The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Note: The transcript of the four “faculty” lectures are deficient. It shows not only noticeable gaps; the author of the transcript is also not familiar with the topic of the lectures. He often made summaries in haste as far as he understood the lecturer. That is why some connections shifted. Although notices of other participants were used, the deficiencies of the text could not be essentially corrected except for some big misunderstandings.

If the theosophical movement has to really intervene in the whole modern culture, it cannot limit itself unilaterally to spread any doctrine, to communicate knowledge concerning this or that, but it has to deal with the most different cultural factors and elements in the present. Theosophy should be no mere doctrine, it should live. It should flow into our acting, feeling and thinking. Now it is in the nature of things that such a movement addressing the heart of the modern culture immediately intervenes where we deal with the leadership in the spiritual life, if it should be capable of surviving. Where else should we look for the leadership of the spiritual life today than in our universities? There really all those should co-operate who work at least if you look at the matter idealistically as bearers of our culture, of our whole spiritual life, who work in the service of truth and progress and in the service of the spiritual movement generally. They should collaborate with young people who prepare for the highest tasks of life.

This would be the big and significant influence that the universities must have on the whole cultural life, the significant influence which comes from them as something authoritative because one cannot deny it, although one may also struggle against any authority in our time: our universities work authoritatively. And it is right in certain respect, because those who have to teach our young people about the highest cultural problems have to be determinative of all questions of the human existence. Thus it is really logical if the whole nation looks at that which the members of the faculties say in any question. That's how it is. Nevertheless, in all our faculties one regards what the university lecturer says about a matter as authoritative.

Thus it seems to me natural that we as theosophists ask ourselves once: how must we position ourselves to the different branches of our university life? No criticism should be offered to our university institutions; this should not be an object of this talk. What will be discussed in this and the following talks should simply give a perspective how the theosophical movement if it is really capable of surviving, if it can really intervene in the impulses of the spiritual movement , can possibly have a fruitful effect on our university life.

A university has four faculties: the divinity (in Germany theological) faculty, the faculty of law, the medical faculty and the arts (in Germany: philosophical) faculty. Indeed, as well as the high educational system is today, we have to include still other colleges in the sense of our present way of thinking and approach to life as a continuation of the university, as it were, namely the colleges of technology, the art colleges etcetera. That will be discussed later in the talk about philosophy. We have to deal with that faculty which in the first times, in the midst of the Middle Ages acquired a leading position in the modern education. In this time, theology at the universities was the “queen of sciences.” Everything that was otherwise done formed a group round the theological scholarship.

The university had arisen from that which the Church had developed in the Middle Ages: from the monastic schools. The old schools had a kind of supplement for that which one needed as worldly knowledge; however, the central issue was theology. These teachers, priests and monks who had experienced the clerical education were active until the end of the Middle Ages. Theology was called the “queen of sciences.” Is it now not quite natural, if you consider the matter in the abstract, ideally to call theology the queen of sciences, and had it not to be this queen if it fulfilled its task in the widest sense of the word? In the centre of the world that stands certainly which we call the primal ground of the world, the divine, in so far as the human being can grasp it. Theology is nothing else than the teachings of this divine. All other must trace back to divine primal forces of existence. If theology wants really to be the teachings of the divine, you cannot imagine it as that it is the central sun of any wisdom and knowledge, and that from it the strength and the energy is emitted to all remaining sciences. In the Middle Ages, it still was in such a way. What the great medieval theologians had to say about the world basically got its light, its most significant strength from the so-called holy science, from theology.

If we want to get an idea of this thinking and of this philosophy of life in the Middle Ages, we can do it with a few words. Any medieval theologian considered the world as a big unity. The divine creativity was on top, at the summit. Below, the single forces and realms of nature existed, dispersed in the manifoldness of the world. What one knew about the forces and realms of nature was the object of the single sciences. What led the human spirit to the clarification of the loftiest questions, what should lighten what the single sciences could not recognise came from theology. Hence, one studied philosophy first. It encompassed all worldly sciences. Then one advanced to the science of theology. The medical faculty and that of law stood somewhat differently in the university life. We can easily conceive an idea how these faculties interrelate if we look at the matter in such a way: philosophy encompassed all sciences, and the divinity faculty considered and dealt with the big question: what is the primal ground, and which are the single phenomena of existence?

This existence proceeds in time. There is a development to perfection, and as human beings we are not only put into the world order, but we ourselves co-operate in the world order. On the one side, the philosophical and the theological faculties consider that which is, which was, and which will be, on the other side, the medical faculty and that of law consider the world in its emergence, the world how it has to be led from the imperfect to the perfect. The medical faculty addresses more the natural life in its imperfection and asks how it should be made better. The law school turns to the moral world and asks how it must be made better. The whole life of the Middle Ages was one single body, and something similar must certainly come again. Again the whole unity, the universitas has to become a living body that has the single faculties as the members of the common life. The modern university is more an aggregate, and the single faculties do not deal a lot with each other. In the Middle Ages, everybody who studied at the university had to acquire a philosophical basic education, that which one calls a general education today, although one has to admit that just those who leave the university today are characterised by the absence of general education.

This was the basis of everything. Also in Goethe's Faust one finds said: the collegium logicum first, then metaphysics. Nevertheless, it is also correct that somebody who generally wants to be introduced into the secrets of the world existence, into the big questions of culture, must have a thorough education in the different branches of knowledge at first. It is no progress that this studium fundamentale has completely disappeared from our university education. In a large part is that which one can know lifeless nature: physics, chemistry, botany, zoology, mathematics etcetera. Not before the student had been introduced into the teachings of thinking, into the laws of logic, into the basic principles of the world or into metaphysics, he could ascend to the other, higher faculties. For the other faculties were called the higher ones with some right. Then he could advance to theology.

Someone who should be taught about the deepest questions of existence had to have learnt something about the simple questions of existence. But also the other faculties presuppose such an educational background. The situation of law and medicine would be much better if such a general previous training were maintained thoroughly, because someone who wants to intervene in the jurisprudence must know how the laws of the human life are generally. It must be understood lively what can lead a human being to the good or to the bad. You must be grasped not only in such a way as you are grasped from the dead letter of law, but you must be grasped like from life, like from something with which you are intimately related. These human beings must have the circumference first because the human being is really a microcosm in which all laws are living. Hence, one has to know the physical laws above all. Thus the university would have to be, correctly thought, an organism of the whole human knowledge. However, the divinity faculty would have to stimulate any other knowledge. Theology, the teachings of the divine world order, cannot exist at all unless it is inserted to the smallest and biggest of our existence, unless one deepens everything into the divine world order.

But, how should anybody be able to say anything about the divine world order who knows nothing about the minerals, nothing about the plants, animals and human beings, about the origin of the earth, about the nature of our planetary system? God's revelation is everywhere, and there is nothing that does not express the voice of the divinity. The human being has to link everything that the human being has and is and acts to these loftiest questions which the theological science should treat.

Now we must ask ourselves: does the divinity faculty position itself in this way in life today? Does it work in such a way that its strength and energy can flow from it to all remaining life? I would like to give no criticism, but an objective portrayal of the relations if possible. In the last time, even theology is brought somewhat into discredit, even within the religious movement. You have maybe heard something of the name Kalthoff (Albert K., 1850–1906, Protestant theologian) who has written Zarathustra sermons. He says that the religion must not suffer from the letters of theology; we do not want theology, but religion. These are people who are able to find the world of religious world view from their immediate conviction.

Now we ask ourselves whether this view can persist whether it can be true that religion without theology, sermon without theology is possible. In the first times of Christianity and also in the Middle Ages, this was not the case. Also in the first centuries of modern times, it was not in such a way. Only today, a kind of conflict has happened between the immediate religious effectiveness and theology, which has apparently turned away somewhat from life. In the first times of the Christianity, somebody was basically a theologian who could see up to the highest summits of existence because of his wisdom and science. Theology was something living, was something that lived in the first Church Fathers, that animated such spirits like Clement of Alexandria, like Origenes, like Scotus Erigena and St. Augustine; it was theology that animated them. It was that which lived like lifeblood in them. If the words came on their lips, they did not need to confide any dogma, then they knew how to speak intensively to the hearts. They found the words which were got out of any heart. The sermon was permeated with soul and religious currents. But it would not have been in such a way unless inside of these personalities the view of the loftiest beings in the highest form had lived in which the human being can attain this.

Such dogmatism is impossible which discusses every word in the abstract that is spoken in the everyday life. But somebody who wants to be a teacher of the people has to have experienced the highest form of knowledge with wisdom. He must have the resignation, the renunciation of that which is immediate to him; he must strive and experience what introduces him into the highest form of knowledge in loneliness, in the cell, far from the hustle and bustle of the world where he can be alone with his God, with his thinking and his heart. He must have the possibility to look up at the spiritual heights of existence. Without any fanaticism, without any desire, even without any religious desire, but in purely spiritual devotion that is free of everything that also appears, otherwise, in the longing of the religions. The conversation with God and the divine world order takes place in this lonesome height, at the summit of the human thinking.

One has to develop, one has to have attained resignation, renunciation to lead this lofty soliloquy and to have it living in oneself and to let work it as lifeblood in the words which are the contents of the popular doctrines. Then we have found the right stage of theology and sermon, of science and life.

Someone who sits below feels that this flows out of depths that it is got down from high scientific heights of wisdom. Then it needs no external authority, then the word itself is authority by the strength which lives in the soul of the teacher, because it settles in the heart by this strength to work with the echo of the heart. One achieved the harmony between religion and theology, and at the same time one tactfully distinguished theology and religious instruction. But anybody who has not climbed up to the theological heights who is not informed about the deepest questions of the spiritual existence will not slip that in his words which should live in the words of the preacher as a result of the dialogue with the divine world order itself.

This was really the opinion that one had in the Christian world view about the relation between theology and sermon for centuries. A good sermon would be that if a preacher steps only then in front of the people, after he has occupied himself with the high teachings of the Trinity of God, of the divinity and of the announcement of the Logos in the world, of the high metaphysical significance of Christ's personality. One must have accepted all these teachings that are understandable only for someone who has dealt with them for many, many years. These teachings may establish the contents of philosophy and other sciences at first; one has to make his thinking ripe for this truth. Only then one can penetrate these heights of truth. To someone who has achieved this, who knows something about the high ideas of the Trinity, of the Logos the Bible verses become something in his mouth that wins another liveliness than it has at first without this preceding theological schooling. Then he freely uses the Bible verses, then he creates that current from him to the community within the Bible verses which causes an influence of the divine creativity in the hearts of the crowd. Then he not only interprets the Bible but he handles it. Then he speaks in such a way, as if he himself had participated in the writing of the great truths which are written in this ancient religious book. He looked into the bases from which the great truths of the Bible originated. He knows what those have felt who were once much more influenced by the spiritual world than he is, and what is expressed in the Bible verses as the divine world government and human order of salvation. He has not only the word that he has to comment and to interpret, but behind him the great powerful writers stand whose pupil, disciple and successor he is. He speaks out of their spirit and he himself puts their spirit, which they have put into it, into the writing now.

This was the basis of developing authority in this or that epoch. As an ideal the human being had it in mind, it was often carried out. However, our time has also brought about a big reversal here. Let us consider the big reversal once again, which took place from the Middle Ages to the modern times. What happened at that time? What made it possible that Copernicus, Galilei, Giordano Bruno could announce a new world view? This new movement became possible because the human being approached nature immediately that he himself wanted to see that he did not rest on old documents as in the Middle Ages, but went straight to the natural existence. It was different in the medieval science. There the basic sciences were not derived from an unbiased consideration of nature, but from that which the Greek philosopher Aristoteles had schemed. Aristoteles was the authority during the whole Middle Ages.

One taught referring to him. The lecturer of metaphysics and logic had his books. He interpreted them. Aristoteles was an authority.

This changed with the reversal from the Middle Ages to the modern times. Copernicus himself wanted to scheme what is given by the immediate view. Galilei shone on the world of the immediate existence. Kepler found the big world law according to which the planets orbit the sun.

That's how it was in the past centuries. One wanted to see independently. One also told in anecdotes what occurred to Galilei: there was a scholar who knew his Aristoteles. One said something to him that Galilei had said. He answered that this must be different: I must have a look at Aristoteles, because he said it differently, and, nevertheless, Aristoteles is right. The authority was more important to him than the immediate view. But the time was ripe, one wanted now to know something independently. This does not require that everybody is immediately able to acquire this view fairly quickly, but it only requires that people are there who are able to approach nature that they are equipped with the instruments and tools and with the methods, which are necessary to observe nature. Progress thereby became possible. One can interpret what Aristoteles wrote; but one cannot progress thereby. Somebody can progress only if he himself progresses if he himself sees the things.

The past four centuries applied this principle of self-knowledge to all external knowledge, to everything that spreads out before our senses. First in physics, then in chemistry, then in the science of life, then in the historical sciences.

Everything was included in this self-observation, in the external looking of the sensory world. One withdrew from the principle of authority. What has not been included in this principle of own knowledge was the view of the spiritually effective in the world, the immediate knowledge of that which is there not for the senses, but only for the mind. Hence, something appears during the last centuries, concerning this science and wisdom of the mind that one could once not speak of. Now we could go back to the oldest times. We want to do it, however, only to the first times of Christianity. There we have a science of the divine, then a great doctrine of the world origin which reaches down to our immediate sensuous surroundings. If you look at the great sages of former centuries, you can see everywhere how this way is taken from the highest point down to the lowest existence, so that no gap is between that which is said by the divine world order in theology and what we say about the sensory world. One had a comprehensive view of the origin of the planets and our earth. But one does no longer need to inform this today. However, someone who observes the development in the course of time can also accept that one goes beyond our wisdom. Time goes beyond the form of our science as we have gone beyond the former forms.

What existed at that time was a uniform world edifice that stood before the soul, and the basis of the soul was the spirit. One saw the primal ground of existence in the spirit. That comes from the spirit which is not spirit. The world is the reflection of the infinite spirit of God. And then that comes from the spirit of God which we find as higher spiritual beings in the different religious systems and also that which is the most powerful on this world: the human being, then the animals, the plants and the minerals. One had a uniform world view of the origin of a solar system up to the formation of the mineral. The atom was chained together with God himself although one never dared to recognise God himself. One sought the divine in the world. The spiritual was its expression. Those who wanted to know something about the highest heights of existence strove for educating themselves in such a way that they could recognise the sensory world. They wanted to conceive ideas of that which is above the sensory world, of the spiritual world order. They could ascend from the simple sensory knowledge to the comprehensive knowledge of the spiritual that way. If we look at the ancient cosmologies, we find no interruption between the teachings of theology and what the single worldly sciences say about the things of our existence. Link is attached to link continuously. One had started from the core of spirit up to the circumference of our earthly existence.

One took another path in modern times. One simply directed the senses and what is regarded to be arms of the senses, as strengthening instruments of sense-perception, to the world. In brilliant, tremendous way one developed the world view that teaches us something about the external sensory world. Everything is not yet explained, but one can get an idea already today how this science of the sensuous things advances. However, something was thereby interrupted, namely the immediate connection between the world science and the divine science.

The picture of the world origin, of cosmology which is the most usual even today even if it is disputed, is found in the so-called Kant-Laplace world view. In order to orient ourselves, we want to say a few words about it to see then what signifies such a Kant-Laplace world view to us. It says: once there was a big world nebula, rather thin. If we could sit on chairs in space and watch, and if it were somewhat visible for finer eyes, this world nebula is organised perhaps because it cooled down. It establishes a centre in itself, rotates, pushes off rings which form to planets, and in this way you know this hypothesis such a solar system forms, which has the sun as a spring of life and heat. However, what is developed that way must find an end in such a way, as it develops. Kant and others admit that again new worlds form et etcetera.

What is now such a world view that the modern researcher tries to compose from the scientific experiences of physics, chemistry etcetera? This is something that would have to be sense-perceptible in all stages. Now try once to really imagine this world view. What is absent in it? The spirit is absent. It is a material process, a process which can happen in microcosm with an oil drop in water at which you can look with your eyes. The process of world origin is made sense-perceptible. The spirit was not involved in the origin of such a solar system. Hence, it is not surprising that the question is raised: how does life originate, and how does the spirit originate? Because one originally imagined the lifeless matter only which moves according to its own principles.

What one has not experienced one can get out impossibly of the concepts. One can only get out what has been put in. If one imagines a world system which is empty which is devoid of spirit, then it must remain inconceivable how spirit and life can exist in this world. The question can never be answered out of the Kant-Laplace theory how life and spirit can originate. The science of modern times is just a sensuous science. Hence, it has taken up that part of the world in its theory of world origin which is a section of the whole world. Your body represents you in your entirety as little as matter is the whole world.

Just as it is true that life, feelings, thoughts, impulses are in your body which one cannot see if one looks at your body with sensuous eyes, it is true that the spirit is also in the world. However, it is also true that the Kant-Laplace theory shows the body only. As little as the anatomist who shows the structure of the human body is able to say how a thought can arise from the blood and the nerves if he thinks only materially, just as little anybody who thinks the world system according to Kant-Laplace can get to the spirit one day. As little as somebody who is blind and cannot see the light can say anything about our sensory world, as little as anybody who does not have the immediate view of the spirit can explain that something spiritual exists besides the physical body. The modern science lacks in the view of the spiritual. The progress is based on its one-sidedness, just in this way the human being can reach the unilaterally highest height. Because science confines itself to the sensuous, it reaches its high development. However, it becomes an oppressive authority, because this science has founded ways of thinking. These are stronger than all theories, stronger than even all dogmas.

One gets used to searching science in the sensuous, and thereby the fact creeps into the ways of thinking of the modern human being since four centuries that the sensuous became the only real to him. Hence, one generally believes that the sensory world is the only real one. Something that is justified as a theory became way of thinking, and someone who looks deeper into this thinking knows which infinitely suggestive strength such an active way of thinking has on the human beings for centuries. It worked on all circles. Like a human being who is exposed to suggestion, the whole modern educated humanity is exposed to the suggestion that only that which one perceives with the senses, can grasp with the hands is the only real. Humanity has given up from regarding the spirit as something real. But this has nothing to do with a theory, but only with the accustomed forms of thinking. These sit much, much deeper than any understanding. One can prove this by epistemology and philosophy which are not sufficiently developed in us, unfortunately. The whole modern science is influenced by these modern ways of thinking. With somebody who speaks today about the origin of the animals and about the origin of the world this way of thinking sits in the background, and he can't help giving such a colouring to his words and concepts that they make the powerful impression by themselves that it is real.

It is different with that which one merely thinks. One has to advance so far today to recognise the deeper reality in that which one only thinks. One has to become capable to behold the spirit. This is not to be attained with books and talks, not with theories and new dogmas, but with intimate self-education, which intervenes in the customs of the soul of the modern human being. The human being has to recognise first that it is not absolutely necessary to regard the sensuous-real as the only real, but he has to realise that he exercises something that was stimulated for centuries. One thinks this way. It flows into the original feeling of the human beings. These are not aware that they have illusions because they got them from the beginning. This impression works too strong, even on an idealist, so that he emphasises and lets flow the things into the souls of his fellow men that only the sensuous-real is the real.

With this transformation of the ways of thinking the development of theology took place. What is theology? It is the science of the divine as it is handed down since millenniums. It scoops from the Bible as the science of the Middle Ages scooped from Aristoteles. But it is just the teaching of theology that no revelation continues forever, but that the world and the words of the old revelations change. In the doctrine of the Catholic Church, the immediate spiritual life does no longer flow; it depends there on whether there are persons from who the spiritual life can still flow. If we grasp it this way, we have to say that also theology is subject to the materialistic thinking.

Once one did not understand the Six-day Work in such a way, as if it had happened purely materially in six days. One did not have the odd idea that one has not to study Christ to understand Him, but one has only pointed to the fact that the Logos was incarnated once in the human being Jesus. Unless one advanced so far, one did not arrogate a judgement to recognise what lived there from 1 to 33 A.D. Today one sees in Jesus – he is also called the “simple man from Nazareth” only a man like anyone, only nobler and more idealised. Theology has also become materialistic. These are the essentials that the theological world view does no longer look up to the summits of spirit, but wants to understand purely rationally, materialistically what happened historically. Nobody can understand the life work of Christ who looks at it only as history who only wants to know how that looked and spoke who strolled in Palestine from 1 up to 33 A.D. And nobody can make a claim to say that in him anything else did not live than in other human beings. Or is anybody able to argue away what he says: to me all power is given in heaven and on earth? But one wants to understand the matters historically today.

What was spoken in a speech on the 31st May, 1904 with a pastoral conference in Alsace-Lorraine is very typical. There a professor Lobstein from Strassburg held a talk Truth and Poetry in our Religion; a speech which is deeply likeable and shows how the materialistic theologian wants to find the way with the external research. Someone who approaches the Gospels with materialistic ways of thinking tries to understand first of all, when they were written. There he can rely only on the external documents, on that which the external history delivers as material. However, what was handed down comes basically from a much later time than it is normally assumed. If one takes the external word, one gets around to saying: the Gospels are inconsistent with each another. One has put together the three Synoptics who can be reconciled; one has to consider the St. John's Gospel separately. Hence, it has become for many something like a poem. One has also examined the epistles of Paul and has found that only this or that part is authentic. These facts constituted the basis of the religious research.

Hence, the religious history or dogma history became the most important science. Not the experience of the dogmatic truth is important today, but the religious history, the external representation of the events at that time. One wants to investigate this. However, it should not depend on this at all. This may be important to a materialistic history. but it is not theology. Theology does not have to investigate, when the dogma of Trinity originated, when it was pronounced first or was written down, but what it means, what it announces to us, what it may offer as living, as fertile to the inner life.

Thus it has come that one talks as a professor of theology about truth and poetry in our religion. One has found that there are contradictions in the writings. One has shown that some matters do not agree with the natural sciences; these are the miracles. One does not try to understand them, but one simply says that they are not possible. Thus one got around to introducing the concept of poetry in the Holy Scripture. One says that it does not lose any value, but that the story is a kind of myth or poetry. One must not be under the illusion that everything is fact, but one must come to recognise that our Holy Scripture is composed of poetry and truth.

This is based on a lack of knowledge about the nature of poetry. Poetry is something else than what the human beings imagine as poetry today. Poetry arose from the spirit. Poetry itself has a religious origin. Before there was poetry, there were already events like the Greek dramas to which the Greeks pilgrimaged like to the Eleusinian mysteries. This is the original drama. If it was practised, it was science for the Greeks, but also spiritual reality at the same time. It was beauty and art at the same time, however, also religious edification. Poetry was nothing else than the external form which should express truth of the higher plane, not only symbolically, but really. This forms the basis of every true poetry. Therefore, Goethe says: poetry is not art, but an interpretation of the secret physical principles that would never have become obvious without it. That is why Goethe calls only someone “poet” who is anxious to recognise truth and to express it in beauty. Truth, beauty and goodness are the forms to express the divine.

