense immediately, so that you know, this is true of the historical development of this people as he wants to show it. However, you get on gradually—only the psychological observation can prove that—: Wilson has not grown together so intimately with his judgement as we imagine this within Central Europe. Another relation between judgement and human being exists there than we are used.

I know that I say something paradox, but it is intimately connected with that what I would like to explain about the historical development of humanity. If it did not sound so superstitious, I would say, you find out for yourself that somebody like Wilson himself does not judge if he makes such suitable judgements as in this interpretation of history and at other places, but he is possessed by something in his soul. I would like to express myself somewhat different:

With such a personality like Wilson, you have the impression that in the soul something is that suggests this judgement from the inside of the soul. You do not have the impression that the own individuality has completely developed it; you rather have the feeling that something like a second personality, a second being is in the soul, which has suggested it.

If one looks at Wilson's appropriate judgements about the character of the American people where he says:

• that already the outer appearance and behaviour shows the right American because he has the quickly movable eye

• that he is inclined to take up courageous, but also adventurous lines of thought quickly

• that he is little inclined, on the other hand, to be attached to his native country as other people are

• that he likes a lot to make plans which can be carried out everywhere,

if you envisage this characterisation of the Americans by Wilson, then they have something in themselves that oppresses them externally: not the sensibly looking, quiet eye—I could also adduce the other characteristics—, but the quickly movable eye is a sign of the fact that something oppresses the American from the inside, and such suggestions continue to have an effect if the judgement of Wilson is accurate.

We compare what I had to say with an interpretation of history, which is spatially and mentally somewhat far away, with that what Lamprecht puts as his ideas about the historical development of Central Europe. These are original ideas. He tries to realise how this being of the Central European people has developed in the course of centuries, since the third century up to now. One notices that he has internally worked for everything that he says. One has not to agree with many things, in particular as a spiritual scientist; we will immediately have to speak of it. However, he gained everything from his immediate personality. It would be complete nonsense to say, any inner force would suggest something. He does not have it so easy. He has to grasp a thought bit by bit, has to overcome thoughts to get to a judgement. Only then, he gets to a conception of the historical development that is relatively new, even in the view of Ranke (Leopold von R., 1795-1886, German historian) and Sybel (Heinrich von S., 1817-1895, German historian), new insofar that Lamprecht understands historical development as the development of the whole soul. Lamprecht tries to pursue the mental dispositions of the people as mental expressions as the psychologist pursues the soul development of every single person.

Up to the third century, the German people developed according to Lamprecht in such a way that one can say, this development shows a symbolising tendency. Also the outer actions, also the political development run in such a way that one realises that it comes from the desire to interpret the world phenomena as symbols, to realise symbols everywhere, even to make the heroes symbols and to revere them as living personal symbols. Then comes the period from the third century to the eleventh, twelfth centuries. Lamprecht calls it the categorising one. There is no longer the desire to use symbols, but to establish types. One revers those persons whom one reveres whom one obeys in such a way that they work not like single individualities, but as types of a whole clan, a whole city.

Then the time comes from the twelfth to about the thirteenth centuries in which knighthood develops particularly; Lamprecht calls it the conventional time in which one judges and feels his will impulses in such a way as the convention demands it from human being to human being, from state to state, from people to people, the time of conventionalism. Then follows—it is important that Lamprecht notices this, although he does not figure the consequences out—the individualistic age with the turn of the fifteenth century where people really feel as individuals within a community. This lasts about up to the middle of the eighteenth century. There begins the age of subjectivism in which we still live where the human being tries to internalise himself, to work out of the depths of his personality, to work, to think and to want out of the depths of the subject. Lamprecht divides this age into two parts: the first lasts until the seventies of the nineteenth century to which the great classical period of Goethe, Schiller, and Herder belongs, and then since the seventies our time follows.

It is strange now, that Lamprecht, as the maybe most significant historian of the present, is completely clear in his mind that he has to look for an impulse first to see how the course of history goes on, and he investigated incessantly how one should start lining up that which the documents, the monuments, and the archives give in such a way how to tell and describe them so that on can call it history. So the most important question of history, the question of existence, became topical to Lamprecht.

He said to himself, one can get only to history—for he did not regard the historiography of Ranke, Sybel and others as history—if one tries to describe the mental development of a nation or of the whole humanity. Then one must have the possibility to observe this mental development to find some laws in this mental development. There it is interesting that a strange contradiction faces us in his whole approach after the habitual ways of thinking of the present. After the habitual ways of thinking, Lamprecht said to himself, the former merely individualistic approach cannot remain. How can one put the facts in order generally? There he says to himself, you have to look at the soul development in such a way that you describe it social-psychologically. This arises to him from a necessary way of thinking of modern time to take the social life, the common being together of human beings into consideration. He says this to himself on one side. Now he has no possibility to look at the social in the soul life or at the mental in the social life following a set pattern. He turns to the psychologists, asks how the psychologists look today at the single individual souls. Here they see in the individual soul the thoughts associating, the feelings ascending, the will impulses developing. Then he wants to apply this to the historical events, wants to investigate how the thought of the one human being works on the whole clan how the thoughts associate externally, as, otherwise, in the individual psychology a thought associates with the other. Thus, he wants to consider history social-psychologically according to the model of individual psychology.

There arises, as I have already indicated, a very noteworthy contradiction. He wants to get away from the individual interpretation of history and to get to the social-psychological one; but he takes the means from the consideration of the individual psychology. A strange contradiction that he does not notice at all.

Something else: if one is engrossed with that which this modern historian performs describing so clearly:

• how a cultural age changes into the other,

• how the feelings of the human beings become explosive at such transitions,

• how there the thoughts associate with each other and separate,

• how they follow in rapid succession,

• how new feelings form,

• how the will impulses work,

one has the feeling that the man misses the trees for the forest. I do not take stock in the saying that one misses the forest for the trees. I would like to know how somebody wanted to do that while he is in the forest and wanted to see the forest! One has to go far away to see the forest. One has the strange feeling that Lamprecht cannot exactly work out the differences of the single periods. Briefly, one gets to the result that he is a researcher who has gained a view of the historical development for himself who, however, could not find the means to present the question to himself: what is now, actually, this historical development of humanity? Is that already history what one attains from the documents, from the archives, or do we still search anything quite different?

Here you have to start if you want to consider the historical life and its riddles spiritual-scientifically. You have to put the question to yourself: is the object of history already found in the usual consciousness? Does one know already what one wants to judge if one approaches history? To answer these questions, however, I have to adduce something from spiritual science that is attached to things, which I have said here in former talks.

The human soul life is within the change of being awake and sleeping. However, the alternating states of sleeping and being awake are normally considered one-sidedly, while one says, the human being spends two thirds or also more of his life awake and a third sleeping. However, the things are not so simple. It is only obvious that the sleeping state continues into the awake life that we are only partly awake in a certain sense from awakening to falling asleep. We are in reality consciously awake only with the percepts of the outside world and the mental pictures that we form from these percepts. Compare only how the feelings are experienced. Someone who gradually learns to observe how feelings arise in the human soul,—I will come back to this issue in the next talk on the Revelations of the Unconscious and say something fundamental now only—, learns to compare the emotional life, the affects and passions with the dreams.

The dreams put pictures before us that are not penetrated with logic and moral impulses that we have only in the awake life. The visions differ indeed from the feelings from the passions and affects surging up and down, but there is something in which both are similar concerning the soul: it is the degree of consciousness in which we are given away to the visions. We have the same degree of consciousness if we are given away to our feelings, save that we accompany our feelings with mental pictures at the same time. If we get an idea about a vision, the light of the mental picture falls on the dream; then the dream becomes completely conscious, then we integrate it properly into the human life. We are doing this perpetually with our emotional life. We integrate our feelings into life by the mental pictures running parallel, but one experiences these feelings are with similar intensity as the dreams, so that the dreams continue in our wake day consciousness and become our world of feelings. You can easily realise that, however, also the deep, dreamless sleep continues in our awake life, namely as our will impulses. We know in the usual awake consciousness about these will impulses only if they are accompanied by mental pictures. We probably imagine what we should do, but it remains unaware to our usual day consciousness how the mental picture changes into the will impulse and then into the action, as we remain unaware in the deepest sleep. Only because we can imagine our will impulses, we accompany these sleeping impulses with the awake life.

Thus, the sleeping life continues perpetually in our awake day life. Even if our feelings, our affects, our passions are only dreamt by us, nevertheless, our emotional life is connected with something objective spiritual-mental as with our own spiritual-mental, with our mental pictures and percepts. However, the connections of the contents of feelings and will impulses with the objective spiritual are in the subconscious. We oversleep this connection with the spiritual-mental, and only that towers above the sea in which we are embedded this way, which we experience by our mental pictures and percepts. If you learn to behold in the spiritual world, you know: indeed, with the usual consciousness you cannot perceive the world in which our feelings submerge just with that part of our soul, which remains unaware to our usual consciousness, but you can it perceive with the beholding one. Since the soul can develop pictures from the contact with this spiritual world by the strengthened will or by the mental capacity strengthened by the will impulses.

The Imaginative cognition forms in it. It is the first level of supersensible beholding by which you get to the real spiritual world. This Imaginative cognition is the completely conscious beholding in a spiritual reality, so that the Imaginations are no imaginations, but reproductions of spiritual reality, although the soul does not experience them denser than the visions, save that you know that the visions have no reality value that, however, the Imagination points to an objective spiritual reality beyond us. You learn to recognise that with which the world of human feelings is connected, which is only dreamt for the usual consciousness; you learn to recognise it in its reality with the Imaginative beholding of the world. In the same way, you learn also to recognise that on the second level of higher consciousness, with the Inspirative consciousness in which the will impulses are embedded. You get to know the spiritual world as far as the will impulses that usually remain subconscious are also embedded in an objective spiritual reality.

If you have figured these things out and if you ask yourself for the real object of the historical course, then you realise what, actually, the historical development is. You do not experience this as that development which is experienced in the everyday life, while we get into contact with the object personally. No, this historical development is something else in which something strange is contained as it is contained in that, which the human being experiences as a feeling, as a will impulse. As the human being dreams his feelings, he dreams the real stream of the historical development. This knowledge is the stupefying result of that observation which turns away from the human being to historical development, and it shows that we cannot use these mental pictures, which control the outer conscious life, to grasp history anyhow. Since that which you experience in the everyday consciousness as a single human being is experienced in the awake state. However, in this awake day life history is not included at all. The human beings do not consciously experience history, but they dream it. History is the big dream of the development of humanity, and history never enters into the usual consciousness.

You may have an astute usual consciousness, you may be the most significant naturalist with that reason which can arrange the things according to cause and effect, and you may have that attitude which is especially appropriate to look properly at nature and to show her lawfulness. If you learn to recognise the real stream of historical development, you say to yourself, with any mental capacity that can understand nature, you cannot look into the historical development. This is not experienced in the usual consciousness like nature, but only on that level of consciousness, which you have also in the dream. It will be once for the interpretation of history one of the most significant results if one gets on

• that one has to find the object of the interpretation of history first

• that the stream of historical development is not at all there as nature is there

• that also that which is there as nature, namely the facts which are registered in the archives as documents which one normally already calls history, are not at all history.

History is in reality only behind the facts; these facts emerge only from the historical development and are not the historical development.

Once Herman Grimm said to me, one could consider the historical life only if one pursued the developing imagination of the people. One can say that Herman Grimm was on the brink to doing a discovery, but he did not want to make the transition to spiritual science. Hence, it appeared to him to be the only fertile to look not only at the outer events and to line up them in such a way as the naturalist does it according to the laws of causality but to look at them in such a way that he saw through them really at the developing imagination of humanity. This was an imperfect expression of that which he could have recognised: the fact that the historical development also does not take place in that which imagination experiences, but is still much deeper in the subconsciousness in which the dreams are woven. As well as the depths of the sea surge up in the waves, the single events surge up in the course of history.

If we apply our usual reason to the historical development, we strangely meet the forces of decline only. Herman Grimm asked himself once why the historian Gibbon (Edward G., 1737-1794) portraying the first centuries of Christianity describes the decay of the Roman Empire only, but not the rise of Christianity. Grimm made a right aperçu, however, did not get on the reason. The reason is that Gibbon, although he is profound, applied that reason only to the interpretation of history, which one applies, otherwise, to the consideration of nature. There he could look only at the decline, not at the rise since one can only dream the rise. In the course of history that which is rising, growing, and sprouting is connected vividly with that what is declining, what is dying. That is why one can look with the usual reason only at the dead in the course of history. What does you need if you want to recognise the growing, the prospering element in the historical development, that what furthers the human being?

In ancient times, one looked deeper in this respect, but just in the ancient form. One did not tell history, one told myths and legends. These myths and legends that should describe the historical dreams of humanity were truer than the so-called pragmatic history. However, we cannot go back in the development of humanity to myths and legends, but we can do something else. We can make up our mind to bring up that what rests for the usual consciousness as dreams in the subconscious, while we apply the Imaginative knowledge to the historical development. With the historical development, humanity and science will recognise that it cannot even reach the object of consideration if it does not want to go over to the spiritual-scientific consideration. Below the consciousness, that remains which works in history, if one does not bring up the dream into the consciousness. Then, however, one has to bring up the dream in the supersensible consciousness that can imagine the spiritual. Imaginative cognition only will create history.

Then someone who can get to the heart of spiritual science and gets involved with the struggle of a man like Lamprecht, will realise that there a way is searched to a goal. However, where is this goal? Why does Lamprecht try to adduce everything to find history generally and, nevertheless, gets to nothing but to the usual psychology, although he believes that one has to apply social psychology? However, what the human being experiences as a social being what becomes his history, he dreams this, this also does not penetrate the individual psychology. There one has to apply that new psychology which spiritual science only can give. You find the demand with Lamprecht, you find the answer of the riddle of historical development in spiritual science. What will become, however, from all that for a conception of history? You see that Lamprecht does not get away from the intellectual consideration of the consecutive events. He considers that what happens up to the third, up to the eleventh centuries and so on even if he considers it brilliantly. But he does not get on to judge the events in such a way that he reaches that what the human being only experiences as a dream.

One can easily find proofs of that. I want to bring in one example only where Lamprecht advances to the modern time. Among the rest, he asks, which are the most significant cultural phenomena in these modern times? Consider that Lamprecht held the concerning talk in 1904! There he asks, which are the most significant cultural-historical moments that appear as achievements of humanity today? He wants to bring in the most significant soul phenomena of the beginning twentieth century. What does he bring in? The answer is very interesting, just for a man who attaches so much significance to the soul. First, he brings in the attempts to propagate unselfishness, an altruistic life of humanity, various societies for ethical civilisation that came especially from England and America to Europe in those days, and secondly, he brings in the peace movement as something especially outstanding. An approved historian of the present says this. Is such a conception of history on the right way, even if Lamprecht endeavours so much? About at that time I held a talk here about similar ideas and explained that the least of all typical ideas of the beginning twentieth century are just these both movements: the movements of ethical civilisation and especially the peace movement. At that time, I summarised my talk saying: this is just the typical that that time in which the peace movement appears especially loud will be the same time in which the biggest human wars will take place. However, a famous historian said the one thing, a crazy representative of anthroposophy said the other, and it goes without saying in the present to whom one listens.

The point is to recognise how one has to use the facts which one called history up to now so that it points you to the deeper currents of human development by this coherence between the human soul and that only dreamt spirituality which flows along as historical current. One can do this only if one replaces Lamprecht's and all other conceptions of history with that which I call symptomatic conception of history if one is aware that one has to use everything that one can find out in the archives, in the documents, briefly, with the usual conscious reason that one evaluates and appreciates it, while one relates it to something that is a symptom, an expression of it.

One does not consider the great men of history, their appearances, and actions, for their own sake if one wants to describe the historical development of humanity but only as symptoms. One is aware that one properly describes history if one is able to connect the right symptom with the underlying spiritual current of development. Symptomatic history will look quite different from history, which runs in such a way, that one only strings together the facts and tries to use individual psychology to the explanation and analysis of these facts as Lamprecht does it. Symptomatic history consists of the fact that one becomes aware of this attitude which Goethe had that one can approach, actually, a spiritual being only from all sides, that one can get to know it only by its symptoms if one realises that that at which one has looked as history up to now is only at the surface and positions itself quite strangely in life like dream contents.

Observe the dream contents, and you will realise that you often dream something quite different from what is directly attached to the most significant events of your day life. Nevertheless, it is anyhow associated as memory with your life, but in a much-concealed way, and it is associated with deeper forces of life. There is a reason why just this or that which works in the subconscious emerges symptomatically, while we do not dream anything significant that seems to be significant in the awake life, but maybe just something that appears to us as externally unimportant.

Symptomatic historical research has to consider events that control the situation for the outer reason as unimportant for the true history and apparently unimportant events as far-reaching symptoms. Only thereby, one will penetrate from the outside to the inside of the historical life. One cannot transfer the individual soul life to the historical development in such an external way. Of course, I can do here no enclosing interpretation of history to show how this symptomatic consideration grasps the essential in the development of humanity, but I can at least indicate something. I have said in a former talk, if the spiritual researcher learns to behold in the spiritual world and its development, then he notices that the results, as one expects them, normally do not happen this way. They happen as a rule different from one could expect them after the judgement that one has gained in the sensory world. I want to bring in an example:

One could expect that the historical events run in such a way that one could compare them to the childhood, youth, mature period, and old age of the human being. Indeed, some historians were under this illusion. These analogising considerations can be rather witty but have nothing to do with reality. However, something else appears. The result of which I have to inform you here is attained really with the same seriousness with which another scientific result is attained; I can state it, however, only as a result.

Lamprecht tries to find periods of historical development for the German people at first. I have already indicated: it is owed to a right impression that he determines a transition from an age to another around the turn of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. It is also very typical that he calls this time the individualistic age. To spiritual-scientific research, an important incision likewise appears around the turn of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. However, while one spiritual-scientifically beholds in the current of the historical development, it becomes obvious that one has to go back further and has to disregard the borders of tribes or peoples. One has to envisage the general historical development of humanity. There the events combine for centuries, namely from the fifteenth century A.D. until the seventh and eighth centuries B.C. This age from the seventh century before the Mystery of Golgotha to the fifteenth century after it has its own character. This character changes from inner reasons in the fifteenth century more than modern people believe. Lamprecht recognises this, but he does not recognise the whole scope of this fact. Others have already pointed out from different viewpoints that one has to explain not for outer reasons, not even because of the emergence of Renaissance et cetera, but because spontaneously that significant reversal arises from historical life, from the souls of the human beings, which asserts itself in this time almost across the whole earth, but particularly across Europe.

It is remarkable that the most significant Germanist of the present, Konrad Burdach (1859-1936), has pointed to that in very nice essays. Burdach recognises from wholly literary-historical investigations that from the soul development of humanity something quite new has arisen in the spiritual configuration, in the activities of the human being.

Now we live in the period from the fifteenth century on. Spiritual science is able to go further back. Now there something very strange appears. If you look at the impulses that control the human beings since the fifteenth century historically, they are different from those, which controlled the human beings in the preceding period. However, one cannot say, the impulses of the preceding period relate to those of the following period in such a way as in the individual human life any life period relates to the following one. This is not the case. Rather the weird turns out that today the historical works in particular in that in the individual human nature, which develops until the twenties of life. The secret of our present development is that we develop those forces by the historical conditions, which belong to our individual life during the twenties. In the preceding age, the historical life of humanity especially grasped the thirties. One can show the matter also different. One can say, today our souls are organised so that we develop from childhood to the twenties, and that we carry that which we have developed during the twenties into the rest of life, so that the human being feels that his developmental period is finished after the twenties. One can prove this with wholly external things.

Scarcely anybody will state that somebody wants to learn earnestly today during his thirties, in a time where already the youngest people write essays in the newspapers. However, one will experience very easily that people say, one reads Goethe's Iphigenia, generally the classical writers, in the youth, nobody does that in his later life. One could still bring in other symptoms. However, if one goes back to the preceding period, one finds that the growing life lasted until the thirties. As paradox as it sounds today, it is in such a way, and one will once have this as a backed historical achievement. The Greek and Roman developed unlike the modern human being develops, and history happened in those days different because the human being remained longer able of development. Spiritual science shows that one gets, going back even further, to times where the human beings remained capable of development until the forties. So that one can say, one finds three consecutive periods in the historical life of humanity: one behind the eighth pre-Christian century in which we find human beings who feel young until the forties; then the period of the Greek and Roman cultures comes when the human beings remained young until the thirties; then the period in which they are capable of development until the twenties. If you reflect about that, you recognise that you cannot compare the historical development of humanity possibly with the course of the single individual life. In the individual life one grows older and older, humanity as such develops in reverse direction; it grows younger and younger, that is it remains younger and younger; it carries youth less and less into the later individual age.

Hence, the civilisation makes a younger and younger impression in the consecutive periods; that means, the human being carries that which he gains to himself in his youth more and more into the old age. One could have believed that in the time before the eighth pre-Christian century, if one had taken prejudices as starting point, one just finds a younger humanity, then an older one, and that we have now become much riper and older. One has to answer the question first what in the course of development, not in the single life, maturity and age do mean. However, you can consider this developmental process of humanity only in such a way as I have indicated now. You see, something quite different results from what one normally imagines as inner laws of cultural development if one looks really symptomatically at the historical development.

I want only to emphasise one thing in the end. One can also go into the whole attitude of the human beings in two consecutive periods. There you recognise that in the period which began with the eighth pre-Christian century another attitude was there than in the present period. If you consider the human soul spiritual-scientifically, you do not have the same comfort as the trivial psychology has it. Then you have to realise that there are three quite different shadings of the whole soul, and, hence, one distinguishes three soul members. I call one of them the sentient soul. In it the desires and passions are anchored, but it also connects the human being with the outer nature by his senses; then one distinguishes the intellectual or mind soul, and thirdly the consciousness soul in which the real self-consciousness is anchored. While now in the course of the historical development always other forces intervene in the human soul, the following turns out: during the period which lasts from the eighth pre-Christian up to the fifteenth post-Christian centuries where the European civilisation is coloured especially by the influence of the Greek-Latin culture particularly the intellectual or mind soul is working.

Hence, everything faces us that the human being accomplishes in the course of the historical development and in the outer life, in the social and economic life, as if his mind worked instinctively, as if he grasped the outer world with body and mind equally strongly. The human body and mind are balanced in this time, and the mind itself works instinctively. This becomes different with the big reversal in the fifteenth century. There the self-consciousness appears. There the consciousness soul becomes especially strong, there the human being does no longer have the mind instinctively, but he has to reflect everywhere. There the individuality starts forming. There he does no longer feel instinctively if he meets another human being: you have to behave to him this or that way. There he reflects, there he turns to the inside of his personality. So that we can say, the whole historical structure since the fifteenth century is characterised by the fact that the consciousness soul works since that time, while before the more instinctive intellectual or mind soul has worked. You cannot understand the Roman Law, nothing that comes from antiquity properly if you do not envisage this difference between the instinctive mind and that what in modern times works in intellectualistic way.

It arises that that which Lamprecht searches up to the fifteenth century is just the preparation of the consciousness soul in the German people. The German folk soul carried that into the coming period what flowed from the south, while it was just minded to further the stream of historical development from the intellectual or mind soul to the consciousness soul and its various nuances.

If one learns to recognise what really works there, then this shines into the details. Then you can ask yourself again, what is that, for example, what Wilson describes as the real nature of the American people? This is another nuance of the consciousness soul. The western nuance is experienced in its archetypal phenomenon, in its original characteristic here in Central Europe. Here the struggling egoity of the human being is really experienced which relates to the consciousness soul quite consciously which wants to penetrate with all forces of personality that what wants to enter life wholly consciously. This appears in another nuance in the American people where the human soul is like possessed by itself. It is sometimes disagreeable to face the truth. However, just the catastrophic events of our time necessitate a certain objectivity. Into the character of the historian Wilson, the light shines which spiritual science can spread.

Only in principle I could show which direction science of history has to take if it is fertilised by spiritual science in the same sense as I tried to show it for natural sciences eight days ago. Only if you consider history in such a way, you will realise how the human being is associated with that dreamt stream of the historical development that stirs him up. Then, however, it will appear that that which becomes known Imaginatively by the symptomatic interpretation of history is internally related to the human being as a historical being. Then you will realise that not the reason, but the subconsciousness, the dreamlike emotional life is connected with the historical development. Imagination will teach what works in the mood and in the will impulses of the human beings, while they are in the stream of the historical development. Then something else will arise than the belief that history can teach this or that. If it were able to teach as one normally imagines, then one would be able to find a connection between history and this usual reason. However, it does not exist. The connection is there with that what works in the depths of the soul, in the subconsciousness. The human being cannot learn, indeed, for his usual reason from history, but from the true history if he develops it more and more by the view of the spirit in history, then the historical impulses settle down in the feeling of the human being. If he faces a fact, if he is called for action or for the right feeling towards a fact within the social life, then his feeling will lead him properly. Then not his reason, but his whole soul is taught by such an interpretation of history.

With it let me summarise this consideration briefly. Goethe suspected that history, if it is recognised truly, works in the mood, in the feeling that it works if enthusiasm originates in the right way if antipathies or sympathies originate for what should be done or be omitted in a social situation. Briefly, Goethe said out of a right notion of that which spiritual science has to bring to light: the best that we can have from history is the enthusiasm, which it excites. Certainly, we cannot feel the intellectual judgement but the enthusiasm as a fruit of history if we can recognise the real historical development.

In the three talks of this week, I would like to discuss the results of the spiritual-scientific research concerning the human being. In this talk I would like to establish a basis to consider the supersensible human being next time and in the third talk two most significant questions, those of the freedom of will and the immortality of the soul.

Concerning our discussion today I am in a somewhat difficult situation, first because the following will be considered in particular compared with the contents of this talk what I have often brought to your attention in the course of these discussions: the fact that the results of spiritual-scientific research are, indeed, in full harmony with everything that natural sciences have performed as great achievements up to now but that which shall be said from the viewpoint of spiritual science just in harmony with the scientific results is in full contrast to that which the naturalists or those who interpret scientific results today say about these scientific results concerning the human being and his nature. On one side complete harmony with the facts, on the other side almost an unequivocal contradiction compared with those who are used to speak about these facts today—this is one objective difficulty. The other difficulty is that I have this talk only, and that that which we will discuss today would have to be the object of at least thirty talks if it should be treated in detail. Thus, I can represent the results only sketchily and can easily be misunderstood in many respects. However, today I do not intend to inform details, rather I would like to evoke a sensation of the direction which spiritual-scientific thinking has to take if it wants to discuss the question of the nature of the human being with the scientific views of the present.

The scientific views have particularly suggested the question of the relation of the human being to the animal realm and of everything that arises from this relationship to the understanding of the human being. What has worked on this question very suggestively is the form that the wholly scientific theory of evolution assumed in the last time. However, one forms wrong mental pictures of the scope and the real character of this theory of evolution, because one grasps the question always too straight, I would like to say, too trivially. So one has the idea today, as if the relationship of the human being with the animals was determined by “strictly scientific research,” the evolution of the human being from the animal realm and again within the animal realm itself the development from imperfect to more perfect beings.