Hence, we cannot speak about poetry and truth in religion. Our time does no longer have correct concepts of poetry. It does not know how poetry streams from the spring of truth. Hence, every word wins something from it. We have to get again to the correct concept of poetry. We have to understand what poetry was originally and apply it to that which theology has to investigate. We probably say: ye shall know them by their fruits. Where to has theology got ? In a book which made a great stir in the last time, and which the people have accepted because a modern theologian has written it I mean What is Christianity? (1901) by Harnack (Adolf H.,1851–1930, Protestant theologian) there is a place, and this place reads: “the Easter message tells of the miraculous event in the garden of Joseph of Arimathea that, nevertheless, no eye has seen, of the empty grave into which some women and disciples looked, of the phenomena of the transfigured Lord glorified so much that his followers could not recognise him immediately , then also of speeches and actions of the risen Christ; the reports became more and more complete and confident. However, the faith in Easter is the conviction of the victory of the crucified over death, of God's strength and justice and of the life of that who is the first-born among many brothers. As to St. Paul, the basis of his faith in Easter was the certainty that “the second Adam” had come from heaven, and the experience that God revealed his son as a living one to him on the way to Damascus.”

The theosophical world view tries to lead the human beings upwards to understand this great mystery. The theologian says: Today we do no longer know what happened, actually, in the Garden of Gethsemane. We also do not know the quality of the messages about the events that the disciples deliver to us. We also do not know how to estimate the value of the words about the risen Christ in the epistles of Paul. We cannot cope with it. But one thing is certain: the faith in the risen Saviour started from these events, and we want to keep to the faith and do not care about its basis. You find a concept in the modern dogmatism that is strange for someone who looks for reasons of truth. One says: one cannot explain it metaphysically. No contradiction is possible, but also no explanation. There remains only the third, the religious truth.

In Trier, they once put up the Holy Robe of Jesus in the belief that the robe can work miracles. This belief has disappeared, because every belief can be held only by the fact that it is confirmed by experience. However, there remains the fact that some have experienced this; there remains the subjective religious experience.

Those who say this are allegedly no materialists. In their theory, they are not, but in their ways of thinking, in the way as they want to investigate the spiritual. This is the basis of the spiritual life of our idealists and spiritists. They all have accepted the materialistic ways of thinking. Also those are materialists who want to sit together in a meeting room and want to look at materialised ghosts. Spiritism has become possible because of our materialistic ways of thinking. Today, one visits the spirit materialistically. All idealistic theories are of no avail, as long as the knowledge of the spirit remains a mere theory, as long as it does not become life.

This requires a renewal, a renaissance of theology. It is necessary that not only faith exists, but that the immediate intuition flows in it with those who have to announce the word of the divine world order. The theosophical world view also wants to lead from the belief in the documents, in books and stories to an observation of the spirit by self-education. The same way which our science has taken shall be taken in the spiritual life, in the spiritual wisdom. We have to arrive at the experience of the spiritual again. Science, even wisdom, decides nothing here. Not by logic, not by contemplation you can investigate anything. The logic of your soul invents a sensuous world system. However, spiritual experience fills our understanding with real contents. It is the higher spiritual experience that has to fill our concepts with spiritual contents. That is why a renaissance of theology takes place only if one understands the word of the apostle Paul: all wisdom of the human beings is not able to understand the divine wisdom. Science itself is not able to do it. Just as little the external life can grasp this spiritual world. Any reflection cannot lead to the spirit; as little as anybody who sits on a distant island finds great physical truths without instruments and without scientific methods one day.

To the human beings something must occur that goes beyond wisdom that leads to the immediate life. As well as our eyes and ears inform us about the sensuous reality, we must experience the spiritual reality directly. Then our wisdom can reach it. Paul did never say: wisdom is the precondition to reach the divine. Not before we have found the whole world wisdom, we are able again to bring together the whole. Not before we have a spiritual system of world evolution again as we have a materialistic one on the other side we must not have the old faith, but behold, here and there , then the sensuous and the spiritual unite in a chain, and one will be able to descend again from the spirit to the teachings of the sensuous science.

The theosophical world view wants to bring that. It does not want to be theology, not a bookish knowledge and also not the interpretation of any book, but it wants experience of the spiritual life, it wants to give communications of the experiences of this spiritual life. The same spiritual strength also speaks to us today that once spoke with the announcement of the religious systems. It has to be the task of that who wants to teach something of the divine world order that he looks for the rise where he can speak again lonely in the heart with the spiritual heart of the world. Then the reversal takes place in our faculty which took place from the Middle Ages to the modern times in the fields of the external natural sciences. Then it occurs that if anybody announces anything of the spirit, and someone faces him with the words: however, one reads that differently in the scriptures, he eventually convinces him or not. Perhaps, he also says to him: however, I believe more in the scriptures than in that which quite a few people may tell about the immediate experience. But the course of the spiritual life cannot be impeded. May there be many inhibitions, may those be ever so reluctant who work for theology in the sense of the mentioned medieval follower of Aristotle today, the reversal which must take place here cannot be impeded. As knowledge has risen from faith up to watching, we also ascend from faith to the watching in the spiritual realm, and behold in theosophy. Then there is no belief in letters, no theology, then there will be lively life. The spirit of life will let those participate who can hear it. The word will forge ahead and find the popular expression. The spirit speaks of the spirit. Life will be there, and theology will be the soul of this religious life.

Theosophy has this vocation concerning the divinity faculty. If theosophy represents a movement that wants to be capable of surviving, that can make life and lifeblood flow into the letters of the scholarship, then we have a certain mission. Who understands the matter in such a way does not regard us as adversaries of those who have to announce the word. If the theologians seriously dealt with the intentions of the theosophical movement, if they got involved in our intentions, they would see something in theosophy that could inspire and animate them. Not fragmentation, but the deepest peace could be between the theologically and theosophically striving human beings. One will recognise this in the course of time. One will overcome the prejudices against the theosophical movement and understand how true it is what Goethe said:

Who has science and art,
Has religion too;
Who doesn't have both,
Shall have religion.

Theosophy does not fight against any religion in any way. Somebody is a right theosophist who wishes that wisdom may flow into those who are appointed to speak to humanity, so that it should not be necessary that there are theosophists who tell something about the immediate religious view. Theosophy can welcome the day with pleasure when one speaks of wisdom in the sites from which religion should be announced. If the theologians announce the right religion that way, one does no longer need theosophy.

Note: The transcript of the four “faculty” lectures are deficient. It shows not only noticeable gaps; the author of the transcript is also not familiar with the topic of the lectures. He often made summaries in haste as far as he understood the lecturer. That is why some connections shifted. Although notices of other participants were used, the deficiencies of the text could not be essentially corrected except for some big misunderstandings.

If any issue seems to be far away from theosophy, then from the issue of this talk that tries to connect the study of law and the juridical life with the theosophical movement. Someone can only accept this as entitled who realises how deeply the theosophical movement is understood as a practical one by those who are involved in it who know its whole significance. The real theosophist takes no stock in theories and dogmas. However, the essentials of the theosophical movement are that it intervenes in the immediate life. If one speaks possibly of the theosophical movement that it has no connection with the practical life, then this may be due only to a complete misjudgement or misunderstanding of this movement.

Compared with the theosophical movement, a big number of the remaining movements appear eminently impractical because they are partial movements, without knowledge of the big connection and without knowledge of the great principles of life. Just in this respect, some question of life will occupy us. What could intervene in our life even deeper than jurisprudence? Of course, in the sense of the theosophical world view we deal less with the right or the laws. Rather we have to do it with the real relations as they face us, namely with those which face us in the figure of the human being itself, actually in our jurisprudence in the figure of our practical lawyers themselves. Hence, the topic does not have the heading The Faculty of Law and Theosophy for nothing.

Above all, it concerns the question: how does one instruct the human beings who are appointed to intervene in the violated right and compensate it? How does the university train the necessary elements, how does it instruct the lawyers? In the last talk on the divinity faculty and theosophy which could demonstrate the much more intimate relation of theosophy to our university, I had to tell you how the matters are correlated. Not so much the materialistic way of thinking as the rather deep, in the human souls deeply rooted ways of thinking of our time are those which put a certain main feature into our life. This will occupy us still more today.

You see, with one single fact I could illustrate the situation in which we are if we touch the topic: the faculty of law and the theosophical movement. Who has dealt with the faculty of law only in some degree knows the name Rudolf of Jhering (1818–1892) not only because of his writing: The Struggle for Law (1872). Everybody also knows, which significance his great work has: Laws as Means to an End (1877–1883).

In this work something is created that is basic for a whole sum of principal views in our conception of legality and in our jurisprudence. Jhering was certainly one of our most significant legal scholars. Who was lucky to be present once at a talk of Jhering knows how impressively this teacher of law has spoken. It was something frank in his nature. I still remember that Jhering said in a lesson: I have spoken for the last time about this or that question; I have considered the thing once again and have still to inform about essential changes. Among those who have done something similar in other fields the physicist Helmholtz (1821–1894) has to be mentioned who had such great results with his significant works, in spite of the modest way in which he worked. I instance Jhering because he worked originally and deeply.

He was an excellent lawyer who deeply intervened in jurisprudence of our days. In his work Laws as Means to an End you find an important sentence. I would like to read out it literally: “If I have ever regretted that my development took place in a period when philosophy got to discredit, it concerns the present work, too. What the young man missed at that time under the disfavour of the ruling mood, the mature man could not catch up.” Such a remark points to a deep lack concerning the education of the lawyers. What has lacked here, you find this not only expressed in the whole public life, as far as it is dependent on juridical relations, but also in the literature, not only the juridical one, but the whole literature, as far as this is influenced by juridical thinking. You find it also in all reform literature. You find it everywhere, also in the practical life because the most important is absent, namely a real knowledge of life and of the human soul.

Why is it absent? Because our impractical practitioners have no idea how the everyday life is connected with the deep principles of the single human soul. Look around with our economists, look around with those who write or speak in the service of a reform movement. Who has a mathematically trained thinking who is able to build up his chain of thoughts strictly logically sees that it is absent everywhere, and he remembers a significant speech that John Stuart Mill (1806–1873, English philosopher) held where he says that it is necessary above all that a real education of thinking, an education concerning the most elementary principles of the soul life penetrates our public relations.

It doesn't take much to train his thoughts in this way as it would be necessary to become a reformer really. Three weeks would be enough if one got involved in a real theory of principles of thinking. Indeed, then you have only the possibility to think correctly and educated, but who thinks correctly and educated, puts aside a lot of what is written today because he cannot endure what a jumble of impossible thinking is contained in it. Realise only once that this is a practical question in the most remarkable sense. If one wanted to build a tunnel and started drilling and digging with the knowledge of the usual bricklayer on one side of the mountain and believed that he came out without fail on the other side and has built a big tunnel, you would presumably consider him a fool. But today in all fields of life one does this in almost the same manner.

What is necessary to construct a tunnel, a railway, a bridge? The knowledge of the first principles of mathematics and mechanics and of that what enables us from the start to foresee something of the layers and formations of the mountain. Only a skilled engineer is able to initiate such a work really, and only that is the real practitioner who approaches the praxis on the basis of the complete theory. The world completely overlooks the most important questions of life, nay, one calls just those impractical people who believe that knowledge is necessary to solve the big questions of life. So we see the failed tunnels in all fields of human life because of insufficient basic knowledge. People do not realise that it is necessary, before one approaches a practical reform movement, to acquire the whole basic knowledge of the human soul and to get things straight concerning the possibilities and impossibilities in this and that field.

This comes to the fore in the explanations of the great lawyer concerning the basic education. For he missed such a basic philosophical education concerning his science and admitted that sincerely. Hence, you see that I am faraway to criticise a single person or an institution. I wanted only to give a characteristic of the relations that face us in life. Then our question will answer itself the easiest which practical significance the theosophical movement has for jurisprudence.

Jurisprudence developed most unfavourably in the course of the historical relations because it developed as it expresses itself in the most different legal systems and schools only in a time in which the materialistic thinking had already seized all circles. The other sciences go back to the older times, and those which rest on natural history have their support in the steady facts which does not allow to deviate so easily in all directions.

Of course, someone who builds a bridge wrong sees very soon the results of his dilettantish action. It is not so simple, however, with the facts that face us in the spiritual field. There one can fudge, and one can contend whether a thing is good or bad. There is apparently no objective criterion. However, there will also be objective criteria gradually in this respect. I said that Jhering missed a basic philosophical education with himself. I say that one can miss this where one intervenes in our life.

You may say that philosophy is not theosophy. But that matters. In certain respect, philosophy was the basic discipline of all remaining studies for some time in the 16th, 17th centuries, even in the 18th century until the 19th century. We have seen last time which disadvantage it has brought to theology that philosophy was no longer this basis of the studies. But in theology there is a substitute of the lacking philosophical study. There is no substitute on the field of law. When the old high schools had developed from the old schools, philosophy was caught a little bit between two stools. Once there were pre-studies at all universities where the students got an overview of the manifold disciplines by which they could also get an overview of the principles of life. Nobody advanced to the higher faculties without having acquired a real knowledge of the principles of life. Now one considers philosophising redundant because one believes that the high school gives the general education. But today also this has disappeared in the high schools. Only few old-fashioned people represent the point of view even today that one should do a little logic and psychology also in the high school.

Thus it happened that the study of law became a one-sided professional study. The other faculties have basically also no own pre-studies which provide a general, real knowledge of life and a deep sight into the riddles and the questions of life. Hence, the students early approach the special questions and must necessarily obsess about these special problems more and more. Thus it happened that the lawyer is already steered in a particular direction during his education. This does not refer to details; but someone who has been filled with particular forms of concepts for years can no longer get away from these concepts. The requirements are those that he must consider everybody as a fool who has kept a certain freedom of thinking with regard to such concepts that have become quite solid for him during his academic years.

Philosophy became something that has no connection with life in a certain respect just in that time in which our modern thinking developed. In the Middle Ages, there was no philosophy which was separated, I mean, which was separated practically from theology. Everything that philosophy treated went back to the big and comprehensive questions of existence. This has changed in modern times. Philosophy has emancipated itself; it has become a science because it has no longer any direct connection with the central issues of life. I will explain this in the talk on the arts faculty in detail. That is why it has happened that one could study philosophy for centuries without connecting anything really living with its terminology. In the 18-th century there still was something that made philosophy the world wisdom. When Schelling, Hegel and Fichte came, the immediate life was grasped. However, these spirits were not understood. A short heyday was there in the first time of the 19-th century. Then, however, one generally did not understand how to connect philosophy really with life and to found such a connection between life and the highest principles of thinking in all fields as it exists between mathematics, the differential calculus and the bridge building.

We want that those who work on life realise that it is necessary to have certain requirements as one must have studied mathematics before one constructs a bridge. Theosophy does not want to teach dogmas, but a way of thinking and an approach to life; the approach to life which should be the opposite of messing about everything, which should found a view of life on serious principles. You need to know nothing about the principles and, nevertheless, you can be a good theosophist if you simply want to go to the origin of the matters. Philosophy is to blame if it is discredited by those who prepare themselves for the big questions of life, because it should just be a kind of world wisdom. Those who developed our legal wisdom to the legal system could not go back to the philosophical attitude. The natural sciences still go back to mathematics, of course, go back to the rational, to mechanics et etcetera, and anybody cannot be a naturalist who does not know these first principles really.

The development of law shows the necessity to acquire an awareness of the fact that also the law must arise from a basic education which is as certain as the mathematical one. It is interesting that that nation which developed the right in the most eminent sense became great in the history of humanity by the development of law that the Roman people, magnificent just in this field, was small concerning that way of thinking which one must demand also for this field: the Romans did not achieve a single mathematical theorem! A totally unmathematical and inexact way of thinking formed the basis of the Roman thinking. Hence, the prejudice crept in the course of centuries that it would be impossible to have such a basis for the fields of jurisprudence and social science as one has it for the remaining technical fields.

I would like to quote a typical symptom of this fact. Fifteen years ago, an important lawyer acceded the presidency of the university of Vienna, Adolf Exner (1841–1894). He was a significant teacher of the Roman right. He spoke about the political education with his appointment. The whole sense of his talk was that it would be a mistake to appreciate the natural sciences so much, because the scientific thinking is not suited to intervene anyhow practically in the social and ethical questions of existence. Against it, he emphasised the necessity that would be founded upon the view of the juridical relations. Then he explained how the juridical conditions cannot be influenced by the scientific thinking. He says: in the natural sciences we look into the first principles. We see how in simple cases the matters are, but in the complex cases of life nobody can lead back the matters to such simple condition.

It is typical that a great man of our time not even sees that it would be our task to create a thinking as clear and transparent in the field of life as we were able to create it in the fields of the external sensuous natural phenomena. This must be just our task to realise that we can be effective only practically in the external field of the big tunnel construction if we are able to lead back all matters of life also to sharp concepts as we are able to lead back the rough matters to mathematical concepts. Jhering says in his book Laws as Means to an End that it is a big lack of our law education as well as in our practical legal life that the human beings who have to introduce anyway in the law are not trained in such a way to work immediately educationally, immediately technically learning, teaching and working in life. Then he says that one can be a lawyer, as well as one is a mathematician who has solved his task if he has carried out his calculation.

Again Jhering does not realise that mathematics has real significance only, since the thinking of the natural sciences has gained significance. One has found the way from the head to the hand if anything becomes practical activity. Then everything is of practical significance that is connected with jurisprudence and the social ethics if it is as clear as it is with mathematics which is necessary if one builds a tunnel. Then one also realises that any partial attempt looks in such a way, as if anybody carved stones, heaped them and believed that a house would come into being. Nothing is conquered or built in the field of the feminist movement or any other social movement unless a plan forms the basis of the whole. Otherwise the carving of stones would be an eminently impractical work.

It does not matter that we stuff ourselves with theories and we could derive all details from the big principles if we absorbed the system. We have to work free of dilettantism and to implement the big principles in life, in the immediate life. We have to work like the engineer works with that what he has learnt even if he has a much lower task, namely to intervene in the lifeless existence. We have to work like somebody works, after he has investigated the whole principles and has recognised them correctly. It is important to recognise the real principles of existence and to be connected with them. Otherwise nothing can be accomplished in the field of law in particular.

It is quite certain that hardly a lawyer leaves our institutions who is not prejudiced by a system of concepts unless he has before got to know the science of life in the conceivably biggest circumference. It is hard to speak popularly just about this question today. One cannot go into particular examples of the legal life, because today, unfortunately, it is a fact that jurisprudence is the most unpopular science, not only because it is liked least of all, but also because it has the least effect.

The juridical thinking can hardly be proportioned with healthy thinking and harmonised even less with life. Many among you doubt that one can obtain firm principles in jurisprudence and in the social life as one can gain them for the natural sciences directed to the sensuous. One requirement would be that our time again would get involved to seek where the human being still had a higher exact thinking and where one tried once to bring some concepts to a clear shape similar to mathematics. Everybody has the possibility, to familiarise himself on the cheap. Take a Reclam booklet in hand: The Self-Sufficient Trading State by Johann Gottlieb Fichte. I am far away to defend the contents of this booklet or to attribute any significance to it for our modern life. I wanted only to show how one can also proceed in this fields as practically as mathematics proceeds with the bridge building. Nevertheless, life becomes something particular in a given case. Someone who puts up general principles cannot apply them in life. It is just the same case with the natural sciences. Real ellipses, real circles exist nowhere. You know that one of Kepler's laws is this that the planets orbit the sun. Do you believe that this is applicable in this simplicity? Realise once whether the earth really depicts an ellipse which we draw on the board. Nevertheless, it is most necessary that we approach reality with such things, although they do not exist really.

Mathematics also does not exist in the immediate life, and, nevertheless, we use it in the immediate life. Not before one will see that there is anything, also in relation to the legal life, that is positioned to life like mathematics to nature, one will also be able to have a healthy view of this legal life again. However, the knowledge exists that there is a kind of mathematics, a way of thinking for the whole life; this knowledge and nothing else is theosophy!

Mathematics is nothing else than an internal experience. You can nowhere learn externally what mathematics is. There is no mathematical theorem which would not have resulted from self-knowledge, the self-knowledge of the mind in time and space. We need such self-knowledge. There is such self-knowledge also for the higher fields of existence. There is a mathesis as the Gnostics say. It is not mathematics what we apply to life, but something similar. There is such a thing also concerning jurisprudence and medicine, also concerning all fields of life and, above all, also concerning the social cooperation of the human beings. Any talking of mysticism as of something unclear is based on the fact that one does not know what mysticism is. Therefore, the Gnostics, the great mystics of the first Christian centuries, called their teachings mathesis because they formed a self-knowledge from it. If one has recognised this, one also knows what theosophy wants, and that one should be afraid without theosophical attitude to lift even a finger concerning the practical questions of life, as one must also be afraid to drill the Simplon Tunnel without knowledge of geology and mathematics.

This is the big severity that forms the basis of the theosophical world view, and what we have to keep in sight also clearly if we talk about such questions like about jurisprudence. Only then we have a healthy juridical education again if our greatest lawyers do not have to complain of a lacking basis of our knowledge if one has developed an awareness again, how that would be as I have suggested. This is the mishap of jurisprudence how it has developed during the last centuries when one did no longer know that there is such a thing like mathesis. The great philosopher Leibniz was a magnificent lawyer, a great practitioner and a great mathematician; who knows philosophy, knows him only too well. This may be to you a guarantee that Leibniz had a right view of these matters. What does he say about a juridical education without a basic practical training? He says: you will be in the legal life like in a labyrinth from which you find no exit. So single reforms are sought just concerning the legal life. There is a legal alliance; it is led by a former theologian. He tries in certain way to substitute our juridical concepts by something healthier. But also here one sees how from the sciences which are less accustomed to an exact thinking than the mathematicians and the physical scientists also nothing beneficial results. You find everywhere that the real insight of the question of fault is absent. Not before one recognises what is concerned, one realises that one has to know life before one has the norms of life. Only then we will have a healthy study.

The lawyer should study knowledge of life at first. How is our lawyer confronted with the questions of the soul life today, and how would he have to face it? Not only in such a way that he depends on the experts. He is confronted with the matters like a dilettante. The deep look into the soul life only enables him to draft a bill. But only he is able to judge somebody who has deviated from the law. You can only project your thoughts into the law of human life if you have exercised psychology. I do not want to speak of the theosophical view about the development of the human soul. The world still is too far back to have a deeper understanding of the more intimate problems of life. However, actually, everybody would have to see what is said with the words: true study of the soul and of the social life.