Now it is not at all right to believe that the view that the human physical organisation is connected with the animals is new. It is not new at all. Even if you disregard the fact that you find the traces of it—or, actually, more than traces—already in the science of Greek antiquity, and basically also already with the Church Fathers, nevertheless, something important is contained in the fact that, for example, already Goethe as a very young person had to work his way through certain fantastic ideas of development which asserted themselves just in his time. Someone who knows Goethe from his own biography knows how he rebelled against the idea: if one only produced certain living conditions, animals could change into other animals, or even into human beings. Goethe rebelled against that, although he stood like Herder on the ground of the emergence of one organism from the other, and although they were followers of the “theory of evolution.” Besides, it is important to consider that not the theory of evolution is new as such, but that an older view was immersed into certain materialistic mental pictures that bring on the human organisation to the animal one in other ways as well. The character of interpretation, the whole way of thinking about the things is, actually, essential which has appeared in modern time. If you consider this, it will not be so difficult to find the transition to those mental pictures of evolution that we have to consider here today.

Someone who believes today to stand with a certain materialistic direction of thought on the firm ground of science and to have to characterise this theory of evolution says at first, the modern view of the origin of the human being from the animals stands in contrast with the superstitious biased way which still goes back anyhow to the Mosaic history of creation.—It cannot be my task today to speak about the Mosaic history of creation. I believe that it has often led to misunderstandings about what forms its basis, and that one deals with it in reality with an ancient human wisdom. That just as a side note. What is important to be considered today is that in an especially significant point the scientific theory of evolution is in full harmony with the Mosaic history of creation. That means this that in the course of the evolution of the living beings the human being appeared as it were as the most perfect animal or anything else when the remaining animals had anticipated their development already before him that he appears as it were as human being after the animals. The modern scientific worldview has this in common with the Mosaic history of creation.

Just the today's consideration must oppose that in particular. Thus, one could say, the novel aspect of this spiritual-scientific history of evolution consists of the fact that it must break just with that what faces it as a quite sure result today. Indeed, some of the mental pictures that can originate only on the ground of spiritual science are necessary if understanding should develop for such things, which are discussed today. It is necessary, for example, that one gets clear about such theoretical disputes, as they are quite usual that they must disappear, however, and will disappear, just if spiritual science settles more in the human souls.

Today you still meet the different worldviews that are apparently contradictory. On the one side, there are those human beings who interpret the world and its phenomena materialistically. One calls them “materialists.” The “spiritualists” are on the other side—not the “spiritists.” are meant, but “spiritualists” in the sense of German philosophy. The former represents the view that only the material is the basis of all being and becoming, and that the spiritual develops as it were from the material and its processes. The spiritualists emphasise, above all, that the “spirit” is to be observed as such in the human being that one has to take the spirit as starting point in case of every world consideration. It is completely irrelevant to spiritual science whether somebody takes materialism or spiritualism as starting point. The only which spiritual science demands from itself and from others is that one thinks the inner contents of thoughts and research through to the end. Let us assume that somebody becomes a materialist by his special disposition: if he really envisages the material and its phenomena and does research until the end, he gets without fail from the material to the spirit. If anybody is a spiritualist and does not deal with the spirit purely theoretically, but grasps it in its reality in such a way that he also grasps the manifestations of the spirit in the material, then the spiritualist also understands the bases and ramifications of the material processes. The starting point of the true spiritual-scientific researcher is quite different. It concerns that one has the inner courage to think the things through to the end really. However, this requires a certain power first which wants to think the things through to the end and secondly the ability to consider the phenomena really which one faces. Concerning the latter one can do strange discoveries. Who believes, actually, today that he stands more on the ground of the facts? This one stresses at every opportunity.

I have repeatedly pointed to an event in the sixties of the last century. However, it is always interesting to point to this fact once again. The philosophy of Eduard von Hartmann attempted to overcome the materialist interpretations of scientific results. When the Philosophy of the Unconscious appeared, the naturalists agreed that there a completely dilettantish philosopher talked about nature in such a way and knew, nevertheless, nothing right about that. Refutations of the Philosophy of the Unconscious were written. Among these refutations, one appeared by an anonym under the title The Unconscious from the Viewpoint of the Theory of Evolution and Darwinism. The author of this writing set himself to oppose this dilettantish opponent of Darwinism. Haeckel, Oscar Schmidt, and others said about this writing: it is a pity that this anonymous has not been called; we consider him as one of ours; since nobody can say the truth better than this anonymous against this scientific dilettante Hartmann.—They also contributed to the fact that the writing was quickly out of print. The second edition appeared, now with the name of the author: it was—Eduard von Hartmann!—This was once a lesson which was necessary and by which all those should be lectured who believe that somebody must always be a dilettante who does not speak about scientific results like a scientist.

Those listeners who were present at the former talks know that I have emphasised a book of the last time as an especially valuable one, namely The Origin of Organisms - a Refutation of Darwin's Theory of Chance by Oscar Hertwig (1849-1922). I regard this book as especially excellent and especially typical for our time for following reason: Oscar Hertwig, a disciple of Ernst Haeckel, came as a young man from the more or less materialist interpretation of the Darwinist research results.

In his book Oscar Hertwig unravelled—it is a kind of Penelope problem—everything that one regarded as particular achievements of the Darwinist research results. Now from the same Oscar Hertwig a book was published which deals more with other problems; it is called: On the Defence of the Technical, Social, and Political Darwinism. I am in a special position now: I will always regard The Origin of Organisms as one of the best books that was written about these things, and I will have to regard Hertwig's last book as one of the most thoughtless, most impossible products of modern thinking. It shows how clumsy the modern naturalist becomes if he should go over from the accustomed ground to another area. Such a fact is very instructive, and one is in a tragic conflict if one has to admire on one side and to condemn radically on the other side. Now I do not want to speak about this last writing by Hertwig generally and in detail; but I would like to mention one thing only:

I have said just now, every naturalist will stress that he stands on the “ground of facts.” You find a place in this impossible book by Hertwig that one reads possibly in such a way: one has to admire how the modern natural sciences have been initiated by the astronomical researches of Newton, Copernicus, and Kepler. Science has become great because it got used to looking at the things of physics, chemistry and biology just like at the astronomical things. Now I ask you, the consideration of the facts that are immediately round us should take place after the pattern of that area where the facts are so far away from us? I am convinced that most readers overlook such an unbelievable contradiction. It appears just in such a contradiction that a significant researcher cannot think so far that this research can be lifted into the spiritual.

Because of those and similar things it has happened that the whole modern theory of evolution has taken its starting point from too straight, too abstract mental pictures which are not able at all to approach the real facts, in particular not the facts which also refer to the solution of the big riddle of the human being.

This human riddle is to be characterised from the start in such a way that the human being seems to be assigned by his whole position in the world not to know at first what he represents in the world and how he stands there in it to get that only from the depths of his being what can enlighten him about his real being. This is also the sense of spiritual-scientific research that that is brought up from the depths of the human mind by special exercises which slumbers, otherwise, in him, which the usual consciousness does not apply at all, and which enables the human being for the “beholding consciousness.” Not before from the depths of the human soul that is brought up what I have called the beholding consciousness in my book The Riddle of Man where the human being has to deal with that which one can call “spiritual eyes” and “spiritual ears” to have a spiritual world around himself, then only one can generally tackle a solution of the big riddles.

These explanations should confirm it: the human being oversleeps his being. A part of the talks should show that the human being oversleeps a part of his being and continues the sleeping state into the waking state. In the depths of his being, something is perpetually sleeping, and his being must be awakened only. As you need that in the usual day life which sleep gives, you need for the usual knowledge if it should be fertile that which the human being oversleeps in his being perpetually. I said, we have to consider the facts at first that are round us. It matters in particular that you put yourself in the position to consider the difference of human being and animal from the viewpoint of the beholding consciousness; since, otherwise, you cannot attain knowledge of the development and origin of the human being and the animal. Now I want to explain sketchily what one can say from the spiritual-scientific viewpoint about the difference of human being and animal.

The animal realm faces us in most different forms. The animals are variously developed. Hence, one divides them into “genera” and “species.” You know that there have been numerous philosophers who were of the opinion that that which one calls “genus” or “species”—“wolves,” “lions,” “tigers” and so on—are only comprising names. What we meet in reality, is always the “material” which is formed most different by its own configuration only. Against it, one has to observe once impartially what there is, actually. There I have to recall a picture repeatedly which my old friend, Professor Vincenz Knauer (1828-1894, Austrian theologian and philosopher) always used when was talk of these things. He said, nevertheless, those people who state that these are only names that are expressed in these genera and species that it is, however, everywhere the same material they should think about whether it is really the same material that is in a lamb and in a wolf. Indeed, one cannot deny that, scientifically considered, it is the same material. However, one should feed a wolf for longer time with nothing but lambs, and one should try once whether he has assumed something of the lamb nature. There it is quite clear that that which constitutes the “wolf” which determines his configuration is not a mere “name” but something that encloses the material in this configuration.

With which is that associated that develops and configures these different animal species in its way? I have to confess, I touch personal relations very reluctantly, but because I can only outline, it is necessary that I do such a personal remark.

For about thirty years, I look at everything that physiological research produces in relation to these questions and compare it to that which the spiritual-scientific research has to say. It would be very attractive to hold a series of talks by which is proved what I state now. What configures itself in the different animal forms is intimately connected with the correlation of forces in the animal structure. Study the structure of an animal very exactly, but not only in such a way as it presents itself to the outer eye, but study the structure of an animal according to its correlation of forces: how different an animal behaves to gravity and how it overcomes gravity if the hind legs are formed different from the forelegs how different an animal appears according to whether it has hooves or claws and the like.

Study how the animal positions itself with its balance in the given relations, and then you find the most intimate relation between the conditions of earthly balance and the kind how the animal is positioned in these conditions of balance. Just these conditions of balance are radically different with the human being and in the animal realm. The human being lifts himself out of the conditions of balance in which the animal is put, by the fact that the line that runs through the spinal cord, runs with the animal in parallel with the earth surface but with the human being, it runs vertically to the earth. I do not mean the wholly outer position, because of course the human being also is in parallel to the earth surface if he sleeps. The human being is organised in such a way that the gravitational direction of the earth coincides with the line of his spinal cord. With the animal, the cerebral line is in parallel to the earth surface. The gravitational line of the human being that runs through his head coincides in certain respect with the main line of the remaining organism. His head rests on the gravitational line of the body; with the animal, it overhangs.

The human being is thereby put in a condition of balance that is different from that of the animal; thereby he is in that condition of balance which he gives himself only during the time of his life, because he is born in a similar condition of balance as the animal. While the human being lifts himself out of the conditions of balance that are forced upon the animal, he lifts himself out of all forces, which form the basis of the different genera and species; he becomes a “genus,” a “species.” He gets free from that what is with the remaining animal beings the reason of the manifold creation; he himself creates his figure, while he gets free from this determinative reason by his upright position.

Everything that is expressed in the human language, in the human thinking is intimately connected with these conditions of balance. Indeed, just the materialist research in the second half of the nineteenth century brought this to our attention; however, it could not completely make use of this fact. Since someone who thinks his way into the subtle configuration of the material can realise that one being in another way takes up the material of the outer nature, it is brought in directions quite different from all other beings. The human being thereby towers above the remaining animal realm. With it is connected that the whole human condition of balance comes about in full measure in the organism itself, while that of the animal comes about related to the world.

Take the coarsest only: the animal stands on all fours; the human being is bound to a certain balance that is not determined from without but is formed in his own organism. Now something particular is connected with this other condition of balance. Since the human being has a vague feeling of this equilibrium position that is similar to dream. This feeling is as vague as a dream, sometimes only vague as the sleep. As what does this sensation of resting on the own body live in the usual consciousness? This sensation is identical with the self-consciousness. What we get to know in the next talk as the human “mind,” which reveals itself in the ego at first, seizes itself in the human organisation in these conditions of balance that the animal does not have. I said, the modern theory of evolution-has something suggestive, so that one can believe that everything is dilettantish that is said against it. It has something fascinating if one says that the human being has as many bones and muscles as an animal has, how could he be a different being? However, in that which the human being has as the same with the animal the ego does not at all live. The ego does not live in the bones and muscles, does not intervene there, but seizes itself in the feeling at first that rests in the equilibrium.

However, there is something else. The animal realm has manifold shapes. Is this manifold configuration not significant for the human being? Because the human being separates by his other equilibrium from all conditions of balance in which the animal is forced, he has his own figure that appears like a summary of the animal figures. However, everything that works in the animal figures enjoys life in him. It is in him, but it is spirit. What is spread out as phenomena manifest to the senses about the most different animal figures is spiritual in the human being. What is it in him?

To the Imaginative observation arises that completely the same lives in the human being that gives the sensory figure to the animal, but as a supersensible nimble element. It lives in his thinking. What causes that we can think about the things is—in supersensible way—the same as that what the manifold genera and species of the animals are. Because the human being breaks away from the diversity of the animals and gives himself his independent figure that is the dwelling place of the ego, he appropriates invisibly what is visible in the animal world. This lives in his thinking. In the animal realm is poured out in the most manifold forms what is poured out in us, while we survey the world with thinking. We pursue what we can observe; we form thoughts about that. Of course, I know everything that can be argued against it. I also know the objection: are you able to behold into the animals? May the animal not have a kind of thinking as the human being has? However, someone who can adopt the Goethean principle that the phenomena are the right teaching if one observes them properly knows that that which becomes obvious in the phenomena is also decisive for the observation. One of the most essential signs is that that which is poured out sensorily about the manifold animal forms lives in the human being in extrasensory way.

While he freed his figure from the formative forces of the animals, he can take this in his supersensible. The animals are more advanced in relation to the sensory configuration than the human being is. The human being has an unstable figure. The animal is built according to the whole earth. With the human being, it is different; he has taken it in his figure. That is why he can grasp that spiritually what is expressed in the sensory form of the animal.

Already in this point, one sees what, actually, the modern theory of evolution suffers from. I am allowed to say, just because I have become a follower of the modern theory of evolution but have tried to lead it really to an end, I have found what it suffers from. It represents everything straight: the imperfect animals, then the more perfect ones, the even more perfect ones, up to the human being. However, the matter is not that way. Someone who considers the phenomena independently, gets on that this only ascending development is actually one-sided; since it lacks an essential element, which is considered here and there, indeed, in our time, but is not really investigated to an end and applied to the single one. One has to deal with a perpetually ascending development and with a perpetually descending development. The descending development would signify what is just so important for the understanding of the human being, and also there I advise you again to consider physiological matters, but without prejudice.

If one stops at the general trivial ideas of evolution, one imagines that the human being is the most perfect one of the animals that even his single organs, even if really here and there descending developments are admitted, are basically in ascending development. This is not the case. I could bring in many examples.

I want to mention one thing only. Study the human eye and compare it to the eyes of the vertebrates: if you go down in the animal realm, you find a more complex construction than with the human being. With him, the eye has become simpler again. I only want to mention that the xiphoid process and the pecten that exist with the eyes of lower animals are not to be found with the human being. The development has forced back them again. The human eye is a more imperfect organ than that of lower animals. The complete human organism has not only become more perfect if one studies it really compared with the animal organisms, but it has also receded. What has happened?

Because certain forces have been disabled, the human being could become a bearer of the spiritual-mental, could take up this spiritual-mental. What I have called up to now is nothing but a degeneration, “devolution,” in contrast to “evolution.” Take that which gives the single animal the form, which it has, and another animal another form: this thought completely determines the whole organisation of the animal. The human being, however, forms back his organisation. It does not advance so far to be determined completely, it goes back to a former level. Thereby he can give himself the equilibrium position which nature does not give him; thereby he gets free from that which nature forces upon the other beings. The whole formation of the human being has stayed behind; from it that originated which became an organ of thinking in the human being. What forms the basis of thinking is the organ of thinking because it is formed back because it has not advanced as far as the animal form has advanced, which expresses the figure externally. The human being lives the form back and can live out the form in thinking in supersensible way as the animal lives out it in the sensory realm.

One more point: we deal with the human being not only with evolution, but also with devolution, with involution. Just because the human being is more formed back than the animal, he can become the bearer of something spiritual-mental generally. With everything that I have explained up to now, something else is connected. Someone who can really observe how in the animal is expressed what must be an organ of imagination, of percipience, of feeling, so the anterior parts of the animal organisation, finds out that that which expresses itself in the form expresses itself objectively. He finds that this part has to deal with imagining, perceiving and feeling, and that the posterior part deals with the will element. Of course, both sides are connected. Because the animal is put in its equilibrium, it has that side by side which the human being has on top of each other: the will organisation on the one hand and the intellectual and instinctive organisation, on the other hand. There is another connection in the animal between the intellectual, imaginative and will element. With the human being, the organs of imagination are above the organs of will. An inner contact is thereby created between the organs of will and those of imagination. Someone who knows to observe the soul life realises that this human life of imagining is characterised by the fact that the will extends into it. Study the problems of attention, you will realise that the will works into it. Thereby the ability of abstract thinking originates which the animal cannot have because its imagination originates beside the will and not above it. And vice versa: the will and the imagining life work together, so that also the will is influenced by imagination.

Only because the organs of will belong to the subconscious ones, the will itself is expressed only like in the sleeping consciousness. The human being has the real will process in the sleeping consciousness as the other processes of the sleeping consciousness. The whole connection of imagining and willing which is typical for the human being is thereby emphasised: imagining is lightened by the will which is with the animal always in a vague, dream-like state. Likewise, the will is more intimately connected with imagining with the animal, it feels much more connected with its will. This causes again that with the human being the free emotional life relates different to imagining and will, enjoys life much more intensely than with the animal. With the animal the emotional life rests in the organisation; it is as it were only a formal arrangement of the life of thought. On the other side, the emotional life of the animal is only an inhibited or uninhibited will life, depending on whether it can reach or not reach something. This is expressed in its whole life. Just thereby, it is much more connected with the whole outer world.

If we envisage this, we can understand something else that, however, only a careful observation of the human soul life can give. Spiritual science has to proceed in many a respect different from the other science that takes up the things often from the trivial imagination and rejects them then because it cannot get on how the things are to be explained. The spiritual researcher will aim more at the positive, will not be content to take up, for example, the idea of immortality, of the continuance of the soul being, but will primarily ask, how does the human being generally get around to having the “immortal” as a thought or as a feeling in himself? How does he get around to assuming that the immortal can play a role in his soul life?

One can understand this only if one can expand the Goethean teaching of metamorphosis so far that one can approach the question, to what extent is the human being dependent on his lower nature in relation to his higher nature that is expressed by his head? While we have tried up to now to understand the special connection of thinking and willing with the human being and animal, now one has to go into that what connects the human being with the animal concerning something that is intimately connected with the problem of evolution. This enters in the animal and human life by the two phenomena of conception—I do not say of birth—what one considers as the first origin of the human, the combination of the male and the female elements, and death on the other side. Conception and death are bound to certain parts of the human and animal organism; in case of conception, this is evident from the start.

Now one has to realise that that which appears at one place in any animal form—it is similar with the plants—is also expressed in other organ systems but transformed. I would like to call attention to the following from the start: how does that behave with the human being and with the animal what is connected with conception and death, because one has already found out, nevertheless, one difference that is directly bound to the organisation? There it becomes apparent that the human and animal head is, actually, only a higher organised, transformed abdomen, as strange as it sounds, just as after the worldview of Goethe the bones of the skull are transformed dorsal vertebrae.

With the physical creation one deals with the fact that the single organ systems are real transformations of each other, and the functions of the organ systems are transformations of each other. What is “percipience”? Percipience relating to the outside world with the senses is a higher developed conception, specified by the different senses. Because the head organism stunts certain other organs, forces them into the limbs, the organism of conception develops to the higher sensory organism of the head on the one side, and thus the progressive conception corresponds to the advanced sense perception of the head. Every organic system develops the whole organism in a way; the head everything that the abdomen contains, the abdomen everything that the head contains. Because the formative forces of the limbs have atrophied that is expressed spiritually what belongs to their life in the head. The ability of production changes into the developing of thoughts. In the head, the organ of thinking is developed simply because the conceptual is developed unilaterally and the productive is formed back, but the productive thereby gives again the basis of the thoughts. Since as animal and human being produce their equals by the other organism, the human being produces himself spiritually: just the world of thought. The world of thought is the spiritualised human being.

This thought has a big scope, and only with deep regret, I exhaust such things in one single talk. Since such things are the result of decades of spiritual research. However, they must be pronounced once, because these things have to be popularised, so that someone who can investigate it in the medical centres and laboratories can also investigate the details, as they must be investigated.

In the animal life, conception and death are apart like beginning and end of the animal life. Conception and everything that is connected with it leads to the knowledge of the progressive development. Everything, however, that determines the death of the animal out of the relations of the earthly life is connected with the retrograde development. One gets on only spiritual-scientifically what conception and death are real for the animal, for the whole evolution of the animal. The animal is seized by everything that is associated with conception and production. This evolution is the highest development of the organic life. It is just like with an increase of the organic life, with fever if you like, that the usual state of consciousness, which is right for its being, is forced back. Thus, a reduction of consciousness is connected with the excitement of the organic life, and the consciousness is increased with everything that is connected with a retrograde. The moment of highest clarification, of most intensive consciousness is the moment of death—and as a spiritual researcher, I am allowed to say, a moment where the animal element approaches the human one; try only once to observe animals at death. These two moments of the highest reduction and the greatest increase of consciousness, conception and death, are with the animal like two widely separated points, like beginning and end.

With the human being, it is different. Because the head lifts out itself in the described way from the remaining organisation, the human being is so organised that he experiences the interplay of conception and death perpetually. This happens during the whole life. We are so organised that we experience in the brain which forms the basis of our thinking in its connection between percipience and will perpetually, transferred to the spiritual, with every production of a thought—but like sleeping or even subconsciously—what the animal experiences, otherwise, only once during conception. On the other hand, death is perpetually involved in our consciousness because the organism changed into the head has the head as its spiritual organism. We are dying at every moment. Precisely expressed: whenever we grasp a thought, the human will is born in the thought; whenever we will, the thought dies into the will. Will and thought belong together in such a way, as, for example, the young man and the old man, while the will thereby becomes will that the thought has died down in it, and on the other hand the will goes through its youth while the thought is born in it.

The human being is perpetually experiencing birth and death. I have described the human spatial configuration with the help of the balance relationships. Concerning time, it is in such a way that with the human being that runs through the whole life which the animal can experience only at the beginning and end; in a dreamish way he experiences conception and death perpetually in his subconsciousness. Because this lives below in the depths of the human souls, emerges from there and the human being becomes vaguely aware of that which he carries as conception and death in himself and not beside himself and thereby has the feeling: his being lives after death and birth, it encloses more than that which starts with conception and ends at death. The human being carries conception and death in himself. I pronounce it in short words. However, if you investigate everything that physiology and psychology can give presently, you will find it confirmed. This generates the idea of immortality in the human being. Thereby he carries the sensation, the thought of immortality really in himself. Only then, you can consider the connection of animal and human being if you regard this.

How does the human being stand there finally? He is more retrograde than the animal is, and this just gives him the basis of his spiritual being. If you check him completely, you find the strange: as the eye is retrograde, everything of his appearance is retrograde, is formed back into the spiritual compared with the animal. He unfolds this on the same conditions on which the animal unfolds its being. The same relations work on the animal and the human being. They work on the human being, while they provide him as it were with a “shell.” What I have described now is, actually, the inside of the human being. This is transformed in such a way that he can produce his own equilibrium that he has that, which takes shape with the animal, in the versatile forms of his thoughts. Thereby he faces the outside world like concluded by a shell.

Spiritual science actually is able to discover only what you can discover in the human being. It can penetrate through this shell. However, what turns out then? Something similar as with the memory. We perceive the outside world as it is, and process it. However, we remember in the later life what we have taken up from the outside world. Today I cannot explain what the organism of memory is based on; but it is based of course not on the organisation of the body periphery, but on that of the body inside. If you go with the beholding consciousness into that what the shell conceals, then you bring up what causes everything in the depth of the human nature that I described today.

The shell is evoked by that which determines the today's animal realm. How does that differ from it, which lives in the human inside? This becomes to the seer like an increased, beheld memory; there he gets up something from the human being that becomes vivid. As well that appears to the usual consciousness which the senses have experienced, something presents itself to the beholding consciousness, if one delves into that what is down there. Then one finds that that time of development which the human being spent together with the animals—the time of the earthly evolution—followed another time for the human being in which the today's animals could not yet develop. The human being developed before the animal realm, but in another figure of course; since he assumed the today's figure because he was put in relations that formed the animals. However, what rests in the “shell” leads back to a former creation of the earth, to a state that we do not get to know by geologic conclusions. We recognise that the human being is older than the animals that the animals originated later. They are related with the human beings but they originated later. Since we come back to a form of the planet when the animals did not yet exist. The planet looked in such a way that on the effect of its conditions that could form which must be protected today with the outer shell, which faces the animal world today.

The seer experiences that as vision first which I have explained as a thought today: he looks back at former states of the earth. However, this gives just the impulse to look at the developmental states in such a way as they are as they must be, so that one can see what one finds if one only looks.

However, there are still other relations. Today one agrees in the trivial scientific life completely to consider the phenomena of the earth like the astronomical phenomena; but it has taken some time until this thought asserted within the modern humanity. One can have an experience. If you come to Mülhausen (now: Mulhouse) in Alsace, you find a monument: On top is a celestial sphere, before it a statue of Johann Heinrich Lambert (1728-1777, Swiss-Alsatian physicist, philosopher), a contemporary of Kant who invented something similar, but much more brilliant than the so-called Kant-Laplace theory. If one still added something that Lambert thought, one would not be far away from that which spiritual science is today.

However, today one is ready that the monument of that man is erected by the decisions of the city council who has a share of modern astronomy. However, if one goes back hundred years from the erection of the monument, one meets something different. At that time, Lambert was a young son of a poor dressmaker. Few people anticipated what was in him, Kant, for example, called him the “greatest genius of the century,” and his father submitted request about request to the city council that the son could get further. Then there one gave him forty francs, but only on the condition that he should leave the city and not return. This was hundred years ago. After hundred years—the monument was erected! Thus, the human development takes place, one example of many.

I come back to my starting point: The modern scientific way of thinking has the same thought with the Mosaic history of creation in common that the human being appears after the animals. Against it, modern spiritual science has to say that the human being precedes the animals, and that one has to go back to such a state in which the human being could only develop that which he was at that time while he had to expose himself to the outer conditions. There one comes back to developmental states of our life on earth, which look different from what one calls Kant-Laplace theory. Externally a primeval nebula may have developed and conglomerated. Some time ago, I have quoted significant words of Herman Grimm: the fact that once later generations will have a lot of trouble to think about the eccentricity of the present, which believed that from such a primeval nebula everything developed that is there now. However, it will take long time, until humanity will be so ripe for a spiritual understanding of the things that one can consider the riddle of the human being as I have done it today.

Then, however, another idea of development arises, and I do not shy away from repeating something that I have already brought to your attention, because I have to show repeatedly from which side life and movement have to be brought in the scientific thinking of our time.

One can have scientific correct thoughts, but these can be very far away from reality. There I have pointed over and over again to that lecture of Professor James Dewar (1842-1923) in London at the Royal Institution in which he explained how the earth would be after 200,000 years. It is calculated quite correctly and one cannot doubt it, just as one can calculate the Kant-Laplace theory quite correctly. One can also calculate this final state of the earth, cooled down below 200 degrees centigrade. There is no mistake: then our atmosphere is condensed into water. Dewar explains it in all details that then the things on earth have assumed other aggregate states. Milk will be solid of course. Indeed, I do not know how it should be produced then; but it will be solid of course. Certain objects will fluoresce; one will be able to coat the walls with protein so that one can read newspapers at night. There is no mistake. However, the question is whether it is not only “right,” but whether it is also “real” whether the thinking knows where it has to stop because it is no longer in reality. Which methods are used to calculate these things? Methods, as for example the following: anybody studies the stomach of a 30-year-old person; he pursues it for more than 300 years and calculates how after 300 years the stomach of this person would be. He can calculate this as well as Professor Dewar calculates the final state of the earth.