This would have to be the basis, the first instructions which the lawyer receives at the university: extensive study of the human being. Not until he has studied the human being as such, also as soul, namely in such clean sphere as the physical scientist tries to study the scientific problems, not until he can delve into in the soul life like a mystic, he is ripe to treat real soul questions that have an effect, that are ordered according to a plan in the public life.

Is it not sad if today in the economics the most unbelievable bustles about, also with so-called experts? Imagine that simple concepts that the economist could realise are not yet decisively grasped. Take the difference between productive and unproductive labour. You cannot decide there if you do not realise how productive and unproductive labour have an effect in the public life. Any such work is completely useless without this clarity. It can still happen that two significant economists argue whether a branch of the public life like the business activity is a productive or unproductive activity.

It is a defamation of theosophy in certain respect if one attributes any nebulosity to it. Those who know the intentions of theosophy emphasise over and over again that it strives for extreme clarity, for the most mellow way of thinking in all fields of life according to the pattern of mathematics. If this is the case, the most favourable must be expected from a fertilisation of our legal life by our movement. Then it will be the result of such a fertilisation that the future lawyer learns how spiritual facts are working in the human life. He realises that whole fields remain unproductive because he cannot get involved in understanding suggestion or other soul phenomena that are due to inner or outer causes.

The suggestions work so tremendously in our public life that one can easily realise that in big assemblies of thousands of human beings not free conviction but suggestion by the speaker works on the listeners. And the listeners spread the suggestion, so that many actions come about under the influence of a suggestion. However, somebody who intervenes in the practical life must know and observe such imponderables. If one knows to observe this way well, one also gets around to realising which effects such suggestions have.

There you already have such a network which extends about our life. There one tells to us what should happen in this or that field of life. If we know life, we know that it gives us nothing but a sum of suggestions at first. The one gives those of the social question, the other of the national question, the third of a third question. If theosophy has become a common property of humanity, it is never possible that somebody who has to deal with the public life does not figure such a thing out. And if you realise how the suggestions work and determine our legal conditions, then you realise that these conditions can only be cured by the theosophical way of thinking. Then it will become also clear that an essential part of that what is done in our faculty of law, a big part of mere knowledge could be cancelled, because the lawyer can also acquire this in practice. Everybody knows what practical work is. One can overcome the practical in much shorter time if one has settled down in the big questions of existence that comprise the big questions of life by themselves, the questions which the lawyer cannot touch like the question of responsibility. How does one debate about that, as for example Lombroso (Cesare L., 1836–1909) in Italy? It is impossible to somebody who figures them out to put up such pros and cons as this normally happens. This is only possible because there people take part who are not practically trained.

Which right do we have to punish? This is also a question which is answered in the most different way. All these matters are not to be solved with the means of our modern practical jurisprudence. If, however, the lawyer cannot get involved deeper in it, he acts without understanding the last principles. Then he must act dependently. But the lawyer has to be a really free man. We have to demand this from nobody more than from the lawyers. Savigny (Friedrich Karl von S., 1779–1861), the significant legal teacher, said once: law is nothing for itself, but it is an expression of life; hence, it also had to be created out of life

Take once the most various views of law which one had in the course of the 19th century, and you realise how little these views were born out of the real practise. There are schools of natural law which believe to be able to derive the law from the human nature. Later one said: the one thinks the right this way, the other that way, the one nation this way, the other nation that way. Then there came the historical law. An interesting attempt was also lately made with the positivistic law. Various experiments were done which do not start from the indicated attitude. To have a historical view of law is as impossible as a historical view of mathematics. It is impossible to found the law historically. It is not possible to prove this important sentence now. To investigate something a little bit “positivistically” would mean that one does not construct purely spiritual networks with mathematics, but that one puts together three rods, measures the angles and forms then the mathematical theorem of the sum of the angles in the triangle. These would be a “positivistic” explanation.

I wanted to speak only about the basis of the attitude and about the relation to that which theosophy can be in life praxis. I wanted to show how in all fields and in particular also in this field the theosophical way of thinking and theosophical attitude could be fertile and useful. The prejudice is spread that theosophy is something that the human being invents to have personal satisfaction. But that is a bad theosophist who has this view. The true theosophist realises that theosophy is life, whereas in the so-called practical life so many attempts are tremendously impractical. It is painful to see seeds everywhere in the single attempts where everybody wants to mess about in the public life; if all impractical movements get together in the big circle that does not face life in an unfamiliar way, but wants to enclose life, then an improvement could probably result. Theosophy itself cannot solve the question. But life pours out from that which it gives. Next time we see how with the doctors another feature comes in our life if they become practical theosophists. It concerns this feature, this undertone of a renewed life. If we understand this, a breath of theosophical attitude has to pour out about all branches of the practical life reform. Then one understands the theosophical movement and also all remaining life.

This has been stressed again and again because certain problems cannot be improved, as long as one does not want to deal with the things really because the human beings judge, long before they have acquired the most exact knowledge of the things. Those who want to intervene with the theosophical movement practically could easily mess about also in other attempts. It would be easy to lend a hand in certain fields if we expected anything only in the least from it, as long as we do not develop the practical sense which many people regard as something impractical.

It would be easy if we did not know that the centre must be controlled, before one goes to the periphery. It would be easy if we did not know that this is true: if you want to create better conditions in the world, you must give people the possibility to become better. In no field this remark is as justified as in the field of jurisprudence. Although the theosophical movement tries to have a practical, a stimulating effect in this field, we shall realise that all disputes between Romanists and Germanists, between historians and the representatives of natural law et etcetera disappear. If we get to that which is real movement and life, if we attain the attitude which asserts itself also against the external sensuous work because life would reprimand us if we could not face it properly, then we have become theosophists and real practitioners.

Note: The transcript of the four “faculty” lectures are deficient. It shows not only noticeable gaps; the author of the transcript is also not familiar with the topic of the lectures. He often made summaries in haste as far as he understood the lecturer. That is why some connections shifted. Although notices of other participants were used, the deficiencies of the text could not be essentially corrected except for some big misunderstandings.

It is a preliminary work of theosophy to illumine all fields of the present spiritual life comprehensively and to show how theosophical thoughts and ideas can work in every field of this modern spiritual life if they are accepted. Then they can prepare a full understanding of that which theosophy has to say in every field of our spiritual life. The modern human beings live in images and suggestions of the public life which, of course, influence them strongly, images that directly counteract our views and would gradually undermine them unless the ideas of theosophy flowed into these views. Fichte says that ideals cannot be applied directly in life, but ideals should be the propelling forces of life. Theosophy aims at this.

The doctor who has set himself the task to heal is freer than the lawyer. He is not restricted by prejudices and authorities and, hence, some doctors are found who co-operate with us. However, we do not want to interfere in the quarrel of the parties, this would be a subjective behaviour; we want to explain quite objectively only what theosophy has to say concerning the medical science. And we want always to bear in mind that theosophy can be hard understood, very hard by those who have lived under the constraint of studies. Only someone who freely stands there does not find any conflict between true science and what theosophy wants. Theosophy completely acknowledges the tremendous progress which the natural sciences have done during the last centuries and particularly in the last decades.

There are in all fields of culture big cyclic laws which refer also to the negative and to the positive sides of culture. If also in the medical science so much is uncertain today, we have to realise that the basic cause of this uncertainty is deeply rooted in our ways of thinking. These ways of thinking are rooted deeper than all theories which one acquires in any science. And they cannot be simply altered, but only replaced bit by bit with others. Today the materialistic, mechanistic thinking of our time influences all these ways of thinking.

How does the modern doctor despise medical science of the Middle Ages and antiquity; and, nevertheless, the future doctor could learn a lot from the history of the medicine of those ancient times. He could learn some other views than they prevail in the present medicine. The fewest doctors today know the theories of Galen, two to three centuries AD, for example, and the medical scholasticism of the Middle Ages. One looks wrongly down at this ancient medical science. If the modern doctors wanted to get to know them, they would be able to get to know something valuable. The Hippocratic doctrine, which teaches that the human being is composed of four elements earth, water, air and fire, excites sneer. If is spoken there of black and white bile, phlegm, blood and their relations to the planets of our solar system, are this no such theories as one puts up theories today. However, these theories have made the medical intuition fertile which gave old doctors the possibility to carry on the medical profession in quite different way than the modern doctor can do it.

The shamans of savage tribes have a principle that is accepted only by few reasonable persons. It is the same principle that also forms the basis of the oriental medicine, namely that the doctor, who wants to heal, must have absorbed qualities in himself which enable him to understand life from quite another side.

It may be an example of that what I mean if we look at a people that does not belong to the present cultural nations, to the Hindus. The doctors of the Hindus apply a principle which forms the basis of immunisation, the vaccination, as we know it, with an antiserum. They combat a certain form of disease, applying the cause of the disease as a remedy. The Hindu doctors heal snakebites, while they work on the wound with their saliva. The saliva is prepared by training, the doctors have immunised themselves against snakebites, against snake venom, exposing themselves to snakebites. It is their view that the doctor can also cause something bodily by something that he develops in himself. All remedial effects of a person on a person are based on this principle. With the Hindus a certain initiation forms the basis of this principle. You know that the human being becomes a different person by a certain training. The forces which another human being does not have are developed with them completely just as a piece of iron develops its strength by touching with a magnet.

The young doctor would receive quite different feelings with respect to healing if he became engrossed in the real history of medicine. Nevertheless, the words whose sense he cannot find out nowadays contain a deep sense, even if he denies it with a sneer.

It is pitiful that our whole science is infiltrated with materialistic imponderables; thus it is hardly conceivable that anybody frees himself from them and learns to think independently. Our whole scientific foundation of anatomy, physiology, comes from this materialistic way of thinking. In the 16-th century, Vesalius (Andreas V., 1514–1564, Belgian anatomist) gave the first teachings of anatomy, Harvey (William H., 1578-1657, English anatomist) gave the teachings of the blood circulation in the materialistic sense; according to this system the 17th and 18th centuries taught. The human being had to think materialistically for some centuries to do all big discoveries and inventions which we owe to these times. This way of thinking taught us to produce certain substances in the laboratory we owe Liebig's (Justus von L., 1803–1873, German chemist) epoch-making discoveries to it-, but it also led to regard the human cover as the only one. It is difficult to reconcile what we call life with the concept which the materialistic doctor has of it. Only someone who knows by intuition what life is can really penetrate to the understanding of life. And somebody like this also knows that the effectiveness of chemical and physical laws in the human body is controlled by something the term of which is absent, which can be recognised only by intuition. Not before the doctor himself has become another person, he can realise this. With a certain training he has to acquire the concepts and then the insight of the mode of action of our etheric body. The usual reason, the usual human intellect, is incapable to understand the spiritual; as soon as it should advance to higher fields, it fails. Hence, without intuition everything in the medical field is only discussing; one does not touch reality. Higher, subtler forces are necessary that must be developed by the doctor, then only a thorough healing of certain damages is possible.

We theosophists know, for example, from occult investigations that vivisection works deeply damaging in certain respect. What happens in this field is deeply damaging. We theosophists cannot appreciate the ostensible merits of the vivisectors. Indeed, we would not be understood if we expounded the reasons why we refuse vivisection; without getting involved in theosophical concepts, one would not understand just these reasons. Vivisection originated from the materialistic way of thinking which is destitute of any intuition which cannot look in the works of life. This way of thinking must look at the body as a mechanical interaction of the single parts. Then it is quite natural that one takes the animal experiment where one believes that the same interaction takes place as with the human being to recognise and combat certain illness processes. Only who knows nothing about the real life can do vivisection.

A time comes when the human beings figure out the single life of a creature in connection with the life of the whole universe. The human beings get reverence for life. Then they learn to realise: any life that is taken away from a living being, any harm that is caused to a living being lessens the noblest forces of our own human nature because of a connection which exists between life and life. Just as a quantity of mechanical work can be transformed into heat, something changes by the homicide of a living being in the human being, so that he becomes unable to have an curative and beneficial effect on his fellow men. This is an unbreakable principle. Here everything nebulous, everything unclear is strictly impossible. Here rules mathematical clarity.

If the human beings got involved in that which forms the basis here, they would also see the influence that must be exercised to be able to heal, to be a healer as a doctor. If the person concerned wants to be a doctor and a healer, he must improve and purify his nature at first. He has to develop it to that stage where only certain sensations and feelings can appear to us. Here it depends on trying! There one has to learn to realise first that the usual reason can be extended, can be spirtualised. It is a triviality saying: here and there are the limits of our knowledge methods. There are still other knowledge methods than those are which our reason uses. But, unfortunately, few persons realise this. Here it depends on wanting to defer to the theosophical attitude. Not before the sense-perceptible facts of anatomy and physiology are not only taught, not before one approaches them with “the eyes of the spirit,” as Goethe says, another study of the human body takes place. And only then all discoveries of the last decades concerning the medical science receive the correct light to recognise, for example, certain relations of the thyroid gland with other functions.

Not before one approaches theosophical knowledge, one sees every matter in its right hue and receives quite different values. The knowledge of the spiritual that connects the facts in these fields is still missing in the search for knowledge. Certain concepts which one has obtained may be absolutely correct, but the methods of application may be wrong. Often two great authorities of a certain field say just the opposite about the same subject. Where from do such things result? From the fact that thinking itself has been urged in a certain one-sided direction with each of these authorities.

You may ask now: would it not be possible that the human being if he always lives a healthy life develops the things in himself that make him immune against illnesses, and could he not educate his organism to be able to endure illnesses? You have to bring the thinking into another direction, then truths appear in this field, and you get another direction of researching. The modern thinking has something absolute, final and is penetrated with the confidence in its infallibility; you can realise something papal in the way someone acquires such concepts. Research is determined by the way how one puts the questions to nature. If one asks it wrongly, it gives wrong answers. The experiments, the questions to nature bear a peculiar imprint in the 19-th, 20-th centuries: that of coincidence. You can often notice all possible attempts that are put next to each other grotesquely. This comes from the lack of intuition, especially in the medical science. However, it is really also possible to come to a free thinking within the medical science.

The modern doctor who has left the university and is unleashed on the suffering humanity is often in a unenviable state. The medical study has thrown him into a confusion of concepts where he cannot form an opinion. Then he finds a way of thinking with his patients, which does not want to get involved in thoroughness, they regard that as a Gospel which refers to any authority. The doctor often suffers hard from the prejudices of the patients. The doctor is only capable of something if he studies the subtle processes that happen in an ill body with the aid of life itself; but the patient must also assist.

Certain illnesses are connected with certain cyclic developments and conditions; certain illnesses are based on [gap in the shorthand] and occur according to certain physical laws. This appears to somebody who investigates certain illness forms with theosophical spirit. Big lines are developed in such thinking, which are the guidelines of life itself. And they give that certainty which is connected with a relentless striving and fulfils with confidence. Some regular world relations were revealed to someone thinking that way which fulfil the soul with deep, religious feelings at the same time. The Tübingen doctor Schlegel (Emil S., 1852–1935) is a typical and symptomatic example of all those who seek for a way out from the labyrinth of modern medicine. This doctor is at the beginning of a big career; he has some intuitions of a natural medicine, and he dares to connect religion and healing power with each other.

A human being whose thinking is spiritual can never take part in those attempts symptomatic for our present in the medical field. For he knows: all single attempts are only really effective if one gets down to the root of the evil, to the core of the thing. All polemic cannot cause any radical reversal; only a quite different thinking is capable of it.

A materialistically trained person cannot understand this. But we human beings must not misunderstand ourselves in this world. The theosophically thinking person understands that the materialistically minded person does not understand him because he is not able of it. Goethe expresses what is meant here saying: “a wrong doctrine cannot be disproved, because it is based on the conviction that the wrong is true.” The ways of thinking of our time must experience a radical reversal; then an improvement of the feelings and sensations results completely by itself up to intuition. Not before the medical science gains this, it will have something again that works in a salutary way, then only a religious feature inspires it again and then only the doctor is that which he should be: the noblest human friend who feels obliged to bring up his profession by his own perfection as high as possible.

Note: The transcript of the four “faculty” lectures are deficient. It shows not only noticeable gaps; the author of the transcript is also not familiar with the topic of the lectures. He often made summaries in haste as far as he understood the lecturer. That is why some connections shifted. Although notices of other participants were used, the deficiencies of the text could not be essentially corrected except for some big misunderstandings.

In the order of the talks on the relation of the universities to the theosophical movement it is the fourth about theosophy and its relation to the arts faculty (in Germany: faculty of philosophy). We have to consider the fact that this is possibly of more significance to our education and culture than the three other faculties, because the arts faculty encloses the scientific disciplines which extend about the whole field of research. That is why somebody who wants to become engrossed in wisdom and world view without certain trend simply for the sake of knowledge and education has to direct his looks at it. The arts faculty has experienced big changes; however, it has grown out of an educational institution to a sophisticating one. It was once the arts faculty a very typical name that had to prepare for the study of theology, philosophy, and medicine.

You know that the university originated in the 12th and 13th centuries, and we can still observe up to the 18th century how somebody who wanted to climb up to the heights by studying had to go through a philosophical preparatory study. This was arranged in such a way that one did not aim at any certain professional education, but at a formal education which should form the spiritual training of a human being in a formal way. Among other things, rhetoric, dialectic, astronomy and music were taught. The latter was understood as an understanding of the harmonies in the universe and in the smaller phenomena which surround us. One appreciated it to make only the mind ripe. The feature of our time is to set little store by the formal education.

Besides, I must touch something that looks very heretical in our time. Today a big tendency exists to underestimate everything formal compared with the material. One makes a point conceiving the matters rationally, bundling together as much knowledge as possible. Who looks at the matters in such a way as it is usual today, does not understand me. Who would not side immediately if anybody said the following: there are two methods to learn languages. A method, which is regarded as ridiculous, is that by which the human being is tormented with pointless exercises, as such as: today, my father has become fifty years old. Tomorrow, my aunt travels to Paris. One smiles at such things and it is still the question whether one has any cause of it.

One thinks today that one could better take sentences from any great classic. Thus it has come to avoid such banal sentences at school; one prefers sentences of the classics who are then shredded and analysed and become thereby unenjoyable for the pupil. On one side, we find the pointless, on the other side, the picking to pieces. There one hardly finds anybody today who sides the first way. Nevertheless, it is for the psychologist no question that the first way is the right one. He is clear in his mind that the human being must remain at the formal very long, that his reason is invoked very late, and that we learn best of all if the things leave us very uninterested as regards contents. During the years in which the mind is most receptive, one has to develop it rightly at first. We have to learn to talk fairly, before our thoughts are transformed with it; one lets the reason mature in the subsoil, lets it develop the ability of logic formally, then this precious good of humankind slowly matures. It is clear that nobody can apply his reason to a problem without further ado. So at first formal education, before that matures which can appear as the best fruit in the human being.

The faculty of philosophy was called arts faculty in the Middle Ages. It was an artistic mastery of the mental material, and it contained an overwhelming quantity of thoughts. Later on, the lower subjects of the arts faculty were assigned for the high school. The modern arts faculty is unworthy of its name; it is an aggregate.

This is not always the case. The philosopher Fichte (1762–1814) headed the Berlin university when it was founded (1810). At that time, any single scientific discipline was integrated into a big organism. Fichte was convinced that the world is a unity, and that any knowledge is a patchwork that is not steeped in it. Why does one study botany, mathematics, history, for example? We study these sciences because we want to obtain an insight into the construction of the universe. In other times, the penetration in the scientific disciplines would not have been so fateful. But the picture of the unity of the world has disappeared. The arts faculty should pursue science on its own sake. It did this once, but thereby it has collided with the cultural life. Already Friedrich Schiller spoke in a talk at the Jena university of the difference between the philosophical head and the bread-and-butter scholar. At that time, it was not yet so bad. Who is a philosophical head can study everything; the biggest points of view present themselves to him from every science. He sees the biggest world secrets in the plant as the psychologist realises them in the human soul. Specialisation had to take place. We know too much today to master everything. Great spirits like Leibniz, Leonardo da Vinci and others could control the knowledge of their times. This is rare today. We can only hope that the scientific disciplines get new life. However, to the bread-and-butter scholar science is nothing but a cow that gives him milk.

One would object nothing if professional schools were established for studies that provide well-paid jobs. However, this has no other value than learning any other trade. From the point of view of world knowledge it is quite irrelevant whether I become a shoemaker or a chemist. The consciousness should become general that the professional study is not more valuable than any other study in life. The chemist, botanist et etcetera is compared with the great philosopher in the same position as the businessman. Who realises, however, what it means to acquire philosophical education knows that there must be sites where one pursues science for its own sake. In this respect, it is not good that the university split up into scientific disciplines, in particular in a time in which materialism has seized everything. Nowadays, the arts faculty is nothing else than a preparatory site for the grammar school teacher. Actually nothing at all would objected if philosophy devoted itself to the task to train educated teachers. Training the human soul belongs to the highest tasks of life. However, only someone can solve them who is an artist of psychology and can undertake the task to guide the souls. The human being was called a microcosm by the great spirits of the world not without reason. There is no branch of knowledge that one could not use to train a human soul. Hence, the pedagogues do not want to cram the young human being with knowledge only, and he will get to the formal quite naturally. Science takes a particular position if one looks at it as a pedagogue. If anyone studies painting or music, he is not yet a painter or a musician. That also applies to the pedagogue. All knowledge is nothing to the pedagogue if it has not proceeded to art as with the painter or musician, so that his mind, like physical organs, has immediately absorbed what he knows, so that knowledge is, as it were, completely digested. The human soul should be an organism in which the soul food is transformed, is assimilated. Only then the human being is a philosophical spirit. It is right that the universities teach the scientific disciplines. However, another human being should arise from them, a human being who has become an artist.

If one really applies the theosophical way of thinking there, it does not depend on scientific exams. As well as anyone does not own the quality of an artist who has only scholarship, also anyone does also never become an artist who has passed the necessary exams only. The problem of examinations must also be seen in a new light. The examiner has not only to examine knowledge, but also which kind of human being the examinee is, whether he has the right philosophy of life, how much of it he has made his own, to which extent he has become a new human being. This has gone unregarded in our materialistic age. When the external appearance to the senses became decisive, the modern arts faculty originated. All the other sciences originated from philosophy. Once one had the consciousness of the connection of all knowledge; but if one does not brand the Middle Ages as heretical, one does rouse prejudices. However, in those days one felt on what it depended for the world and for the human beings.

In 1388, a person was appointed professor of theology and of mathematics in Vienna. Today, a professor would faint about that. However, we know that mathematical thinking can serve well for that where to theology leads us. Who learns to think in the way that he exercises some mathematics, learns to think quite differently, can also be a mystic without becoming a romanticist. Who has not acquired a comprehensive knowledge, can abandon himself only to a suggestion. With this he enters in a professional study. What can he know if he has experienced a purely philosophical higher education, what can he know about mathematics? Only mathematical concepts, having no inkling of the fact that mathematics introduces in the great principles of the universe.

It is not long ago when one still knew this. In the Middle Ages, this view was not dangerous, because it is not true that the iron theology of the Middle Ages put everybody in irons. The best proof is that at the Paris university one argued, for example, about such subject like: The Speeches of Theology Are Founded on Fables or The Christian Religion Prevents from Adding Something Superficial to Theology. It was possible at that time to argue about these subjects. One argues differently today. Once arguing was fertile because one had acquired formal education. Today one can prove errors in reasoning very easily. But any arguing that is based on errors in reasoning is infertile because one is not clear in his mind that someone who argues has only to understand the technique of arguing. In the Middle Ages, mathematics was regarded as the basis of any knowledge, even of art. There could be the great idealism of which our time cannot have any idea. A typical remark by Leonardo da Vinci (1459–1519), this representative of the great idealism, is that the mechanics is the paradise of the mathematical sciences. He was an artist and mathematician at the same time. The physical education of his time lived in his soul. The way of thinking and the knowledge of his time also speak to us from his paintings. He called the external world the paradise of mathematics! Where he built bridges, thoughts about the spirit of humankind flowed to him... [Gap].

The “sacrifice of the world” means theosophically: the less someone acts for himself, the more he is capable to put something of himself into the culture of his time. It is not so important what we develop from ourselves, as what we implant in the world. Not what we perfect in ourselves, but what we give to the world is the pledge and the pound which is imperishable. Leonardo da Vinci got thoughts about the spirit of humankind as thoughts of mathematics from bridge building. The gods want free beings, they do not want a thing in nature. What the human being creates consciously in the world is an execution of the divine world plan. Something common can become something sacred if it is for the benefit of humankind. If we take this point of view, we have taken up the great idealism in ourselves, and this idealism would have to flow through the whole arts faculty. Within the frame of our arts faculty all scientific disciplines can be probably placed. But it had to be the headquarters of the world view as a core in the centre instead of taking the second place behind the single scientific disciplines.

With the help of this central philosophical science we would come to the artistic view. Only that should receive the doctorate who has absorbed this central attitude of having life in himself. The last exam of the philosopher would have to be an examination of his life forms; the only honorary title of the philosophical doctor would have to be founded on the fact that in the human being the life contents of this life form is included. Otherwise, the philosophical doctor is an arabesque, a pretension, a social form. Not only knowledge belongs to the philosophical doctor, but a knowledge transformed into art of living. One already had such consciousness. Thus a philosophical doctor will have only the maturity as it is commensurate with the philosophical head. A large dissemination of theosophy would bring it about by itself, for it wants to develop the forces that slumber in the human being. The theosophist is aware that the human being is capable of development that like the child must develop also mind and soul are capable to develop to higher stages. The human being is not yet complete when he leaves the high school and the universities. Theosophy asserts more and more that the human being is only in the beginning of his development. The arts faculty should have the greatest say. It should develop from the mathematical attitude into a spiritual direction; everything should run up to this point. Theosophy is not so difficult. It would be bound to occur that if there were a theosophical faculty all sciences would become theosophical in the end.

Physiology is the science of the phenomena in plants, animals and human beings. If in physiology the equipment of the eye is considered et etcetera, these are pictures to take the knowledge that the human being sees. Physiology teaches us that basically all our sense impressions depend on our senses; it teaches the subjective. In the end, it says that we know nothing about that which is beyond our sense impressions. If we consider this, and do not remain unthinking, but keep on investigating spiritually, we get exactly to the same teachings which occultism gives us that everything sensory is illusion and that the theory of sense energy, theosophically treated, leads into big depths. One needs physiology; one must study it and then top it with philosophy. One has no other choice. The philosophy in the arts faculty is only a piece. It does no longer have any strength; it is a discipline like other disciplines. This should not be; it had to give the strength to the other disciplines. Instead of this, it has received for its part the colouring from single professional disciplines.

The fact that one thinks substantially materially results from the fact that philosophy and the great world view do not have the saying, but rather psychology, which came from other disciplines, has become an experimental science. If one believes that psychology is done precisely only if one experiments around with the human being like with an unliving crystal, one considers the human being as something that has neither life nor soul. Psychology can recognise nothing but the material expression. Theosophy would realise that the studies of physiology and psychology are one and the same in certain way and would integrate both into the big framework of knowledge. The modern universities cannot do that and, therefore, they cannot carry any idealistic world view into the world. The arts faculty is not able to be the standard bearer of a philosophical attitude. The faculty should not be an aggregate of the various disciplines, but allow them to grow together to a common soul. Then it is taught theosophically without transplanting theosophy to the universities. Otherwise, the arts faculty remains an aggregate without spiritual bond. Knowledge should become a living whole from whose single parts the spirit shines. It satisfies us as theosophists if the prerogative belongs only to this philosophical study and if it develops on this basis. Then it is well rescued in theosophy. We want only what everybody wants for the welfare of the single sciences. Should theosophy fulfil its task, it must not be a doctrine but life. We have to be theosophists with every step, we have to impregnate everything that we do in life with this living theosophical attitude. Then the theosophical movement is more; it is like one of the most powerful cultural factors of the present. However, it has to win influence on those who are selected to lead our culture. We have to confess and represent theosophy where we want to work in life. The world process is not anything dead, but something living. The beings and not the relations cause the development of the human mind. If theosophy is a world of the spirit, then theosophy is one of the most powerful cultural factors of the present. It does not depend on the reading of theosophical writings, but on the attitude so that the human being is seized in the everyday life.

Spiritual research cannot interfere in the immediate problems of the day. Besides, the confidence must also not arise that the spiritual knowledge should be anything that floats above all reality and would have to do nothing with the life praxis. We do not want to state the events, which turn up the world directly today, in which way one treats the current events, and we do not want to belong to those who want to be blind and deaf to that which moves the human hearts immediately what concerns us directly. Between these two cliffs, the spiritual researcher has always to find the way, so that he is never merged in the opinions and the views of the everyday life. On the other side, he is never allowed to be involved in mere empty abstractions or to be addicted to authorities. I said that repeatedly from this place: spiritual science has to make us directly practical, much more practical than normally the pragmatists think. However, it should make us practical leading us in the deeply succumbing forces of life and clarify us about the things that they direct our actions in harmony with the big universal laws. Only then, one can achieve anything in the world and intervene in the activities of the world if one does it in accordance with the big universal laws.

After this premise, let me point to a few facts at first that should solely show us the importance and actuality of our questions.

Perhaps, you remember the fact that 24 August 1898 the authorised representative of the czar (Nicholas II) sent a circular to the foreign representatives accredited in Petersburg. In this circular you find, among other things, the following words, “The maintenance of the general peace and a possible lowering of the excessive armaments which press on all nations constitute an ideal in the present situation of the whole world to which the efforts of all governments should be directed.

The human and highly noble-minded striving of His Majesty, the Emperor, my elated lord, is completely dedicated to this task. In the conviction that this elated final goal corresponds to the most essential interests and the entitled wishes of all governments the imperial government believes that the present moment is extremely favourable to search for the most effective means on the way of international consultation, in order to ensure the benefits of a true and durable peace and to set an objective, above all, to the progressive development of the present armaments.”

Moreover, you find the following words in this document: “Because the financial loads increase and impair the national well-being, work and capital are headed off in great part from their natural determination and are consumed unproductively. Hundreds of millions are used to acquire dreadful destruction machines which are considered today as the last word of science and are condemned already tomorrow to lose any value as a result of any new discovery in these fields ... Because the armaments of every power grow to such an extent, they correspond less and less to the purpose which the concerning government has proposed to itself.” The document closes with the proposal that a conference with God's help should be an auspicious sign of the next century.

Certainly this manifesto arises from an intention. The last events teach us how this intention could come true. This intention is not quite new, because we can go back even centuries, and there we find a prince, Henry IV of France, in the 16th, 17th centuries, who stimulated the idea of such a general peace conference. Seven of sixteen countries were won when Heinrich IV was murdered. Nobody continued his work. If we were interested in it, we could probably trace back the intentions still much farther.

This is one range of facts. The other is this: the Hague peace conference took place. You all know the name of the meritorious person who pursues her ideal with a rare devotion and with a rare skill, the name of Bertha von Suttner (1853-1914, Austrian novelist and pacifist). A year after the Hague peace conference, she tried to collect the acts for a book in which she registered the partly nice and marvellous speeches. She prefaced the book. I ask to take into consideration that one year had passed, after Bertha von Suttner could have seen in this work of the peace conference. She already anticipated the results, after one year had passed. In the meantime, in the diametrical contrast to it, we had the bloody Transvaal war (1899-1902) with rejected mediation, and today we have war again (Russo-Japanese War 1904-1905).

Looking around in the world today, we see the struggle of many noble human beings for the idea of peace, the love for a global peace already in the hearts of high-minded idealists, and, nevertheless, so much blood has hardly flowed in other times on our earth as now. It is this a serious, very serious affair for everybody who also deals with the big mental problems. On the one hand, we have the dedicated apostles of peace with their activity. We have the excellent achievements of Bertha von Suttner, who was able to portray the frightfulness of fight and war with rare grandeur. However, we do not forget that we also have the reverse. If we do not forget that also many are among our judicious fellow-men who assure us, on the other side, again and again that they consider the fight as necessary for the progress, as something that steels the forces. Only in the fight against the opposition, the forces would grow. The researcher who has attracted so many thinkers (Ernst Haeckel), how often has he pronounced that he wishes the powerful war and that only the powerful war can further the forces in nature. Maybe he has not pronounced it so radically, but many people think that way.

Even within our spiritual-scientific movement, voices were being raised that it would be a weakness, almost a sin against the spirit of national strength if one objects anything against the war that has led to national honour, to national power. Today, in any case, the views in this area are confronted still harshly, very harshly. However, the Hague peace conference has brought one thing. It has brought the votes of a range of people who lead the public problems. A big range of the representatives of the states gave their consent in those days,—that the Hague conference could take place. One should believe that a thing that has found such an approval from such places had to be promising in the most eminent sense.

In order to be able to comment this spiritual-scientifically, we have to look a little deeper into the matters. If we pursue the question of peace as an ideal question as it has developed in the course of time, and pursue the facts of fight and quarrel, nevertheless, we must probably say that how this ideal of a general peace is pursued challenges our attention and an investigation. Many of those who practised the art of war are those in whose hearts pain and maybe even aversion of the results and effects of the war exist. Such matters induce us to ask, do the wars generally come from anything that can be eliminated by principles and views? Who looks deeper into the human souls, knows that two separate, completely different ways cause the war. One is that which we call power of judgement and reason that we call idealism, the other is the human desire, the human inclinations, the human sympathies, and antipathies. Some things would be different in the world if it were possible to regulate the desires, wishes and passions according to the principles of heart and mind without further ado. This is not possible, but the reverse has always been there in humanity up to now. For that which the passion wants, which the desire requires, the reason, even the heart creates a mask with its idealism.

If you pursue the history of the human evolution, you can put the question repeatedly, if you see lighting up principles or idealism here and there: which desires and passions are lurking in the background? If we consider this, it might be very well possible that one is not yet able to make use of the nicest principles in this question, then it could be that something else is necessary because simply the human passions, impulses and desires are not yet advanced enough to follow the idealism of the singles. You see that the question lies deeper, and we must grasp it deeper. We must really have a look at the human soul and its basic forces if we want to assess the whole thing correctly. The human being does not always see enough of his development. He often sees a small span of time only, and that is why an extensive worldview must open the look for us which, on the one side, leads deeply and allows us, on the other side, to overview the bigger periods, so that we get a judgment about the forces which have to lead us into the future.

Let us have a look once at the human soul, where we may study it in a point deeply and thoroughly. Today we have something that we could touch eight days ago, from another side. There we have a scientific theory, the so-called Darwinism. Within this scientific view, a concept plays a big role. One calls this concept the struggle for existence. At the sign of the struggle for existence, our natural sciences stood completely for decades, our whole view. The naturalists said, those beings in the world that survive in the struggle for existence best of all will remain and the others pass. So that we do not need to be surprised if those beings we have round ourselves are the best fitted ones, because they have developed through millions of years. The most efficient ones have survived; the unfit ones have declined.

The struggle for existence became the slogan of the researchers. Where from did this struggle come? It did not come from nature. Darwin himself, although he looks at it in a bigger style than his successors, took it from a view of Malthus (Thomas Robert M., 1766-1834), spreading about the human history, that view that the earth produces food in such a progression that this increase is much lower than the increase of population. Those who have dealt with these matters know that one says, the increase of food rises arithmetically, the increase of population geometrically. This causes a struggle for existence, a war of all against all.

Starting from it, Darwin also assumed the struggle for existence in the organic nature. This view does not correspond to a mere idea, but to the modern ways of life. This struggle for existence has become an actual reality as the general economic competition in the conditions of the single persons. One has seen this struggle for existence in the next nearness; one has regarded it as something natural in the human realm and has then accepted it in the natural sciences.

Ernst Haeckel, who has almost regarded war as a cultural lever, starts from such views. Struggle makes strong, the weak ones should decline. Civilisation demands that the weak ones perish.

Then economics have applied this struggle to the human world again. Thus, we have great theories within our economics, within our social theories which regard the struggle for existence as completely justified and as something that cannot be separated from the human evolution. One has further gone back on these things—not without prejudice, but with these principles—to primeval times, and there one tried to study the life of barbaric savage tribes. One believed to be able to eavesdrop on the human cultural development and believed to find the fiercest principle of war there.

Huxley (Thomas Henry H., 1825-1895, biologist) said, if we look at the nature of the animals, the struggle for existence resembles a gladiator fight, and this is a physical principle. If we look from the higher animals at the lower ones and if we get ourselves into the previous way of the world evolution, the world of facts teaches us everywhere that we live in a general struggle for existence.

You understand that this could be expressed and could be represented as a universal principle. Somebody who is clear in his mind knows that words are not pronounced which are not founded deep in the human soul says to himself that the whole soul constitution of our best men starts even today always from the view that struggle in the human race, even in the whole nature is justified.

Now you may say: but the researchers may have been quite humane persons who longed for peace, for balance and wished it in their deepest idealism. However, their profession, their science convinced them that it is not in such a way, and perhaps they wrote down their theory with a bleeding heart.—This would be an objection unless anything else had entered first. We are allowed to say that among all of those who believed to think scientifically and economically, the quoted theory was quite usual in whole Western Europe and Central Europe.

The view was quite usual that war and struggle are a physical principle from which one cannot escape. One had got rid of the old view of Rousseau (Jean-Jaques R., 1712-1778, philosopher) thoroughly—one believed—that only the human perversion has brought struggle and war, opposition and disharmony to the general peace of nature. This view of Rousseau was still spread at the end of the 18th century that if one looks into the life and activity of nature, which is still unaffected from the super civilisation of the human being, one sees harmony and peace then everywhere. Only the human being with his despotism and civilisation has brought fight and quarrel into the world.

This view of Rousseau still existed and the researchers assured us in the last third of the 19th century: yes, it would be nice if it were in such a way, but it is not the case. The facts teach us in another manner. Nevertheless, we ask ourselves seriously, has the feeling spoken or have the facts spoken? We could little argue if the facts spoke this way.

There a strange man appeared in 1880, a man who held a talk in the naturalists' meeting of 1880 in St. Petersburg in Russia, a talk that is of great importance for those who are thoroughly interested in this question. This man is the zoologist Kessler (Karl Fedorovich K., 1815-1881). He died shortly after. His talk dealt with the principle of mutual help in nature. For all those who deal with such matters seriously a quite new feature emerges from the research and scientific maturity that is stimulated by it. Here for the first time in the modern times facts of the whole nature were put together, which prove that all former theories of the struggle for existence do not comply with reality.

In this talk, the phenomenon is discussed and proven by facts that the animal species do not develop struggling for existence, but that there is a struggle for existence between two species only in exceptional cases, but not within the species. On the contrary, the individuals of a species help each other and those species survive whose individuals have a certain bent of mutual help. Not struggle, but mutual help grants long existence. One got a new point of view with it. However, modern research brought about because of a strange concatenation of circumstances that a personality that stands for the present on the most unbelievable point of view, Prince Kropotkin (Pyotr Alexeyevich K., 1842-1921, Russian anarchist, philosopher), has continued the matter. He could show with animals and tribes with an enormous sum of proven facts which significance this principle of mutual help has in nature and in the human life. I can recommend to everybody to study the German translation of this book (Mutual Aid; A Factor of Evolution, 1902). This book brings in a sum of concepts and ideas to the human being that are like a school for a spiritual attitude. Now, however, we understand these facts only correctly if we light up them esoterically if we penetrate these facts with the bases of spiritual science. I could demonstrate examples speaking quite distinctly; however, you can read them in the cited book. The principle of mutual help in nature means: those advance most of all who have developed this principle best.—The facts speak distinctly and will speak more and more distinctly for us.

If we speak of a single animal species in spiritual science, we speak of it like of a single human individual. An animal species is to us the same in a lower field as in higher fields the single human individual is. I have said it already once here: you must make a fact clear to yourselves to understand which contrast is there between the human being and the whole animal realm. This contrast expresses itself in the sentence: the human being has a biography; the animal has no biography. With the animal, we are contented if we have described the type. With the human being, we say: father, grandfather, grandson, and son; with the lion, this does not differ in such a way that we should especially describe any single one. Indeed, I know that one can argue a lot; I know that somebody who loves a dog or a monkey believes to be able to write a biography of the dog or the monkey. However, a biography should not contain what the other can know about the being, but what the being itself has known. Self-consciousness belongs to a biography, and in this sense, only the human being has a biography. This corresponds to a description of the whole animal type or species. The external expression of this fact is that any animal group has a group-soul and that any individual human being has a soul in himself. I was also allowed to discuss here already that a hidden world is directly connected with our physical world, the astral world that does not consist of such objects and beings whom you can perceive with the senses but it is made out of the substance from which our passions and desires are made. If you check the human being, you can see: that he has led his soul down to the physical plane or to the physical world. In this physical world, there is no individual soul of the animal. However, you find an individual soul of the animal that is on the so-called astral plane, in the astral world hidden behind our physical world. The animal groups have individual souls in the astral world.

There we have the difference between the human being and the animal realm. If we ask ourselves now, what fights in reality if we pursue the struggle for existence in the animal realm?—Then we must say: in reality it is the astral struggle of the passions and desires behind this struggle that is fought out between the species in the animal realm. It is rooted in the species or group souls.—However, if there were a struggle for existence within an animal species, then it would be in such a way, as if the human soul fought against itself in its different parts. This is an important truth. It cannot be the rule that there is a struggle within an animal species, but the struggle for existence can only take place between the species. For the soul of the whole species is uniform, and because it is uniform, it must control the parts.

The mutual aid within the animal realm that we can study within the species is simply the expression of the uniform activity of the species or group soul. If you look at all the examples you find cited in the mentioned interesting book, then you get a good knowledge of how the group souls work. For example, if an individual of a certain cancer species is thrown on the back by chance, so that it cannot get up itself again, then a bigger number of cancers comes along and helps it up. This mutual support results from a common soul organ of the cancer species.

Study once the way how beetles support themselves to maintain or protect a common brood, to master a dead mouse etcetera, how they combine there, support themselves, carry out common work, then you see the group soul working. You can study this up to the highest animal species. It is true: somebody who has a sense of this activity of mutual aid with the animals gets an insight, a concept, a notion of the activity of the group souls, too. Just there he can appropriate the vision with the eyes of the spirit. There the eye becomes sun-like.

However, the human being has a group soul that has become individual. In every single human being such a group soul lives. Thus, the single human being is able to fight against any single other human being like an animal group soul fights against other group souls. Let us now have a look at the purpose of the fight, whether the fight is there for the sake of the fight in the world evolution. What has emerged from the struggle of the species? Those species have remained which mostly support themselves mutually, and those which are most warlike against themselves have perished. That is the natural principle. That is why we have to say that in the external nature the developmental progress consists in the fact that peace takes the place of struggle. Where nature has arrived at a certain point, at the big turning point, there is balance; there rules peace to which the whole struggle has developed.

After all, take into consideration that plants as species struggle for existence against each other. However, consider how nicely and splendidly the plant and the animal realms support themselves mutually in their common developmental process: the animal inhales oxygen, the plant exhales oxygen. Thus, a peaceful universe is possible. What nature produces this way by its strength is determined for the human being that he produces it consciously from his individual nature. Step by step, the human being has advanced and step by step that has formed with him, which we recognise as the self-consciousness of our individual soul. We must look at our international situation in such a way that we envisage its previous development and trace its future trend. Go back to former times, and then you see group souls still in the human realm ruling first. They exist in little tribes and families; there we deal also with group souls of the human beings. The farther you look back in the world evolution, the more compact, the more uniform the human beings appear who are united that way. It is like a spirit that penetrated the ancient rural community that then became the primitive state. You could study that it was a completely different matter when Alexander the Great waged war with his hosts, from waging war today with human masses of more developed individual intentions. One must light up this properly. For this is the way of the progressive culture that the human beings become more and more individual, more independent and more conscious, more self-conscious. From groups, from common characteristics the human race has developed. Even as we have group souls that guide and direct the single animal species, the great group souls guide and direct the. The human being grows out of the guidance of the group soul more and more and becomes more and more independent by his progressive education. This independence implied that he is really—while he faced his fellow men in the groups more or less inimically—in a struggle for existence penetrating the whole humanity. This is our international situation, this is the destiny of our race in particular, and this is our immediate present.