Only that is the mistake that then the human being does no longer live, just as the earth does no longer exist after 200,000 years. Likewise, one could calculate how the earth looked 300,000 years ago, because in the same way one can also calculate the Kant-Laplace theory; but at that time the earth did not yet exist. It concerns that one learns to distinguish realistic thinking and only “correct” thinking.

With it, I have said a lot. Since the thought that one gets by the study of the human being to relations where the earth looked completely different is only to be gained if one applies realistic thinking. Then one can also have a thought about how the human being who is protected with the characterised outer shell from the present earthly conditions—which will be quite different from those which Professor Dewar describes—, so that the human being develops into times when the earth will be very different when the today's animals will no longer exist.

This was a spiritual-scientific discussion about the origin and the development of the human realm and the animal realm. Next time I want to show how the human being returns in repeated lives on earth, so that one can again accept Lessing's view of repeated lives on earth. Today I wanted to create a basis to show that spiritual science gets to quite different initial and final states of our earth, and that, indeed, one has to break with the opinion that the animal realm was there first and the human being could then develop on its basis. The human being precedes with his development. Spiritual science will assert these things. A very spirited and vigorous researcher of the nineteenth century, Wilhelm Heinrich Preuss (1853-1909) had an anticipation of it.

There you find the first beginning of these things, but there everything remains more or less assertion. These things can be investigated first if one penetrates with the beholding consciousness into the spiritual-mental of the human being, about which natural sciences cannot speak at all. Since they can only ask, how is the human being related as a spiritual-mental being to the animal organisation? However, the highest of the spiritual-mental does not relate at all to the animal organisation, but it lifts out the organisation, produces quite different equilibrium relationships, so that the experience of conception and death coincides at one moment, so that in the human being by the continuous perception of conception and death the experience of immortality vaguely lights up.

(At the end, Steiner briefly summarises the contents of this talk.)

Because one has to consider the supersensible human being as the core of the human being, it is quite natural that the knowledge of the supersensible human being is human self-knowledge. However, with this human self-knowledge you face a very strange paradox. On the one side, you face the necessity of understanding the human being as a supersensible being; on the other side, any usual cognitive ability is bound to the sensory appearance. What he grasps with his reason is also bound to the sensory appearance. One could say without thinking, self-knowledge demands the view of the human being with cognitive abilities that are far away from his consciousness at first. In so far as the human being becomes aware of himself as a supersensible being, he has to acknowledge in a certain sense that everything that he performs in life arises from his supersensible being. On the other side, one could say, everything that appears in his consciousness appears sensorily “veiled” in a somewhat improper sense. Hence, one misunderstands spiritual-scientific research and speaking about the supersensible so easily and so often. Since the today's considerations will show that one cannot approach the true nature of the human being with the usual abilities of the everyday consciousness. Yes, one has even to say that that kind of knowledge which has developed so greatly on scientific basis rather misleads concerning the self-knowledge than to lead this self-knowledge in the right way. Since just if the well-schooled scientific way of thinking approaches the human self-knowledge, one notices that it can fail too easily. We want to take an example as starting point.

In the very interesting booklet The Subconscious Self and Its Relation to Education and Health by Louis Waldstein (1853-1915) is talk of various things that also strike the scientist if he gets to know the human life in its development in the different relations. We have spoken in a former talk about the revelations of the unconscious, of the subconscious. The example that I want to bring in is that of a naturalist, and the way in which he speaks about that is completely scientific. The author of this booklet wants to point to a certain place how this subconscious being plays a peculiar, vague role. Waldstein chooses the following example. He says, I stood before the shop-window of a bookstore. Because I am a naturalist, I just looked at a book about mollusks. At this moment when I saw this book, I started smiling to myself, and I was surprised why I did this, because a book about mollusks has nothing humorous.—He continues: I closed my eyes to investigate what maybe proceeded in my surroundings. When I turned the view away from the book, I heard the tones of a barrel organ quite soft in the distance. It played the melody of a song that one played when I danced my first quadrille. At that time, I did not care with which sympathies or antipathies I met this melody; since I was occupied very much to make my dance steps well arranged. At that time, I was not at all especially careful on what entered half my consciousness musically. Still the fact that I must smile standing before the book about mollusks after decades proves that the impression, which at that time that melody had done still, has continuing effects; and if I had not closed my eyes, but had been content with the astonishment, I would not have known then why I smiled standing before the book.

One realises how mysteriously such things have continuing effects in the subsoil of the soul life, how much generally exists in the human being that comes up only quite fantastically in the consciousness; one realises how difficult it is to get to real self-knowledge. Since to which danger do you expose yourself, if you want to practise introspection? To the danger that you have to deal with all possible completely blurred subconscious things which you have maybe taken up decades ago which have a lasting effect which work only in the deepest subsoil of the soul like a mood that comes up then and nuances what you now observe in yourself.

Waldstein and others bring in numerous such examples. You find those also in my book How Does One Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds?. Such examples are very suitable to be rather careful about introspection. Since even some people believe to get with introspection also to a real knowledge of the human being. Some people also believe while bringing up such memories from their subconsciousness that they do all possible clairvoyant discoveries.

Now one has to be careful also in another respect. You can realise, for example, that some who claim to figure this or that out by their supersensible knowledge of their inside express this supersensible knowledge in pictures which are got, for example, from telegraphs or railways or as the case may be. From it, one would see that the supersensible with its pictures had just to wait to appear, until the railways were invented. Someone who does not approach the supersensible research uncritically will also be able to know easily how frivolously one proceeds in this field now and again, and how it is really soothing that thorough scientific thinking points to the fact that such contents which somebody regards as revelation of higher worlds sometimes are nothing but what the person concerned has taken up once in any blurred way at a younger age

• what he regards, however, as a revelation what did not come to his consciousness at that time

• what changed in multiple way

• what he does not recognise again,

• what now, which has come about in supersensible way.

In my book I have pointed out that, actually, everything works on the human being and that sometimes in something that the one regards as an inspiration is nothing but the transformation of a shop sign at which he did not properly look when passing by in the street, but which penetrated only into his subconscious.

With it, one points to an area of human life that one has to consider rather carefully and rather critically just by somebody who seriously wants to expand his research to the supersensible world. However, on the other side, all these memories, these subconscious images point to something else, it is as it were the side effect of something quite different. There I have to return more exactly to something that I have already mentioned here in the course of these talks: the relation between memory and the usual mental pictures. A very usual kind of thinking that has played a big role also in science, in particular in psychology, is that the human being has experiences while facing the outside world. These experiences evoke mental pictures in him. Now he has these mental pictures. After some time he “remembers.” Now one imagines this process very often in such a way, as if these mental pictures, which he had once and which he has somewhere in the subsoil of the soul, come up again as recollections in his consciousness. One thinks very often, more or less consciously or subconsciously, that that which appears in the recollection is nothing but the same mental picture which one had once, and which was down there anyhow and comes up again in the consciousness. However, someone who knows to practise real observation in this field has to regard this way of thinking as something rather childish and dilettantish.

Since if we face an outer phenomenon if we have an experience of the smallest or biggest kind, which evokes perception and mental pictures by the perception in us, this “activity”—I want to call it provisionally so—is accompanied by another activity of which we do not become aware usually. This activity is yet another one; it accompanies the conscious imagining activity and causes something in us that leads to memory. However, you have to observe properly. The most trivial observation in this area is that if you consider the difference of imagining, which can be completely easy, and memorising. Remember only what the young people who have to “cram” for an exam have to do, so that they have not only the mental picture, but also keep it in mind. There quite weird performances are carried out sometimes. Think of the play, which takes place between the human hands and the head if anybody has to cram something. Of course, that is only an outer sign of what I mean. But in truth it is in such a way that during the imagining activity another activity is still there which does not get to our consciousness and exercises an effect on our organism which consists of something quite different than of forming mental pictures. Later if we remember that again which we have imagined once, this mental picture completely originates anew. It originates as it were from the “sign,” from the “engram”—if I am allowed to use this expression—which that activity can exercise which accompanies the imagining activity on our organism. As we face the object of the outside world and form, inwards directed, our mental picture, we face our organs while remembering.

What happens there what is different from our imagining as the outer object is different from our mental picture is changed into the mental picture anew. Somebody who is able to observe the organisation of the human mind and its effectiveness knows that that which forms as a mental picture appears and disappears, while it is imagined. If anything is reminded, the mental picture has not slept down there and appears again, but from something quite different that happens below in the organism the mental picture is anew formed. What I want to show there is that we have to see something in that accompanying activity, which goes along with it, actually, in the subsoil of our conscious life and is connected with something that always emerges with the memories from our subconscious. As well as everything that appears in the world has its concomitants which appear like the caricature of the real now and again, is that which I have mentioned from the writing by Waldstein also such a concomitant of the quite normal regular way how the human being works in the memories. I would like to say, what proceeds subconsciously, so that the human being has a memory, appears in such things if it overflows or if anything remains indistinct or blurred like the sounds of a barrel organ that still generate an effect making Waldstein smile. That which is there rather conceals the things than that it explains them. Since the point is that it is a very normal activity, which is very necessary for the human being, namely that which forms the basis of the human memory. This is something that accompanies our whole conscious life perpetually, but we do not turn our attention upon this accompanying activity in the usual life. The accompanying activity is due to our organisation.

It is a kind of touchstone of the real supersensible research to consider such a thing like this accompanying activity forming memory. Since that which normally works in the subconscious can be changed into something conscious on the first level at first. Changing something unconscious into something conscious is one of the capacities that lead to the real investigation of the supersensible. What remains usually subconscious must be brought up in the consciousness. Thereby it already becomes different. The exercises, which I have described in my book, which one has to go through to put the soul in such a condition that it can face the supersensible, consist of many things. However, one can illustrate something elementary showing that this first elementary is related to a quite normal activity which remains, however, usually subconscious. One has to carry out the activity consciously which is carried out there unconsciously, but quite normally to form the memory. For that, it is necessary that you are able to refrain from that activity which causes the usual mental pictures bound to the senses. You must be able to withdraw as it were from this imagining. However, you are not able to do this if you cannot replace it with another kind of imagining. You attain this, while you focus on self-developed mental pictures that are easily understandable.

I say "easily understandable" mental pictures; this is exceptionally important. Self-chosen, self-developed, easily understandable mental pictures must be because just any subconscious, everything about which one cannot know to which blurred perception it is due must be removed. However, you never are sure—one sees this from this example—that this blurred, subconscious weaving of the soul life is blanked out if you do not focus on a mental picture which you can really figure out at the moment where you yourself have formed it, so that you know, any part of this mental picture has arisen from your immediate will which you have unfolded at this moment. “Self-chosen” does not mean of course “self-made;” you can get such mental pictures from an experienced spiritual researcher, and he is able to know best of all how they can be adapted to the individuality of the human being concerned. However, it matters that you intermingle the mental picture with the thoughts and experience in the soul that you have nothing in the soul but this mental picture. It also matters that these mental pictures occupy our consciousness if possible in very versatile way so that this mental picture is present in every atom, I would like to say. This is particularly fulfilled if you take such mental pictures in your consciousness that stimulate you to make the thoughts versatile.

A growing plant, for example, is a good mental picture; not staring at something resting, but at something that is in motion or that has any relations to each other. Thereby we are protected that our consciousness becomes idle while staring at the mental picture. Since it matters for the investigation of the supersensible world that everything that is done as preparation has to be done completely consciously from start to finish that in no way the consciousness is anyhow darkened. Hence, it belongs to the first requirements of the future spiritual researcher that he eliminates everything from that soul activity which should lead him to spiritual research—of course, not from the remaining life—that can decrease the consciousness anyhow. It is particularly important that in this living in easily understandable mental pictures, in this “meditating,” nothing prevails in the consciousness that may darken it. It is the first requirement that anything dreamy, all thoughts, arising from the inside, which one likes, are eliminated from the preparations of spiritual-scientific research. Furthermore, everything has to disappear that could anyhow darken the consciousness of percipience. What you want to aim at must not deal anyhow, for example, with staring a luminous point by which one could get to a certain hypnotic condition, or with that which some people even feel as a rather nice preparation: looking at a “crystal ball” and the like. The opposite of all suggestive or hypnotic conditions you have to exercise if you prepare yourself for spiritual research. You can learn from that: if you often hear from people who are also “followers” of spiritual science and say that you have to lose yourself if possible eliminating the own being to a dreamy “devotion,” then it is that “spiritual science” which may cause a lot of ease which does not at all lead, however, to the investigation of the supersensible world.

I have to draw attention sometimes to such things; since even people who want to be serious critics of spiritual research confuse it with its opposite. Even a critic (Max Dessoir, 1867-1947, German philosopher) who has made a great stir confuses this spiritual research with its opposite, and he describes them in Beyond the Soul (1917), with those phenomena which belong by no means to the spiritual world according to the methods of spiritual research. However, it is strange that just this critic brings in an example of his own soul life that he continued speaking for a while when he held a lecture and then only realised that he had continued speaking without his thoughts having gone along. You can be quite sure that such a lecturer has not understood any trace of that which I mean here with spiritual research.

Of course, you have to develop that further what I have given now, but it matters to emphasise the essentials. The essentials and important of that what you experience internally this way is the following:

While you evoke such mental pictures more and more in your soul and mind how the soul is active different than with the outer percipience, the big, important fact manifests itself to you from a certain point on that you are now inside such a soul activity which remains usually unaware and leads in the usual life to the formation of memory. You have pushed one level down as it were what you experience, otherwise, in the imagining. You have not considered what you experience, otherwise, in the imagining, and you have considered what accompanies this imagining else. You have pushed your whole ego-consciousness one level down where, otherwise, this is done what leads to memory, and you get to know this way what takes place usually perpetually below in the soul what you do not consider in the usual consciousness. I have repeatedly shown also here what the fact depends on that the human being is able to form memories. Everybody knows what it means to the human being if his memory power is disturbed pathologically for a time. You get to know a level of soul experience which represents something subconscious to the usual life, and which still cannot be denied, because it is there in its effects which, however, is a particular experience if you settle in that which you have woken by meditating.

This experience is a shaking one for someone who generally has a feeling of such things. You experience that you have reached that level where memory lives that you have approached something in your being that proceeds, otherwise, rather unconsciously that normally never enters even approximately in your consciousness by its nature. This memory-forming force is related to the formative force in us in a way. Since while the force of growth is far away from the usual imagining, it is near by the memory-forming force. Always something immediately grows together that is, otherwise, separated: the force of growth and the memory-forming force to a compound thing which you have in yourself and which you get to know this way. We carry this perpetually in ourselves.

The usual consciousness does not suspect at all that the same force which accompanies the human being as force of growth, as formative force is—increased and refined—the same to which you appeal if you form memories. However, it is something compound. If you get to know the thing, it presents itself as something compound. Since you learn to distinguish that which is combined as force of growth and as memory-forming force; it is as it were a duality that co-operates as a unity. While you dwell on the thing, you discover: what you bring up as memory is, actually, subconscious knowledge, a deeper level of consciousness in which our usual ego does not live. However, this consciousness penetrates the force of growth.

The force of growth and the memory-forming force face each other closer than our conscious knowledge and the outer physical world. However, our conscious knowledge of the outer physical world is more distant from each other; we cannot build the bridge from the one to the other. That which we want to get from there, which we bring to mind by meditations, carries its own object in itself, but it is something that is related to our knowledge. We learn to figure a duality out. However, this duality appears, the further you advance in your soul life, very clear to the beholding consciousness. You behold the force of growth this way. You behold it—to use a good old quotation of Troxler (Ignaz Paul Vital T., 1780-1866, Swiss physician and philosopher)—as the true human corporeality compared with the physical corporeality. In our usual consciousness, we perceive the physical corporeality. This subconsciousness perceives this corporeality in us.

Do not misunderstand me, I have called this corporeality the body of formative forces in the magazine Das Reich. I called it the “etheric body” previously. Because certain people take exception to expressions, I have tried to come closer with the term to that which it concerns and I have called that which is closest to the physical body and accompanies our whole life as formative- forces the “body of formative forces.” One can call that which does not live in our usual consciousness which is always closer to this body of formative forces, and to which one gets by meditation the “astral body” for certain reasons; but one can also call it the “soul,” which works a level deeper than the usual consciousness.

As the chemist separates a compound substance into the different elements, or as the physicist splits the white sunlight into different colours, we have the nature of the human being divided into the physical body that one perceives with the outer senses, into the body of formative forces that is the first supersensible member of the human being, and into the astral body or soul that subconsciously knows about the work of the body of formative forces, but shines in the usual consciousness only in the memory pictures . From all that the real ego is separated which swims on this triple human being, which knows nothing about that which the soul knows about the bodily, which separates, however, from the soul and which then forms the usual consciousness, and which is spiritual. The fact that this ego-being must be separated as a particular member from the other members turns out only if you advance further with the recommended exercises. I have described how one puts self-formed, clear mental pictures into the soul. It is advantageous if one takes versatile mental pictures and tries to feel, to experience what can be just experienced resting in such mental pictures.

These are two things. The one is that you become aware that there is such a weaving and living in the human being as it is similar to the memory formation. The other is what you experience if you look internally at this experience. It is as if you proceed in such a way that you form the mental pictures on one side, the thinking on the other side, which becomes memory then. This is a particular experience. Someone who goes through it who trains himself as spiritual researcher in the real sense knows that this is a particular experience. Since an element stops from a certain moment on prevailing in this soul life, which, otherwise, is significant always for our soul life: the spatial element. If you reflect that in the usual consciousness almost only spatial images are available, then you realise how much the usual consciousness is dependent on space. This experience, which attaches itself to such mental pictures, as I have developed, causes gradually to know yourself lifted out of space and being in only temporal processes. This is like a significant progress of the human soul life: to know yourself in the tides of time, because this causes to figure the stream of time out really. I said, the whole results in recognising the relationship of the memory power with the forces of growth. You are put just in this.

Something else is still important. I said, it is a double: to have these mental pictures—and to pay particular attention on what you experience there, how you really experience the mental pictures becoming versatile, the living in time, since then you are with your ego in this imagining life.

You are not only in an imagining life, but also generally in a life, which is mixed with the real forces working in time. Then you have got at an ego-experience that is completely different from the usual ego-experience. Someone who knows the usual ego-experience by appropriate introspection knows how narrowly it is bound to the human corporeality, and I have described last time to which elements of the corporeality the ego is bound at first: that it concerns equilibrium relationships, so spatial relations. However, you cannot stay at this experience, but you properly get into the course of time.

Very few people regard anyhow what I have indicated now. Thus, some philosophers assume that our ego is that ego which remains in any experience from birth to death. However, this weird concept of the permanent usual ego as Bergson (Henri B., 1850-1941) designed it can be easily disproved. Every dreamless sleep disproves this assertion. This is why one is not able to build up something on the usual ego-experience if one wants to recognise the human being. However, one carries the ego--experience into the course of time.

If one carries the ego into the course of time if to the other experience of the mental subconscious and the memory-forming body this new ego-experience appears, then it does not count any more that every sleep interrupts this ego-experience, but then something else counts. Then turns out that with our ego-idea also the following is associated.

I have shown last time from which vague feeling this ego-idea appears. It has to be inspired as it were. It is not there in the dreamless sleep. How is it inspired? It is inspired when we approach our corporeality with our soul again. Our corporeality stimulates our ego in the usual consciousness from without. We collide in the usual consciousness with our body; this stimulates our ego-idea. This ego-idea must not be considered as something permanent. However, with that which I have portrayed as new ego-experience the situation is quite different. This lives in the tides of time, it is lifted out from space. This is just inspired, while the human being inspires the experience at one moment in time and not with the spatial collision with his corporeality, but in the collision with the experience of another moment in time. This ego-experience about which I have spoken now is identical with the fact that if I wake I collide in mysterious way with that moment in time at which I have fallen asleep. This forms the basis of the new ego-experience that we experience ourselves at different, at consecutive moments in time that we bridge the time, even if it is discontinuous if sleep disturbs it.

These are the essentials of this ego-experience. Because we immerse the ego in the soul, as far as this is related with the conditions of growth, thereby we immerse the ego itself in the conditions of growth. We advance to that in the ego, which accompanies us from birth to death; we penetrate into the continual stream of ego-experience. What philosophy only concludes else about which one only judges, this is experienced. One defends himself even against the fact that Eduard von Hartmann talks of the fact that if one wants to observe a feeling it is disturbed and changes.

If Eduard von Hartmann notices this, he just wants to exclude that the ego can live in this stream of time. He wants to prove just with it that for the ego-experience the stream of time gets lost to him. However, it does not get lost, but is just gained with it. Yes, someone who can practise introspection spiritual-scientifically knows that the ego-experience that is there at this moment interrelates with former moments in time.

Do not take it as tomfoolery or as boast, if I tell an own experience which seems to be very simple if it is experienced which shook me again recently. I finished a book in 1894 in which I pointed out wholly philosophically that the human thinking is already something spiritual: my Philosophy of Freedom. At that time, I was a young man of 33 years. Now recently the necessity has arisen to work through this book again, to go through everything again that penetrated my soul at that time and to observe at the same time how the ego-experiences of today relate to the quite same ego--experiences of those days.

If you succeed in realising how something similar appears in time while experiencing again and encountering the revived experiences as usually at awakening, then you can just realise with such an example how the ego is inspired exactly the same way as in the corporeality at awakening, while it meets something of it again that existed in the stream of time. Someone who cannot observe this does not imagine at all what he experiences if he does not have the ego in the stream of space, but if he is forced to think it according to the mental pictures in the Philosophy of Freedom that many people regard as “abstractions.” I call them the most concrete, most living mental pictures because the Philosophy of Freedom develops nothing but living concepts. This is the ego-experience due to the interrelation of the one moment in time with the other moment in time. There begins that what you can pictorially call the transition to the inner musical experience of the world. It is, as if you interrelate a tone of a melody to the other tones of the melody if not only this originates that the tone shakes the air as it were, experiences itself in space, but if a tone interrelates with the other tone. It is impossible actually to look different at the inner weaving and living of this highest member of the human being from to proceed to such a musical experience of the one moment of time through the other.

The whole human being is thereby divided into (1) the physical body, (2) the body of formative forces working in the memory, which spiritualises the body of formative forces like a subconscious knowledge, (3) the actual soul or astral body, and (4) the ego. Then we have tried to look at the supersensible, and with it you have the complete human being. With it, you also have the suggestion how you have to experience, so that you can directly behold the permanent in the human being. There is no interpretation or philosophical analysis of the usual ego useful; you have to carry this ego into another sphere, you have to experience it anew on quite different conditions. That ego which you experience this way is an ego that is independent from the spatial corporeality at the same time, and it can gradually perceive, while you continue your exercises, that in the tides of time which lives in the human being only temporally, not spatially.

If I am allowed to insert something for those who know of such things: one has pointed out in the present philosophy that one does not approach the soul if one wants to grasp it substantially, but only if one grasps it as a passage through a process. In particular, Wundt (Wilhelm W., 1832-1920, German psychologist and philosopher) pointed to that. However, Wundt pointed to the fact abstractly that one does not approach the soul if one considers it as a substance, but that one has to observe it in the living process.

However, it does not concern to visualise it only in the mental process by abstractions but to submerge with the own ego in the mental process and to experience it. Then one can gradually pursue this mental process also beyond those times in which it is busy in the spatial-physical. If you have learnt to let collide the experience of one moment in time with the other moment, then you can also gradually develop the ability in yourself to let collide the inner experience of the ego generally with the stream of time where the spatial-bodily-has only originated in the stream of heredity. Then the stream of time extends beyond the spatial-bodily, then you behold in the stream of time in which the ego weaves in the life before birth and in the life after death.

To somebody who experiences that which I have described now in principle something occurs internally that one can compare with the experience, which probably Giordano Bruno (1548-1600) might have had when he stood at the beginning of the modern scientific way of thinking and asserted this. The human beings up to Giordano Bruno looked at the cosmic space, saw the blue firmament and regarded it as a real border of space. It was significant that in Giordano Bruno's soul the idea appeared first: there is really nothing at all; only our view, only the conditions of our sense perception cause that we see a blue bowl there; in truth it extends to infinity, the blue firmament is only a border of our view. This also applies to the temporal. Birth or conception and death become the borders of the temporal firmament at which we look which our sense. What we regard as our world in which we live with our ego, with our supersensible human being, this is beyond this temporal firmament beyond death on one side, beyond birth or conception on the other side. Today we face this great leap forward of the human knowledge where in similar way as centuries ago the spatial illusion was removed the illusion is now removed that birth and death are borders beyond which one cannot get.

You have to do this leap. Then it opens the view of the real life of your supersensible being. However, you have to consider particularly: someone who wants to become a spiritual researcher as I have described here has to pursue with the highest critical introspection always what could keep him from coming objectively into this spiritual world. He can be very easily kept from it. It is advantageous not to use mental pictures for meditation, which evoke feelings and emotions. Somebody who uses mental pictures, which excite him very strongly, can deceive himself very easily. Hence, you should avoid for the preparation that religious impulses are brought in the exercises. Strange to say—it will be fine with some people—those mental pictures are the very best which touch us the least concerning our emotional life. If you become engrossed in geometry in such versatile mental pictures where the figures can accept different forms, or in such mental pictures, as I have shown them in the Philosophy of Freedom, then that furthers us in this field. With it, I do not want to say that spiritual-scientific research is not concerned with the religious life. However, it concerns that one gets to that religious internalization and deepening for which just spiritual science can also be the preparation best of all because one does not take it as starting point, but proceeds with very unemotional and incurious mental pictures on the way of research, and if you are in the spiritual world, the view which can already be a mighty help just for the religious deepening comes to you from this spiritual world. Thus, you have to use particular mental pictures, which are not associated with the griefs and concerns of human life and which you can easily understand. However, these never are the mental pictures, which excite us easily, because there everything imaginable appears from the subconscious in the soul. One has to exclude this subconscious above all.

You really penetrate into a spiritual experience this way where you can find that being in the human being only which lives in the freedom of will which lives in the immortal soul being. Every human being bears it in himself. However, you can recognise it only in such ways as I have described.

In the next talk, I want to go on talking from this point about the important questions of the human soul life: about the freedom of will and about the immortality of the soul. I want to show how one advances from the supersensible human being to a real conception of the life of this supersensible human being, of the life in the real perpetuity, and the life in the freedom of will. People have argued so much about freedom of will and immortality because one did not want to get involved with creating the necessary preparations first to enter the field of human experience which you have to enter if you want to gain a view of that from which only freedom of will originates, and in which only that rests which goes through births and deaths in the human being. You have to recognise first how in the human life the temporal runs during this life on earth. Then you also find the ways to get beyond this life on earth.

Such research can become fertile for the most important, most practical fields of life, for example, for education. One does not at all consider this field from the temporal experience of the soul, although one wants to make modern ideas fertile for it today. Someone who can look from one time of human experience to another finds a metamorphosing life in the soul life. He finds, for example: if he has grown old and looks back at former times and then at more distant times, and if he looks not only outwardly, but experiences it internally, then he notices how the inner mental object changes what originates from an object of the soul life at a moment in time.

One notices: what works in the childhood mainly as will what is expressed as wish works in the later life in the experience of life, works in the thinking. What we have later as fifty years old humans as experience of life is a transformed will life of our childhood. As the petal of the plant is a transformed green leaf in the sense of the Goethean metamorphosis outwardly, but as the leaf does not remain green, but becomes red with the rose, that changes which is wish with the child into experiences of life in the later age. And vice versa: what the child thinks changes into willpower in the later life. If you know this coherence, you can imagine how you can work on the child!

If you fulfil every senseless wish of a child and induce it that it atomises its will in all directions, then you make it relatively idiotic early in later age because the atomised will cannot change into experience of life which expresses itself in a quiet life of thought later.—This metamorphosis of the inner life manifests itself to spiritual beholding as usually spatial relations manifest themselves. One also learns to recognise that one has to try to lead the thoughts of the child, so that it does not become a limp, weak human being later, but takes up such mental pictures that lead to a certain willpower. Someone who possibly believes that by suggestion of the will the will, and by suggestion of the life of thought the thoughts are strengthened is on a quite wrong track; he does not know the weaving and living of the supersensible human being. Here is a point—and we could bring in countless ones—where real penetrating into the reality of existence leads immediately to life praxis. Somebody who wants to stop at the outer reality resembles a person who has a horseshoe-shaped piece of iron before himself and says about it, this is a horseshoe-shaped piece of iron. However, another says to him, this is a magnet. The former means, I see nothing of it, I see a horseshoe only, and I want to shoe my horse with it.—He does not see the magnet. What can the other do who can add the invisible to reality!

Thus, the world is interspersed with something invisible. However, everywhere reality is fulfilled with a stream of existence that one only recognises if one gets a relation of the supersensible in the human being to the supersensible in the surrounding existence. The fact that many things make a particularly unreal impression in our time is due to the fact that the human beings believe to face the stream of reality immediately. This should be “a scientific view.” However, they do not realise what lives in the depths of reality. Hence, they cannot acknowledge that which weaves in the human life as something real. Someone who has a recognising sense for that which goes forward in the present who can compare subtler, more intimate events to the catastrophic events which have now become the human misfortune is reminded very much of how necessary it is just in our time that understanding of the supersensible relation of the human being to the world gains ground again in humanity. If you ask yourself how it has happened, actually, that this understanding is not there, then you can characterise it in the following way.

It is not there. Today people are regarded as especially clever, and those who are far away from reality are clever in certain respect. I can call a book in which, actually, from start to finish no tone of reality is included, and which contains the knowledge of the whole world, nevertheless, strictly speaking from its point of view, because it is a dictionary, a philosophical one: that by Fritz Mauthner (1849-1923, German author) which is an idol of knowledge not so much of the experts but of numerous laymen or—if I am not allowed to say this—“journalists.” However, someone who approaches this book with sense of reality can get a peculiar feeling. Start reading any article, read it to the end: you have turned around in a circle.

It is, as if you have looked at something that blinded you; then you turn around and look again. However, you get to nothing at all. You ask yourself with every article why it is written, actually? It is to everybody with sense of reality a torture to read this pretentious book. Nevertheless, it is a very clever book. I could praise the astuteness, the cleverness of this book; but a book has come about which reminds you with every article of the good Munchausen who wanted to pull himself out of a swamp on his own shock of hair. This book is also typical for many things that are thought in the present and are done for a long time, and what removes the human beings from reality, from the supersensible. However, in this supersensible the spiritual, the real is flowing. Why did the human being diverge from reality?

Nothing can face the real Christianity and the real piety more understanding than spiritual science. However, take the reality that is often associated with the development of the last two millennia, there you get stuck into the idea: you have to search the spirit beyond outer nature, have to consider the outer nature as something that you must avoid if you want to get to the spirit. Go back to the older centuries, and you realise that one withdraws from the outer nature and her secrets; one looks for other ways and does not look for the spirit that is spread out in nature. Then natural sciences came; other necessities appeared to the human consciousness concerning the concept of nature. However, the former centuries had made sure not to see the spirit in nature; one wanted to find it apart nature. Now she faced the human beings and she was divested of spirit. Now one investigated that nature which one had divested of spirit. This takes place since four to five centuries. Because one saw everything approaching the human being from this spirit-divested nature with a certain necessity, the human being was also divested of spirit. The spirit-divested nature became the vampire of the human spirit. Nature entered in science and her facts became irrefutable. I have often said that the human beings have to admire the results of natural sciences; but nature must not be considered as spirit-divested, otherwise, it becomes the vampire, and one can no longer find what lives in the human being as spirit. Then you find what the barrel organ plays. That which the barrel organ plays is below in the organic. There one grasps the organic life only, one side of life only, not the other side that we have taken as starting point today that already has the supersensible stream in the memory.

In this talk, I have connected two significant riddles of the human soul life with each other not by chance, but I hope to show that the enclosing questions of free will and immortality belong intimately together from the spiritual-scientific viewpoint and are considered together best of all. However, it especially strikes just in case of this consideration that a spiritual-scientific discussion must take ways that are somewhat different from those of a usual scientific consideration, simply because another scientific consideration can point mostly to the results that are there immediately. A spiritual-scientific consideration needs to show more exactly on which way the researcher gets to his results; and how it has to be considered as proof of the matter.

You know that one has also dealt and deals with the questions of free will and immortality from the oldest times of human reflection up to now. In the second half of the nineteenth century, one regarded these two questions almost as arisen from a childish viewpoint of human thinking. One has abandoned from doing this in the last time. One has become more careful, but the central issue has not changed. One can say, the philosophical beholders of these questions do not advance further even if they are careful than to a kind of confession that the human methods of thinking are not sufficient to recognise something certain about these questions. I do not want to go further into it, but I would like to consider my topic from that viewpoint which has been asserted in all these talks here. However, I would like to say in advance that, nevertheless, it strikes that not more results with serious application of all human means of thinking, of any astuteness for the usual philosophy than a kind of doubt mania concerning these questions. This does not surprise you especially if you think that the highest revelations of the human being have to emerge from the innermost core of the human being, and that this innermost core has to be searched in the supersensible. Hence, it is not surprising that, before one enters into the spiritual-scientific consideration, just about these questions little explanation can be given. The researchers always experience that they work with inadequate cognitive means. They feel, without realising it clearly, that in the human being a supersensible life is contained that, however, everything that this human being can consider with the help of the usual organism is directed either upon the sensory world or is abstracted from it. Hence, considering the innermost human core you find yourself in a situation that you can compare with that in which the human eye is.

The eye can perceive the things round itself but not itself. Because the eye is an outer sensory apparatus, an outer object, the eye can observe another human being of course, as far as it is a sensory object. However, one thing is clear: you can observe the human eye if you can take this point of view beyond this eye. In a similar position is the beholder of the human self, of the human core. He would have to be beyond the human soul being if he wanted to observe it. There one cannot say that another human being can observe this human soul life because to the other human being the human corporeality appears. It is not sufficient that another directs his attention upon the soul being; it is necessary that the beholder of his own being could really manage to get out of his own being to observe it.

Maybe another comparison can illustrate that which should be in the object of the today's consideration. There is still a possibility to see the human eye: looking at it in the mirror. Then you have the picture of this eye only before yourself. This comparison matches what I want to explain while you have to put yourself in a position by the spiritual-scientific methods which shows that what you experience as a human being in yourself and at yourself first in a picture, and that you put yourself with your real human nature in a position which changes that into a picture what you have, otherwise, as a living reality before yourself.

To observe the own human being, it is necessary to leave the own being. Since even if you want to have the own being as a picture before yourself, you have to stand beyond the picture. You can do this only with those research methods about which I have spoken with all considerations in this winter as of a fundamental tone: while you apply those inner performances to the soul—one calls them “exercises” or as you want—which cause the soul to be brought out of itself, so that it faces itself objectively. In the last talk, I have explained some of these things that the human soul has to do with itself to get to this life in cognition beyond the body. I have shown all that in the book How Does One Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds?, in the second part of Occult Science. An Outline and in The Riddle of Man.

It concerns that the everyday soul life is strengthened, is “awoken,” that is to a state which relates to the everyday consciousness as this relates to the vague dream consciousness. As you wake from the dream to the full day life, it is possible to wake to a higher consciousness that I have called the “beholding consciousness.”

If you succeed in strengthening the soul life by concentration of thinking, feeling and willing in such a way that you can enter into this beholding consciousness, then you can refrain from everything that, otherwise, the human being perceives with the senses. You have advanced beyond this sense perception. You live in another inner soul being, in the Imaginative consciousness at first. I call it Imaginative consciousness, not because something unreal should be expressed, but because the soul is fulfilled in this consciousness with pictures that are, however, pictures of a reality. The soul knows that the pictures are not real, but are pictures of a reality, and it knows that it is in the real world context that it does not weave these pictures from nothing, from any inspirations, but from inner necessity. Since the soul has put itself in the real world context and does not create pictures from this in such a way, as for example the mere imagination, but so that the pictures have the character of reality.

It is particularly important to consider this first level of spiritual experience exactly, because an error can arise in two directions. On the one hand, one can confuse this Imaginative world with those pictures that arise from a pathological consciousness. However, from my former explanations you have seen how already the spiritual researcher takes every precaution on his way to the spiritual that strictly reject the uncertain life in all kinds of visionary. The vision enters into the soul so that you do not feel involved in its realisation. It appears as a picture, but you cannot take part in the realisation of the picture. Hence, you do not know its origin. The visionary picture comes always only from the organism, and what emerges from the organism is not anything mental-spiritual, maybe it is a cover of anything spiritual-mental. You have exactly to distinguish the whole unaware life in all kinds of visions from that which the spiritual researcher considers as Imaginative consciousness. This consists in the fact that you are completely involved with your thinking going from thought to thought in everything that appears there as pictures. You can only penetrate into the spiritual world if the activity with which you enter it is as conscious as the most conscious life of thought. There is only the difference that the thoughts are shadowy as those and that they are acquired with outer things or emerge from memory anyhow, while the soul weaves the Imagination when it appears.

You have only to cherish that you must not confuse this Imagination with imagination on the other side. What it weaves is also woven from the subconscious; however, this binds itself often to inner laws of the real life. However, the human being is not in that which he weaves in his imagination in such a way that he is aware of his weaving. While forming the figment of the imagination he is left to an inner real necessity. In the Imaginative experience, however, he is left to an objective world necessity. It is very important to know that that which forms the basis of the work of a spiritual researcher appears as an objective factuality in his consciousness that is neither visionary nor is imagination, but that it has to be distinguished as something midway of these two—I would like to say polar—contrasts. In the Imaginative life you are in a similar position, as if you face your sensory being in a mirror. You know: that who stands there is a reality of flesh and blood, but from this reality, nothing transitions into the mirror. In the mirror is only a picture; but this picture is a likeness, and you know its relation to reality.

Now, however, you are in the spiritual-mental world. But you know at the same time that the first thing that faces you is an imagery, an Imaginative world, and you also know that this Imaginative world has a relation to reality, as well as the reflection is related to the human being of flesh and blood.

This Imaginative knowledge is the first level to enter in the spiritual world. That which the soul experiences in the Imaginative knowledge is a certain increase of the usual soul life, because you know at every moment, because you live in the Imaginative consciousness: if you refrain from own activity if you interrupt the consciousness anyhow, the view of the Imaginative also stops at the same time. This gives a special nuance of the consciousness life that the consciousness feels internally strengthened and feels in an activity perpetually going out from itself from which it must not refrain and towards which the consciousness must not flag at no moment. The imagination of the usual everyday consciousness is supported by the outer impressions, can be left to them, and, hence, does not demand from the soul to work as intensely as it must work in the Imaginative consciousness. The Imaginative consciousness is not found in the usual consciousness. This is the first level that the spiritual researcher reaches if he wants to penetrate into the spiritual world.

On the second level, he must attain the ability to become aware not only of the pictures but also of the just described activity that must be never refrained, while one does research Imaginatively. He must develop an increased self-consciousness. However, something particular thereby appears. You succeed, actually, only in grasping the complete significance of the Imaginative knowledge.

Since you can know if you have prepared your soul sufficiently you attain pictures only with the Imaginative consciousness; you face an imagery, not reality. While you advance somewhat further in your spiritual development, while you divert the attention of the soul somewhat from the pictures and turn it more to the own activity, to the increased self-consciousness, you get to something with which the usual day consciousness is less familiarised than with the Imaginative world. You realise that the pictures disappear gradually. What you have evoked at first disappears gradually. However, reality does not disappear. Instead of the pictures, which you have beheld spiritual-mentally at first something appears that manifests itself from the pictures, that “speaks” from them. The pictures are ensouled as it were; they say such a thing as the colours and tones of the outer objects say. While you have only had pictures first, a spiritual-mental reality appears from the pictures and a second level of supersensible consciousness comes into being, the Inspirative consciousness.

This happens if the activity of Imagination is so maintained that by the forces of maintaining the pictures disappear as it were and that which can speak as reality from them really speaks to the human being. There you notice something exceptionally significant, and it matters with all these things that you accomplish every level of spiritual research completely consciously. You realise that the whole imagery was, actually, only the means to penetrate to reality. The visionary describes his pictures. The Imaginatively recognising human being also has pictures; but he describes them only in such a way that they are the means to penetrate to reality. He will not state, in the pictures reality is given, but at most: something is given in the pictures like senses. The senses are also something that leads to reality, but one does not look at it while one looks at reality. One does not look at reality this way, while one looks at the pictures or describes them, but the pictures have to disappear first. As the eye if it were not completely transparent if it were clouded and were itself perceptible could not see any outer reality, spiritual-mental realities can also not appear to the Imaginative pictures, before these pictures have disappeared, have become spiritual eyes and ears. That of which the pictures are only the means is that which is already behind the pictures. What expresses itself by the pictures is spiritual reality.

It is a particular experience again which the consciousness has on this level of knowledge. In the pictures, the consciousness is tensed up; it has to maintain its activity. Now the consciousness has got to an enclosing loneliness in a way just because it concentrates its attention on this maintaining. With its own activity, it gets gradually to an enclosing loneliness. The pictures disappear, Imagination stops. However, to that which speaks by Imagination, the consciousness relates more passively. It recognises that which it adsorbs now as originating from reality. It is put into a position, as if from all sides effects of reality come, but one does not reach reality itself. One is not in reality; one does not face it.

It is important again that you are aware that you have to deal now with experiences not with effects of reality, with reality. The Intuitive consciousness is necessary to get to reality. This level of Intuitive consciousness is different from the usual intuition. Since the Intuition meant here is an inner process, is not a mere feeling or sensation. There it concerns that you still ascend to the third level of consciousness where you are neither as active as with Imagination, nor are in such a way that from all sides the impressions of Inspiration flow in. After already the liveliness of the pictures is erased, that has to be eliminated from the consciousness which is there as impressions from Inspiration. The consciousness must defend itself with a certain increased inner force against Inspiration. It has to get as it were temporarily—but just temporarily—to a state where it loses itself in that by which it was inspired. It has to put itself in the position to eradicate itself as it were, to submerge in the Inspirative to emerge again in such a way that now it only knows that that which has appeared by Inspiration is spiritual reality. You have to grasp that which you bring up as inner experience different from that which you have brought down when you have submerged in Inspiration. Only that which one has brought up from Inspiration gives the full consciousness of the reality of the Inspirative, and nothing can be considered as spiritual reality that has not entered into the Intuitive consciousness through those three levels. Then only this Intuitive consciousness works after the soul has lost itself in Inspiration. As the human being becomes lost in sleep in the evening to appear again in the morning from sleep, the consciousness becomes lost in the Inspirative, but it keeps the force to ascend again, and brings that with it, which it has experienced, in the Intuition.

In the interaction of Imagination, Inspiration, and Intuition everything is contained that is experience or knowledge of the spiritual world. Everything that I have developed in these talks here has originated, while I have really applied the methods, which are totally unknown to most people today. Since most people generally know nothing about these methods, by which one really recognises the spiritual that lives in the surroundings of our mind, as the sensory lives in the surroundings of our senses. However, if you can penetrate into this spiritual world with Imagination, Inspiration, and Intuition, you find the spiritual being of the human being in it, too. Only then, you find the innermost core, which lives in the human being, which the human being is, and which only manifests itself with the outer physical organisation, if you face yourself if you have left your body. Then you can really recognise your innermost being in such a way that it manifests itself only in pictures, in Imaginations. Now the outer body in which you have been becomes an Imagination of the supersensible. You get to know the human being as we consider him today, while he gives cause to the important questions of free will and immortality.

In 1894, I tried to cope with the riddle of free will in my book The Philosophy of Freedom. At that time, I tried to speak wholly philosophically, so that all those can read this book who regard spiritual science as folly. I tried to answer the question of free will starting from most obvious observations, and I was urged to do what mostly is not done if the free will is considered philosophically: I dedicated the complete first part of the book to an immediate, unbiased consideration of the human thinking itself, not of the thoughts. I intended to ask once, how does it appear if the human being realises, what is active in my soul, while I am thinking? I asked, how does the activity of thinking appear to the human being?

Although I did not take appropriate action in this book, because the matter should be shown truthfully, I was already urged at that time to point to the fact that this experienced thinking is strictly speaking something that is experienced internally and shifts for itself so that it cannot be compared with the remaining soul life that is bound to the human organisation. Since the spiritual scientist is aware absolutely that he completely stands on the ground of the scientific way of thinking. Someone who investigates the human soul life as it is in the usual consciousness between birth and death realises that this soul life is dependent on the human organisation. However, someone who goes to his work conscientiously and unprejudiced finds that, indeed, everything is dependent on the human organisation but not the real thinking. In the thinking, the human being can lift himself out of his organisation. This is based on the fact that the human being does not have that only in his organisation which is progressive evolution. I have explained during the last months that the whole matter is considered unilaterally by such a view and that one has brought in with it all wrong viewpoints to the scientific thinking. One has to look also at a retrograde evolution, at a devolution. The human organism is really a miraculous construction; it is not only in a certain ascending development; rather the human nature takes up a retrograde development in itself, and the strongest retrograde development is in the senses, in the head.

It would be very tempting to point to everything that could be stated by the today's science for the fact that the human organisation shows a progressive development that, however, this development abstains, and that in the head a retrograde development exists. This expresses itself approximately by the fact that the head is the most ossified part of the human being that shows the biggest involution of the sprouting life. The head thereby is just the organ of the usual consciousness because in it the development does not progress but is withdrawn. The nervous activity of the head, generally the whole activity of the head and the senses is based on the fact that the human being is mineralised in this area; he deteriorates, it is a slow dying. Look once at the human being, how he faces you in abounding, progressive life and how he takes up that descending life in his organisation; thus this destruction creates space, and while it creates space, his mental-spiritual can take place. The human being does not think because the forces of growth are active in the head and in the whole mental organisation generally, no, he thinks because these forces disappear and make way for that which replaces that now which causes unconsciousness of the remaining organism in the flowing, surging blood. One realises once that the human being develops his free thinking because he does not straight continue the development in the head, but that the development must become retrograde to unfold thinking. Then one will understand the connection of the human organisation and thinking. One will understand how thinking intervenes in the organisation, that, however, the human organisation must be decomposed first, so that it can intervene.

I know that I have to be contradictory to that what the naturalists say today; but I know that somebody who considers that properly which the naturalists have discovered will find confirmation of that in physiology and biology what I can only indicate now. Because it is in such a way, the human being is in that peculiar relation to his thinking that, indeed, it is observed, but cannot be seen according to its own inner being if one does not consider what I have explained now.

If the human being abandons himself to his mental pictures, you can pursue exactly how a mental picture associates with the another. One can pursue how this is dependent on the organism. The psychologists call it association of mental pictures. One can let this association of mental pictures to the naturalists to investigate them, because it really turns out as that where the organism has a say. However, the human being also knows that often in life moments have to take place where he does not let the association take its course. Since there would never be a logical control of thinking if one had to follow the association blindly. One knows, it is something different how the mental pictures emerge and associate with each other and something different to control them logically, so that they become “right.” You only need to read one of the most popular manuals about this field, then you realise that the human beings are already aware how something intervenes in the natural course of the mental pictures that does not belong to the organism. What intervenes there is that what can only be there in the human being if the organism withdraws with its functions first if it adds the retrograde evolution to the progressive evolution.

I refer there to a chapter that is also taboo today; but it will not last very long, until an inner necessity leads the human beings to this. You need only to remember the important speech that during the seventies of the last century the famous physiologist Du Bois-Reymond held about the “borders of the knowledge of nature” in which he spoke about the “world riddles.” Du Bois-Reymond was inclined in a certain respect to consider carefully not to be completely immersed in materialism. He put up two such limits of knowledge: consciousness and matter. He said rightly, in the material life the same happens which happens in the brain. Atoms of hydrogen, nitrogen, and carbon move according to certain principles; however, the soul becomes aware of this, and one cannot derive the simplest sensations that appear in the consciousness from the movements of the atoms, one also cannot derive any coherence of the movements of the atoms and the sensations. Then he says, and this is important: if one knew what is there where matter haunts in space, one would also know maybe how matter thinks. Indeed, he does not know what it is about which he thinks that it “haunts” there in space. In a certain respect, he is right, but he also is right with that what he means for his science as “limits.” Since one develops mental pictures, sensations, thoughts with the usual consciousness. However, all that is, actually, rather far from the processes in the material life. That is why Du Bois-Reymond could just point to the following: one does not know what haunts as matter in space; if one knew this, one could also find out what as spiritual life is associated with a material process. In some sense, he is right, although his way of thinking is quite materialistic: the fact that one is far away with the usual thinking from the processes of the spiritual life. One does not figure them out, these are more shadowy things, and one does not penetrate into the processes.

When you descend into the Imaginative consciousness, you get also closer to the material processes—namely at first to those of the own body. Then you are no longer far from them as, otherwise, with the usual shadowy mental pictures. The usual consciousness has no means to say how mental pictures and thoughts relate to the processes in the brain. Hypotheses about hypotheses have been put up; but nowhere anything appeared that would have really satisfied, apart from certain anatomical-physiological investigations, which, however, are also far away from the true being of the things. However, while you move into another consciousness, you have to get closer to the usual imagining.

There you get to that which sounds paradoxical to many people today, which is only experienced with the Imaginative consciousness. Someone who can experience thinking who can look with the beholding consciousness at that which proceeds, actually, in the thinking gets closer also to the material processes He is forced, actually, to a kind of materialism, but it is only a kind of materialism that finds the spirit in the matter. He learns to recognise that that which underlies the material process in the brain is a sensation of hunger living in the brain, which is not spread out, however, about the whole body. Thereby he discovers the destruction, the retrograde development. This appears as hunger, and the counter-image of hunger in the soul is thinking and imagining.

It concerns that a quite normal process of our organism causes this devolution so that we are always in a partial hunger during our whole awake life, and we owe our consciousness to this hunger. As we become aware of our hunger if the stomach rumbles, we are aware of our thinking by the fact that the head starves.

Something appears there that can be a kind of historic evidence of that which I have just said. You know that certain ascetics who follow no spiritual-scientific path but a wrong one also starve to get to the spiritual life. This abnormal starving induces the people to be more aware of that which goes forward in them. This evokes a stronger self-consciousness and a stronger spiritual experience in abnormal way. This instinct of having spiritual experiences by hunger experiences is based on the exaggeration of the facts that the normal consciousness and its imagining and thinking are based on a sensation of hunger of the head. As said, if one discovers this, one gets on that this retrograde process exists that really destruction forms the basis, and the thinking is not based on a progressive development, but forces back the organic life and replaces it. If one figures this out once if one really penetrates to the self-knowledge and grasps the human being in such a way that one can say: what appears in it, you have to owe to the sensation of hunger in the human organism,—if you penetrate to the concrete this way, you notice—strange to say—that thinking is an unaware Inspiration in the human being.

This thinking with its effects approaches the human being while he can control the mere associations of mental pictures as something outer because an unaware inspiration approaches him. The spiritual researcher penetrates into the activity of thinking that appears when the organism regresses, and he recognises, you are concerned with an Inspiration. If one investigates what forms the basis of this Inspiration, that is one submerges in the Inspiration and emerges again, then this is the way to discover the spiritual-mental being of the human being before birth or conception to discover what has combined with that what descends in the line of heredity from the ancestors. You get to that which embodies itself at conception; which is the spiritual-mental past of the human being compared with his presence in the body. One gets to an immediate view of the everlasting in the human being.

If you penetrate up to Intuition in this area, you even get to the view of that which as a former life on earth forms the basis of the present one. Talking about repeated lives on earth is based not on speculative fiction but on careful research that prepares the soul first to behold what goes forward in the soul phenomena.

If we try to grasp the thinking free of sensuousness in Imaginative knowledge, which disappears, however, because this thinking itself is an Inspiration, we get to know: the human being was, before he has taken the earthly body, in a spiritual world into which he entered from the previous life on earth. One gets to know what is beyond conception and is everlasting. While one is able to behold the thinking as that which destructs what comes just from father and mother what requires just devolution, one gets to know how the life in the body is the result of the everlasting in the human being. Another view is to be added to that view, which was usual even if only in religious ideas, and it will not only ask: what happens with the human being after death? However, it will add the other question: from which state of the spiritual-mental life does the human being come, while he lives here on earth? The question of immortality will be much more important in future because one recognises that life is to be understood here as a continuation of something spiritual-mental. The first that one discovers as an unaware Inspiration is thinking which is based on the retrograde development.

Something else confronts the retrograde evolution in the human organisation. As everything that I have characterised now is based on devolution which withdraws the evolution, everything that is connected with the development of the human limbs—hands and feet and everything that is a continuation of the extremities inwards, it is a lot—, is another extreme in the human being and his organism. Since that which forms the basis of the human extremities suffers no devolution; but it shows the peculiarity that it exceeds the measure of the evolution of the organism—with the exception of the head. The extremities are overdeveloped; they exceed the point up to which the head and the rest of the organism go. As the remaining organism degrades, the extremities develop a kind of inertia; they overshoot the usual measure.

That which is connected physiologically with the evolution of the human extremities represents an over-development. This knowledge results concerning the human organisation that is connected with the wonderful construction of the extremities that one can only cope with it if one ascends to the Imaginative knowledge. Not until one does no longer consider the extremities in such a way as the outer physiology can consider them, but if one gets to the spiritual subsoil of the extremities, one discovers that also there something spiritual is contained. However, as that which is in the thinking already announces itself as a rudimentary Inspiration, it is with the extremities. But here that which causes over-development can be grasped only pictorially; it can be viewed only this way. Of course, one does not need to stop with this knowledge at the picture, but one takes the picture and tries to figure it out. There is the true reality only. One penetrates from the picture to the corresponding Inspiration and Intuition. What do you discover there? You discover what exists as an unaware Imagination in every human soul what, however, represents the essential if you grasp its being with Inspiration and Intuition what goes into the spiritual world if the human being passes the gate of death. There is the spiritual part of our future. These seeds are the breeding ground of that what we need after death. That is why over-development is there because, otherwise, the development would stop at death. This is the reason of over-development that one needs to have a spiritual-mental organisation after death.

The human being is removed, actually, from Imagination. Hence, that appears what I have now described for the human organisation in the usual consciousness in such a way that the Inspirative thinking—and every true thinking is Inspirative—remains a riddle. One can explain it only as I have explained it today. One does not at all investigate that in philosophy but one accepts it. One writes books on logic, which arrange the ascending, not-binding thinking. However, one does not find out where from the soul has it that it unfolds logic. One gets to that only if one recognises that the soul was in the spiritual world and has brought the guideline of thinking from there, and that our logic is not at all developed in the present. All these contents originate from the existence before birth or conception; they have not passed. We live the everlasting life; we have not come off the everlasting life. This inspires us if we soar the thinking exceeding the mere imagining. This is a proof, but one does not figure the facts out. Hence, one gets to riddles in this area but not to answers.