Spiritual science distinguishes five successive races, consisting of seven sub-races, in the present world evolution at first. The first sub-race developed in ancient times, in the distant India. This sub-race was penetrated with a priest culture. This priest culture gave our present race the first impulses. It had come over from the Atlantean culture that was on that ground which forms the ground of the Atlantic now. This sub-race set the tone; then other sub-races followed, and now we are in the fifth. This is no division that is borrowed from anthropology or any race theory but a view that is discussed closer in the sixth talk of this series. The fifth sub-race furthered the distinct nature, the individual consciousness of the human being most notably. Christianity prepared the human being really to attain such an individual consciousness: the human being had to gain this self-consciousness. If we look back at the time before Christ when in ancient Egypt the huge pyramids were built, there an army of slaves did the work the difficulties and efforts of which no one has a right idea today. It was just a matter of course for these workers to build peacefully for the most time. They built because at that time the teaching of reincarnation and karma was a self-evident fact. No book says this to you, but this becomes clear to you bit by bit if you penetrate into spiritual science. Any slave who worked his hands raw and was in misery knew: this is a life of many lives, and I have what I suffer now to bear as a result of that which I prepared in my previous lives. However, if this is not the case, I experience the effect of the present life in a future life; he who orders me today was on the same point of view as I am today, or he will still be on it.

However, with this attitude, the whole self-conscious life on earth would never have developed, and the higher powers who guide the destiny of the human race in the large scale knew what they did when they atrophied the consciousness of reincarnation and karma for a while, for millenniums. This was the great previous development of Christianity that it atrophied the vision of a compensating Otherworld, and has drawn attention to the immense importance of the life on earth.

It may have gone too far in its radical realisation, but this had to happen, because the matters of the world do not develop according to the logic, but according to other principles. One has deduced eternal punishments from this life on earth; the tendency of development led to it if it is also illogical. Thus, humanity has learnt to be conscious of this one earth existence. Thereby the earth, this physical plane, became infinitely important to the human being. That had to become that way. Everything that happens in material respect could develop only from an attitude that is based on an education for this earth, apart from the ideas of reincarnation and karma. We see the result of this education: the human being has entirely settled in the physical plane. For the individual soul could only develop there, there it is separated, enclosed in this body and can look out only as an isolated special existence through its senses. With it, we have more and more of human rivalry, more and more of the effect of the special existence brought into the human race. We are not allowed to wonder that the human race is not ripe by a long stretch even today to eliminate the results of this education again.

We have seen that the present species of the animals developed to their perfection because of their mutual aid and that struggle was there only from species to species. However, if the human individuality is the same as the group soul of the animals, the human soul is only able to get a self-consciousness going through the same struggle as the animals outside in nature. As long as the human being does not yet have developed complete independence, the struggle will still last. However, the human being is appointed to consciously achieve what is there outside on the physical plane. Hence, it will lead him on the stages of consciousness to mutual aid and support because the human race is one single species. Only after the whole humanity has attained the peaceableness, as it is to be found in the animal realm, an entire, all-embracing peace will be. The struggle did not further the single animal species but mutual assistance and support. What lives as a group soul in the animal species as a single soul lives peacefully with itself, this is the uniform soul. Only the human individual soul is a particular one in this physical special being.

This is the great achievement of our soul which we obtain from the spiritual development that we really recognise the common soul that penetrates the whole human race. We do not receive it as an unaware present, but we have to get it consciously. It is the task of spiritual science to develop this uniform soul in the whole human race really. This expresses itself in our first principle: to found a brotherhood on the whole earth, without taking into consideration race, gender, skin colour etcetera. This is the recognition of the soul that is common to the whole humanity. The purification has to take place down to the passions, so that everybody understands that the same soul lives in the fellow man. In the physical, we are separated, in the mental we are a unity as the ego of humanity. However, only in the real life we can grasp and adapt this. Hence, it can be only has to foster the spiritual life that penetrates us with the common breath of this uniform soul. Not the present human beings with their principles, but the future ones who develop the consciousness of this common soul more and more establish the basis of a new race that is completely merged in mutual assistance. Hence, our first principle means a completely different thing than one usually says. We do not fight; we also do not fight against war or against anything else because struggle does not lead at all to higher development. From the struggle, every animal species has developed as a special race. Leave all struggle round us to the vicious ones who are not yet ripe enough to seek for that which the common soul of the human race finds in the spiritual life.

A real society of peace strives for spiritual knowledge, and the real peace movement is the spiritual-scientific movement. It is that peace movement as a peace movement can be in practice, because it aims at that which lives in the human being and progresses to future.

The spiritual life always developed from the East. The East was the area where the spiritual life was fostered. Here in the West was the area where the external material civilisation developed. Hence, one sees to the East as an area where the human beings are dreaming and sleeping. However, who knows what takes action in the souls of those whom we call dreaming or sleeping if they ascend to worlds that the western people do not know?—We have to get out of our material civilisation considering everything that is in the physical world round us. We have to ascend to the spiritual with everything that we have conquered on the physical plane. It is significant and not only symbolical that Darwinism still found Huxley as a representative who had to say from his western view: nature shows us that the apes struggled against each other, and it was the strongest who prevailed, while the slogan went out from the East: support, mutual aid consolidates our future. We have a particular task here in Central Europe. Nothing would avail us to be unilaterally English or unilaterally Oriental. We must combine the dawn of the East and the physical science of the West to a great harmony. Then we understand how the idea of the future is combined with the idea of the struggle for the special existence.

It is more than by chance that in that basic book of theosophy from which somebody who wants to get involved deeper in the spiritual life can find light on the path the second chapter ends meaningfully with a sentence that harmonises with this idea. You can read it not like a phrase in Light on the Path (1885, by Mabel Collins, 1851-1927, theosophical author), but because the spiritual development leads the human being to the knowledge of the common soul that settles in the single soul. At the same time, the nice words agree with which both chapters of Light on the Path close. Somebody who delves completely in this marvellous little book which fulfils the soul not only with the contents which make us internally devout and give the human being real clairvoyance because of the strength of the words sees the balance in detail if he lives through what he reads in every chapter. Then the last words light up in the soul: peace is with you. This will be finally imparted to the whole humanity by the mental power, which we look for and foster. Then the human genius bends over the human race spiritually whose principal words will be: peace is with you.—This opens the right perspective for us. There we have to speak not only of peace, not only establish peace as an ideal, conclude contracts, long for decisions of an arbitration panel, there we have to foster the spiritual life, then we cause the strength in ourselves that pours out over the whole humanity as a strength of mutual aid.

We do not fight; we do something else: we foster love, and we know that with this care of love the fight must disappear. We do not confront fight with fight. We confront fight with love, while we nourish and cherish it. This is something positive. We work on ourselves pouring out love and found a society, which is built on love. This is our ideal. We carry out an ancient saying in a Christian way if we penetrate this emotionally and vividly. A new Christianity or rather the original Christianity will awake for the new humanity. Buddha gave his people a saying that envisages such a care. However, Christianity also has such a care of love in even nicer words, if one understands them properly: you do not overcome fight with fight, or hatred with hatred but you really overcome fight and hatred only with love.

It was not at all that long ago that one considered as something unscientific in certain circles to speak about the human soul as a particular entity. The least understanding is there today if one speaks even about the mind or spirit besides the soul. The subject, which we set ourselves today, is rather extensive. I am only able to show some outlines. Within the spiritual-scientific worldview we are led to that older division of the human being, which is a trichotomy compared with that which has still validity almost entirely in the consciousness of the present humanity, compared with the division in two parts of body and soul. The trichotomy to which the theosophical or spiritual-scientific worldview has to go back again is that of body, soul and mind or spirit. Let us come to an understanding first of all about what we understand, actually, by body, soul and mind or spirit. The body of the human being is something about which we do not require many ideas to understand it. However, on the other side, the idea of the physical, of the external physical is so much the only thing that occupies our present humanity that the understanding about the difference of soul and mind and already about the entity of the soul is rather difficult. Today we have to be mindful—in contrast to some other talks I have held here—of a rather intimate exactness of our concepts and ideas which we want to develop here and, hence, I ask to be allowed to engage your attention to finer distinctions in the human ideas.

If a human being stands before you, you will admit without further ado that in the space, which the concerning person fills, his body exists. Because your senses attest this human body to you. However, the human being can look at himself with his senses at least partially, and we can say without thinking, the human being is a bodily being for another sensory-gifted human being. However, in the space, which the human being fills, even more exists certainly, than what your senses can see. It is maybe for the human life—understood in its entirety—the least that the other human being can see with his eyes and touch with his hands. For if the human being speaks about his life, he speaks very seldom about his bodily appearance perceptible to the senses. Then he speaks about his destiny, about joy and sorrow, about pain and everything that lives inside and is not perceptible to the senses at first.

A human being may stand before you and another beside him. What your senses perceive of both human beings is not the essential at first, but it is to be added that perhaps in the one human being a sad soul lives and in the other human being a joyful, happy soul exists. In both cases, the internal being of the person fills the space somewhat different from the physical existence. If you put a blind person before another person, this blind person does not perceive the bodily existence of the other person at first. He may be tempted to state under circumstances—if he does not take notice with his sense of touch or in another way—that nobody is in the room because his eye is unable to see. One just needs senses to be convinced of an external sensory existence, senses that are able to perceive this external bodily existence.

Now we must ask ourselves, would this external bodily existence not be there if one did not perceive it? Would I not stand also in this place if on all sides nothing but blind and deaf people were who cannot see and hear me? As for me, I would be there, I would be in myself. Just as I am in myself according to my bodily existence, and this must be distinguished from the perception by the others. We have now to soar a view that the same difference exists for that which I have called the second way of existence, for the desire and pain, for the life, which fills the space, but this space fulfilling is not perceptible to the senses. If a person stands before a blind person and this blind person becomes suddenly sighted, the external existence becomes a discernible existence for him. Then the question arises: could not be joy and pain, rage and passion—not perceptible to the senses at first, but living also in the human being like his red blood, his nerves and bones—a discernible entity perceptible to the other human beings?

The human being knows what he can perceive. He is a developing being, a being that has developed from imperfect levels in a distant past to his present existence. All organs, which are at and in the human being, have developed gradually. The abilities of seeing and hearing developed bit by bit; the external physical world became a discernible world for the human being, a world that he knows, that he can observe. If the human being develops that way, could we not ask there, whether he is not also able to improve himself further? May it become discernible to him what is not discernible to him even today?—Just as the room in which a human being stands is dark for a blind person at first and he starts perceiving colours and the physical figure if he becomes sighted, nonetheless, it could also be that that which still lives in the room what flashes through the soul would also be made visible, discernible. The human being was led to his external, sensuous visibility by the external forces of the world. He has added nothing there. He was put on the physical plane by the order of nature, equipped with senses to perceive the sensuous world. However, the human being himself can take in hand his further development; he can make himself able to experience other things except the sensuous world round him.

This development of a higher life was always nourished and cherished in certain human communities from times immemorial. Just as the human beings have sensuous eyes and sensuous ears at first, the ability to perceive with the eyes and ears of the soul—if I may express myself this way—was developed by the own activity of single human beings. As true as it is that the eye if it opens perceives a coloured world round itself, where, otherwise, darkness was, it is also true that the mental eye is unlocked by a suitable training, so that that which lives in the affects, in desire and grief becomes discernible. The instruction that leads to such higher development of the human being is different from the usual lessons. Our ninth talk will discuss that in detail what one can generally discuss on this internal development publicly. Somebody who wants to know more about this internal development can find out more about that. Today I can refer only to the ninth talk. However, the most necessary should be suggested.

The present external civilisation knows very little about those instructions, which the human being must receive to get mental eyes and ears. Only marginal knowledge is there. However, just the spiritual-scientific worldview is appointed to rouse an understanding of the supersensible because it is a necessary requirement for the culture. Today all lessons intend to fill the mind and reason mostly. However, this means that a world of ideas is woken in us that is connected with the external sensuous world. Our external sensuous knowledge attracts more and more increasing attention. However, this is not such necessary; it does not deepen the human being, as splendid as the achievements of our civilisation may be. There was another instruction at all times, an instruction that does not aim at the external expansion of the sensory world, but at the deepening of the world being. I describe it to you only with a few words to give an idea of it.

Everything that you read in the scientific writings today has come about by external sensuous observation. Science considers it more or less as something that must not contain what has not come about by external observation. One presupposes that the human being should remain, as he is that he already has the ability to absorb what this science can offer him. However, it is completely different if it concerns the instruction, which should lead the human being to the ability of mental perception. In such schools, one taught something else. At first, no teaching material is handed over to the student that contains as many concepts as possible. Rather a student went to a master and the master accepted him if he considered his disposition as ripe for developing the internal senses. Then he had not to take up much new contents in himself, but he had to become another human being at first. He did not get a book, not special contents, but so-called eternal contents of thought at first, something eternal that was due to those human beings who were further in their development than the remaining civilised human beings were. We have to come to an agreement about what we understand by such eternal contents of thought.

Try once to look around in your soul and to ask yourselves: how much of the ideas and thoughts living in me, of the feelings and what is, otherwise, in my soul, belongs to the time and the place in which I live?—Try once to think about what moves your soul from the morning up to the evening, and what would be different, completely different, if you were in Moscow instead of in Berlin, and if you did not live at the beginning of the 20th century, but at the end of the 18th century. Subtract everything that you have taken this way from space and time in which you live, from your soul contents. Try to understand how much of that which you imagine would also apply to a person in another place and time. It is not much. However, there are things, which do not only apply to today and to Berlin, but also to other places and other times. If we ascend in this sense, we detect more and more that our sense is led, like by a great spiritual guide of humanity, to such eternal contents of thought.

The religious scriptures of all times are full of such things, which are independent of space and time. To mention the most trivial I can say that mathematics is something that is independent of space and time. What deals with time and space is itself temporal and transient. However, if the soul devotes itself to the imperishable, it becomes everlasting and imperishable and absorbs what is immortal. Hence, the master gives everlasting contents of thought to the soul at first. The contents that are only related to the core of the soul can be given to everybody, indifferently whether he lives in America, in Japan or in Africa.

Then the student had to cut himself off the sensuous outside world and to live with that which lives as strength in him. With immense patience, the deepening had to happen on the inside of the soul. The human inside is something living, and as from the mere cell mass the wonderful construction of the physical eye has originated, the spiritual eye originates in the soul from the everlasting spiritual contents if it becomes engrossed that way and lives in meditation. The physical eye was not always there. It has originated from the confluence of the external physical forces. The human being is able to wake the spiritual eye in the soul if he can be developed by the spiritual contents. Such pupils awaited and awaited in patience, they had to use a big part of the day to their exercises. There were times in which this was possible. Thus, they waited until the internal forces woken by the mental deepening gave them the perception of that which filled the space as desire and grief, as instincts, passions, and impulses.

A physical eye sees because the external source of light throws rays on an object. One cannot see without light. Eye and light belong together. In the sensuous outside world, eye and light are two separate things. In the soul, the spiritual eye is woken, and this is at the same time the source of a new mental light. We ourselves must emit this light which makes the mental visible that stands before us. If you have received the inner light this way, by sinking in your inside and the awakening of the internal life linked with it, your own astral body starts shining from the inside and lights up everything in truth and reality like the sun the objects. However, you do not light up the external world, but that which is mental which lives in the human being as an affect; this becomes visible by the rays, which you yourselves emit. Thus, the human being is able to make discernible for himself what is not discernible externally.

All great guides of humanity who have spoken to us about the soul—do not believe that they had empty phrases and words in mind only. One knows nothing of the depths that have moved and caused the human culture if one believes only in the sense world. One normally speaks from the immediate view. Envisage, for example, the relation of soul and body as I have just discussed it, then you must say to yourselves, this relation of soul and body is such that something mental penetrates the bodily that stands before. As true as it is that this body that you call your own is fed from the outside by foodstuffs and is thereby animated and supplemented from outside, as true it is that this body is animated, penetrated and lighted by the mental. If this body sleeps, the mental is not in it at first, then it is separated from it, it is outside it. Then we cannot speak of the fact that the mental streams into the body. A German theosophist, a deep spirit, characterised this relation of soul and body in a wonderfully attractive way, which one understands only properly if one makes such requirements as we have just done. This theosophist—we are allowed to call him a theosophist—speaks about the sleep, when the soul is not in the body, in a peculiar way. He says, “Sleep is the digestion of the soul; the body digests the soul. Being awake means the effective state of the soul—the body enjoys the soul.” It is a wonderful comparison. As one enjoys the food with the absorption of nutrients, the body enjoys—this theosophist thinks—the soul, which lives in it. As well as the body, after it has enjoyed the food, digests it, the body digests in the sleeping state what the soul has sunk into it. This saying of our German poet and theosophist Novalis (pseudonym of Friedrich von Hardenberg, 1772-1801, poet) is very beautiful. You can find a source of the most beautiful spiritual-scientific wisdom with him. Only the spiritual-scientific worldview can understand him. I could state countless things of the German culture that would show you how the great seers of humanity spoke of soul, body, and their relation to each other with expertise.

The third thing about which we have to speak is the mind or spirit. We summarise desire and grief, pain and joy, passion, instinct and avidity and what else under the name “soul.” If one asks what the soul is, then we say, what gets the living existence inside at first. Someone can attain the perception of this soul who has received an education as I have just described it. Mind or spirit exists not only inside of the human being, but also everywhere in the world. You can convince yourselves of that by a very banal thinking activity. All human beings in the world think, think in that which is round them. They get knowledge of the world round them with their thoughts. These thoughts are not only expression of that which lives in the outside world, but also of something that does not live in the outside world. If you oversee the universe, your sense sees an enormous sum of stars and processes, and then there comes your reflection and gets a concept of these stars. If your sense sees a drop of water, your reflection gets a concept of this drop of water. Briefly speaking, you are not contented to perceive the things; you also want to understand them. This is something different from mere sensuous perceiving. If you have a glass without water in it, you cannot pour out water from it. If no thought and no concept were in the space outside, one could also not get out them. It would be illusionary to think about the world if the world were not built up according to thoughts. The stone about which you think and which you understand must have originated from a thought, otherwise the thought could not be got out. If you do not want to get involved in absurd contradictions, you have to admit that the thoughts are as true in the world outside as the thoughts in your head inside. You think, and the thoughts that live in you are not different from those, which have built up the world.

Thus, we have three aspects:

1. The sensuous in the world, the material existence, perceived by the external senses;

2. The soul which we experience and which that soul, which is instructed in that way about which I have spoken, can also perceive, and

3. The mind or spirit that we assume all over the world as that which flows through it like a fluid and announces the being of the things to us at first.

The human being can perceive this spirit first of all where it appears as such. What he can perceive is its external physiognomy, its sensuous expression. You do not see the spirit in the world, but its sensuous expression.

The human being thinks in the spirit. Indeed, the thought lives in the world, but the human being cannot see it. He can only think it. As true as you yourselves think about the world and as true as a spiritual mirror of the world forms, as true it also forms in every other human being. This other human being is not only desire and passion, but this spiritual mirror of the world also lives in him. One can perceive this with the spiritual eyes and ears. It is true that that internal training about which I have spoken produces not only the ability to perceive the soul of the human being, but the human being can also develop the ability in himself to see the thoughts of his fellow-man, to understand and perceive the worldview, the whole environment. When the human being perceives not only the external portrayal of his thought, but the thought itself, when he is able to open his spiritual ears to the universe, then he will really perceive the thoughts, the spirit of the world. Then the star appears to him not only as a star, but the star says something to him. The stones, the rock crystal, for example, appear to him not only water-clear, but it also announces its being to him. Then the human being can face everything in a new way with such a deepening, as it has been suggested, so that the things speak sounding round him, say their innermost names to him, announce their being to us.

The old Pythagoreans meant this. They had such a training and initiated into such a hearing of the world speaking of the sphere music. It was not a mere comparison; it was the immediate percipience and the bringing to awareness of that which is hidden, otherwise, behind the things. The spiritual eyes disperse this veil of nature, and the harmony that is hidden behind this veil starts sounding. Goethe also means that with his words in the Prologue in Heaven (Faust I). You read no phrase there. It would be a phrase if Goethe spoke of the sounding sun. However, no, he speaks: “In ancient rivalry with fellow spheres the sun still sings its glorious song and it completes with thread of thunder the journey it has been assigned.” These words sound from the world music of the world spirit. Goethe continues this later once again, where he says, “Hearken! Hear the onrush of the Horae! In these sounds we spirits hear the new day already born.” If the human being develops this ability, he becomes aware of the spiritual. Then his soul perceives the thought as distinctly as the usual human being perceives his body.

Body, soul, and spirit are the three members of the human being. He is a bodily, physical being at first. In his inside, the mental existence lives and develops. In this the spirit of the whole world—as far as the human being can grasp it—is reflected and lives as the third member. From the outside into the inside and from the inside again to the outside, this is the way, which the human being walks from the body through the soul to the spirit. What gives us generally the possibility to have such a mental existence? We owe this possibility to the fact that we can live in the soul. We live in desire and grief, in pain and joy even if we do not perceive it externally. We also live in our body, but we perceive it also from the outside. It is a difference between these two fields of existence. In the spiritual-scientific worldview, one calls that which one has round himself as one has the external bodily round himself: existence of complete consciousness. Our consciousness combines with the bodily existence first. This consciousness lives only on the physical plane that way and we call that the physical plane, which spreads out round us to the senses. What lives in our soul is different. One calls it life, and one calls this life existence on the so-called astral plane. The physical plane and the astral plane are both realms in which the human being lives. On the physical plane, the human being is aware, on the astral plane, he lives only. There he forms the things that are outside him not yet consciously. However, he lives in the mental or astral.

The third kind of existence is the spiritual existence. In general, as present human beings we do not yet live in it or only partially at most. However, while we settle in the spirit, this spirit combines with our soul bit by bit. We could say that this soul spreads over the whole environment, it becomes bigger and bigger. If the human being seizes the outside world, grasps the sense and the spirit of the outside world, then he is no longer concluded in his inside. Then he walks daringly out of himself and combines with the things around him. Compare the animal with the human being in this respect. The animal lives, so to speak, completely in the soul. It does not create concepts of the environment. It does not spread its soul over the spiritual of the world. This is also the difference between the human being and the animal. The animal lives and weaves, so to speak, in his inside. However, the human being emerges again from his inside. We could also say, the human being exceeds his self (German nonce word: sich entselbsten). The human being has always soul, inner life. This inner life is there. However, the development of the human being consists of the fact that he spreads this inner life over his environment, over that what is around him, over the spirit; it streams out over the whole world. If this happens, the human soul combines with the everlasting of the human being. Then this marriage of the human soul with the everlasting, the world spirit, takes place. When this union of the human being with the everlasting world spirit takes place, this whole sum of joy and grief changes, this whole world of impulses, desires, and passions in our inside, the whole astral body of the human being becomes different. That desire, those instincts of the human being, which he got, when he arose from nature's hand, which he has in common with the animal, all this soul life disappears and passes and belongs as such to the transient. Try to visualise once what lives in such instincts, sufferings, and joys in the human being and how this life takes place in the human being. They are connected with the transient.