In the Inspiration, the human being gets already somewhat closer to the matter because he approaches it with feeling. Subconsciously he has the Imagination that is shown in relation to the extremities. Hence, the philosophers also talk a little about the antenatal life because it can only recognised in a higher area, which less enters into the usual consciousness. The thinking that is closest to the Imaginative emerges vaguely. Hence, one talks much easier and much more usually about that which remains as immortality, but avoids the forces that inspire in the soul, and also the forces that we find Imaginatively, so that the pictures transition into the spiritual world and from the pictures the preparation of the next life on earth is accomplished. We go into the spiritual world with the pictures. That which we bring in there shows our future in a way.

The kind of knowledge about which I have spoken which ascends through Imagination and Inspiration to Intuition makes it possible to survey the human life vividly, to penetrate thereby, however, into the reality of this life. However, something strange appears if you experience everything that belongs to the antenatal and the postmortal life: while you come off the own corporeality, while the own corporeality becomes pictorial, the self-experience of the ego scatters. It is a dangerous moment for the knowledge where the usual ego scatters. You are scattered to the four winds as it were, you feel being without consciousness.

This feeling is a significant knowledge. One notices that that which one has left behind was the basis of the usual ego. The physical organisation is the basis of the ego, which the human being calls his “ego” in the usual life. This ego begins with conception, with birth; later the consciousness of it begins. This ego is bound to the organism; one cannot find it if one leaves the organism. However, one experiences this ego as self-contained. It would be dreadful if the human being experienced that as his ego, which the spiritual researcher experiences as the scattering ego when he has left his body. How does one experience this ego? One experiences that it just has submerged; since if it has not submerged in the physical body, the human being sleeps; then the ego has left the body and he does not experience it. One experiences it in the body, namely in that part of the human organisation which is not the deteriorating head organisation and not the organisation of limbs exceeding the normal development; but it is stimulated in the remaining part of the human organisation by the activities of lungs and heart. It is stimulated by the fact that the human being is in his organism.

What is this ego that scatters, otherwise? This ego becomes conscious because it submerges in the organism. The spiritual researcher recognises it as an unaware Intuition. This is the Intuition which is attained, while the true ego which does not at all appear submerges in the organisation, namely in the middle organisation of the human being. The consciousness of the ego is based on unaware Intuition. Hence, you can often hear speaking of “intuition,” but much less of Imagination and Inspiration. However, just of this highest which appears as a process of spiritual research taking place except the body a vague consciousness exists. This self-consciousness ascends from the organisation. Unconscious Imaginations go from the thinking that is free of sensuousness to that part of the human being, which is embedded in the part of extremities, and go from there to the future. That which lives in the present self-consciousness scatters. It gets free from scattering in future. One realises this just if one pursues the matter further. Since now one has something threefold in the human nature, namely the three members of the human everlasting nature: the past, being before the earth embodiment, which settles in the unaware Inspiration of the organism; then that which is experienced during the life on earth in the unaware Intuition; and thirdly that which is anticipated as nature of the human being in the Imagination after death. These are three members of the human being, and they always co-operate in him. In truth, the human being is not the simple monad-like being, but three egos co-operate in the human being: the Inspirative one that lives in our thinking that is carried over from the spiritual world and from the preceding life on earth; the Intuitive ego that lives in the present corporeality; and the Imaginative one that is carried over to the spiritual world after death.

Now that action, the act of volition, can appear which is connected internally with the organisation of the limbs. It can appear in such a way that it follows from the organisation. Ascribing free will to the trivial life, to the instinctual life would be nonsense. Hence, I made a point asking in the Philosophy of Freedom: which actions are free? Since one discovers that those actions originating from the associations of mental pictures are not yet free. The human being is free concerning some actions, but not concerning other actions. The free element of the action develops only from the human being, that is only those actions are free which originate from the thinking, which is free of sensuousness, from the Intuitive thinking. There the human being has to develop something to launch such actions, which lead him out of himself. Since the thinking that is free of sensuousness does not originate from the organisation of the organism, but it is based on destruction. What originates from the desires and instincts comes from the organisation. The human being has to leave himself, even if unconsciously.

However, in what way does he leave himself already in the usual consciousness? If he does actions, in which he is less involved with his desires and instincts while he has the free thought: “it must happen,” and, nevertheless, only feels as tool of the events. Someone who can really check the human life finds that such actions position themselves in life as we face a person whom we love. If we love him really, we take him as he is, we look at him, exceed ourselves. Actions that have love as the innermost impulse are free actions if this love is carried by the insight that is based on the Intuitive thinking. Twenty-five years ago, I have shown this in the Philosophy of Freedom from observations, today I show it from the spiritual-scientific standpoint. Therefore, we have the triad of a free action: free Intuitive thinking, love, and action. However, it must emerge in the usual consciousness. That which I have described now has to form its basis as it were.

However, the human being who acts freely is not yet a clairvoyant; he has not yet attained the beholding consciousness. As the spiritual life enters in poets and artists, it enters in him by the moral imagination as I have called it in my book. If you beheld the spiritual counter-image of the moral imagination in the spiritual world, you would have Imaginations. Since the moral impulses do not live in us. You feel the reflection of it in your conscience; the reflection of it in the consciousness is the moral imagination that has the moral impulses. Spiritual-scientifically, one says, the moral impulses not only are in us, but they are taken from the spiritual world; but they come into our consciousness as moral imagination. That forms the basis of the free will.

We look once again at that which is expressed in the higher organisation of the limbs. This is not for the life, which leads to death; it contains the impulses that become significant after death. They exist, live in the human being, do something that is significant after the usual life; they are not founded in the organism. Since the organism must exceed its measure of organisation, while it wants to produce this. There it causes something in the human being that has nothing to do with an only scientific necessity, because this scientific necessity looks at the human being only between birth and death. However, if that appears which works, indeed, here, but receives its full reality only after death, and then it is the “future ego” if I may so express myself. What does this future ego grasp? I said: the free thinking. The past ego that the human being brings in at his incarnation, which inspires his soul life, accomplishes that we have free thinking which is free from mere imagining which also provides the impulses of moral actions.

However, this would remain passive. Nevertheless, this must be seized by lively impulses. They are from the future ego. In every free action, the immortal nature of the human being acts out. Since into the present ego, which lives by the body, which receives its significance in future, only by that which prepares itself by the spiritual-mental the future ego works with all impulses, all active forces which seize the free thinking of the past ego. In the present human being, the immortal human being works in harmony with the future human being. That is why the human being is a free being.

One has only to find out that the immortal nature of the human being is in the free action to realise that natural sciences are completely right if they do not speak about free actions; since they do not consider—it is not their task—the immortal nature of the human being. However, before one does not realise this immortal being, one cannot penetrate to that which emerges from the subconscious depths and manifests itself in moral actions.

The human will is not free in its desires, but the development of freedom is contained in it. The human being is a being that gets free more and more. The more that unfolds in him which lives as an everlasting essence in him, the more he gains freedom. We are free with that part of our being with which we are immortal.

This is the way how this can be found what concerns free will and immortality and what natural sciences can never find; they will remain the more good natural sciences, the less they arrogate to intervene in these areas. However, that remains science, which intervenes in the spirit and in the spiritual life this way.

The humanity of former centuries and millennia that had another soul life did not yet need this science. However, today we approach the time more and more where full awareness of that must arise what forms the basis of the human life. The human being needs that more and more what the science of the supersensible life can give him. I have often explained: only the spiritual researcher is able to penetrate into the supersensible life; but check what he says with your usual consciousness, and you can accept it even if you yourself are no spiritual researcher, although everybody can become one today. If the spiritual researcher presents his results to the usual consciousness, you can understand them with the usual consciousness. Indeed, many things lead away from spiritual research, and someone who possibly believes that the spiritual researcher is allowed to have the slightest predisposition of speculative fiction is very wrong. Someone who thinks there that it is easy to penetrate into the spiritual world and that against it the usual research is difficult in medical centres and laboratories has no idea of the real relations. Strictly speaking, all efforts of the outer science are minor compared to that which forms the basis of the research in the areas described today.

However, it is also necessary that you notice that that people often believe to be unbiased, and, nevertheless, are biased. I have to remember if I see repeatedly that philosophers treat the questions discussed today in such a way that they say, the human being consists of body and soul. You know that one does not manage with the consideration of the human being if one does not divide him in body, soul, and mind. Only spiritual science does this today. Where from does it result that the philosophers do not speak of body, soul, and mind today? They believe to do research without presuppositions, but they follow the Eighth Ecumenical Council of 869 (Fourth Council of Constantinople). They do not know that it corresponds to the dogma put up at that time that the human being must be considered not as tripartite, but that one is allowed only to talk of body and soul while the latter may have some spiritual qualities. What was through the whole Middle Ages a true horror has continued into modern times; and if today Wundt speaks about body and soul, he believes to be unbiased, in truth he obeys the guideline of the Eighth Ecumenical Council only. Thus, the human beings are under the impressions of the unconscious. However, the today's humanity is not “trusting in authority,” and, therefore, it does not mind whether these authorities attain their assertions from such subsoil, or do unbiased science. That is one point that the observer realises.

The other point is that inner power is necessary to ascend to Imagination to keep the reinforced consciousness in such a way that it does not get perpetually lost. You must not believe that you come to speculative fiction straight away if you do not progress in the apron strings of the outer reality with your experience if one dares from an inner necessity to stand in the new experience. People lack this inner courage, but spiritual research could easier penetrate. Faintheartedness and the fear of loneliness are in the subconsciousness. Those who have this faintheartedness and this fear call spiritual research a pipe dream and believe that they could disprove spiritual research with their reasons.

If you check their reasons, you find unaware faintheartedness, unaware fear, and timidity, which are blind to themselves and want to daze themselves about the reasons they bring forward against spiritual research. However, every spiritual researcher knows that that who settles in spiritual science can get to an understanding of the things. Truth finds its way—as a spirited German thinker said—through the human development even through the narrowest scratches and rock crevices; it finds the way to humanity. Humanity will recognise that it is a supersensible being and needs supersensible knowledge more and more to the true self-knowledge, but also to the real practical life. That is why one is allowed to call attention to that prevailing power of truth and to this always-living impulse if one brings forward such paradoxical ideas of spiritual science if one does not regard the misunderstandings. This induces me to say, not as a phrase, but as a deadly serious conviction: May details be still imperfect, as they are investigated today; the impulse of truth lives in that which should flow from spiritual-scientific research. Someone who is in it feels that. Therefore, he says it, not as a phrase, but as an expression of a life connected with the spirit: in spite of it all—truth will also be victorious in this field.

This is the 7th of 10 lectures given by Rudolf Steiner in Berlin between 24 January and 20 April, 1918. (No. 67 in the Bibliographical Survey, 1961). The title of this series of lectures is: The Eternal in the Human Soul, Immortality and Freedom. They were published in German as: Das Ewig in der Menschenseele. Unsterblichkeit und Freheit.

Everyone who is to some extent eager for knowledge and has realised how useful a true understanding of reality can be to human life desires to familiarise himself with the content of Spiritual Science as presented here. On the other hand, its methods for the attainment of knowledge are often irksome, because Spiritual Science is bound to show that the ordinary faculties of cognition—including those applied in orthodox science—cannot lead deeply into the spiritual life; and to be obliged to turn to different sources of knowledge is not an easy matter. True, if the study of Spiritual Science is free from preconceived notions and ideas, it will become more and more evident that ordinary, healthy human reason—provided it really gets to grips with life—is capable of grasping what Spiritual Science has to offer. But people are not willing, above all in the case of Spiritual Science, to apply this healthy human reason and ordinary knowledge of life, because they do not want to turn to something that can be achieved only through actual development of the soul. Although the facts presented by Spiritual Science can be investigated only by the methods to be described here, once the facts have been investigated they can be grasped by healthy human reason and ordinary experience. But because a certain mental laziness makes people hesitate to penetrate into Spiritual Science, even those who at the present time have an urge to know something about it prefer to turn to sources more in line with the methods applied in the laboratories, dissection-rooms and other institutions of modern science. And so in order to acquire a certain insight into the spiritual life, people who cannot bring themselves to approach Spiritual Science itself often prefer to concern themselves with abnormal phenomena of human life to be observed in the outer world of the senses. These people believe that the study of certain abnormal phenomena will elucidate certain riddles of existence. That is why Spiritual Science is so repeatedly and so mistakenly associated with endeavours to gain knowledge of spiritual reality by investigating all kinds of abnormal, borderline regions of human life.¹

For this reason I must also speak of borderline regions which through their very abnormality point to certain secrets of existence but can only really be understood through Spiritual Science and without it are bound to lead to countless fallacies about the true nature of spiritual life. The vast range, the interest and enigmatic character of the borderline region of which I shall speak is to some extent known to everyone, for it points to certain connections between external life and its hidden foundations. I am referring to man's life of dream. Starting from this life of dream it will be necessary also to consider other borderline regions of existence whose phenomena, if experienced in an abnormal way, might induce the belief that they lead a man to the foundations of life. I shall therefore also speak of the phenomena of hallucination, of visionary life and of somnambulism and mediumship, as far as this is possible in the framework of a single lecture.

Anyone who would have these borderline regions of human life explained in the light of Spiritual Science must bear in mind those essentials of genuine spiritual investigation through which they can be elucidated. From the range of what has been described in previous lectures I want therefore to select certain matters which will provide a basis for study of the phenomena in question. Spiritual Science must depend upon development of forces of the human soul which lie hidden in the everyday consciousness and also in the consciousness with which ordinary science works. As I have indicated, through certain exercises, certain procedures carried out purely in the life of soul and having nothing whatever to do with anything of a bodily nature, the human soul is able to evoke powers otherwise slumbering within it and so to gain insight into the true spiritual life. I must now briefly describe the essential preliminaries which enable the soul to make itself independent of the bodily element in acts of super-sensible cognition.

I have said in previous lectures that the attitude to be adopted to spiritual reality must differ from that adopted to external physical reality. Above all it must be remembered that what is experienced in the spiritual world by the soul when free from the body, cannot, like an ordinary mental picture, pass over into the memory in the actual form in which it is experienced. Whatever is experienced in the spiritual world must be experienced each time anew, just as an outer, physical reality must be confronted anew when it is actually in front of us and not merely remembered. Anyone who believes he can have genuine spiritual experience in the form of mental pictures which he can remember just as he remembers those arising in everyday life, does not know the spiritual in its reality. When, as is possible, a man subsequently recollects spiritual experiences, this is due to the capacity to bring such experiences into his ordinary consciousness, just as in,the case of perceptions of some outer, physical reality. Then the pictures can be recollected. But he must learn to distinguish between this recollection of mental pictures formed by himself and a direct experience of a spiritual happening, a direct encounter with a spiritual being. A special characteristic of body-free experience, therefore, is that it does not immediately penetrate into the memory.

Another characteristic is that when, in other circumstances, a man practises in order to be able to achieve something, the exercises enable him to do this more easily and with greater skill. In the domain of spiritual knowledge, strangely enough, the opposite is the case. The oftener a man has a certain spiritual experience, the more difficult it is for the soul to induce in itself the condition where this same spiritual experience is again possible. It is therefore also necessary to know the methods by which a spiritual experience can again become accessible, because it does not allow itself to be repeated in the same way.

The third characteristic is that genuine spiritual experiences pass so rapidly before the soul that alert presence of mind is required to capture them. Otherwise a happening passes so quickly that it has already gone by the time attention is directed to it. A man must learn to be master of situations in life where it is impossible to procrastinate and reflect upon what decision to take, but where decision must be rapid and sure. This alert presence of mind is essential if spiritual experiences are to be held in the field of attention. I mention these characteristics of spiritual experience because they at once show the great difference between an experience in the spiritual world and an experience in the outer, physical world of the senses and how little justification there is for people who know nothing to insist that the spiritual investigator simply brings ideas and concepts acquired from the outer world of the senses as reminiscences into some kind of imaginary spiritual world. Anyone who really knows something about the characteristics of the spiritual world, knows too that it differs so entirely from the world of the senses that nothing can be imported into it from the latter, but that the development of special faculties is essential before the spirit can confront spiritual reality.

Certain other conditions must also be fulfilled by one who wishes to be capable of genuine spiritual investigation. The first condition is that the soul must be immune as far as possible from inner passivity. A man who likes to give himself up dreamily to life, to make himself ‘passive’, as the saying goes, in order that in a dreamlike, mystical state the revelations of spiritual reality may flow into him—such a man is ill-adapted to penetrate into the spiritual world. For it must be emphasised that in the realm of true spiritual life the Lord does not give to his own in sleep! On the contrary, what makes a man fit to penetrate into the spiritual world is vigour and activity of mind, zeal in following trains of thoughts, in establishing connections between thoughts seemingly remote from each other, quickness in grasping chains of ideas, a certain love of inner, spiritual activity. This quality is indispensable for genuine spiritual investigation. Mediumistic tendencies and a talent for genuine spiritual knowledge are as different as night from day.

Another condition is that in his life of soul a genuine spiritual investigator must to the greatest possible extent be proof against suggestion, against allowing himself to be influenced by suggestion; he must confront the things of external life too with a discriminating, sceptical attitude of mind. A person who prefers to be told by others what he ought to do, who is glad not to have to arrange his life according to his own independent judgment and decisions, is not very suitable for spiritual investigation. Anyone who knows how great a role is played by suggestion in normal everyday life, also realises how difficult it is to combat the general tendency to succumb to it. Think only to what extent, in public life particularly, people allow things to be suggested to them, how few efforts they make to create in their own souls the conditions for independence of judgment and for governing their affairs by their own will. Those who study the findings of spiritual research because their healthy intelligence makes them desire relationship with the spiritual world are very often accused of blind belief in the investigator. But the fact is that blindly credulous adherents are anything but welcome to an investigator who tries to penetrate with conscious vision into the spiritual world. A society composed of credulous followers would be the caricature of a society suitable for the cultivation of spiritual knowledge. The genuine spiritual investigator will find, to his joy, that sooner or later those who come close to him develop independence of judgment and a certain inner freedom also in regard to himself, that they do not adhere to him blindly, under the influence of suggestion, but because of common interest in the spiritual world.

I shall speak now of yet another characteristic which can elucidate the relation of spiritual reality to physical reality and the attitude to be adopted by the human soul to the spiritual world. It is very often said that the spiritual investigator takes with him from the physical world of sense preconceived ideas which he then uses to describe some imagined spiritual world. But as I have already said, genuine experience of the spiritual world takes a different form each time. We may be quite sure that what we experience in the spiritual world always proves to be different from anything we previously believed. For this reason it is clear that the spiritual world can be reached only when the soul has been made fit for the experience of it. There is no question of carrying reminiscences of the physical world into an imaginary world. But there is something else which—paradoxical as it seems—will be confirmed by decades of experience of the things of the spiritual world. It is that however highly trained a person may be in body-free cognition, however well practised in seeing into the spiritual world, when he contemplates a particular being or happening—especially a happening which indicates a relationship between the spiritual world and outer, physical reality—he will very often find that his first experience is false. Hence the spiritual investigator acquires the caution which leads him to anticipate that the first experience will be misleading. Then, as he perseveres, it becomes evident to him why he was on the false track, and by comparing what is subsequently correct with what was formerly fallacy, he finally recognises the truth of the matter in question. As a rule, therefore, a genuine spiritual investigator will not communicate his findings to his fellow-men until a long time has elapsed since particular researches were made, because he knows that above all in the realm of the spiritual life, delusion and error have to be encountered and overcome in order finally to recognise the truth. This delusion and error are due to the fact that in investigating the spiritual life we take our start from the material world; we bring our powers of judgment, our mode of perception, from the material world into the spiritual world. At first we are always inclined to apply what we have thus carried into the spiritual world—hence the erroneous conclusions. But the very fact of having to realise each time anew how different the attitude adopted to spiritual things must be from that adopted to physical things, enables us for the first time to perceive the intimate characteristics of spiritual experience. It certainly seems paradoxical as compared with ordinary, everyday experience. But one who is able to look into the spiritual world knows, firstly, that the eternal, immortal essence of the human soul cannot come to conscious expression in the ordinary experiences connected with the body; the immortal essence of the soul is concealed, because here, in physical life, through his bodily constitution, a man can acquire knowledge of the physical only. That is why it is so necessary for the spiritual investigator to emphasise unambiguously that knowledge of the spiritual is acquired outside the body. The moment the body is in any way involved in the acquisition of such knowledge, this knowledge is falsified, even when remembrance—which is preserved in the body—plays a part.

Another outcome of a real grasp of the spiritual life is the knowledge that a man expels himself from the spiritual world to which the eternal core of the human soul belongs, when he surrenders his free will in any way and under the sway of coercion or suggestion allows what is in his soul to come to expression through his body in actions or even only through speech—that is to say, when anything that comes to expression through his body has not been mediated through the will. One fundamental condition for experiencing the spiritual world, therefore, is to recognise that the bodily functions must play no part in this knowledge. The other fundamental condition is that a man must make every effort to ensure that whatever he accomplishes through his body is the outcome of his own power of judgment, of the free resolve of his own will.

I was obliged to speak first of these conditions because they provide the basis for studying the abnormal provinces of the life of soul which we shall be considering. In true spirit-knowledge, what otherwise remains unconscious is revealed and this revelation sheds light upon the eternal, essentially free, core of being in the human soul. It is therefore possible to compare what is thus revealed with abnormal manifestations of the life of soul. The upsurging and ebbing world of dream which beats against human consciousness rather than actually passing into it, cannot really be counted among these abnormal manifestations. The world of dream has become the subject of much scientific and philosophical research, although it cannot be said that the methods applied with such brilliance in natural science are particularly suited to penetrate into the real nature of this borderline province of human life. The same may be said of the contention that thinking must be in strict keeping with that of natural science and surrender completely to the conceptions arising from it. Although, understandably enough, modern people claim to be free from any tendency to believe in authority, they are very inclined, under certain conditions, to do so. Whenever somebody who is publicly reputed to be a great thinker produces a bulky volume dealing with the investigation of abnormal psychic phenomena, numbers of people who really do not understand much about the subject, praise the book to the skies, and then, as a matter of course, our contemporaries, while disclaiming belief in authority, accept it as a reliable basis.

Among philosophical treatises on the life of dream, I want to refer particularly to a book on dream-phantasy by Johannes Volkelt, a German scholar of brilliant intelligence and at present Professor of Philosophy and Education at Leipzig University. He wrote the book in 1875, before he had reached professorial status. Even today this really valuable book is still held against him and is doubtless responsible for the fact that he is still only an Assistant Professor. Friedrich Theodor Vischer, the very significant Swabian aestheticist, wrote a fine treatise about Volkelt's book. But academic prejudices, which during recent decades have led to a definite view of what is or is not ‘scientific’, are to blame for the fact that what might have been inaugurated, even if only meagrely, by that book, lies fallow and is obscured by current prejudices which prevent any real penetration into the life of dream.

In the framework of one short lecture I can give little more than a sketch, but I want for all that to speak of particular points in such a way that they can be illumined by Spiritual Science.

Everyone is familiar with the external characteristics of the upsurging and ebbing life of pictures arising in dreams. I shall speak of a few of these characteristics only. The dream arises as the result of some definite instigation. Firstly, there are dreams which have been instigated by the senses. A dream may arise because a clock is ticking away beside us. In certain circumstances the pendulum-beats become the trampling of horses, or perhaps something else. Certain sense-images, therefore, are found in the dream. I lay particular stress on this, for dream-experience bases itself upon numerous impressions received by the outer senses. But what works upon the outer senses never works in the dream in the same form as in the ordinary waking life of day. The sense-impression is always transformed into symbolism—a transformation that is actually brought about by the life of soul.

Such dreams occur very frequently. Johannes Volkelt narrates the following in his book. A schoolmaster dreams that he is giving a lesson; he expects a pupil to answer ‘ja’ to a question. But instead of answering ‘ja.’ the pupil answers, ‘jo’—which may well be a source of irritation to the teacher. He repeats the question and now the pupil does not answer ‘jo’, but ‘j-o’, whereupon the whole class begins to shout ‘fire-jo!’ The teacher wakes up as the fire-engine is racing past and the people are shouting, ‘fire-jo!’ The impression made upon the senses has been symbolised into the complicated action of the dream.

Here is another example given by Volkelt—wherever possible I shall only quote examples actually recorded in literature. A Swabian woman dreams that she is visiting her sister in a large town. The sister is the wife of a clergyman. The two sisters are in church listening to the sermon. The clergyman starts in a perfectly decorous way but suddenly seems to get wings and begins to crow like a cock. One sister says to the other: ‘What a very peculiar way to preach!’ And the sister replies: ‘The Consistory Court has decreed that this is how sermons are to be preached.’ Then the woman wakes up and hears a cock crowing outside. The crowing of the cock which would otherwise have been heard simply as such, has been transformed in this way in the soul; everything else has grouped itself around the crowing. These are examples of dreams instigated by the senses.

But dreams can also be due to inner stimuli, and again it is not the stimuli as such which appear, but the sense-image which has been transformed, cast into symbolism, by the soul. For example, someone dreams of a very hot stove; he wakes up with his heart thumping. Dreams of flying which occur very frequently, are due, as a rule, to some kind of abnormal process taking place in the lungs during sleep. Hundreds of such examples could be quoted and the different categories of dreams enumerated at great length. Although we cannot enter exhaustively into the deeper aspects of sleep, I want still to speak of certain points.

Literature offers no evidence of particular success in discovering elements in the human soul capable of showing what is actually going on in the soul when bringing about such transformations of the outer stimuli of dreams. But the question of paramount interest is this. What, in reality, is it in the soul that causes such different imagery to be connected with an outer stimulus, or also with a memory-picture emerging from the darkness of sleep? Here it must be said that what is actually working in the dream is not the faculty which in ordinary waking life enables man to link one mental picture to another. I could give you hundreds of examples which would prove what I can illustrate now only by one, for the sake of comparison. Think of the following. A woman dreams that she has to cook for her husband—sometimes an arduous duty for a housewife. She dreams that she has made one suggestion after another to him. To the first suggestion he answers: ‘I don't want that!’ To the second suggestion ‘I don't want that either!’ To the third suggestion: ‘Don't for heaven's sake inflict that upon me!’ And so it goes on. In the dream the woman is very miserable about all this and then an idea occurs to her. ‘There is a pickled grandmother on the floor; she is rather tough, but what about cooking her for you tomorrow?’ That too is a dream actually recorded in literature! Nobody who knows anything about the subject will doubt that the dream took such a form. You will at once say to yourselves : Anxiety is at the bottom of it. Something has happened to make the woman anxious. The mood of anxiety—which need not have anything whatever to do with the idea of the cooking and the rest—is transformed into a dream-picture of this kind. The picture is merely a clothing for the mood of anxiety. But during sleep the soul needs this picture in order to throw off the mood of anxiety. Just as you laughed about the pickled grandmother, so does the soul devise this grotesquely comic image as an adjunct to the other content of the dream, in order to overcome the anxiety and to induce an ironic, humorous mood. An oscillation, an alternation of moods can always be perceived in dreams and—like the pendulum of a clock—a swing between tension and relaxation, between anxiety and cheerfulness, and so on. What is of paramount importance in man's life of feeling is always the decisive factor in the structure assumed by the pictures of dream. From this point of view, therefore, the dream takes shape in order that certain tensions in the soul may be overcome. The picture which, as such, has no special significance, is born from this need to lead tension over to relaxation, relaxation over to tension. The soul conjures before itself something that can be an imaginative indication of the real gist of the matter.