The human being starts stepping out of the circle of this transient. He refines his impulses and desires, his passions, he ceases to appreciate or displease what is bound to place and time. He rises to that which lies behind the things and is just hidden by the veil of the sensuous. This is something important if the human being starts enjoying not only what his eye gives him, but also what the impressions of his eyes bring from the spiritual world to his soul. This is a great moment in the human development when the human being is no longer following his sensuous instincts only, but is led by supersensible motives, by moral ideas and concepts that do not penetrate from the outside but from the spirit. Just as the body is interspersed with the soul, the soul is interspersed with the spirit. Consider the human being on certain former stages of development, there you find his physical being, which is interspersed with the soul. While the human being stands as a body before you, he realises his existence in his desires and passions. More and more comes from the supersensible into the soul. It is infiltrated with the spiritual. This process lifts the soul out of time and space. What is beyond time and space is imperishable, remains as the everlasting in the soul. Thus, you see that just as the soul is embedded in a body, the spirit is embedded in the soul. As the imbedding of the soul in the body points us to a distant past, in which they were connected bit by bit with each other, the union of the soul with the spirit points to the future of humanity. This development takes place gradually. It takes place at first in such a way that the spirit penetrates the soul more and more.

Consider how the beginning of the spiritual contents is in the soul at first. Imagine, you have an object before yourselves. You look at it as a sensuous object. You turn round: the sensuous object is no longer before you. However, a picture of this sensuous object is before you. We call this the idea of the object, the memory of it in a certain respect. This remains in the soul. This is the first element that the spirit gains ground in the soul as memory. We could not absorb anything from the spirit of our environment if we were not able to know anything about the objects when they do no longer stand before us. The first element of the spirit lives in the human being. It is to the objects of the environment, as it is also to our own soul. Get clear in your mind, which role memory plays in our soul life. The animal completely lives in the present. Of course, the levels or degrees, which I indicate, are more extremely expressed than they are in reality. The animals have also to go through a certain spiritual development, but I have to express it somewhat extremely to bring the matter to mind.

What the animal feels and experiences today is the central issue for it. The spiritualisation of his whole being means to the human being that he is able to live beyond the present. While we take the memory with us from our spiritual into our present, we spiritualise ourselves more and more; thereby we grasp the spirit in the first element. I have the spiritual before myself, if I remember the experience of yesterday. Memory is one of the most important moments for the spiritualisation of the soul life. Memory ties on the spiritual-mental existence that is connected with the external from birth up to the present. If we could not remember the past days, we would have little spiritual contents only. There are tribes even today that do not have such memory. There are still tribes which forget the experience in the cold, and that is why they must look for a protecting shelter for themselves every evening anew. Somebody who strives for a higher development takes up the memory and trains it more and more. Here begins the possibility to look beyond our transient existence, which is enclosed between birth and death.

Imagine that you have made a point of bringing in sense and reason to life by memory, and of living not only in the present, but learning more and more to have the whole life like a tableau before yourselves, with the consciousness that that can flow out only from your whole temporal being what you want to accomplish. If this is the case and if this is used again to wake up the internal forces as I have indicated this just now when I spoke that you have to live up the soul contents by contemplation, then you can try to extend the review farther and farther, make it more and more concrete and go back to birth. You can do this. However, infinite patience belongs to it; we shall still speak of these methods. Then you also see that of the soul which is not enclosed between birth and death. Then you learn to tie in with other things what takes action within this life between birth and death. There you learn to tie in your present with your past by the very own consideration in the memory and to reasonably connect the effect of today with the cause of yesterday; there you learn to pursue the inner thread of cause and effect in your soul. Then the same strength, which leads you back to your present life, leads you beyond birth. Because you have learnt to look at cause and effect in the soul independently, you experience what was before your birth, how you lived before your birth.

By the gradual development of this sense, the human being gets knowledge of his previous lives. The principle of re-embodiment or reincarnation becomes a fact to him. Sharpening the sight for the temporal in the inside world we attain the mental ability to make reincarnation or re-embodiment a fact for us. What do we do in this case? In this case, we penetrate the soul with that which connects us with the mental. There our sight extends inside. While we grasp the spirit of the outside world by understanding the outside world, pour out our soul over the outside world, and extend it, we spread the consciousness about the mental itself coming beyond our birth. Thus, our sight extends more and more, and thus we look from that which is bound to place and time to that which follows each other in the sequence of times. From there, we take possession of the essence of the human being that is imperishable and everlasting.

The human being spiritualises himself more and more. The first stage is if he comes out of joy and sorrow and develops feelings for the supersensible, a sort of joy and sorrow. The further he develops this, the more Plato's beautiful sentence comes true to him: the body is transient because it subsists on transient food; however, the spirit is imperishable because it subsists on everlasting food.—The relationship of body, soul, and spirit is this way. The body passes. What you can see of the human being is handed over to the earth at death. However, what lives as joy and sorrow in the human being, the soul, has not originated at birth, but is tied together with something that extends beyond birth. Thus, the soul existence extends beyond the borders of birth and death. However, what the human being absorbs in himself, while he goes out of his soul again and combines with the spirit, connects this soul with the everlasting springs of existence. This deifies the soul. The human soul becomes visible outside the body. As far as it is bound to the body and is one with it, it is something transient. If the soul combines with the spiritual, it thereby becomes more and more everlasting and imperishable. With it, we come to the point where we understand what human self-knowledge is, what true cognition of the human inside is.

At first, the human being experiences his soul in his inside undergoing joy and sorrow. However, then this soul realises images which disappear again. Something revives that is hidden to the mere senses. The human being has as the bare thought in himself what revives there in the soul. However, he connects this thought with his soul in the course of his life. He learns to feel and sympathise with the spiritual and, in the end, he likes the spiritual with pleasure as he only liked the sensuous with pleasure before. The desire applies, in the end, to everything spiritual. Selfishness becomes the unselfish love of the imperishable. In selfishness, the human love is grasped in the soul. But while we grasp it deeply inside as spirit, we realise that we find this self in the whole remaining world, that we are connected with the whole remaining world and that as we are born from the physical it is as true that we are born as a spirit any time from the spiritual universe, the spiritual-divine world. If we look for our higher self, which exists like a spark in us, we see the spiritual in the whole environment. This is the great knowledge of wisdom that the Vedanta philosophy sums up in the saying: tat tvam asi—Thou art that.—If the human being is aware of his spirit and his development begins to go out into the world, then his self extends to the spirit of the universe, to an existence of a spirit self, and we are with our very own being everywhere. Then that which was mere understanding becomes emotionally related content, and this is the real elevation of the soul to the spirit, the elevation to the real spiritual life.

There is a beginning of the spiritual life; however, it is dry and cold. There are people who only become warm if it concerns something mental, human beings who are glad and suffer, only if it concerns something mental, pain and desire. They say that the spiritual is something dull and cold. If they look up to the stars, they regard the thoughts about them as abstract; but they are dry and cold in their intellect. However, if the soul seizes the spirit, we feel, we think not only with the universe, because then the view changes by reason and mind into the mental conception of the whole universe. What was only desire once becomes now the desire of the spiritual, what was love in the mental becomes now love of the spiritual-divine in the world. Our feeling, which we have closed inside, spreads about the whole world. Our self flows out, and we become one with the all-embracing spirit. We lose our selves and we find ourselves in the all-embracing spirit. This is something higher than the mere thinking. In the mental, the human being has got the sensation. In the spiritual, he starts being able to operate the spirit. However, he will also come there where he reaches the spirit with the sensation. Then he is on the divine stage. He has to climb up this ladder with his own strength of connecting the soul with the spirit, so that they become one. This is true self-consideration. If we grasp the divine spirit flowing through the world not only with the reason but also with the heart—as we meet a friend and feel warmth in the heart—then we penetrate from the head and its wisdom to the heart and its love of wisdom of the whole world. Thus, we rise raising our soul, and we get not only to know our narrow-minded inside this way, but we extend our selves and find ourselves outside in the world. I have stressed it often and often: Look at your inside only, there you find the divine human being. No, you only find in yourself what you have in yourself. If you want to find more in yourself, you must develop this higher self first, and you develop it, spreading out the higher self about the whole world. Those who advised self-knowledge to a human being did not mean idle examining of his inside. This self-knowledge is considered as we have grasped it now, as an ascent of the soul to the spirit. Then the human being no longer feels any difference between himself and the animal, the plant and the stone. A general feeling of a universal brotherhood permeates his heart. And then, and only then if the human being has this in mind, he understands as the last destination of the development from the bodily-mental to the mental-spiritual the beautiful word of the poet and seer (The Novices at Sais by Novalis, 1802): “Somebody was successful to lift the veil of the goddess at Sais.—But what did he see? He saw—miracle of miracles—his self!” The spiritual scientist adds: he finds the divine in his self, and this is just theosophy, divine wisdom to raise the heart, the soul to the spirit, so that one succeeds in connecting wisdom with the divine and to have not only understanding, but the general feeling of the divine world.

One has often said that the human being himself is the best and most important study of the human being, and that the human being himself is the biggest riddle of the human being. In view of certain facts, one has to emphasise that this riddle faces the human being in manifold forms. The human riddle appears as multiplied to us and looks at us from all sides. The manifold forms of the human being, the races, are certainly such a multiplication of the human riddle. Natural sciences and spiritual science have always tried to bring in light to this variety of the human existence, in these different forms of the human being. Besides, we realise plenty of questions. We have the consciousness in ourselves that in all human beings a uniform nature and being exists. However, how does this uniform nature and being behave to the manifold forms and physiognomies, which face us as races? In particular, this question approaches us if we see which different abilities the single human races possess.

Apparently, to our consideration, the one human being is on the highest cultural level, the other on the most primitive, subordinated one. All that makes it appear strange to us that the human being who has, nevertheless, a uniform nature can appear in such a different and imperfect figure. One feels it often as an injustice of nature that it condemns one to an existence in a lower human race and raises the other to an apparently perfect race. To put a new contemplation to this mystery, to lighten up this riddle, the spiritual-scientific worldview seems to be more suitable than any other is. For this spiritual-scientific worldview does not speak in the same sense of the uniform human being as the other worldviews. It has a concept of it, which is different from that of the philosophers, religions et cetera, and it speaks of a recurrence of the human soul. It says to us that the soul, which lives in the modern human individual, was already often on this earth and will still often return. If we look at the matter even closer, we see that the souls of the human beings go through the different races. Thus, the variety of the races gets sense and reason. Thus, we see how the one is not condemned to live only in a primitive race and the other to be on the developmental levels of race existence.

Each one of us goes through the most different levels of the races, and this passage just signifies a further development of the single soul. Someone who appears as a member of the European race today went through other races in former times and will go through others than ours later. The races appear to us as levels, and this variety becomes coherent and reasonable.

However, if we want to see this sense quite thoroughly, we have to investigate the developmental basis of the different races deeper. Someone who rises above the only sensuous view to the invisible, supersensible world and tries to answer this question from such realms can really get an adequate solution of the riddle.

The usual natural sciences, which have to confine themselves to the sensuous observation in this question, were only able to bring in one leading thread in these cases concerning the human types. They are able to lead us back to the imperfect levels of human existence according to the modern Darwinist point of view. They trace the human being back to the former epochs of the earth evolution. They show us how the human being experienced stages in the former times in which he satisfied his needs with simple, imperfect tools with which he could only perform small work. To even former times the natural sciences want to lead us back in which the human being developed from the animal realm. We are led to the statement that we can no longer prove the earliest developmental stages of the human being scientifically, presumably because the areas of the earth in which the human being developed at that time are covered with the floods of the ocean. The natural sciences only point to an area repeatedly. This is the area in the south of Asia, in the east of Africa and down to Australia. Ernst Haeckel supposes that an ancient, extinct continent is to be sought there and that the interstates of animal and human being developed there. He calls this continent Lemuria.

Indeed, in the same sense in which Haeckel speaks about this continent and his inhabitants, about pithecoid human beings as the ancestors of the modern human beings, spiritual science cannot speak about this matter out of its experience. I have tried to show that there are other methods and means to find out something of the prehistoric times as those are on which the natural sciences must rely, other methods than the investigation of the leftovers, which one has found in the earth. You find everything about the origin of the human being and his classification in different races that has always been taught in the so-called secret schools out of inner mystic experience in my essays From the Akasha Chronicle (CW 11). Physical records and sensuous experience cannot lead us to the times, which can really teach us the decisive of this question. The supersensible experience only can teach us this. Today, I can only give a spare concept of this supersensible experience, and only a comparison should show us where from that is taken which we want to discuss in the main.

You know that my words I speak here are carried away by the undulations, which are stimulated in the air. The oscillatory air brings my words through your organ of hearing into your soul. While I am speaking here, this whole airspace is filled with sound waves. Imagine that these sound waves could be fixed, one could get an imprint with any means at every moment of that which is spoken here. Then you would have a recording of everything that is spoken here. Just as the word that I speak here makes an imprint on the medium around us also the other expressions of the human nature do, indeed, not on the air, which is somewhat coarse in relation to many other and subtler substances, because there are subtler substances than the air is. I point only to the ether, although our consideration deals nothing with it. However, I mean, actually, the finest matter, the akashic matter in which not only the spoken words imprint themselves, but all thoughts, feelings and will impulses of the human being.

This akasha matter with its imprints really forms a large phonograph. While these sound waves pass here in the air perpetually, last only as long as the sound is heard, the imprints that the human achievements up to the thoughts cause in this so-called akasha matter always persist. Somebody who is able to develop so far to read in this akasha matter can read the recordings, which have been put down since primeval times. From this chronicle, from the higher spiritual experiences the information comes which spiritual science announces about the human development through the different races. We are led back not only to the human beings who the natural sciences and archaeology register investigating the leftovers of human beings who had primitive tools and weapons in the caves of France or anywhere. These human beings had low receding foreheads and were backward in their intellectual development compared to the modern civilised human beings.

These researches do not lead us back to those forms of humanity that the spiritual-scientific worldview teaches us, even if the modern naturalists think that they lead us back ten to fifteen millennia, maybe even farther. All those human forms and racial forms that the naturalist can find in the earth point again back to quite differently formed human physiognomies, to races which have lived on another earth area, on Atlantis which extended between Europe, Africa and America. The idea is also no longer strange to the natural sciences that the Atlantic was once land. The resemblance of the fauna, of the animal realm and the various soil formations, also some relationships of languages, all these matters point the naturalist to the fact that we deal with a big earth subsidence, with a flood of a large land domain that took place in very early times of our development. Plato tells about an island Poseidonis which is still stated by him as an island in the ocean, it was the last rest of the past world. The spiritual-scientific view teaches us that, too.

If we go back to the inhabitants who lived in Atlantis, then something appears to us that is different from today. We get to know a race in which the most significant abilities, which make the modern civilised human being a civilised human being, did not yet exist. The Atlantean race did not yet have these abilities, the ability of combining, of counting, of logical thinking. These human beings had memory and language at that time. That had only developed in them. However, in return, they had other abilities. A progress of the human abilities takes only place if certain so-called higher levels of the human existence are purchased with the disappearance of former levels of development. Exactly the same way as the human being has a very low ability of smelling compared to certain animals, whereas the animals have less developed higher senses, the brain in particular, however, they bring the lower abilities to perfection. It is the same here on these higher levels of humanity.

The Atlantean had an almost omniscient memory. His knowledge was generally based on his memory. He did not know what we call law or rule. He did not calculate in such a way that he knew a multiplication table; indeed, he did not know this. His memory was the basis for his whole thinking. He knew if he had piled up twice five beans that this was a small heap of so and so many. He did not count, but he kept it in his memory. His language was also different from ours. I will come back to this phenomenon in the course of this talk. Because the Atlantean had developed these abilities only, a certain clairvoyant talent belonged to him inevitably which withdrew when our day consciousness, our reason, our mathematical, logical consciousness, our cultural consciousness developed. The Atlantean was able to quite different sense to work on the growth of plants out of his nature using the special magic willpower. Without sensuous mediation, the Atlantean was able to carry out certain magic effects. All that also was connected with a completely different body structure, above all with a receding forehead and with a defective formation of the forebrain. On the other side, other parts of the brain were unlike those of the modern civilised human being. This enabled him to use his big abilities of memory.

If we observe such an Atlantean according to the recordings of the Akasha Chronicle, we find that at the same time the brightness of our present consciousness was not yet achieved. It was a dream consciousness. It was brighter than this, but it did not yet have that bright clarity of the intellect, which our modern consciousness has. It was more a brooding and dreaming one. What worked with him was also not in such a way that he could regard himself as the master of that which he caused, but it was in such a way that everything that was in him was like a kind of inspiration. He felt to be connected with other forces, like with a spirit flowing through him. The spirit was something concrete to him, it was that which was in the wind, in the clouds and which grew up in the plants. The spirit was something that one could feel if one moved the hands through the air, if the trees rustled. This was the language of nature. The independence of the Atlantean was also not as great as that of the modern human beings.

If we look back farther, we come to the ancestors of this population, to those human beings who lived on a part of the world, which the natural sciences know as well as spiritual science: on Lemuria, the land between Asia, Australia, and Africa. However, spiritual science has to portray the appearance and figure of those human beings quite different from the naturalists. The portrayal of the figure of these human beings, which the spiritual researcher gives, is not so different from that which the naturalist supposes. However, it is spiritually completely different. The Lemurian was much more clairvoyant than the Atlantean. He had a gigantic willpower; he was a human being with whom language and memory were not yet developed. The language began only in the later Lemuria. However, the Lemurian could make the plants grow, he could command the wind, he could take natural forces out of the earth like with magic, briefly, what the Lemurian was able to do borders on the miraculous compared with the modern ideas. However, all that was in a vague consciousness, in a deeper dream sleep than it existed with the Atlantean. Completely conducted by higher influence, by higher spiritual beings, this Lemurian was a dependent creature in the hands of higher forces, which gave him the impulses of his intentions, of his actions.

With it, we have three successive developmental forms of our race. This Lemurian developed out of the not yet human companion of the ichthyosaurs, plesiosaurs, et cetera. These fabulous animals were there still before our mammals and perished because of big physical revolutions in these continents. The volcanic formations that stand out of the ocean are the remains of that old Lemurian age. In addition, those primitive constructions of gigantic size and strange form, as they are found on the Easter Island, are remains of the cyclopean constructions, extend into our time like monuments of those human beings whose soul life was completely different from ours.

Only with a few words, I would like to point to the relation between the human being and the different animal forms. The modern naturalist, accustomed to materialistic ideas, supposes that the human being developed from lower animal forms. The spiritual researcher is not able to do this. He supposes that the spiritual led the way of the material that the primal ground of the outside, of the material is founded in the spiritual that the external human body of the human being is an expression of the human soul. What the spiritual researcher describes as an astral body developed much earlier than the physical body of the human being. This astral body experienced a compression and it forms the etheric body this way, and only the compression of this etheric body forms the physical body.

The denser condition evolved only later. The thinner one, the astral one in particular, existed in much earlier times. Thus, spiritual science shows us that a being did not originate from an accidental agglomeration of physical matter, which has such impulses, passions, and instincts as the human being, but that these impulses and passions are the origin of the encasing matter. The passion did not create this matter, but the former passions created the forms of the physiognomy. Thus, the human being goes through a process of compression. Indeed, if we go back to the Lemurians, we see that their bodies become thinner and thinner, until we come back to human beings whose physical matter is very similar to the gelatinous matter of certain present animals. If we went back even farther, we would find ancient human ancestors, formed in a matter, which one cannot see with the usual physical eyes: the etheric human being. However, I do not want to go back to this very ancient time.

We want to begin our considerations with those human beings who start appearing in such a carnal cover as the present human being carries it, although the covers of the human beings who inhabited Lemuria and Atlantis were completely different from the construction of our muscles and skeletons. All that was much softer, more pliable, and flexible, and complied with the requirements of those vague, dreamlike soul forces I have described to you. Just by the fact that the physical matter of the human being becomes denser and denser; the pole of the physical matter is created on the other side, which is the tool of intelligence. With the creation of the brain, a compression of the remaining human organs took place at the same time.

Thus, the brain becomes the tool of the intellect, of the mind. If we summarise these three stages, we have them in the civilised human being. First, we have the Lemurian human being, his consciousness is trance-like, then we have the Atlantean human being who develops memory and language and then we have the actual civilised human being, the human being of our time.

If we consider the modern human beings, they developed from these former stages of existence. The primitive stage does not disappear at once when the higher one appears. It survives for the time being and changes in manifold ways. So that we can say: a part of the former Atlantean population migrated from Atlantis to Europe and farther to Asia and established colonies, a part stayed behind, so that we have the most manifold stages side by side. Every progressive part leaves behind as it were the stages of development like memories. That also applies to the human being in a similar way. He developed the most different forms of the animals from himself. Just as humanity leaves lower races behind, the human being leaves certain animal forms behind on even former stages which are like externally preserved memories of his former existence. Looking at the animals, we can say that they show the stages of our own development, from the lower animal form up to the forms of our race. However, our own forms did not look like that which stayed behind. At that time, the conditions were still different.

One normally does not imagine at all how infinitely big the changes were which took place on the earth. In the old Atlantis was no distribution of rain and sunshine, air and water as today. There was another air saturated with water. There was not yet rain at that time. Myths and legends hold on these things vividly. Hence, the Nordic legends also speak of “Niflheim,” “nebulous home.” A real fact forms the basis of that. The forms of our ancestors were different from ours, and those human beings whom they left behind got to conditions, which they did not stand. Hence, they had to develop to lower stages, they became decadent, and they degenerated.

The physical conditions of our present earth make it possible that the mind develops with a certain level of the beings. If the earth had not developed from the completely different conditions of rain and sunshine to our advantage, the human being would never have been able to develop to the stage on which we are today. We see that only the progressive race is able to develop suitably. However, what maintains the former form and is as a reminiscent sign of it, becomes degenerate because it does not comply with the later conditions. If we go back to the former times, we understand that that which we were once was completely different from the present animals. These changed because of the completely changed conditions. We also have to regard the subordinated races as stages of former human existence that were adapted, actually, to other earthly conditions according to their nature.

The matter becomes much more understandable, if we look into it that way. Then we understand that the Indian population of America, which appears to us so mysterious with its social structures and peculiar instincts must be completely different. The African race, the Ethiopian one, the black race is different in another way. There are the instincts that tie in with the lower human. We find a certain dreamlike element with the Malayans. Within the Mongolian population those qualities exist which are based on a special energy of the blood. There are also certain mental qualities, which developed quite typically. Hence, the Mongolian race always refuses to accept a pantheistic view. Its religion is a belief in demons, a cult of the dead. The population, which one calls the Caucasian race, constitutes the real civilised race, which is appointed to develop the logical thinking, to create tools for the work on nature using the mere reason of the human being who can no longer use the magic forces but has to rely on the mechanical. Everything that the human being had in the times of the old Atlantis in this way got lost, and, therefore, he manufactured tools because he could no longer work as he worked once; hence, he required tools for the mechanical effect.