Examination of the whole range of the life of dream brings to light two peculiar features which must be particularly borne in mind. The one is that what is usually called logic plays no part in dreams. The dream has a rule entirely different from that of ordinary logic for the way in which it passes from one object to the other. Naturally you will be able to insist that many dreams take a perfectly logical course. But this is only apparently the case, as everyone who can observe these things intimately, knows. If dream-pictures present themselves in logical sequence, the reason is not that you yourself produce this sequence during the dream but that you are placing side by side, mental images which you have already connected together logically at some time or which have been so connected by some agency in life. In such a case, logic in the dream is reminiscence; the logic has been imported into the dream; the action of the dream does not in itself proceed according to the rules of ordinary logic.

It can always be perceived that a deeper, more intimate element of soul underlies the action of the dream. For example—I am quoting something that actually happened. Someone dreams that he must go to see a friend and he knows that this friend will scold him for some reason. He dreams that he gets to the door of the friend's house, but at that moment the whole situation changes. On entering the house he comes into a cellar in which there are savage beasts intent upon devouring him. Then it occurs to him that he has a lot of pins at home and that they spurt fluids which will be able to kill these beasts. He finds then that he has the pins with him and he spurts the fluids at the savage animals. They suddenly change into little puppies which he feels he want to pat.—This is a typical course taken by a dream and you can see that here again it is a matter of the tension caused by the anxiety as to what the friend is going to say—the anxiety takes expression as the savage beasts—being relaxed as a result of the soul having brought about the transformation of the wild beasts into lovable puppies. Obviously, something quite other than logic is in evidence here.—And anyone who is familiar with examples of dreams knows that the following has often happened. Before going to bed, someone has made efforts to solve a problem, but has failed. Then, in a dream, as he says, he discovers the solution and can write it down in the morning when he wakes up. His story is quite correct but those who cannot rightly investigate such things will always misunderstand them. It must not be thought that the actual solution was found in the dream. What was found in the dream and is then thought to have been remembered, is something quite different. It is something that need have very little logic about it, but produces in the soul the beneficial effect of tension being led over to relaxation. Before going to sleep the man was in a state of tension because he could not solve the problem. He brooded and brooded; something was amiss with him. He was healed by the form taken by his dream and was therefore able to solve the problem when he woke up.

Moral judgment is also silent in dreams. It is well known that in dream a man may commit all kinds of misdeeds of which he would be ashamed in waking life. It can be argued that conscience begins to stir in dream, that it often makes itself felt in a very remarkable way. Think only of the dreams contained in Shakespeare's plays—poets generally have a good reason for such things—and you will find that they might appear to suggest that moral reproaches make themselves particularly conspicuous through dreams. Again this is an inexact observation. What is true is that in the dream we are snatched away from the faculty of ordinary moral judgment which in connection with human beings in outer life we must and can exercise. If the dream seems to present moral ideas and moral reproaches in concrete pictures, this is not due to the fact that as dreamers we form moral judgments, but that when we act morally the soul feels a certain inner satisfaction; we are inwardly gratified about something to which we can give moral assent. It is this state of satisfaction, not the moral judgment, that presents itself to the soul in the dream. Neither logic or moral judgment play any part at all in dreams. If the search for truth is sincere it is essential to set to work with far greater exactitude and depth than is usual in life and in science too. Such matters elude the crude methods usually applied. It is extremely significant that neither logic or moral judgment gain admittance into the world of dream.

I want to speak of still another characteristic of the dream which even when considered from the external point of view, indicates how the soul, when it dreams, is related to the world. This relation can, it is true, be fully clarified only by Spiritual Science. Anyone who studies the sleeping human being will be able to say, even from the external standpoint, that in sleep the human being is shut off alike from the experiences arising from his own life and also from the environment. Spiritual Science does of course make it clear that when man falls asleep he passes as a being of soul and spirit into the spiritual world and on waking is again united with his body. It is not necessary to take this into consideration at the moment, but simply to keep clearly in mind what can also be apparent to ordinary consciousness. The human being is shut off from his environment, and what rises out of his body into his ordinary consciousness is also stilled during sleep. Pictures do indeed surge up and fade away in dreams but their actual relation to the external world is not changed; the form assumed by the pictures is such that this relation remains as it was. The relation to the external world, that which as bald environment giving contour to the outer impressions, approaches man as he opens his senses during waking life—this does not penetrate into the dream. Impressions can indeed be made upon a man, but the characteristics of what the senses make out of those impressions are absent. The soul puts an emblem, a symbol, in the place of the ordinary, bald impression. Therefore the actual relation to the outer world does not change. This could be corroborated in countless cases. In the normal dream the human being is as shut off from the external world as he is in normal sleep; he is also shut off from his own body. What rises up from his bodily nature does not come to direct expression as is the case when he is united in the normal way with his body. If, for example, someone's feet get overheated because of a too warm covering, he would be aware in the ordinary waking state that his feet are too hot. In the dream he is not aware of it in this form, but he thinks he is walking on burning coal or something of the kind. Again it is a matter of transformation brought about by the soul.

Attempts to explain the nature of dream simply by using methods and sources available to external science will always be in vain, because there is nothing with which the dream can truly be compared. It occurs in the ordinary world as a kind of miraculous happening. That is the essential point. The spiritual investigator alone is in the position of being able to compare the dream with something else. And why? It is because he himself knows what is revealed to him when he is able to penetrate into the spiritual world. He realises that the ordinary logic holding good for explanations of the outer life of sense, no longer avails. Those who rise into the spiritual world must be capable of expressing in images what is experienced in that world. That is why I have called the first stage of knowledge of the spiritual world, ‘Imaginative Cognition’. At that stage it is realised that the images themselves are not the reality but that through the images the reality is brought to expression. These images must, of course, be shaped in accordance with the true laws revealed by the spiritual world and not be the outcome of arbitrary phantasy. The spiritual investigator learns to know—quite apart from the physical world of sense—how one idea or mental picture is related to another, how images are given shape. This first stage of knowledge of the spiritual world is then capable of being compared with the unconscious activity at work in dreams. There a comparison is possible, and moreover something else comes to light as well.

A man who makes real progress in knowledge of the spiritual world gradually begins to experience that his dreams themselves are changing. They become more and more rational, and crazy images such as that of the pickled grandmother and the like gradually turn into pictures which have real meaning; the whole life of dream becomes charged with meaning. In this way the spiritual investigator comes to know the peculiar nature of the relation between the life of dream and the kind of life he must adopt in the interests of spiritual investigation. This puts him in the position of being able to say what it is in the soul that is actually doing the dreaming. For he comes to know something besides, namely, the condition of soul in which he finds himself while experiencing the pictures and ideas of genuine Imagination. He knows that with his soul he is then within the spiritual world. When this particular condition of the life of soul is experienced, it can be compared with the condition of the soul in dreams. This scrupulous comparison reveals that what is actually dreaming in the soul, what is active in the soul while the chaotic actions of dreams are in play, is the spiritual, eternal core of man's being. When he dreams, man is in the world to which he belongs as a being of spirit-and-soul.

That is what emerges as the one result of spiritual investigation. I will characterise the other by telling you about a personal experience. Not long ago, after a lecture I had given in Zürich on the subject of the life of dream and cognate matters, I was told that several listeners who, on the basis of training in what is called Analytical Psychology or Psycho-Analysis, wanted to be considered particularly clever, were saying after my lecture: ‘That man is still labouring under mistaken notions which those of us who are schooled in Psycho-Analysis have long since outgrown. He believes that dream-life should be taken as something real, whereas we know that it is merely a symbolic form of the life of the psyche.’—I shall not go further into the subject of Psycho-Analysis today but simply remark that this ‘cleverness’ is based upon gross misunderstanding. For under no circumstances will a genuine spiritual investigator take what presents itself in dreams as reality in the actual form in which it is there presented. Unlike the psycho-analysts, he does not take even the course of the dream as being directly symbolic; he knows that the gist of the matter is something entirely different. Anyone who is familiar with dreams knows that ten or even more people may tell of dreams with utterly different contents, yet the underlying state of affairs is the same in all of them. One man will say that in his dream he was climbing a mountain and on reaching the top had a delightful surprise; another says that he was walking through a dark passage and came to a door which opened quite unexpectedly; a third will speak of something else. In the course they take the dreams have no outer resemblance whatever, yet they originate from an identical experience, namely tension and relaxation which are symbolised in different pictures at different times. What is of essential importance, therefore, is not the factual reality of the dream, not even its symbolism as the psycho-analysts maintain, but its inner dramatic action. From the sequence of the meaningless pictures we must be able to recognise this dramatic action, for that is the reality in which the soul with its spiritual core of being is living while it dreams. This is an entirely different reality from what is expressed in the pictures presented in the dream. There you have the gist of the matter. The dream therefore points to deep subconscious and unconscious grounds of the life of soul. But the pictures unfolded by the dream are only a clothing of what is actually being experienced in the course of it.

Again and again I must emphasise that as far as I am concerned there is no question whatever of wishing to revive ancient notions in any domain. The antecedents of what is said here are not derived from any medieval or so-called oriental occult science, as was the case with Blavatsky and with others who draw upon all kinds of obscure sources. Whatever is said here is based on the consciousness that it can hold its own in the face of modern scientific judgment. If an opportunity for proving this were to occur, it could certainly be used. Spiritual Science is presented with full consciousness of the fact that we are living in the scientific age, with full cognisance of what natural science is able to say about the riddles of existence, but with full cognisance, too, of what it is not able to say about the regions of the spiritual life.

Where do the pictures which form the course of the dream, originate? It is like this. A man who is really free from his body in spiritual experience has the spiritual world before him with its happenings and its beings, whereas the dreamer has not yet awakened his consciousness to the degree where this is possible for him. His soul resorts to the reminiscences of ordinary life and the dream arises when the soul impacts the body. The dream is not experienced in the body but it is caused by the impact of the soul with the body. Hence the things which constitute the course of his life present themselves to the dreamer, but grouped in such a way that they bring to expression the inner tendencies of which I have spoken. In reality, therefore, the dream is experienced by a man's own essential being of soul-and-spirit. But it is not the Eternal that is experienced; what is experienced is the Temporal. It is the Eternal that is consciously active in the dream; but this activity is mediated by the Transitory, the Transient. The essential point is that in the dream the Eternal is experiencing the Temporal, the Transitory—the content of life.

I have now briefly explained the nature of dream as viewed in the light of Spiritual Science and why it is that the content of the dream is not an expression of what is actually going on in the soul when relaxation follows tension and tension follows relaxation. In the life of dream the soul is in the world of the Eternal, free from the body. But what enters into the consciousness as the clothing of this experience arises from the connection with the ordinary circumstances of life.

I pass now to the second borderline region of the life of soul where manifestations of the unconscious may occur in the form of hallucinations, visions and the like.² Even philosophers capable of sound judgment, such as Eduard von Hartmann for example, whose powers of discrimination and discernment I rate exceedingly highly, have been led to the mistaken belief—because they could not grasp the nature of the dream from the standpoint of Spiritual Science—that what comes as a picture before the soul in dream is really identical with a picture arising as an hallucination or vision. But these phenomena are essentially different from each other. Because the genuine spiritual investigator knows what condition of soul is present when he stands within the spiritual world and can compare this with the condition of the soul prevailing in dream, he is able to assess the meaning of certain peculiarities of the life of dream, for example, the absence of logic. The spiritual investigator knows that sensory experience is not without significance but that equally with body-free experience between death and a new birth it has its meaning and purpose in the life of man. It is precisely in our intercourse with the outer, material world that we can assimilate the logic streaming into the soul from that world. The spiritual investigator knows too that moral judgment comes to direct expression in physical life, in the experiences arising from civilisation. Genuine Spiritual Science will never lead to escapism or false asceticism but rather to a full appreciation of physical life, because logic, the capacity for moral judgment and moral impulses, are inculcated into the soul through its contact with the outer world during physical life.

In point of fact the dream passes only slightly into the abnormal life of soul. Spiritual Science shows that the soul is free from the body in dream, that the experiences of dream are independent of bodily experiences; they are separated from the link with the outer world that is present in waking life. In the dream, man is actually free from his body. Is this also the case in hallucinations, in visionary experiences? No, it is not! Hallucinations and visions are due precisely to abnormalities of the physical body. Visionary, hallucinatory activity in the life of soul can never occur independently of bodily experiences. Something in the body must always be disturbed or diseased, must be functioning improperly or too feebly, thus preventing a man from entering into the full connection that is present when he is using his nerves and senses in such a way that in experiencing himself, he is also experiencing the outer world. If an organ connected in any way with the faculty of cognition is diseased or too weak, a phenomenon such as an hallucination or a vision may arise: it resembles spiritual experience but is fundamentally different from it. Whereas in spiritual experience a man must be free from the body, this hallucinatory, visionary life sets in because something is either diseased or functioning too feebly in the body. Now what really lies at the bottom of hallucinations and visions? The ordinary process of ideation (Vorstellen) taking place normally in sensory life succeeds in being independent of those forces in the human organism which cause growth in childhood, bring about the inner functions of the body—metabolism, digestion, and so forth. I cannot speak in greater detail today of how that which as a bodily function underlies the normal life of ideation arises through part of the organism being lifted out of the sphere of purely animal life, of the processes of growth, digestion, metabolism and so forth. The basis of the normal life connected with the nerves is that a kind of soul-organism develops like a parasite out of the process of digestion, metabolism, etc. Now when, owing to particularly abnormal conditions, some organ of cognition is so affected that this soul-organism does not work through itself alone but that the bodily organ with its animal functions is working as well—this is due to disease or weakness of the organ concerned—the result is that the man does not devote himself to mental life independently of the forces of growth, digestion and metabolism, but that hallucinations and visions arise. What is organic activity in the vision ought really to be promoting growth, bringing about digestion and the distribution of the more delicate processes of metabolism. What happens in this condition is that animal functions are surging upwards into the soul-organism.

Life is not by any means sublimated in hallucinations and visions; on the contrary it is far rather permeated by the animal functions which do not, in other circumstances, extend into the soul-organism. What ought to be serving quite different processes is carried up into those of cognition, of mental perception. Hence hallucinations and visions are always an expression of the fact that something is not in order in the human being. True, what makes its appearance is a manifestation of the spiritual, but one of which Spiritual Science cannot make use; for Spiritual Science can make use only of what is experienced independently of the body.

You now see what an utter lack of foundation there is for the very general misconception that Spiritual Science acquires its knowledge through visions, hallucinations and the like. On the contrary, Spiritual Science shows that these states are always connected in some way with abnormalities in the body and that they must play no part whatever in its findings. Neither are hallucinations and visions ever identical in character with the pictures of dreams. The pictures of dreams arise outside the body and are only mirrored in it; hallucinations and visions arise because some bodily organ so to speak leaves a space free. If it were functioning normally the man would stand firmly in the physical world with healthy senses. But because a space is left free, the spiritual-eternal element which ought to remain invisible in the bodily organism comes to light through it. This condition is not merely a physical illness, it is a psychical abnormality, something that can only cloud and falsify the pictures from the spiritual world. Hence the fact that pictures arise when some bodily function is weakened, need cause no surprise. For how do sense-pictures come into being? They come into being because the forces which promote metabolism, digestion and the like in the normal way, are toned down and assert themselves in the soul-organism in a different form. If, then, these forces are toned down in the human being to a greater extent than is proper, abnormal consciousness is the result. The sense-pictures we have in normal consciousness are conditioned by bodily life that has been toned down to the normal extent. If the weakening is excessive, something that originates entirely from this improper condition makes its appearance. It can therefore be said that hallucinations and visions represent a striving that has been obstructed. As the human being develops from childhood to mature age, he is really striving to penetrate into his bodily organism. He endeavours so to develop his nature of spirit-and-soul that the body becomes the instrument for soul-activity. This is obstructed when something in the body is unhealthy. When the human being develops in such a way that his body becomes his servant, he grows into physical independence, into his egoity in the world of the senses, into the amount of egoism that is necessary to make him a self-based being, able to fulfil his destination as man. This egoism must of course be mingled with the necessary selflessness. The important thing is that a man shall permeate his life with the forces of his Ego. If certain obstructions make him incapable of doing so, his search for the requisite amount of egoism takes an abnormal path. This comes to expression in hallucinations and visions which are always due to the fact that through his bodily constitution a man cannot acquire the due amount of egoism necessary to his life.

To the borderline regions of the life of soul also belong the conditions produced when catalepsy or coma have led to somnambulism—which is akin to mediumship. Just as man's organism of thinking—I say expressly ‘organism of thinking’, not ‘mechanism of thinking’—must be constituted in a certain way to prevent the disorder I have just characterised as hallucination and vision from taking effect, so too the mechanism of the will—here I say ‘mechanism’—must be constituted in a certain way for normal life in the world of the senses. Just as the organism of thinking can bring about hallucinations and visions as manifestations of abnormal soul-life, so the will can be undermined when its mechanism is disturbed, quashed or paralysed in catalepsy, coma, or mediumship. True, if the spirit is not working upon it, the body is not able directly to evoke the will, but it is able, when certain organs are put out of action, when the mechanism of the will is brought to a standstill, to enfeeble the will, whereas the spiritual investigator, as I said at the beginning, can stand firmly in the spiritual world because his will works in full consciousness upon his body. If the body is paralysed in respect of the will, it quashes, suppresses, this will; man is then lifted away from the world to which he belongs as a being of spirit-and-soul, as a being of eternity, and is cast into the physical environment which is, of course, also permeated with spiritual forces and entities. He is then thrust out of his real world into the element of spirit which unceasingly pervades and weaves through the physical. This is the case in somnambulism, this is the case in mediumship.

Those who in the sense indicated at the beginning of this lecture adopt an easy-going attitude where Spiritual Science is concerned, would like to investigate the spiritual world in the same way. But such people cannot reach the true spiritual world which guarantees eternal life for the soul; they can work only with what permeates and pervades the physical environment. What is working in the somnambulist, in the medium, works in the normal human being too, but differently. This may indeed sound strange, but it is nevertheless a finding of Spiritual Science. What is really working in the medium, in the somnambulist? In ordinary life we have a certain moral link with other human beings; we act out of moral impulses. I said that these moral impulses are generated by way of the physical body. We perform acts in the field of external civilisation, we learn to write, to read, we learn what the human will inculcates as a spiritual element into the outer physical world. With the forces employed by our soul in the activity of learning to read, of assimilating other cultural endowments, of entering into moral relationships with the world—with all these forces the soul of the somnambulist or the medium is connected in an abnormal way. This activity which is otherwise exercised only in the moral domain, in the domain of the cultural life, is transferred directly into the bodily constitution of the medium or the somnambulist; this is possible because the consciousness has been lowered and the soul disconnected. Whereas in normal life the human being is in contact with the surrounding world solely through his senses, in the case of the somnambulist and the medium, the whole man comes into connection, through his will-mechanism, with the surrounding world. This makes it possible for influences from a distance to take effect; a thought can also work into the distance and distant vistas—both spatial and temporal—can arise. But in most of these cases, what penetrates into the human organism is the spiritual element which pervades the physical world to which we belong as physical men, it is the spiritual element belonging to the cultural and moral life. But it penetrates in such a way that the soul is disconnected from the organism. Hence what is made manifest through the medium or the somnambulist does not lead to the being of spirit-and-soul in man but is simply a caricature of the workings of the spiritual upon man's bodily nature. Whereas in normal life the soul itself must be the intermediary between the truly spiritual and the body, in these abnormal states the spiritual is working directly on the body—but only in the sense I have described. The result is that with his consciousness disconnected, such a man becomes a kind of automaton; only those elements which belong externally to cultural or moral life are expressing themselves in him. From this it will be clear to you that, although it is disguised and masked in the most diverse way, what is to all appearances the spiritual does come to expression through mediumship and somnambulism, but only provided certain combinatory factors and associations are present; these cannot be discussed here because it would lead us too far afield. The essentials which come to expression in this way originate from the physical environment. Men who stand firmly on the ground of natural science but do not outgrow its established notions, would like to penetrate into the spiritual world to which the eternal core of man's being belongs, by taking to their aid the phenomena of somnambulism and mediumship. But this leads to countless fallacies and errors.

I shall now speak of one recent example. It is of great interest because it is characteristic of this whole domain. Here we have a scientist very highly esteemed in his own country, a scientist well versed in all the niceties of scientific methods and who therefore does not by any means go carelessly to work when he approaches these matters. I am referring to Sir Oliver Lodge, the celebrated English scientist. It is a very remarkable case, one that is connected with the present catastrophic events. Lodge was always attracted to the question of how a link could be established between the outer, physical world and the world to which man belongs when he has passed through the gate of death. But he wanted to remain firmly on a scientific foundation.—This attitude is of course characteristic of people who are not willing to have anything to do with the methods of Spiritual Science.—Lodge had a son who was serving on the French Front during the war, and one day the father received a strange letter from America. This letter informed Lodge that his son was facing great danger, but that the spirit of Myers—who had died ten years previously—would hold a protecting hand over the young man while the danger threatened. Frederick Myers had been President of the Society for Psychical Research; he had been occupied deeply with the study of super-sensible matters and Lodge and his family knew him well. It could therefore be presumed—if it is in any way accepted that a connection is possible between some happening in the super-sensible world and human life—that Myers would certainly hold a protecting hand over young Lodge when danger was looming before him. But the letter was extremely ambiguous—as letters of such a kind are always wont to be. Obviously young Lodge might be in danger, but he might also be saved from it, and then the writer of the letter would be able to say: ‘Did I not receive through a medium a message to the effect that Myers is protecting Lodge's son? Through the help of Myers the boy has been saved from the danger of death.’ But if the boy had been killed, the writer of the letter would equally well be able to say: ‘Myers is protecting him in the other world.’ If a third eventuality were possible, the letter could have been interpreted in that sense too.—It does not do to be unsceptical if we wish to get at the real truth of these matters.—Naturally, Lodge did not attach particular weight to the communication, for he was well aware that such things are capable of many interpretations.—The son was killed. Then his father received a second message to the effect that Myers was indeed protecting his son in the other world, and that there were people in England who would provide proof of it.—Certain ways of organising such matters do exist.—There were several mediums who were received into the circle of Sir Oliver Lodge's family—most of whom were sceptics. Manifestations of all kinds took place and Lodge has described them in detail in a bulky volume which is extremely interesting for many reasons. The phenomena there described do not, for the most part, differ greatly from others that have been put on record and there was no need for any particular excitement about them—nor indeed was any shown. Lodge would not have thought it worth while to describe these manifestations if something else had not happened. Because he was familiar with all the devices used in the scientific mode of research, in this instance too he set to work like a chemist making investigations in a laboratory and used every conceivable precautionary measure in order to establish the facts without possibility of dispute. People feel therefore that this book makes it possible to form a real judgment about the case in point, for Lodge describes it as a scientist would do.

Among all kinds of other cases he describes the one that may be regarded as a veritable experimentum crucis, and it caused a tremendous stir. Even the most incredulous journalists—and journalists are usually sceptical, whether or not always from well-founded judgment I could not say—were impressed by this crucial test case. The circumstances were as follows : A medium who claimed to be in communication with the soul of Myers as well as with the soul of Lodge's son, said that a fortnight before the latter was killed at the French Front, he had been photographed together with a number of his companions, and the photograph was minutely described—the placing of the officers, how young Lodge was sitting in the front row, how he was holding his hands, and so forth. It was then said that several photographs had been taken and that the grouping had altered slightly while this was being done. The different grouping was also indicated with the same precision—the position of young Lodge's hands and arms had changed, he was inclining towards the man next him, and so forth. An exact description was given of this photograph too. Now the photographs were not in England; nobody—neither the medium, nor any of the family, nor Sir Oliver Lodge himself—had seen them. It could only be assumed that the medium was rambling in imagination when describing the photographs. But lo and behold, after fourteen days these photographs arrived and tallied exactly with what the medium had said. That this was an experimentum crucis for Lodge and those intimately concerned, cannot be wondered at; and it is here that the real interest of the book lies. A genuine spiritual investigator will not, of course, be taken in—as in a certain respect Lodge himself was taken in—because the scrupulously exact presentation enables him to form an independent, objective judgment.

How comes it that a man who is not willing to penetrate into the spiritual world by means of true spiritual investigation does nevertheless find on such a path something that convinces him of the influx of a spiritual world? The genuine spiritual investigator would not be brought to a like conviction, because he knows what has actually happened in this case. Moreover he will be astonished that such a man as Lodge, in spite of his experience in scientific research, is an out and out amateur in these matters.

Anyone who has only a superficial acquaintance with these phenomena, perhaps by no means through independent vision but simply from literature, knows that in somnambulists and mediums there is a connection with the environment in the sense I have described, that the whole man is as it were transformed into sense-organs—with the result that automatic pre-visions in time arise. These pre-visions are always due to a sick or enfeebled life of soul. They have nothing to do with the world to which man belongs with the immortal part of his being; they have to do with what is spiritual in the physical sense-environment, especially with what the will of man brings to pass there. Just because Lodge describes conscientiously it becomes quite evident that the medium simply had a pre-vision, that he ‘saw’ the photographs a fortnight before they arrived in England. This may seem miraculous enough but these are quite ordinary phenomena. At all events this is not, as Lodge thinks, a proof that Myers was protecting his son. It may have been so, of course, but it would have to be investigated in research carried out in a body-free condition.

When there is unwillingness to take the path of Spiritual Science the temptations and allurements even for those who are conscientious researchers and confront such phenomena cautiously and critically, are very great. What can be learnt through these abnormal manifestations, whereby man is made into an automaton, must never become the content of a true science of the super-sensible world to which the eternal part of man's being belongs.

A great deal that might still be added would show in the same way how these borderline regions of man's life of soul point to something which, although it too rests in the realm of the Unconscious, can never reveal to man that which, in that same realm, is of the greatest significance of all—namely the spiritual world to which man belongs with the free, immortal part of his being. Among all these manifestations the life of dream alone remains within the sphere of the normal, because in dream the human being is not experiencing through the bodily constitution but through the spirit-and-soul; as a being of spirit-and-soul he strikes up against the body and the physical experiences. Hence in respect of the life of dream too, man is able to exercise correctives and to give it its right place in the rest of life; whereas in the case of what he experiences through his body in the way of hallucinations, visions, manifestations of somnambulism and mediumship he is not able to do this with his normal powers of discrimination.

In the next lecture we will go more deeply into something which in the course of cultural development brings constant blessing and upliftment to human life, namely ART. In dream, man experiences the spiritual world in such a way that as the result of impact with the bodily constitution, sense-images take shape. The experiences which arise in a true artist and in one who finds delight and inspiration in Art, also lie in regions beyond those of merely physical experience. True Art is brought from the super-sensible into the sense-regions of life, but in this case the process of clothing the experiences in pictures is not an unconscious one. Just as in the dreamer the soul's actual experience remains in the unconscious but reveals itself through what the soul—again unconsciously—adds as clothing to the experience itself, so the super-sensible experience of the artist and of the one who finds delight in a work of art, is brought into the sense-world. But in this case the clothing with the picture, with the Imagination which, arising from external life, gives the super-sensible experience a place in the sense-world, is consciously achieved. The gist of the next lecture will be that Art is in very truth a messenger from a super-sensible world, that delight in Art is a power which lifts the soul to the super-sensible world by way of sensory form, through sense-imagery.

And now to sum up what has been said today. It is true that man is led towards the region of spirit when he confronts these abnormal manifestations; for it is the spiritual world that shines into the life of man even if he is experiencing it in an abnormal way. But these abnormal manifestations may never be induced artificially, any more than pathological states may be induced for the purpose of acquiring knowledge.

What is it that remains from all these manifestations and phenomena as a vital admonition? It is that man shall find the way to true experience of the spiritual. We have heard that in the light of Spiritual Science the realm of dream is saved from the suspicion of being one of pathological experience—although naturally there may now and again be slight tendencies towards it. But when it is realised that through the seemingly chaotic life of dream man is admonished to find the path into the true spiritual world, the significance of such study becomes evident. A great world-riddle is knocking here at the door of human life. This world-riddle is the dream with its strange pictures in which logic and moral judgment are lacking but which are a definite signpost to the spiritual world itself. Hence we can find ourselves in agreement with what is said by the clear-sighted aestheticist and philosopher Vischer in his critique of Volkelt's book:

‘When the dream with all its rich meagreness, its meagre richness, with its ingenious stupidity and stupid ingeniousness, is contemplated in its unconscious creative activity, it will be recognised that it does nevertheless point to what is spiritual in the human being and can be sought after.’
And Vischer is also right when he says:

‘A man who believes that this spirit-realm of dream is not worthy to be a matter for genuine investigation, merely shows that he has not much spirit in him.’

The realm of dream is an admonition to man to seek for the spiritual world, and the aim of Spiritual Science is to fulfil this admonition. Whereas in the life of dream there can be pictures of the transitory only, for all that the soul's eternal core of being is active there, through spiritual-scientific knowledge it is possible for the soul also to be filled with pictures that give expression to the spiritual reality corresponding to its own inherent nature, thereby pointing to its allotted place in the world of spiritual reality as the senses point to its allotted place in the physical world.

REFERENCES (among many others):

Lecture-Courses by Rudolf Steiner.

True and False Paths in Spiritual Investigations. New edition, 1969.

Cosmic and Human Metamorphoses. Lecture One.

The Occult Movement in the 19th Century (typescript).

History of Spiritism, Hypnotism and Somnambulism.

• 1. See True and False Paths in Spiritual Investigations. Eleven lectures given by Rudolf Steiner in Torquay, August, 1924. See also references below.

• 2. See references below.

The courses have covered a long road of historical development. I have tried to present the course of human development from an historical phenomenon that we follow to the point that is called the Middle Ages; series of nations with state institutions have passed by, and we will pick up where things are in completely different circumstances.

The transition from the Roman Empire to the Middle Ages is one of the most significant transitions in the world. Therefore, we want to review the highlights of this development again. We have discussed the magnificent Indian culture, which can be proven to have been historically advanced through writing and documents that amaze Europeans. Once we have realized that it is a people of contemplation, of deep inner life, other interesting points are revealed to us in other peoples. In Egypt, we see a civilization of a different character, and we stand in awe of its culture, which has achieved incredible things in mathematics and technology – engineering of great sophistication and based on different principles. We see the buildings of Lake Moeris, which held back Egypt's water to irrigate the land at certain points to make it fertile. Today, everything must be calculated in detail; in those days it was based on intuition, direct insight. We need only think of the beaver dam, which builds at an angle that the engineer had to recognize as the best. This instinct was developed to the point where it became what we call intuition. So human development does not mean that we have developed from the primitive, but if some of us have achieved something new, much of what was previously higher has been lost.

Let us move on to Babylonia and Assyria. Much of what these people also knew has been lost, despite our geometry. We can no longer hold on to the concept of a straight line of development. Then we came to the Persian people with their remarkable culture; if we remember how a young Persian was educated, we will assess the different picture that the world could have. Speaking the truth. Symptomatically, the innermost part of his being emerged from this people. That a person was inwardly stable was for the Persian when he was unified with his flowing words. What later became law: Yes, yes – no, no (Matthew 5:37), was education here.

A belt begins in Persia, and spreading across Europe, it encompasses the peoples from whom the Roman-Greek culture was replaced. — While art and powerful ideas were developing in Greece and what we call the Roman citizen existed on the Italian peninsula, various peoples lived in the north of Europe. For Rome, this means that the Nordic specter, the Cimbrian terror, in Italy something is emerging in the development of humanity that has never been seen before: to call the difference between [Romans and Greeks] — to simply call the bourgeoisie, which brings personal prowess to its highest peak. This is a new development that we did not have before. We never had any reason to look into the family in Greece – we were only interested in the polis – and so what we call law today, which is essentially based on the family context, is poorly developed. We have seen how this penetrated into the most isolated conditions of the people in ancient Rome; often a boy could not read or write, but he knew the twelve table laws. A Roman sense of dogmatism emerged from this, the direct living force that connected the Romans with their legal principles was lost and became abstract. This Roman legal form had spread throughout the world, but had lost its life. —Officials, the heads of individual districts, dioceses, were the shadow, the shell of the former life and Caesar the abstract, intellectual summary of what used to live in Roman hearts. We saw how Christian life poured into this shell, into this skin, how the vast Roman Empire ultimately had none of the things that had originally made up its greatness. All the cults, Greek, Phoenician, Egyptian, could be experienced there, and this whole chaos of peoples was held together by externally grafted Roman laws. Only one thing united, was equally widespread... /gap] a proletariat suffering terribly under the pressure, and the fact that at the bottom was what was united only by the bond of common pressure, of suffering, made that this Christianity spread with tremendous rapidity. Because it does not care about differences, but about the unity of suffering... /gap] and that is why this living life that came from the East poured into this skin.

And so the Roman emperors used this to save... /gap] but could not save because this people were at the gates.

Let us look at these peoples, who had the strength – the living life of the Christians at that time.

In ancient times, there lived... /gap] peoples whose culture can hardly be imagined today. Only a few remnants have survived by pouring their blood into later components, partly into those like [in] the Balkans. — These ancient peoples — their culture emerges from various finds, trumpet-like instruments that produce a strange harmony. The art of metalworking and an understanding of the sound of the instruments. Something of this was in the peoples on whom the external culture of the Roman Empire was built; there was something of this in the old Etruscan culture – and then in northern regions, in Danube regions. Celtic people – from this center, the entire cultural situation of Europe was dominated; they had a high spiritual maturity, an Illyrian and musical disposition, energy and an entrepreneurial spirit – actually a moving element in European culture. – A cultural ferment that clings to the limbs but does not become historical. He had to be there when he wasn't there, it didn't stay, spread across Spain, France. In the north of Italy there were always those in whom Celtic blood flowed. What made the Romans great was their sense of personality, their legal system based on agriculture – not present in others, and poets like Man... come from the north, like Horace from the south, where Greeks [were] –- everything that is great, if not from the law, is from outside...

The culture of the land the Romans conquered in Spain and Gaul was influenced by Celticism... /gap] A culture that disappeared again because he had to be there in person, this people of the Celts, who had a powerful influence, was attached to blood... /gap] It did not die out, but it does not work through tradition, but still today through its blood. For it can be proven that wherever important cultural influences occurred, they came from those who had Celtic blood in their veins, Shakespeare, demonstrably Robespierre... /gap>

This was a source of conflict for the country, which was always stirring and liberating and had an important mission at this point in time.

A people moved into this country that must have gone through difficult fates – we do not meet them... /gap] with such an intellectual culture, but with one that shows that this people had developed character traits that distinguish them significantly from others. Europe has undergone many glaciations. Once there were hot, tropical times there, then the great ice ages. Undoubtedly the ancestors of the Germanic peoples went through the last great glaciation, and under this influence something developed that is different in skull structure... /gap]

A primitive people more than the other European peoples. The Celt was active and energetic, where he personally applied, agitator in the finest style and therefore somewhat outgrown by nature, - the Romans loved what nourishes them, was intertwined with their agriculture. - The ancient Teuton loved nature, where he found it, was a wanderer who, as such, could enjoy nature. He loved nature, not a certain ancestral territory, had grown together with nature and therefore had a way of life that corresponded to it. Life in village communities in communism, which can be broken open again in the same way. The ancient Germans were engaged in cattle breeding and hunting. These people pushed into the areas formerly inhabited by the Celts, settled in areas as far as Russia, and broke up into a myriad of tribes. Freedom was innate in a sense, but depended on defending it with weapons. Somewhere in the north, there was an island where a festival was celebrated every year and a goddess appeared who was shown off in front of everyone. The connection with nature is evident. And we see how nature services are established everywhere. There is much talk of sacred oaks. But this was a misinterpretation of a word. However, the Celts gave their religion to the Germanic tribes, who were in league with nature. Druids were called oaks. The priest was revered. This shows what a driving element the Celtic people were. — When the Romans extended their rule in Spain, they had to deal with a mixed population that was attached to the Celts... / gap. The Germans had settled in the middle of Europe. At first the Romans met them in the areas of present-day Carinthia, Marius the Cimmerian. Then in France, then they broke into Italy, Cimbri terror. They were joined by Teutons and constant clashes since then. We see how they are beaten back by the Cheruscan Armin.

The Roman form of government had been imbued with Christianity, but the Roman Empire was unable to spread Christianity throughout the world as a people. Something else had to be introduced into that which had absorbed the shell of Roman culture: the strength of a people with an organizing effect.

The task of truly living in Europe, what the Romans had absorbed, was given to the northern peoples, and at first it was the Celts again. So we see the old cultures now replaced by their own rule. The Roman form of government remains only in the church's rule, in the pontificate. Into this body of state the moral-ethical life of Christianity is poured, the power of the northern peoples – Rome gave the form. Celtic agitation brought life forward. The messengers came from England and Ireland. Thus new peoples enter into the old. The inheritance of what has emerged from the most diverse currents is still contained, and if we understand how we have become, we understand how we have to look into the future. Only when we understand what we live in can we continue to build. Thus we will understand how we come to the views, to the material goods under which we live today, which make up our joys and sufferings. Goethe said, the power... /gap>

Law and rights are inherited in eternal illness.

When we consider what, as it were, is the shadow... [gap]

What you have inherited from your fathers, Acquire it to possess it.

Transform yourself, and history will be our teacher.

We must infuse our reflections on the present with what we have learned from the past. Thus we become masters of our history and learn from history how we should work to ennoble our race. Man is the only being that must forge his own destiny, and therefore he must understand it.

When we have acquired our ideals, we will...

[Gap]

Only those who learn to conquer it every day deserve freedom and life.

When the patriarchs are spoken of and their age is given in huge numbers, then we have to understand that these so-called patriarchs must be seen as representatives of tribes. The Bible students had been doing this for a long time, but they did not know what was actually behind it. If we now remember the lecture “Blood is a Special Juice”, we find a special application of the word “consciousness”. Those who firmly believe that there is development must also admit that everything is in development, including consciousness. The consciousness that we have today was not always there; it developed out of another consciousness that was dim and dream-like, that lived in images in people. This kind of consciousness, which was dull and clairvoyant at the same time, was dependent on a very specific fact. In those days, people lived in small communities. All nations, in whose distant origin we delve, show the same thing. The further back we go in the history of civilization, the smaller the communities of people become. It was considered immoral to marry outside of these small communities. It was only later that this principle of close marriage was interrupted by the principle of distant marriage, and it is with this interruption that the development of the dim consciousness to the present rational consciousness begins. In the members of those ancient tribes a very different memory lived; what the father and grandfather experienced lived in the son as if he himself had experienced it. The ancestral powers passed down through the blood of these tribes, which were united in close blood ties, to such an extent that the descendant remembered the events of his ancestors as if he had experienced them himself; that was in the blood, which rolled through generations. The son remembered and said: I have experienced this - what father and grandfather, etc., had experienced. As long as this I - this tribal I - was preserved, one spoke of the same entity with the same name. It is Adam, the continuous I of Adam, it refers to what is inherited through many generations from Adam, not the person of Adam.

Likewise, we must understand the passage where it says, “Enoch, the man of God, disappeared from the earth.” (Genesis 5:24) This does not mean that he dissolved into vapor and mist, but “Enoch” means one of those common “I”. This is dissolved by him becoming the man of God, that is, the one who devotes himself to the spirit, who gives up having offspring, who devotes himself in a kind of asceticism and therefore disappears, since he does not live on in the son and has given what runs in the blood.

Those who believe in the Bible today have no real idea of what the relationship to the Bible was in ancient times. For the ancients, the Bible was the “Word of God”; they knew that those who wrote it were initiates inspired by divine wisdom, and the more they believed that only truth could come from the divine spirit, the more each word of the Bible was sacred to them as the outpouring of that divine spirit, which revealed itself to them through these inspired men. For today's man, it is difficult to put oneself in this reverent frame of mind, which did not criticize this inspired wisdom at all.

It is only natural to see that the modern man must criticize, but we ask ourselves: How is it possible that through the centuries truly not stupid minds, who had these books in their hands, did not also criticize, why they did not also, for example, subject the differences that the four gospels show to this criticism? Are we to imagine that those few who had the Bible in their hands before the invention of printing did not see what today's critics see and from which they draw doubts about the authenticity of the Gospels? They saw these differences, but they knew how they came about. They knew that at this momentous historical moment, in the founding of Christianity, the sequence of initiation had been drawn down onto the physical plane and completed in the Mystery of Golgotha. From then on, the “Son of Man” could undergo this on the physical plane, that is, the one who had developed the consciousness of the general in himself. The Son of Man brought the secret of initiation into the physical world, and the life of these initiates had to be described in such a way that it was a reflection of the old canon of initiation in the old mystery schools, the old temple sites. This canon of initiation was fixed in this area in one way, in another area in another, but you can see the initiation mode of the old initiation schools shining through it.

The physical life of Christ Jesus, as described in the four Gospels, really did unfold as the life of a disciple in the ancient mystery schools; we see in the four Gospels only the various forms of the initiation canon as it was established by the different schools of initiation. There are small deviations, but one whole, one single stream runs through all four. The Jesus Christ, the only Son of Man, presents this mighty sentence in the physical life, living it in the physical body: that life conquers death! What the initiate experiences in his etheric body, Jesus Christ experiences on the physical plane. The symbol has become outer reality, has become an historical fact. In these three days, in which the Christ is dead, spiritual science sees carried out onto the physical plane that which the initiate experienced in the depths of the crypts. When he then awakened to life in his physical body again, when he, having returned from the spiritual worlds, was able to bear witness to their reality, when he had become a proclaimer of the spiritual worlds, then, in the exuberance of these high and holy feelings, the words that Christ Jesus also spoke on Golgotha broke free from his soul: “My God, my God, how have you glorified me!” — “Eli, eli, lama...” (Matthew 27:46, cf. Psalm 22:1; Mark 15:34) The word “forsaken” is not to be used; it is an incorrect translation. These words, “My God, My God, how have You glorified Me!” were the words of each one when he awoke from this three-day sleep, when he had experienced that life in the spirit conquers death.

The principle of initiation before Christ was different from today's. Only the chosen were admitted to the mysteries, from which the schools on the one hand and the churches on the other later developed. The teachings were oral, and in the mystery schools, once admitted, the student was subjected to a very special rhythm of life, which he had to integrate into his life. This rhythm, given in the ancient initiation canon, was fixed and unchangeable; as fixed and sure as the course of the sun, as surely as that, a disciple walked the path of life. These disciples were called solar heroes when they had reached a certain degree; and this life of a disciple, that is what the Christ Jesus carried out onto the physical plane, and that is described in the four Gospels.

There is a certain organ in man that contains the Christ potential; through this organ, man enters into direct relationship with the Christ. The Christ consciousness is created by the historical Christ. Just as the eye beholds light, so does this organ behold the Christ, but the historical Christ has created the Christ possibility, the possibility that man, through this organ, may come into direct touch with the Christ.

When the human body was not yet the carrier of a soul, as long as it was still inanimate, it was, like the earth it inhabited, still quite differently formed. It had an organ within itself that still exists today as the swim bladder of fish. Man did not walk upright at that time; he moved forward by floating and swimming. He carried this organ within him, which has remained with the fish that have not developed further; in man it was transformed into lungs. This gave him the ability to breathe in and process air. We still find gill breathing in the embryonic development of man. This point in time, when the lungs capture oxygen from the air, is also the moment of ensoulment. This, expressed in terms of feeling and perception, is illustrated in the monumental words: “And God breathed into the man the breath of life, and he became a living soul.” (Genesis 2:7) That is to say, man inhaled the divine soul.

The ancients still felt every breath as a soul, hence the legends and myths that see in the air the body of the deity that has ensouled man. In all ancient forms of religion we find this clothed in images. It had to be clothed in images for humanity at that time, because if the great spiritual leaders of humanity had expressed these truths in the form in which they are expressed today, they would not have been understood; they had to speak in images. Everything, absolutely everything, is in a state of development, including consciousness! The form of imparting truths that was valid for the earlier dim consciousness of man was the pictorial one, so in the old religious documents the I also appears at the same time as the blowing, the one blowing in the air. This is the truth that individualizes itself in the breathing process. This is the same as Wotan, the one riding in the air stream, the one blowing.

Before its embodiment, the soul was sexless; here too, a development has taken place. Every spiritual researcher looks at this development. Before there were men and women, the God who unites both sexes within himself arose within the spiritual world order. This is the reason why the creation of man is told twice in the first chapters of Genesis. Once male-female (Gen 1:27), that is the divine spiritual man, who is neither male nor female, but unites the powers of both sexes in himself, and then the creation of man down on the physical plane; it says: Man came into being as a male-female being (Gen 1:27), not as Luther writes: “a little man and a little woman”.

The new instrument guides humanity towards a common bond that is more comprehensive than the bond of love. In the past there was a tribal ego, then, after long-distance marriage occurred, the same developed into a national consciousness, a national ego. Now, in humanity, there is a tendency to expand the national consciousness, which lies within this national ego, into that which holds all humanity together, into a brotherhood. To prepare this brotherhood, this blood brotherhood, which is independent of the blood that runs through the veins, that is the mission of Christianity. The old God, Jahve, the one who blows, who gave the ego, the one God who lives in the individual consciousness, will develop to recognize something common in all people, this human consciousness, that is the Christ consciousness! This encompasses an ego that will embrace all of humanity in one consciousness. There is a sentence that expresses this: “If anyone does not give up father, mother, son, or brother, he cannot be my disciple.” (Luke 14:26; Matthew 19:29) Christianity prepares for an all-encompassing human brotherhood; we must not understand this in an everyday, trivial sense.

We may call Jehovah the people-god who splits up humanity into separate peoples; Jahve also means the blowing of the breath with which the I-spirit enters into man, but in Christ, the Son of Man, as whom he designates himself – that that is, not the son of a man or of a family, but of all mankind. In Christ we see him who prepares the universal world-alliance of love; and as Yahweh pours a part of his humanity into man, so the Christ pours a part of his being into humanity from now on. This essence lived in supreme glory in Jesus of Nazareth. He was the most highly initiated of all, and therefore He could say, “Before Abraham was, I am,” or rather, “I am to be.” (John 8:58) In such words lies the esoteric teaching of Christianity, which is meant to live as a power in outer Christianity.

How did it come about that the Son of Man was embodied in a personality? To explain this question, I will describe to you what prophecy means and how the Mystery of Golgotha emerged from it. In the beginning there were only a few initiates, prophets. To initiate means to develop those higher abilities in man that lead him up into the higher worlds and allow him to experience their truths for himself. All spiritual realities that they see and experience there will one day descend to the physical plane. A prophet can ascend to the spiritual plane, he can see what is there, and so he can say what will later descend to the physical plane. That is prophecy!

The old prophets proclaimed the coming of the Son of Man, that is, they foresaw in the spiritual worlds the preparation of that which later became a physical fact at the momentous time when the Christ appeared on the physical plane. The Son of Man brought down to the physical plane that which had previously been in the spiritual worlds, the brotherhood of man, which is to unite people in love, independently of the bonds of blood. And in the blood that flowed from the wounds at Golgotha, there flowed out that which was superfluous, overcome, selfish in human blood; this blood was sacrificed on the cross. That is the mystery of Golgotha. Human blood sacrificed itself to purify the blood of human egoism. This purification of the blood from the ego took place at Golgotha.

If we compare the meaning of the first three gospels, we find that a certain mood underlies them all. The Gospel of Luke points to the initiation school of the Essenes and therapists, which is why we find a certain social character in his parables.

Accompanying words by Marie Steiner on the publication of Rudolf Steiner's report in “Was in der Anthroposophischen Gesellschaft vorgeht” (What is happening in the Anthroposophical Society) No. 1922/1944:

It may be of historical interest to include here the report that Dr. Steiner himself gave orally about the congress. The reproduction of this report that appeared in the “Mitteilungen” of 1909 is quite accurate. It takes us back to the time when the dispute with the leaders of the Theosophical Society began. These leaders were trying to push back the Christian esoteric current of Western occultism by founding the “Star of the East” soon after and proclaiming Krishnamurti as the reincarnated savior. Instead of another report, the lecture that Dr. Rudolf Steiner gave at the Berlin branch about the Budapest Congress will be presented here. Dr. Steiner said something along the following lines:

Rudolf Steiner's report:

Since the Munich Congress, there has been a change in the way these meetings are held. Previously, the convention was held every year. Since the Munich Congress, after a discussion that had already taken place following the Congress in Paris, a change has occurred. Since that time, these congresses have been held every two years. Accordingly, a period of two years has also elapsed between the Munich and the Budapest Congresses. The next congress will be in Turin in 1911 and will be organized by our Italian Section.

Above all, with regard to the last Budapest Congress, it must be mentioned that we were able to experience the enthusiasm and strong theosophical idealism of our Hungarian friends and Society members. The Hungarian Section is one of the youngest sections to have been founded within Europe. We were able to experience the effort and dedication with which our Hungarian friends had approached this event. Within the Theosophical Society, there was truly a sense of what one might call an image, a reflection of what is known by someone who is somewhat familiar with Hungarian conditions. The Hungarian nation is rightly considered hospitable, and it was this quality, in an eminently national view, that particularly struck us at this congress.

In Budapest, a start was made on what was sought in Munich and what, to a certain extent, can be called the “harmonization” of the external environment and what takes place in the theosophical heart. We began to do this at the time – and a further implementation of this idea is shown by our Berlin lodge room – to express symbolically in the surrounding space what moves our hearts. For it does matter what thought forms are stimulated from outside, namely from the space from which Theosophical thoughts are to be experienced and moved from within.

The Hungarians, however, found a substitute by decorating the hall with symbolic works of art. Those members who are not officials of the Society – the latter are occupied with administrative work during the congress – were able to admire the most diverse symbolic pictures on the walls, especially those by Hungarian artists, during their leisure moments. I would like to emphasize in particular that this decoration of the hall showed how this nation is inwardly disposed to combine a certain primeval element of feeling and imagination with a sensuality that has emerged from a deep merging with European conditions, and how interesting things come to light as a result, especially in symbolic painting. A cycle of pictures, such as the one by Alexander Nagy, which symbolically represented the search for happiness and tried to show how the person born into the world first desires everything around him, namely the happiness of the human heart; then further, how the human heart, in search of happiness, goes through the most diverse experiences that the outside world can offer, how it experiences what is going on in the world of wealth and poverty, how it comes to see that happiness cannot be achieved on a journey through life if it is not sought in love for the other beings who live with us; and finally, how happiness can never be found for the single heart that only wants to live for itself. Similarly, in a symbolic way, many ideas are expressed in images that fill the soul with tragedy. This is especially true in the serious, thoughtful pictures by [Belé Takéch].

Of particular importance was the photographic reproduction of a large-scale work of art by one of our members from the Scandinavian Section: Frank [Heyman]. He has a curious way of creating art. I had already encountered this way of creating under much more favorable circumstances; at the time when I was able to visit the creative artist in his studio. On one of my journeys, which I had to make in the interest of theosophy, I also came through Gothenburg, got to know Heyman personally and was led by him to his studio near Gothenburg. This is located on a hill. On all sides, you have a wonderful panorama in front of you. You can hardly imagine a more inspiring landscape than the one that is visible in the round.

There are basically quite a few, but enormous, colossal works of art by Frank Heyman. There are figures that may make an impression on the realistic sense of our time, which could perhaps be characterized with the following words: “What kind of crazy painter is this?” You see some colossal figures in which the head looks like a prismatic, but not regularly shaped figure. Hands, gestures, in short, the whole figure is shaped in the most diverse ways, angular, angular.

This figure makes a different impression on the occultist. He immediately has the impression: this is something that has been sensed from a higher world. If one knows the actual secrets of the human etheric body, if one knows how this etheric body stands as a force body behind the physical body, and knows how is expressed in the physical body, a very definite movement takes place in the etheric body, and one has the impression that the artist created out of the forces of the etheric body and expressed his supersensible experiences in these forms.

In this way he attempted to show how the human soul develops and, one might say, how the etheric body functions in this development. The basic feeling one has when confronted with his works of art is as if he were asking himself the question: “What am I?” And when this question trembles through the whole human being, then the etheric body enters into a regularity that Frank Heyman has beautifully expressed in his works. What he thus represents are the simple geometric forms of the, as it were, crystallized etheric body.

A second picture embodies the question of the human being immersed in himself: “What am I?”. One feels the emanation of the feeling of 'peace' in the form. Here, too, the ether currents are expressed in the sculpture. So we are not dealing with representations of the physical body in the sculptures of our friend Heyman, but with the fact that he crystallizes what is going on in the etheric body into the plastic substance. In this way, the whole inner life of the human being is depicted, right up to the moment when he looks up to the divine. It is fair to say what I suggested in Budapest in a short address about these works of art: the Theosophical movement will flourish and thrive all the more, not only on the part of the teachers, but from all sides, the currents of life flow from their impulses. Much is done when currents of life flow from Theosophy to art in this way.

Not only would a railway carriage have been needed to transport these not very numerous but colossal works of art from Gothenburg in Sweden to Budapest. This transport could not be arranged, and so visitors had to make do with smaller photographs of the works of art.

But it is my hope that as the Theosophical movement grows stronger and stronger and the culture of the time becomes more and more receptive to it, our friend Frank Heyman will once again become of the greatest importance to it as an artist. That is just to point out the type of decoration of the spacious hall that was available to us.

It was particularly noteworthy that the European sections had all come to this congress, which could also be seen from the fact that a wide variety of European languages could be heard from the podium during the welcoming address by the General Secretaries.

One could feel satisfaction at how, although perhaps only a very few could physically understand the speaker at the moment when the most diverse languages were being spoken, the Theosophical movement is an element that will gradually develop a language that goes from heart to heart, from soul to soul, creating understanding between different nations.

In addition to the older sections – Scandinavian, French, Dutch, English, Italian, German, Finnish (the latter represented by our friend Selander, who we are pleased to have with us today) – we now have two new sections in Europe: Russian and Czech. There was also a representative from Bulgaria. So there was no lack of languages when the General Secretaries gave their welcoming addresses.

It was significant that Mrs. Besant, President of the Theosophical Society, was able to preside over the Congress in person and thus be with us once again. On the evening of May 28, the Congress members had gathered for a casual welcome.

In her first address on Sunday, May 29, Mrs. Besant spoke in particular about the place of the Theosophical movement in the intellectual life of the present time. She showed how the Theosophical movement fits into our present intellectual life. She gave a broad overview of the development of humanity, especially in the last three cultural epochs up to our own era. She showed how man has gradually developed out of the past cultural epochs, the third, the fourth of the post-Atlantic period and out of our fifth epoch, and how then in our time the theosophical movement in particular must be placed in the whole of this spiritual life, how through the theosophical movement in our time this spiritual life must take on a special impetus, a special impact. It was a significant speech, because it was able to show how the theosophical knowledge of human history is indeed not just there to satisfy the curiosity of this or that person, but to point out our place in the spiritual development of humanity. It is not a matter of learning theory: the individual races and sub-races develop in this or that way – but rather, it is a matter of recognizing our own place in the present time.