The physical research tried in manifold ways to divide the different races. It tried to divide them according to the shaping of the skull in those, which have a narrow and backwards long skull, in those, which have a short and broad skull, and in those, which are between the both. One divided the human beings also according to their skin colour, into black ones: Black, Ethiopians; in yellow-brown: the Malayans and Mongols, and in white ones, the Caucasians. This division is done more according to external signs and gives certain differences, however, is not exhaustive. In the newer time, one has taken the language as a basis. However, if you consider the past spiritual-scientifically, you get quite different views. You find that our white civilised humanity originated from the fact that certain parts separated themselves from the Atlanteans and developed higher under other climatic conditions. Certain parts of the Atlantean population stayed behind just on the former stages, so that we have to observe remains of the different Atlantean races in the population of Asia and America. However, they have changed; they differ from the original Atlantean population.

We distinguish seven human sub-races within the Atlantean population. Five of these seven sub-races are in an ascending development. I only want to mention here that the Chinese are descendants of the fourth sub-race of the Atlantean population, and that the Mongolians are descendants of the seventh sub-race of this Atlantean population. Memory and language gradually developed. Only with the third sub-race, with the Primal Toltecs, language appeared clearly. There also appears a culture supported on memory. The fifth sub-race which we call the primal Semites and which had established its main residence in Ireland was the first germ of our present Caucasian or—as spiritual science also calls it—Aryan human race.

A part of this sub-race—it was very unlike the modern Jewish population but was still called Semitic rightly because of certain processes—moved to Asia and developed the intellectual culture which spread then over Europe, southern Asia and over the population of northern Africa. On the other side, around this centre is a belt of human population that had manifold remains in its character from inhabitants of former times, remains of the Atlanteans. All these inhabitants left behind descendants, and thus we can imagine that the train, of which I have just spoken surged to Asia, collided there with a population that was left from Atlantis and maybe from Lemuria, and formed the Malayan races then. With them, one can perceive a drowsy being and a prematurity concerning passions and sexuality. In such a way, the Indian-Aryan race developed from a choice branch of the Atlantean population, with mixing in of remains of the old population. It connected a certain dreamlike, clairvoyant being with a peculiar intellectual worldview. Perhaps, in no other worldview the clairvoyant view of deeper forces of nature and a system of thinking with such an architectural unity and pervasive astuteness were connected with each other. We find other new populations of quite different forms in the direction to the Middle East.

Moreover, another train of Atlanteans went to America—the spiritual-scientific worldview can prove this. There were rests of Lemurians and of Atlanteans who intermingled in many respects. This Indian population faces the European immigrants later. There two very different human developments collided. What lived in the ancient times, a completely different soul element, something clairvoyant, something of the spirit flowing through the whole world still lived in this Indian population. A speech is preserved to us that an Indian chief held at a clash of Indians and Europeans. He condemned the breach of promise by the Europeans. One had promised to the Indian population, after one had taken their residences from them, to give them other residences. He possibly said the following, oh you pale-faces, you do not understand what the Great Spirit teaches us. This comes from the fact that you pale-faces read everything that the gods say from books that the letters in your books tell you what is true. You promised us that you give us land again, but you have not kept your promise because your god does not teach you the truth and keeping your word. We know a god who speaks to us in the clouds, in the waves, in the rustling leaves, in flash and thunder. The god of the red man keeps his word. The god knows that he has to be loyal to the tribe.—This was a great speech. The Great Spirit was a rest of a human view that originated from a dreamlike consciousness, from inspirations of higher forces. Hence, at the same time it was closer to the divine, the springs of the divine.

The languages teach us something similar. If we compare the different human races, we find a quite different structure in the languages of this external belt of peoples. We find the old Atlantean structure in the Mongolian languages, and we find something of Atlantean origin expressed in the structure of certain African languages. They emphasise the nouns, and they express by prefixes what we express by inflexions. We learn from that that they originated from an excellently working memory. The Mongolian languages show that they originated at a time in which memory did no longer function in such a way, as it was the case once. There the verbs are more developed which already tend to the reason. The Atlantean did not at all talk, actually, from memory. Everything was present to him. Not before one starts forgetting, the verb forms in the language. I would like to say that a magnificent monument of the middle of the Atlantean culture has remained, and this is the Chinese language. This language has something purely composing and at the same time something original where in the sounds even something inside, mental and a certain relation to the outside world is expressed. If we studied certain parts of the population in the connection with it, we could understand this completely.

We can understand our race if we pursue it in two currents, which we can clearly, prove. There we have that current at first, which moves from the west, maybe from England to Asia. It probably gave cause for the Indian, the Near Eastern-Semitic, for the Indo-African-Semitic races as well as for the Arabian-Chaldean race. Then, however, we must imagine another current that did not progress so far which came maybe only to Ireland or Holland, or also to the area that the ancestors of the ancient Persians inhabited. There we have a belt of related population through the area of the Persians via the Black Sea to Europe.

Thus, we can verify two zones of human population. One extends from India over here and encloses the southern peninsulas of Europe; the other encloses the zones located to the north with different gradations. There we have the Aryan one and the different Semitic gradations in Asia and Africa; then in Greece and Italy the Greek-Latin population. However, we have to imagine them also in such a way that it originated from the mixture with the northern belt which also encloses the Persian population and everything that developed, like from undergrounds, the Slavic and the Germanic populations in the west, and that which provides the basis more or less of all, the ancient Celtic population. We can imagine that we had an ancient Celtic population in the west of Europe. This part of the current of peoples lies farthest to the west, while the Persian population is that part which went the farthest to the east. The Slavic and the Germanic peoples stand between; intermingled with the southern belt, these established the Greek-Latin race. You can prove it in the languages that a relationship of the population exists, which expresses itself the strongest in the deep relationship of the languages in the northern belt.

There we have languages that are completely different from that which constitutes the character of the Semitic-Egyptian culture. The structure of the Semitic-Egyptian languages express what developed in the fifth sub-race of Atlantis as a Primal Semitic culture. It is characterised by the first lighting up of the intellect in the human development. Here logic and intellect developed first. The former dreamlike clairvoyant element intermingled in the most different way, and the different religions formed. However, the Semitic language does not have an atomistic character like the Chinese one, but an analytic character. On the other hand, the Caucasian languages have a synthetic character.

We distinguish five human races. I leave it undecided whether the word is used rightly or wrongly. The ancient Indo-Aryans with their marvellous visionary thinking established the first culture. This culture preceded the Vedic culture. That is why there are no recordings of it. What you read in the Vedas is only an echo of the ancient visionary Indian culture. Then the ancient Persian culture comes as the second race, that population which preferably applies the intelligence to the external work. The ancient Indian culture has something unworldly. In these northern regions, we find human beings who enclose the world who want to conquer the world who use tools and the like. Hence, we see in this culture how there the consciousness develops that humanity has to achieve something that there is good and bad. Here Ormuzd and Ahriman confront themselves. Then we come to the Near East. There develops another race. What expresses itself in the structure of the Semitic language is the combinatorial, the mathematical, and the logical-conceptual aspect. This faces us in the architecture of Egypt; this is expressed in the pyramids and in the great thought structures, then in the marvellous science, in the astrological form of astronomy.

We have three sub-races now. We come now to Europe to the southern peninsulas. There we find that which flows from the north and expresses itself in old cultural peoples. We find that something develops that looks for the inner life. While the Egyptian builds up externally, with internal symbolism, the Greek starts erecting monuments and cultivating sculpture stimulated by the mystery dramas. However, the most significant action within this fourth sub-race or culture epoch is the rise of Christianity. The southern peoples are not able to understand this Christianity in its peculiar figure. In Greece, it is Grecized, in Rome it is Romanised and becomes state church. This happened while the fifth sub-race approached gradually in the Middle Ages. This is our own sub-race. It had the task to bring the culture down to the physical plane. This indicates that sense and reason is in the succession of races.

Still in another sense, sense and reason are in this racial development. The human being consists of three members according to his lower nature: of physical body, etheric body, and astral body. The physical body is that which we see with eyes, can touch with hands. The astral body is the bearer of our desires, passions, and instincts, of our emotions, affects, of rage and hatred. The etheric body is the bearer of the vital forces. The human ego lives in them. This expresses itself differently.

I immediately want to begin with the way in which it expresses itself in our present cultural epoch. It has developed the physical body most remarkably, elaborated it most marvellously. The body, the brain became the tool of the intellectual life and thinking. Gradually the body had to be conquered. If you were able to look back, you would see that during the Lemurian age the body looks like an awkward huge thing. The astral body is not yet able to move the limbs. The ancestors of the Lemurian age were clumsy. You see this still echoing in the Native American population. On one side, the instincts still fight because the human beings do not yet have the consciousness to penetrate themselves from the inside, they work on the body from the outside, they tattoo it because it does not yet appear finished to them. If we go up to the other races, we see the human being conquering the etheric body. The functions of life and nutrition developed, so that the human being becomes a conscious and autonomous being from an unaware one.

The human being gradually starts the campaign of conquest through his own being. The Lemurians conquered the astral body, the Atlanteans the life body, and our present humanity conquers the physical body. The conquest of the spiritual-mental forces follows, which is the task of our time. Thus, the racial development gets an even higher sense and we understand that it is a training of the developing human mind. We look back to areas where the human being is structured quite differently. Our souls embodied themselves at that time and got to know the phenomena of the external world. Later they returned to the earth in another race and learnt to look into the world in another way. Moreover, it goes on that way. The human being goes through race by race. Those who are young souls reincarnate in those races that remained on their former level.

Thus, that which lives as race and souls round us fits into each other organically and mentally. Everything gets a sense, becomes transparent, and becomes explicable. We approach the solution of these riddles more and more and we can understand that we have to go through other epochs in the future that we have to go other ways than the race made them. We must be clear in our mind that mental and racial developments are different. Within the Atlantean race our own souls lived which developed then upwards to a superior human race. This gives us a picture of the human development up to our time.

Hence, we also understand the principle to found the core of a general brotherhood without taking into consideration race, colour, social rank et cetera. I shall explain this thought in particular. I wanted to show today only how in the different figures the same being exists, namely in a much more correct sense than the natural sciences teach it. Our soul steps from stage to stage, that is, from race to race, and we get to know the significance of humanity if we look at these races. We learn to understand one thing more and more, namely how deep and true the saying is, “Somebody was successful, and he lifted the veil of the goddess of Sais. However, what did he see? He saw—miracle of miracles—himself!” We see ourselves everywhere and in the manifold figures.—This is self-knowledge! The great saying in the temple of the Greek school of wisdom comes true: human being, recognise yourself.

If anybody reads a popular book, about astronomy, for example, then probably above all because he wants to inform himself about the mysterious facts of the universe. He finds his satisfaction, perhaps in such a book if the information makes sense to his reason, sensation, and feeling. He also tries perhaps to penetrate into the matters as far as it is possible to convince himself of such truth, such knowledge, visiting popular talks in which one makes experiments or observatories, laboratories et cetera. However, in any case, one fact remains in force. The human being who reads such things has to assume that still other human beings exist who have these abilities with particular research methods, with particular scientific and technical schooling.

Who reads Haeckel's Natural Creation History may possibly say to himself, yes, this makes sense to my intellect, to my reason and to my feeling.—However, he also becomes aware of the fact that it requires a lot of work to ascertain these facts only. Then maybe he assumes that there is a little group of human beings which deals with the finding of such facts. In quite a similar way, a big part of humanity probably behaves towards other writings which want to bring facts of another field home to the human being, namely towards the so-called religious scriptures.

It is no other relation than that I have just described. Also towards the religious scriptures, the human being asks himself at first, does this speak convincingly to my sensation, emotions, and reason?—Also here, he assumes or assumed in past times at least just as for the external, sensuous facts, which we possibly get to know from the Natural Creation History by Haeckel or from popular representations of astronomy, who know the methods, have the key to ascertain these facts. Thus, the human being also assumed concerning the religious documents that there are single human beings who are able not only to read this truth but also to ascertain it. He assumed that there are single human beings who have the key of them and know methods how one can convince oneself of them directly. Briefly, one has to demand from the religious scriptures, as from any other representation of facts that they come from knowledge, from immediate experience.

The human being assumes that there are single people who ascertain the described sensuous facts using telescopes, microscopes, biological and other methods of investigation. Concerning the communications that are included in the religious documents we must also assume that there are human beings who know the methods to penetrate by the experience into the field, which is described in the religious scriptures. Just as in the Natural Creation History the field of the sensuous facts and in the popular talks the field and the facts of astronomy are portrayed, the field of the supersensible, the invisible, the spiritual is portrayed in the religious scriptures. If we who do not research have to offer the same trust, the same confidence to the religious scriptures, we must assume also that there are single persons in the world who made it their particular task to collect experiences in the world of the supersensible, which forms as spiritual causes the basis of the sensuous world. The human being is not allowed to behave differently towards the representation of a natural creation history and the representation of a supersensible creation history.

Not the behaviour of the human beings towards these matters is different, only the fields are different about which the concerning writings tell. With it, one says that there must be knowing people who are able to ascertain the facts in the religious scriptures. Indeed, up to a certain degree this consciousness has got lost just in our time. Just as it would be of little use if anybody were not able to assume that researchers exist behind the popular scientific representations, also it would not make much sense basically if we did not assume that researchers are behind the statements of the religious scriptures. It is the task of theosophy or spiritual science today to renew and animate the consciousness that there is also a research in the supersensible fields. Spiritual science wants nothing else than to evoke the consciousness in the larger circles again that it is in such a way as I have said it now.

One often translates the word theosophy saying that theosophy is knowledge, wisdom of God. This translation is not right; at least it does not describe what theosophy wants. Knowledge of God is something that the theosophist has in mind as an inkling at first, as something that signifies the last purpose of all knowledge. As little as we already have awareness of all means and abilities of knowledge, just as little as we are allowed to say that we can have a comprehensive or final knowledge of the divine primal ground of the universe today. Humanity develops, advances, also its abilities of knowledge. Perhaps, even the most advanced people cannot form an idea of the insights into the mysterious worlds of existence the human being can get on this way. We have to absolutely realise that European civilised human beings have another concept of divinity than, for example, the so-called savages of Africa or the barbarians who invaded the Roman empire from the north at the beginning of the Middle Ages.

We have to assume that a usual educated person also has another idea of the divine being than Goethe had. Thus, we can also imagine that the human being advances further, that abilities develop in him compared with which Goethe's intuitive and imaginative strength was undeveloped. There we can have an inkling how much more elated and more magnificent the concept of God of those human beings will be than ours are. We can say that we exist, work, and live in Him; however, the knowledge of Him can never be completed. Therefore, theosophy does not think that it wants to be knowledge of God. Theosophy is that knowledge, namely, which attains the deepest, innermost being of the human being, in contrast to the usual, everyday knowledge that acquires the external, sensuous, transient nature of the human being.

Let us realise once: we see colours, light, we hear tones, smell and taste, seize objects, feel heat, cold, and so on, everything with the help of our outer senses. We can also imagine that for anybody who has no ear no sounding world, but a dumb world is around him, for anybody who has no eyes no luminous, no colourful world but a dark one exists. All that is only a summary of that which the human being can perceive with the senses. However, the senses consist of material forces that are handed over to the earth again. What we perceive with them is also something transient. With it, we have realised the transient human being. The physicist shows us that a time comes when the earth is dispersed in countless atoms in which it does no longer exist. Then also no colours, lights, tones, the present forms of minerals, plants and animals exist, the human form itself does no longer exist.

Thus, we have characterised the extent of the transient in the human being. What this transient human being recognises is everyday science, is our official science. With it, I say nothing against this official science. However, this whole science is nothing else than preoccupation with transient matters. However, there is still another possibility to look at the world, namely with those abilities in the human being which are imperishable. The human being bears an imperishable core in himself.

The human being bears an imperishable core that we find in ourselves by introspection, by self-observation to a new existence in the times when the earth is dispersed. He carries this imperishable core to other worlds, and carries that which he recognised as the fruit of this life on earth to another world. What the divine core recognises is the content of spiritual science. Theosophy is not knowledge of other matters of the human being but knowledge of the other part of the human being. Hence, theosophy or spiritual science does not come from such people who want to rise with the usual reason, with the usual senses to a consideration of the spiritual from the sensuous, but from such people who have woken the abilities slumbering in the human being and are thereby able to investigate the supersensible, the imperishable. The usual science considers plants, animals, and human beings according to their usual qualities as they present themselves to the senses. In addition, the spiritual research looks only at that which surrounds us in the world. However, it looks at it with other forces and other abilities and, hence, gets to know the everlasting and imperishable qualities of the things. This is theosophy.

Such researchers who have woken such abilities in themselves are able to ascertain the supersensible facts independently which the confessions communicate. As well as the naturalists ascertain in the laboratory and on the observatory using the strength of the senses and their instruments what you can then read in the popular books, the researchers of the supersensible ascertain by their own experience what was communicated to humanity in the religious documents. In the same sense as we speak of the scientific laboratories and astronomical observatories as research sites, in the same sense we speak of spiritual research sites. We call this spiritual research site—the term does not matter—the Lodge of the Masters of Wisdom.

Because all wisdom must be based on a common origin, because all those who are in a spiritual relationship to these teachers are penetrated and irradiated by that wisdom, all researches also go back to the spiritual primary source. They go back, to the big brotherhood of the most advanced sages who have recognised what those religious documents announced from own observation by the means of spiritual research. You may call this basis of all religions the “spiritual laboratory of humanity,” or the “great White Lodge,” it is the same. Now we know what it means. As any popular book goes back to something that has really been investigated anywhere, each of the great religions goes back to that which was investigated in the spiritual sense in this laboratory of the white brotherhood of humanity. Those who founded the religions were great, excellent individualities who experienced the lessons and instructions of that brotherhood in this big spiritual laboratory. They were introduced into the spiritual life, which forms the basis of all phenomena, and were then sent from there to the various peoples to speak to them in their language and according to their characters.

One taught a uniform ground of knowledge, an ancient truth in that spiritual laboratory, and it is possible that those who advance further by internal development learn the methods of research and can use them as Haeckel and other naturalists used the sensuous methods. It is possible that these find access to the researchers of the spiritual laboratory, that they get to know from which central site the great sages came who went to the south and the west, and brought the great messages to humanity. It is possible that they find the way to those from whom they can learn how all that has come about.

The ancient religious teachers were sent out from the same site, the great founders of a religion who brought the first messages to India the echo of which the European researchers admired so much when they faced the wisdom, which is contained in the old Brahmanism. The same site of wisdom sent out the various Buddhas who brought their messages to the single members of the Asian religions. It sent out the Egyptian Hermes, too, who founded that marvellous religion about which anybody said to Solon (~640-~560 B.C., Athenian statesman, lawmaker and poet): what you know is like the knowledge of children compared with the wisdom of our initiates.

Pythagoras (~570-~495 B.C., philosopher, and mathematician) came out of it, the great teacher of the Greek people. That man came out of it who illuminates the future, whose religion becomes more and more comprehensive and spiritual, Jesus himself. There we have the spiritual connection, and we see how the different religions point back to the central site where the loftiest human wisdom is cultivated. Who looks at the different religions can convince himself that their qualities point to such a central site. Our materialistic cultural researchers have also often recognised resemblances of the different confessions. Zarathustrism, the ancient Indian culture, Buddhism, even the religion that lived in the old America contain all components in which marvellous accordance exists. However, one has believed that this accordance comes from external reasons. One has not penetrated deeply enough because one had lost the key of it. Who gets involved, however, really in the core of truth of the religions can obtain the conviction concerning the religions that the accordance cannot come from the outside, but that it arises from a common core of wisdom, and that they were differently organised considering the single peoples and the different epochs.

If we look at Asia, we still find the remnants of an ancient religion at first, which one cannot understand, actually, as religion in the modern sense. We find this religion in the strange culture of the Chinese. I do not speak about the religion of Confucius, not about that which spread as Buddhism in India and China, but I would like to speak of the remains of the ancient Chinese religion, of Taoism. This religion points the human being to Tao.

One translates Tao as the way or the goal, the destination. However, one gets no clear idea of the being of this religion if one simply sticks to this translation. For a big part of humanity, Tao expresses and already expressed the highest to which the human beings could look up. They thought that the world, the whole humanity would attain it once, the loftiest that the human being bears in himself as a seed and that develops once as a ripe flower from the innermost human nature. Tao signifies a deep, concealed soul ground and an elated future at the same time. Somebody who knows what it concerns not only pronounces it but also thinks of it with shy reverence. Taoism is based on the principle of development. It says, what is around me today is a stage, which will be overcome. I must be clear in my mind that this development in which I am has an aim that I develop to an elated aim and that a force lives in me that urges me to arrive at this destination Tao.

If I feel this big strength in myself and if I feel that with me all beings strive for this goal, then this strength is to me the steering force which blows from the wind against me, which sounds towards me from the stone, which shines towards me from the flash, which sounds towards me from the thunder. It appears in the plant as force of growth, in the animal as sensation and perception. This force produces form by form repeatedly up to that elated goal by which I recognise myself as one with the whole nature, which streams into me and streams from me with every breath, which is the symbol of the loftiest developing spirit that I feel as life. I feel this force as Tao.—One did not speak in this religion of a transcendent god at all, one did not speak about anything that is beyond the world, but of something that gives strength to the progress of humanity.

The human being felt Tao intensely when he was still connected with the divine original source, in particular in the Atlantean age. Our ancestors still had no such advanced reason, no such intelligence like the modern humanity. In return, however, they had a more dreamlike consciousness, an instinctively ascending imagination and their life of thought was in such a way that they were almost innumerate. Imagine the dream life, but increased, so that it makes sense and is not chaotic, and imagine a humanity from whose souls such pictures arise that announce the sensations which are in the own soul, which echo everything that is external round us. One has to imagine the soul world of these prehistoric human beings quite unlike ours. The human being today strives for forming thoughts and images of the environment as exactly as possible. However, the prehistoric human being formed symbolic images, which appeared in him full of life.