Just as new impulses have come in earlier epochs to give new impetus, so we live entirely in a time in which the great ideas of the theosophical movement – brotherhood, reincarnation and karma – are to take hold in the hearts and minds of those people who gather within the Theosophical Society to truly help bring about a kind of future culture.

It was of particular importance that Mrs. Besant emphasized the necessity of grasping our place in the spiritual development of humanity, given the many different opinions within the Theosophical movement. She emphasized that it is truly not important whether we belong to this or that direction or current, but that these different currents within the Theosophical Society, so that they flow together into humanity in a common stream of spirit, which is essentially characterized by the fact that those who belong to it are aware that the correct grasp and feeling of the ideas of brotherhood, reincarnation and karma is what the realization of a corresponding future depends on.

It would be going much too far if I were to expand on the individual ideas here, in the way that Mrs. Besant has done. How we should think about these ideas was something I myself hinted at in the last meeting that was held here before our departure for the Budapest Congress.

It may be useful, instead of dwelling mainly on words, to write a few notes in our soul, so to speak, about the spirit that has been consciously sought in this, our last congress. It is good to touch on these things from time to time. There has been much talk of the diversity of teachings and opinions and the different ways of presenting knowledge in our and other circles of the Theosophical Society. One often hears here and there in Europe: What should one adhere to? Mrs. Besant teaches this, Dr. Steiner that, and so on. If one only considers the externals, then it cannot be denied that there may be some semblance of justification for this claim here or there. Now, however, the view should actually gain more and more ground within the Theosophical movement that it is truly much better if the rich, varied, occult life of the higher worlds is presented from as many sides as possible. Can anyone wish that the wisdom be contained in the two volumes of H. P. Blavatsky's “Secret Doctrine” and that in all places of the world where there is Theosophy, work be done only on the basis of this Secret Doctrine, and only photographs of what is contained therein be given? The Theosophical movement is something that should be present in people as a living life. We are right to say that Theosophy did not come into the world through this or that book, nor through this or that sum of dogmas. Theosophy comes from those high individualities whom we call the “Masters of Wisdom and Harmony of Feelings,” because they have opened the sources of spiritual life that can flow into people from there. It is natural that what flows in is written in books from time to time, and an enormous amount of such wisdom has been written in “Secret Doctrine.” For example, the Dzyan stanzas and the letters of the masters are parts that are far from being fully understood, parts that will be long to be drawn upon, parts that are among the greatest revelations in human development. But we must be clear that it is not even that which matters, but rather that this living spiritual life has been flowing into the theosophical movement ever since that time.

And now I ask you: if someone wants to paint a tree, how do they do it? They sit down, paint it from a certain side and then show you the picture. Indeed, only someone who shows what is going on in the spiritual world in a book or through spoken words can do that. In “Secret Doctrine” you have also shown nothing more than a certain amount of wisdom, from a certain point of view. Just as you can now sit on a different side and paint the tree from a different perspective, so too can the spiritual image be illuminated from a different side. Take a picture of the tree that is painted from a certain side. What would you say if another painter showed the tree in his picture, shaped and illuminated somewhat differently, and said, “This is this same tree, only seen from the other side”? Would you say, “That is not the tree, because otherwise it would have to have the same shape and lighting as that one?” It is more or less the same with “Secret Doctrine”, and it is not at all necessary to merely photograph the wisdom as it is written in “Secret Doctrine”. Get to know the tree by having it painted from different sides, if you do not yet know it yourself. The possibility of speaking about the spiritual world from the most diverse aspects is given by the fact that the “Masters of Wisdom and of the Harmony of Sensations” have allowed their power to flow into our movement, and that these inflows continue.

But why is one picture more painted from one side and the other more from the other side? This does not depend on chance or arbitrariness, but on necessity. It depends on the fact that from the most diverse places in the world, from the most diverse cultural currents and movements, other needs for the spiritual world exist. This must be taken into account. The form of the presentation depends not only on the one who presents, but also on what his task, his mission is. The right thing must be done in terms of the presentation; that is what matters.

Although, on superficial examination, one could say that Misses Besant says this and Dr. Steiner says that with regard to the form of presentation, it was good that it was emphasized at this congress that it does not matter whether everyone speaks exactly like the other, but that the different occult sources in the Theosophical Society can be found and that they can flow together.

We can use another image to characterize the spirit that was sought: the spirit of harmony. You may know that tunnels are dug from both sides, and that if they are dug in the right way, they meet in the middle. This can and should also be the case in the work of the Theosophical Society. It will therefore be good if that which has more of an oriental character, that is, more of the character of the early days of our movement and the “Secret Doctrine” as its basis, works towards this union, just as Western occultism, whose sources were not yet open at the time, is doing today.

Of course, when speaking of Blavatsky's Theosophy, one should not speak of Indian Theosophy. It will be my task in Munich, on the occasion of my next lecture cycle there, to show what the real form of what can be called Indian Theosophy is. In Blavatsky's teaching, there is very little that could be called Indian teaching. Those who are familiar with Blavatsky's doctrine will know that it contains much from Egyptian, Babylonian, and Chaldean teachings, and that it is not at all specifically Indian theosophy. It is an abuse to speak of Indian theosophy as opposed to what is being done here. It is merely a matter of the fact that at the time when H. P. Blavatsky had to work, the Western sources had not yet been opened, and that these have more to say about some things than the Eastern sources. We do not hold it against the Eastern sources if they cannot provide satisfactory information about certain things. One must understand that. The question arises again and again: “Why do you say something different from oriental theosophy?” If one were to see what this other thing is like, one would no longer be able to ask this question. Just see how it is. For example, we give that deep interpretation of H. P. Blavatsky about the legend of Buddha, which tells us that he perished because of the consumption of pork. The interpretation is namely that he revealed too much of his teaching and consequently ended karmically tragically. We admit what is positive and - this must be emphasized - that nothing is missing in the Western teaching that is positive in the Eastern teaching. Nothing is denied, everything is said “Yes”. But when the oriental occultists say, “Which occultist has ever heard that an initiatic writing like the Apocalypse was given under thunder and lightning?” the western occultists answer: every western occultist knows what is meant by that. And we have to say that we, as Western occultists, have a mission of addition, of expansion, with regard to the Oriental teachings. One has to distinguish between what has been so far and what the expansion and the addition mean. Then one will already understand how two such directions relate to each other, which have recently been presented as antagonistic.

It is particularly important here in the West to emphasize what is called the principle of development, the principle of development in our physical world, the principle of development in the higher world.

Mrs. Besant gave a very beautiful lecture, I say it openly, of great intuition and deep feeling, entitled: “The Christ - who is he?” In this lecture one can see that there is not disharmony but harmony between Eastern and Western life, if one only wants to look at the matter in the right way. This lecture on the second day of the congress was preceded by one of mine: “From Buddha to Christ”. You all know the details of this lecture, except for one thing that may not have been mentioned here and that refers to the three great names that are mentioned within Rose-Cross Theosophy as particularly worthy of veneration. There were three great names throughout the Middle Ages. These three names were also known to those who represented a dogmatic church. They often demanded of their orthodox followers the formula, which was a formula of curse: “I curse Scythianos, I curse Zaratas, I curse the Boddha.” These three individualities were loaded with curse in medieval culture when one wanted to document that one was a Christian.

Christian Rosicrucianism recognizes these three figures as exalted luminaries. We will talk more about Scythianos later. Zaratas is a great teacher of the Western initiation. He was none other than Zarathustra, who reappeared in various disciples, in Hermes and Moses, and finally in the sixth century BC as Nazaratos. He was one of the great inspirers of the Rosicrucian wisdom. Buddha was also counted among the great individuals. The individual contributions they had to give were then combined into an overall contribution for the development of humanity, and thus the great impulse could be given, which we call the Rosicrucian impulse. Now, in my lecture “From Buddha to Christ,” I had to emphasize, to stress, that what I said here before my departure for Budapest, about the connection between Zarathustra and Christ, about the seven Rishis who came over from the Atlantean period, etc., was not to be included in the lecture. In her lecture “The Christ - Who is He?” Miss Besant also said something that applies to the presentation of such insights as I have hinted at. She emphasized that when approaching such questions, one must be clear that there is agreement among all occultists with regard to the basic principle, but that it is natural and an obvious truth that every occultist is obliged to present things as they present themselves to him, that he is obliged to show what he can show through his level of development. Miss Besant emphasized that the appropriate inner development is achieved through the mystical path, through the path that has been characterized here in the most diverse ways, that has the most diverse stages, and so on.

When one considers what is experienced by the personality of the occultist, the various stages of the ascent, then there can be no other difference between one occultist and another than that one is somewhat more or less developed than the other. But in what is right, there can be no difference, just as when climbing a mountain, if two people together reach the same peak, there may be a difference in the view. The same applies to occultists if their lives are true to life. Mrs. Besant started from that and showed that the occultist who wants to be serious and work in the world has to cross a certain boundary, a boundary that is very easily resented by our ordinary public. For example, there are many people who believe in reincarnation, believe that human individuality can be re-embodied. But if you then come and point out to them that this or that individuality appeared at this time in this personality, at that time in that one, and so on, then people take offense at it, even though they believe in re-embodiment. For such specific details as I had to give about the re-embodiments of Zarathustra, a certain limit must be exceeded, and it is questionable how many people are still willing to go along with it.

There is indeed - and this was also emphasized by Mrs. Besant - only one true story and that is the one written in the Akasha Chronicle. He who is able to read the Akasha Chronicle - which, however, only a higher, spiritual eye is able to decipher - can state the true story. But then we must also allow the one who is to describe reality to cross this boundary.

Mrs. Besant then continued: Now it is quite natural and self-evident that each of us can only decipher this difficult-to-decipher chronicle of the Akasha world according to our own level of development. But nevertheless, it is true that in the essential features, everything definitely strives towards a great unity. Every occultist will recognize what we call the “Great Lodge of the Masters of Wisdom and of the Harmony of Sensations”. These Masters of the Wisdom are available to those who are knowledgeable in the occult. It is true that the Masters of the Wisdom live outside in the world and have the opportunity to reach that strange place called Shamballa, which also plays an important role in the Orientalist doctrine. Miss Besant emphasized that those whom we call the “Masters of the Wisdom and of the Harmony of Feelings” can communicate through their relationship to this mysterious place called Shamballa.

But then we must again be clear that anyone who engages with occult teachings should not be offended by names, that they should not confuse the name with the thing. Confusing the name with the thing can easily occur when certain names are associated with particular sensations and feelings in certain areas. Therefore, Mrs. Besant emphasized that such a confusion of name and thing should not occur when speaking on the one hand of Buddha and Bodhisattva, on the other hand of Christ. Above all, we must bear in mind that when we speak of Bodhisattva, we do not mean an individuality, but an office. There are names for offices and names for individuals. Every human being has a name for himself. But then there are also names like emperor and king. However, we must not confuse the name given to an individuality with that individuality itself.

I would ask you to bear in mind that I am not giving a lecture in the strict sense about Misses Besant's lecture, but that I am freely linking my own ideas to Misses Besant's arguments.

You will remember that in the many lectures I have given here this winter, it was emphasized how the “spirits of personality” have a completely different role on Saturn and grow into a completely different office on Earth. It is the same with what is called a Bodhisattva. This is an office that the individuality enters when it is ready for it. So we can fully understand when Mrs. Besant said that the individuality that appeared as Buddha had previously passed through the most diverse stages of development, that it had matured and matured and at a certain point in its development had become a bodhisattva. Just as in a worldly career one can become a member of the government council and so on over time, so the various individualities pass through these offices.

Now, I have always emphasized that, for example, the entity about which the “Seven Holy Rishis” say that it is beyond their sphere is basically the same as the Christ. This entity is also the same one that has outshone the various bodhisattvas, has worked in them and through them. What I have to teach is that this entity, which was beyond the sphere of the rishis, which inspired Zarathustra, which poured its truths into the beings we call bodhisattva, embodied itself in a very specific and much more appropriate way than before in the Jesus of Nazareth for the last three years of his life, so that we can definitely say: Christ was also connected with humanity before the Palestinian event; he is progressing in development. The earlier epochs were necessary for him to become what he is in our epoch. One can also say that the essence was already present in the cosmos in the past and has worked through various messengers. One can also emphasize that the same essence has always been there.

Oriental teaching, the whole spirit of the Orient is analytical. From the various embodiments of man, rising to the whole, to unity, that is the way of the Orient. The Occident's task is to develop the synthetic mind. What is the nature of the being that has developed as Ahura Mazdao? What are the various factors that it has developed? How has revelation always come to us differently? Understanding these questions, the goals of development, the great moments in development, that is what matters in the Occident. But if someone comes and says, “Here is a plant,” Goethean thoughts can be particularly well developed here. “When the leaves change, they become flowers; the petals are transformed stem leaves...” is not enough; one must also show how a green stem leaf can become a red petal. Thus, the Occidental does not deny anything of the Oriental, but adds something by characterizing the factors whereby stem leaves become petals. It is the same with Christ if one simply says that He was there before. The combination of the synthetic method with the analytical method is desired in all science, and it can also be had in full harmony within the theosophical spiritual current. There is absolutely nothing that could disturb the harmony of the Theosophical Society if the oriental analytical spirit is added to what must be added: the occidental synthetic spirit. Because the Theosophical Society is living life and not the reproduction of dogmas, I myself cannot find what could be called a contradiction between any of its directions, disharmony. This harmony must be based on some deep foundation that creates a stream that can absorb the waters of various sources. It must be based on this foundation, not on parrot-like repetition of dogmas. We will still learn many things in this direction as the Theosophical movement grows into its mission. The Theosophical Society will always bring something new. We have the certainty that the Masters of Wisdom watch over the Theosophical movement. If one were to be surprised and immediately speak of heresy when something new comes, then the Theosophical movement would be worse than earlier similar ones. And yet, unfortunately, the search for heresy in our time is actually more common than in any other time. Mrs. Besant regards the Christ as the Entity that revealed Itself in Jesus of Nazareth (more about this later) and as the Entity that is destined to show the way for what is now forming as a new cultural germ. In this lecture, she also pointed out that this Entity will continue to work in a more intimate context when humanity has reached a certain point in its development. There may be contradictions in the external indications, but one can fully agree that the Christ will come again, and that He will be recognized by those who are prepared for it. But one should emphasize being prepared rather than the Second Coming. It could easily be the case that people have the Christ but do not recognize him, even if he were among them for more than three years. It depends on developing the ability of recognition more and more. Wait and patiently develop the ability to recognize him. Pointing to a specific time is basically a disservice to humanity. Therefore, it is better to emphasize the means that lead to the recognition of Christ.

I wanted to give a few notes to show what the spirit was that was sought at this Budapest Congress. Therefore, the unity of work should be emphasized, even though the occult sources are of the most diverse kinds. It will be all the better the longer this unity and harmony of work is maintained within the Theosophical Society. We must be quite clear about this. The Budapest Congress has only given the participants the opportunity to be able to say, when they leave this congress, that there really is the best will and the best prospect of working in full harmony; and one should not fall into the trap of wanting to state differences. 'Those who prefer the name Bodhisattva – to which Miss Besant professes to adhere – will present the matter differently from those who consider the name Christ to be more appropriate. We therefore want to be in harmony among ourselves and in harmony with the Theosophical movement.

We can describe this harmony as a gratifying fact. As a symptom of the fact that the will to work together, to work in harmony, currently outweighs all other divergent tendencies, I would like to mention the following fact: Some of my books have been translated into different languages, and Mrs. Besant, in her character as president of the Theosophical Society and as chair of the Society's General Council, felt moved to award me the Subba Row Medal, once donated by our dear president Olcott, for the best writing recently published in the theosophical movement. As Mrs. Besant emphasized, this medal has been awarded to H. P. Blavatsky, then to Mr. Mead, and finally to Mrs. Besant herself. The first time Mrs. Besant, as president of the Theosophical Society, had the opportunity to award it, she gave it to me. I mention this fact not for my own sake, but as a symptom of the will to work together in harmony in the Theosophical Society. I may say that I particularly look at the name when it comes to the Subba Row Medal, which I also emphasized at the Budapest Congress. Those who know me will know that I have long regarded Subba Row as a spirit working from direct spiritual realization. It is very nice that this special medal has been donated in his honor. Please consider what I have said not in relation to me, but in relation to the entire German Section. What belongs to me belongs to the German Section.

Now I would like to characterize the course of the congress further. Perhaps one or the other will say that I am a poor reporter who wants pedantic details. To this I would like to say that I do not want to give a report, as the newspapers tend to deliver, but the intellectual facts. I would like to mention that our Hungarian friends have also ensured that the necessity of that school of thought, which is cultivated in the ranks of the Theosophical movement, has been brought into a bright light. They could not have done this better than by presenting us with a significant work of Hungarian drama, “The Tragedy of Man” by Emerich Madách, in a special theater performance. This work is something that had to be presented to the Theosophists at some point. We can learn an enormous amount from this tragedy by Madách. If I were to digress further from what some people call reporting, I would have to tell you something about what is called the Hungarian spirit, which is characteristically expressed in this “tragedy of man”. But I don't want to go that far; I just want to make a few comments about the work and its relation to the Theosophical movement. This Madách is indeed an interesting personality. He lived his life in a time when Hungary went through a lot. He was born in 1823 as the scion of an old Hungarian noble family and died in 1864. He lived through the times when Magyars tried to become independent through the revolution of 1848. He lived through the entire repercussion of this revolution, the defeat of Hungary by Austria, until the great Hungarian statesman Deak found a way to create a configuration in the Austrian state that resulted in the coexistence of the Austrian and Hungarian countries in their present form. This formation of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy is quite complicated and a further explanation would be too far-fetched here. Madách participated with all his soul in this Hungarian development and died in 1864, shortly after another attempt had been made to establish centralization, which failed, whereupon - albeit after Madách's death - the Austro-Hungarian dualism was created.

Madách began writing political articles early on, and from this you can see that he was involved in the affairs of his nation. He was one of those Magyars who stood up for the development of Magyar independence, for conditions that were only partially achieved under Ferenc Deák. He felt it deeply as a disgrace done to his nation that under the so-called Bach regime, Germanization was carried out and Magyar identity in Hungary was completely ignored. Madách personally had an unpleasant encounter with Austrian reaction. He did not personally take part in the 1848 revolution, but out of a big and beautiful heart he took in a refugee who had been involved and had sought shelter on Madách's estate.

At the beginning of the 1850s, Madách married in a way that can only be described as eminently happy. Then, in Hungary, a persecution of those who had participated in the revolution began. When it was discovered that Madách had sheltered a refugee – the refugee was no longer found – he was put on trial and thrown into prison. In prison, he wrote wonderfully tender poems. He knew nothing of his homeland, no news reached him. But there is a note of hope in his poems, that he would find again those from whom he had been snatched, and especially the one he loved so much, his wife. It was a great disappointment for him that his wife of all people had been unfaithful to him during the time of his imprisonment, so that he had to separate from her afterwards. Thus Madách had to endure external and internal pain. That is why he so severely criticized the conditions of his time; and one might say that he expressed everything that had been deposited in Madách's soul in the form of terrible, quite painful living conditions in his “Tragedy of Man”. Thus we see how this tragedy is imbued with the feeling one has when traveling across the wide plains of the Great Hungarian Plain, where one senses infinity but finds no real point of rest. The way he portrays the “tragedy of man” is very characteristic of a personality who was born in our time, and indeed from an elemental people. We see how creation is presented to us, how it is released from the hand of the Father-God. After the Father-God has been praised by his serving spirits for the glory he has put into the work, Lucifer confronts him and emphasizes: “I am as old as you; you could not have created in your way without the negative principle, which always opposed and shaped that which is in development into fixed forms. Without this you could not have created. We then see how man appears within Paradise as Adam and Eve; we see how God gives Lucifer two trees, especially the tree of knowledge. It is beautifully illustrated how Adam and Eve partake of the tree of knowledge, how they are then expelled from Paradise and are now cast out into the world, where they must fend for themselves. Adam and Eve are faced with the necessity of creating and working with their own hands and thus making their way in the world. Then Lucifer reappears. Adam, who has the urge to know what will actually become of this world in which he is placed, is lulled by Lucifer into a dream in which he is shown in images of overwhelming grandeur what man has gone through in the past and still has to go through in the future. First, ancient Egypt appears; Adam as Pharaoh, with slaves all around him. The wife of one of the slaves is Eve. The full tragedy of this epoch of humanity appears before Adam's soul. He senses the terrible destiny expressed in the words: millions for one, one for millions. His soul rushes away from this image and sees itself transported to a later epoch. Adam is embodied again in Miltiades in ancient Athens. Miltiades has just accomplished a great and glorious deed; in his wife he finds the reincarnated Eve, who teaches her son the virtues of the father. Around him a demagogic mass. He is accused of treason, condemned and dragged to death. Further on, Adam encounters in a dream a later period of Roman emperorship. There he is presented to us as he lived in the Roman imperial era. A scene of a terrible kind. Adam had sought power as a pharaoh; as Miltiades he had seen how insubstantial everything is, had gone through the great disappointments that a people's benefactor can go through as a result of betraying his people. Now he wants to live a life of debauchery, to have evil in all its possible forms. He is presented to us in a revelling company, Eve as a prostitute. Outside, a man who has died of the plague is carried past; a prostitute presses a kiss on his lips. All life and activity is a terrible presumptuousness. And it is at this time that the apostle Peter's speech takes place. We see ourselves at the beginning of the spread of Christianity. Among those who had seen the prostitute kiss the body was Peter. He stepped forward and said: “You are breathing the plague, you insolent one.” Then Peter spoke further words that illuminate the matter like lightning:

"You cowardly generation, you wretched brood!
As long as luck and joy smile on you, like
Flies in the sun, you are insolent,
Brazenly trampling on God and virtue;
But when danger knocks at your door,
God's mighty finger touches you,
you cower in cowardice and despair, do you not feel how heavily heaven's punishment already weighs upon you? Just look around you, the city is deserted, rough strangers tread the golden crops, all order is dissolved, no one commands and no one Obey. With heads held high, Through silent places of peace, robbery and murder, Horror, pale worry behind them. And heaven, earth, the whole world fails you In these hardships, compassion, help you. Isn't it true that you, with a ravenous rush of mind, Can't lull that solemn voice, That stirs all the depths of your soul
And urges you in vain to a better goal? Not true, you feel no satisfaction,
Only disgust does lust awaken in your heart?
You look around anxiously, your lips stammer...
In vain, you lack faith in your old gods
faith in your old gods, they have turned to stone.
(At this moment, the statues of the gods crumble into dust).
Their image crumbles into dust, and never
will you find a new deity that
would rise from the ashes, purifying you.
Just look around you, what is raging in the city
more devastating than the plague? Innumerable rise from their soft pillow, to populate the deserts of Thebais with wild anchorites, seeking what could still arouse their dull senses, might lift them up. You will, O degenerate generation, disappear without a trace from the scene of this world.“

”The image crumbles into dust,” that is the flash of lightning that Peter's speech brings to this period.

Adam also turns away from this image, to the Crusades. Here he sees how Christianity is embodied in external forms. Then he sees himself as Kepler, surrounded by the vanity of the court. Then he comes to us in the French Revolution as Danton; Eve as the sister of the Marquis.

He rushes away from this image, comes to London and sees himself in the time when materialism is emerging, the idea of freedom is gaining ground and people want to redeem the world through it. He also turns away from this picture and comes to a different situation, where people live only for utility, where they stand next to each other only as numbers, so to speak, where everything that has warmth has fled, and only thought chimeras remain. Finally, at the last picture, at the end of the earth's time, the remaining people are like Eskimos, half-wild. This is how the advanced, their becoming, their power present themselves to him; as such, he sees them as “monstrous creatures” walking through the worlds in the future.

When he wakes up, he wants to kill himself. Now comes the point to which I actually want to draw attention, because it shows the necessity of theosophical development in our time. After the dream, Eve confesses to Adam that she feels [like] a mother. He is completely overjoyed and now hears himself say: I will not continue to research what lies before us, in the natural-law becoming; I will be satisfied with living on in the species. And in fact, what is given to man here as a kind of teaching is: Do not search, man, trust in what is given to you... It is contained in the words spoken by the Lord:

"Do not search for the secret that your
longing eyes, the benevolent hand of God
has favorably veiled with a wise mind.
For if you saw that your soul
is only temporarily sheltered on earth,
And eternal life awaits you in the beyond,
it would no longer be a virtue to suffer there.
And when you see again, your soul When the burden of your existence weighs you down,
You are carried by the elation of infinity
. And should this feeling of pride ever lead you astray,
Set limits to the span of your life span
And greatness of soul and virtue will be preserved.

In “The Tragedy of Man” we have a work of real greatness. But there is also a sense of sadness that is only possible for a personality who has experienced such deep pain as Madách, and who was thus predestined to create the work in this way. What would be possible if man could solve the riddles of the world to a certain extent, could answer the question: “What will become of evolution?” The best minds have come to pessimism because they have not found an answer. And now I ask: in the face of such a question, as it arises from the beautiful, magnificent, powerful, but unsatisfying poetry, has not the most beautiful answer become: theosophy? Does not the poet Madách prove the necessity of theosophy in our time when he says: “What would it be, if we were to look at the aimlessness and lack of value of existence?” And now, with the theosophical worldview, we not only look into the depths that go down to the Eskimos, but we also see how humanity will rise to ever higher levels of development, to higher spiritual spheres.

Imagine the significance that would have been accorded to Madách if, at a time when he was able to grasp it, his poetic soul had been confronted with what had been given to humanity in the last third of the nineteenth century. It would have been something for which he would have bled, and he wrote his play with his heart's blood.

I would like to mention a few more points regarding the congress.

If we compare this Budapest Congress with previous ones, we notice that there has been a tremendous shift in thinking and perception regarding the relationship between theosophy and science. In particular, this shift has become apparent through our seven years of German work and the help of our scientific collaborators, who have contributed significantly to this transformation of the relationship between theosophy and science.

Dr. Unger gave a lecture on “Theosophy as a Life Force,” in which he showed how, if one thinks in a scientific spirit, one will find the same attitude towards the recognition of experience in Theosophy as in the other sciences. He showed how much faith and authority must be placed in the other, even the natural sciences, just as much as, for example, when a theosophical community listens to someone who can research the occult world and professes what he has to communicate from his research. Our friend Dr. Unger gave a beautiful discussion of theosophy and science in his lecture.

Then our friend Dr. Peipers showed in two lectures, accompanied by slides, how what is taught by the theosophical movement proves to be practical in science. He explained how occult anatomy and occult medicine are the corresponding sciences of our time that must first be put back on a sound footing. I would have to say a lot if I wanted to share more details about the work of our very hard-working colleague, Dr. Peipers.

Finally, I would like to say that not much has come of the various discussions that have been initiated. There was little interest in discussing the issues raised, in particular:

1. whether a journal should be established in the most important languages spoken within the Theosophical movement and in Esperanto, and

2. whether schools should be founded in which suitable Theosophical speakers can be trained.

I probably do not need to say that I did not participate in these discussions, since you all know that I do not expect much from discussions.

Then Mrs. Wolfram – Leipzig – spoke about the occult reasons for the saga of “Tristan and Isolde”.

The Congress was followed by two public lectures, one by Mrs. Besant on “Ways into the Spiritual World” and one by me on “The Western Ways of Initiation”. These public lectures were exceptionally well attended.

On the whole, I was only able to characterize the spirit of our gathering in Budapest. It was satisfying for us that the Theosophists of Europe met again, even if only a small number of them.