If you face a person today, you try above all to form an idea of him whether he is a good or a bad, a clever or a silly person, and you try to get an idea very soberly which corresponds to the external human being. This has never been the case with the prehistoric Atlantean. A picture arose in him, not a rational concept. If he faced a bad human being, a picture arose in him, which was vague and obscure. However, this perception did not become a concept. Nevertheless, he acted on this picture. If he had a bright, beautiful picture before himself, which appeared dreamlike in his soul, then he knew that he could trust in such a being. He got fear of a picture if it arose in black, red, or brown colours in him. He did not yet grasp realities with reason and intellect, but they appeared as inspirations. He felt as if the divinity working in these pictures was also in him. He spoke of the divinity, which announced itself in the blowing of the wind, in the whispering of the woods and in the pictures of his soul life if he felt the urge to look up to an elated human future. He called this Tao.

The present human being who replaced this ancient humanity relates to the spiritual powers differently. He has lost the strength of the immediate beholding, which was more vague and twilighted than ours in certain respects. He has attained the developmental stage of the intellectual and rational ideation, which is higher in certain respects, however, also lower in certain respects. The modern human being thereby outranks the prehistoric human being because he owns a sharp, pervasive intellect; but he is no longer feeling the lively connection with the divine Tao forces of the world. That is why he has the world as it reveals itself in his soul, and on the other side his intelligence. The Atlantean felt the pictures living in him. The modern human being hears and sees the external world. These two things, outside and inside, are opposing each other, and he is no longer feeling the connection of both.

This is the great sense of the human development. Since the land masses have risen again, after the floods of the oceans had flooded the continents, since that time humanity longs for finding the connection of inner soul life and external sensuous world again. That is why the word religare (Latin)—religion is justified. It means nothing else than to combine again what was connected once and is separated now, the world and the ego. The different forms of the confessions are nothing else than the means, than the ways taught by the great sages to find this connection again. Therefore, they are formed so differently to become understandable in this or that form to the human beings of any cultural level.

The ancient Indian had an excessively growing plant world around himself, which made him dreamy in his soul and did not make it necessary to produce external tools and external culture. He had to get religion in another form than the modern human being. If the human being lives quietly, other images appear in his soul, than if he works with coarse tools and must be technically active. The external nature is different in the different areas of the earth, and the inner soul life of the human beings is different, too. Because the connection should be sought by the different religions, it is only a matter of course that the masters had to determine the way of finding the connection differently for different peoples and different times.

The first way to determine this connection, to look for the ancient Tao of Atlantis, is the religion of the ancient India. This received the instructions of the holy Rishis, great initiates in ancient times whose elated teachings still go on sounding in the marvellous Vedic poems and in the Vedanta philosophy of the ancient Brahmans, which extends to the loftiest levels of human understanding. It was announced to humanity in broad outlines there that there is something that as a uniform world ground serves everything as a base. One called it Brahman, Parabrahman, Bhagavad and so forth.

What we find in the Vedas, which are only an echo of the original old teachings, shows us how great and stupendous and, at the same time, how sublime the concepts were by which that subtle spirituality attempted to reach the divine original source of being. One could circumscribe it as follows: once the spiritual hosts assembled round the original being and asked it who it was, and it said, I am not that who I am if I am able to define myself by anything other than by myself. If you define a thing, you look for a higher concept. You define the single animal beings, the lion, the eagle, the dog, the wolf, while you change over to the superior concepts of the cat species, the dog species, the bird species et cetera. You define the single winds, while you change over to the general concept of wind. Thus, anything in the world has its name that indicates what stands above it. I, however—the Brahman said to the spirit hosts—I have no name which stands above me. I am the I-am.

From this original source, the human being started; he shall come to it again. There was also development in the ancient India. Development was the magic word by which the human being felt his destination. There must have been anything, as the confession says, that leads to the point on which the human being stands today. Once there must have been a longing that leads him from the divine origin down into this world, to the necessary stage on which we stand today. As true and inevitable as it was that there was such a yearning and desire which leads into the world, as true it is that there must be a force that leads the human being again out of it, so that he brings the fruits of this world back again to the divine original source. This force is the overcoming of the desire by the divine desires, the purification of the destinations by the divine destination.

Now it was something else that was felt as a religion than in the ancient times of which we have spoken. Now, it was no longer the god who revealed himself to the inside, now it was the god revealing himself from the outside, because the human being had to create an abyss between himself and the outside world. The word obviously replaces the immediate life and the sheer strength, and Veda means nothing else than “word.” By this word, advanced, wise human beings announced the origin and destination of the human being, which forms the basis of the universe. One had another idea of this word in ancient times than today if one speaks of the word.

I would like to try to give you an idea of that which one felt speaking of the Veda, of the Logos, and later of the Word. The human being gives names to the things. He says, this is this and that is that. However, if his mouth names the things, it is no arbitrariness, but these are the same names, which once the divine original soul of humanity pronounced from itself and thereby created the things. The human being sees the things and pronounces the names afterwards. However, once the original soul spoke the names first and according to the word, the things formed. This is why there an original soul was in the ancient times, which expressed the words of creation. The words became things and the human soul afterwards found the words out of the things, which the god had put into them.

It revived the sleeping words out of the things. The human being behaved to the divinity this way where one had religious sensation, the sensation towards the word, which lived with the ancient Indians really. Therefore, the opinion combined with the word that there are human beings who are able to look deeper into nature and the being of the world, who are able to directly echo in their words and announce what once the divinity breathed out of itself into the world. One perceived such human beings as initiates. The ancient Indian considered his Rishis not as usual human beings, but as such beings who had reached the level of immortality already in the physical body and live not in the sensory world, but with their souls in the higher heavenly world and have contact with the gods, with the spiritual beings who form the basis of the world. While one looked up at the human beings who had developed the Tao in themselves in this way, one was aware that every human being would also attain this stage once.

The doctrine of rebirth, of the repeated return was combined with it. Buddha did not speak out of his imagination but out of his perception when he spoke to his believers and said, I see back at one, two, three, four, ten, hundred lives.—He spoke of these hundred lives as the human being speaks of one life. In these many lives, he obtained everything that enabled him to speak no longer about the experience of the sensuous world, but about the experience of the supersensible worlds and to bring the message of these supersensible worlds to humanity. This supersensible knowledge is an original component of all religions.

If we put ourselves once again in the peoples feeling the Tao. They not only tried to unite in the religion with the divine, but they also considered themselves as embodiments, as covers of the divine. This was their immediate consciousness. There were human beings who could not think correctly; they were not as clever as we are, but had a direct consciousness that they surrounded a divine core as a fruit surrounds the pit. They saw and felt this core, and they looked through it at the past and the future. They thereby felt the doctrine of reincarnation in themselves.

At that time, the immigrants found such a consciousness. At that time, the ancient Indian teachers who gave the first Brahma culture to the Indians still found a lively view of re-embodiment. Hence, all religions, which started from this site, have the teaching of reincarnation. One felt the Tao in its different creation of human activity. It is only a matter of course that the human being of our period who has separated his soul life from the big external powers could not overlook so many lives, but only saw that he represented this limited soul life. From every next stage, which extends northbound then—starting from the ancient Persian religion—the consciousness of the fact disappeared that the human soul is a cover around the core reincarnating forever. The consciousness confined itself to the zenith between birth and death and to how within birth and death “religare“, religion, has to be sought for. There one felt the contrast of a duality instead of the unity for the first time.

Whereas the Taoist human being of the Atlantean age felt his connection with the original source vividly, and the Brahmanic human being still tried to rouse the Brahman, which is thought outside and within the human being as the same, the human being felt a certain duality, a dualism in Persia first. He felt that which has originated from the human being, as an inside and outside, as an original ground and present human figure. He looked up to the original ground from which everything had risen round him, he looked up to the word from which plant, animal, and human being had arisen according to the physical figure. However, he still felt something else: he felt that anything was therein that did not be in accordance with the original harmony that has to become only again like the original divine. He felt the latter as renunciation from the original divine. He faced the contrast, the duality of light and darkness or of male and female. They represent the original ground and that which expects the human soul in the material compression. This is the second level of human development.

The third stage faces us in the prehistorical and historical Egypt; it is preserved for us as the Book of the Dead. There the human being felt a third aspect besides the duality. He saw a light, the sun, illuminating the earth and saw it penetrating this with its beams and enlivening the seeds and beings slumbering in the earth, and saw how the primal ground had to be fertilised. We find this triad original ground, conception, new life, symbolised as Osiris, the sun, the god of light; as Isis, the matter, and as Horus, the life developing from it. These were three Egyptian divinities. The triad appears here. This triad becomes a basic core in all later confessions.

As trinity the divinity faces us in the confessions where it is called Father, Word and Holy Spirit—Isis, Osiris, Horus—atma(n), buddhi, manas. We find the triad everywhere in the religions now. We have recognised the reason. It faces us with pictures or words in Asia, in Egypt with the priests, but also in the Greek-Roman world, with Augustine, then as nuances in the Middle Ages.

If we have got a bigger perfection in the future, that strength will have appeared as a forming one to which we owe our existence and which works today as a concealed primal ground of the being in us. One felt this as the divine, the inexpressible of the human being that is identical with the first essential component of the tripartite world. One felt then what lives in the human being, what strives for this highest as the word active in the present, the son, who originated from the father who rests unutterably in him. As true as this Father's ground forms the future, more perfect human being, he created the developing son, the buddhi, the second human member, which is not yet perfect but is the reason why we strive for perfection. This is the second being. Also in the past this original ground worked. As well as the sensuous human being was created by the universal primal ground in the past, also that which has already assumed and given off shape in him has something that has likewise arisen in the past from the primal ground and is already developed now.

Let us look at the universe, how it makes itself perceptible as colours, tones, smells and tactile sensations, it streamed from the inexpressible primal ground. In such respect, we may call this primal ground, which appears to us, the creatures, spirit, also in the Christian sense. However, the creation of the world is not finished. The world is a germ, something that has a soul that has the impulse of the future in itself. This is the son. Hence, one called this striving the Word, Veda, Edda. The third one is a strength in us that becomes discernible in the future in us: the Father's ground of all being deep set in any of our souls.

Feeling this vividly means feeling the trinity, making it the being of the entire internal imagination. Persona (Latin) signifies mask or external figure, cover. Hence, the religion shows this core of truth, which I have just explained, in three different masks, in three persons. God has three different persons. That means that he appears in three different masks: Spirit, Word, and Father. With it, we have touched that confession at the same time that then led to Christianity. If you understand this really, you find this truth also expressed in it. If you correctly understand the deepest Gospel, that of John, you find the same consciousness of religare, of the connection with a higher consciousness that appeared in human form. It is the teachings of the incarnate Logos, the incarnate divinity, the present divinity that lives in brotherliness with both forms of the divinity, with the active Spirit coming from the past, working in the present, and the Father creating in the present into the future. Thus, the Son originated from the Father, is connected with the Spirit at the same time, and that is why the Son is the great preannouncement that will lead to the Father.

The words no one comes to the Father except by me (John 14:5), by the divine essence of the present, point to this. He says that he sends the Spirit again, the essence of that which is already in the world. As true as Christ said, I will be with you always, to the end of time (Matthew 28:20), it is also true that he will come again that the whole Christianity has been a preparation of the new figure. The Spirit is there provisional, the knowledge, the science, the religions were taught provisionally as they were taught in the past. The religious documents were preserved to us and now the theologians try to interpret them and to teach according to them. This is the way now theology works in place of wisdom. Theosophy means wisdom and truth, theology means the doctrine of wisdom and truth. As well as theology originated from spiritual science, theology has to go back to spiritual science.

I have often drawn your attention to the condition of former research, and that then a reversal took place. Once one trusted in the books of the old sages, in Plato, Aristotle and others at all sites where one taught. Researchers were not there, but interpreters. I have that strange time in mind about which theology tells that one could no longer understand later when one learnt to read in the book of nature. The confidence in the written was almost absolute. If, for example, a naturalist had stated that the nerves do not start from the heart, but from the brain, one said, nevertheless, Aristotle says differently, and Aristotle is right, although one saw the demonstrated phenomena. Today in wide sections of the population, the consciousness does not yet exist that there is a key that there are research sites and research methods that ascertain the facts of the spiritual worlds as the observatories or the laboratories ascertain the facts of the sensuous world.

Since thirty years it has been announced again that there is such a thing like a spiritual central site of humanity, and with it the theosophists say nothing more unbelievable, than if Haeckel says: this is in that and this way.—If Haeckel argues anything, we assume that he has found the proofs of it in his research. We assume also that the statements in the religious documents were proved by the facts to be true, and that there are persons among us which themselves can go back again to the sources. Theosophy or spiritual science means drawing the attention to the spiritual researchers and to the central site. It speaks again from experience about the matters of the supersensible, as those did who originally created the religious documents, from their inner experience. As well as 400 years ago, the natural sciences experienced a revival, theosophy or spiritual science should today signify a revival of the immediate spiritual research.

Thus, we are put in the necessity to return to that core of truth, which I tried to outline from the Tao up to the appearance of the great saviour of humanity. I wanted to generate awareness of the relation of spiritual science to the central point, the core of truth in the different religions. Those who have not yet approached spiritual science maybe come again to hear more. However, some may also say that it is a kind of neo-Buddhism, a new religion, something oriental; it wants to bring in something foreign to our world. However, this is not the case; this would not be spiritual-scientific. Only those speak in such ways who do not have the will to listen to that which spiritual science says. The aspiration of spiritual science is to look for the core of truth in our external confessions, to go back to the sources from which the books existing today were created. It is necessary to go back to the facts, then the books are better understood, then new life flows in humanity.

Christianity is to be understood as a religion that has to prepare humanity for the future, as the religion of the Son by which one finds the Father on the same ways. At the same time, it is one of the most important tasks of spiritual science to get this religion across. Therefore, it searches for the core of truth in all religions to find it in our own. We recognised that religion originated not from childish images, but from the highest wisdom, from spiritual research. However, we also learnt that one can abreast with science and be, nevertheless, a religious person. If this knowledge finds an echo again, the lively feeling awakes for that which one of the theosophists, Goethe, called into the world more than hundred years ago like a program, like a beautiful and marvellous saying to humanity. I would like to close with this saying today, confessing that there can be no true science, no deeper human observation, which shows the religious truth as something childish; and that all religions contain as a core of our highest destination:

Who has science and art,
Has religion, too;
Who does not have both,
Should have religion.

It is our task today to speak about two soul contents one of which fraternity, represents a great ideal penetrating humanity, and the other represents something that we meet in life at every turn wherever we go, the struggle for existence: fraternity and struggle for existence. Those of you who have occupied themselves only a little with the aims of the spiritual-scientific movement know our first principle to establish the core of a fraternity founded on general altruism, without difference of race, gender, profession, confession et cetera. With it, the theosophical society itself ranked this principle of a general fraternity first and made it its most important ideal. It has indicated that way that this great moral pursuit of fraternity—a pursuit that is necessary besides other cultural aspirations—is intimately connected with the main destination of humanity.

The spiritual-scientific striving human being is convinced, and not only convinced, he is quite clear in his mind that the deep knowledge of the spiritual world must lead to fraternity if it seizes the human being really, that fraternity is just the noblest fruit of deep, innermost knowledge. However, with it the spiritual-scientific worldview seems to contradict something that approached humanity lately. One pointed in certain circles to the progressively working strength of the struggle. How often we can hear even today that the human forces grow with resistance that the human being gets strong will and intellectual initiative because he must measure his strength with the adversary. A worldview which has arisen from bases full of mind, the worldview of Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900, German philosopher), has among other enthusiastic pugnacious sentences also this: I love the critic, I love the great critic more than the little one.—We can find this over and over again most variously just with Nietzsche as something that completely belongs to his approaches to life.

It depends on certain economic views, which prevailed for a long time that one regards the general competition in the struggle of all against all as a powerful lever of progress. How often one has said that thereby, humanity can progress best of all that the single human being benefits himself, as well as possible, and establishes his position. The word individualism has become almost a catchword, admittedly, more in the external material life, but also to some extent in the inner spiritual life.

The human being benefits his fellow men the best if he obtains as much as possible economically from life, because he becomes economically strong, he can also be more useful to the public: this is the creed of many economists and sociologists. On the other side, we hear repeatedly emphasised that the human being should not become stereotyped that he should develop the forces lying in him universally that he should enjoy life wholeheartedly that he should develop what lies in his inside and that he can thereby benefit his fellow men mostly.

There are many among our fellow men who are virtually eager for the pursuit of this principle who enjoy life as intensely as possible. The spiritual-scientific worldview does not misjudge the necessity of the struggle for existence, just not in our time, but at the same time this worldview realises also that today—where this struggle for existence peaks—the deep significance of the principle of fraternity must be brought near to an understanding again.

The most important question is: is it right what so many people believe that the human forces grow in particular with the resistance that it is the struggle above all which the human being has to fight that has made him great and strong? In my talk on the idea of peace, which I held before you, I pointed already to this principle of the struggle for existence in the human life that receives strong support by the fact that the natural sciences have made it a general natural world principle. They, in particular in the west, believed for a while that those beings in the world are formed most suitably, which have out-competed their adversaries and have been left in this struggle for existence.

The naturalist Huxley (Thomas Henry H., 1825-1895) says: if we look at life outdoors, it appears to us like a gladiator fight, the strongest remains as the victor, the others perish.—If one believed the naturalists, one would have to suppose that all beings, which populate the world today, have been able to out-compete the others, which were there earlier. There is also a school of sociologists, which wanted to make this principle of the struggle for existence almost a doctrine of human development. In a book, entitled From Darwin to Nietzsche (1895), Alexander Tille (1866-1912, German philosopher, economic functionary, and lobbyist) tried to show that the future happiness of humanity depends on the fact that one accepts this struggle for existence wholeheartedly in the development of humanity. One should arrange it in such a way that the incapable perishes, however, that one must care for the strong ones and encourage them in the struggle for existence. The weak ones should perish. One said that we need such a social order that suppresses the weak ones because they are injurious.—I ask you, who is the strong one, who has an ideal mental power but a feeble body, or the other one who owns a less high mental power in a robust body?—One achieves nothing with general rules as you see. It is hard to decide who should be left, actually, in the struggle for existence. If it concerned practical measures, this question would have to be decided first. Now we ask ourselves, what becomes apparent to us if we look at the human life? Has the principle of fraternity or the principle of the struggle for existence achieved great things in the evolution of humanity, or have both contributed something to it?

Only with brief words, I would like again to draw your attention to what I already said in the talk on the idea of peace that even the modern natural sciences do no longer stand on the ground on which they still stood one decade ago. I have already pointed to the basic talk of the Russian researcher Kessler (Karl Fedorovich K., 1815-1881, German-Russian zoologist) in 1880 where he showed that the actual progressive animal species capable of development are not those which struggle the most, but which help each other. With it, it should not be asserted that struggle and war do not exist in the animal realm. Indeed, they exist, but it is another question what promotes development more, the war, or the mutual aid? One put an additional question: do those species survive whose individuals fight perpetually with each other, or those, which help each other? Here the above-mentioned research has already proved that not the struggle, but the mutual aid actually supports the progress. I have already pointed to the book of Prince Pyotr Kropotkin (1842-1921, Russian geographer, anarchist) Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution. In this book, you find some nice contributions to the questions, which occupy us here.

What did fraternity achieve in the human evolution? We only need to look at our ancestors on the same land on which we live today. You can easily get the idea that hunting and war were the actually supporting and caused the character of those human beings primarily. However, who defers deeper to history, finds that this is not right that those, also among the Germanic tribes, prospered best of all, on the contrary, those who had developed the principle of fraternity extraordinarily. We find this principle of fraternity above all how in the times before and after the migration of the people's property was regulated. In a great measure, there was a common property of land. A village in which the human beings lived together had a common property, and with the exception of a few things that belonged directly to the domestic use, with the exception of the tools, maybe of a garden, everything was common property. Every now and then, the land was divided again among the inhabitants, and it became apparent that these tribes had become strong because they had extraordinarily maintained fraternity concerning material goods.

If we go on some centuries, we find that this principle faces us in an exceptionally fertile way. The principle of fraternity, as it is distinct in the old villages, in the old conditions where the human beings found their freedom in the brotherly living together, expressed itself typically in the fact that one went so far to burn everything that a dead person had possessed. For one did not want to possess anything that the dead had possessed. When the principle was broken because of different conditions, in particular because single human beings had acquired a large estate and the persons in the surrounding area were thereby forced to serfdom and corvée, the principle of fraternity asserted in another, luminous way. Those who were depressed by their lords, the owners, wanted to free themselves from this oppression. Thus, we see in the middle of the Middle Ages a big liberation movement going through entire Europe. This liberation movement was characterised by general fraternity from which a general culture blossomed. We are in the so-called urban civilisation in the middle of the Middle Ages. Those human beings who could not stand the labour work on the manors escaped from their lords and sought for freedom in the enlarged cities.

People came from Scotland, France, and Russia, from everywhere and brought about the free cities. The principle of fraternity thereby developed, and it promoted culture in the extreme. Those who had common activities of the same kind united to associations which one called confraternities and which grew up to the guilds later. These associations were far more than mere unions of artisans or merchants. They developed from the practical life to a moral height. The mutual aid was highly developed with these associations, and many matters, which almost nobody cares about today, were objects of such assistance. Thus, for example, the members of such a confraternity provided assistance supporting each other in cases of illness. Two brothers were determined from day to day who had to keep vigil at the bedside of an ill brother. Sick people were supported with food.

Even beyond the grave, one thought brotherly, while one regarded it as something particularly honourable to bury a brother suitably. Finally, it also belonged to the honour of the association to supply the widows and orphans. Thus, you see how an understanding of morality arose in the common life how this morality formed on the ground of a consciousness an idea of which the modern human being can hardly conceive. Do not believe that here the present conditions should be rebuked in any way. They have become necessary, as well as it was necessary that the medieval conditions were expressed in their way. We have only to understand that there were also other phases of development than the modern ones.

Everywhere in the free cities of the Middle Ages, the trade in the market places and the prices were controlled. What did this mean? I want to illustrate it with a concrete example. If products were brought from the surrounding farmland to a market place of a city, one was only allowed to sell them in retail in the first days. Nobody was allowed to buy wholesale or to be an intermediary. At that time, one never thought to regulate the prices by supply and demand. At that time, one was able to adjust both. The authorities of the cities or the guilds had to fix the prices of the goods after one had determined everything that was necessary to their production. Nobody was allowed to exceed the prices. If we look at the labour conditions, we see that a thorough understanding existed of that which a person needed. If we look at the wages of the past taking into account the completely different conditions, we must say to ourselves that we cannot compare the remuneration of a worker of that time with that of a worker of today. The researchers have often interpreted this fact quite wrong.

According to practical points of view, these associations were formed and, hence, they formed gradually according to such practical points of view. Then they spread from one city to the other, because it was a matter of course that those who had a common craft and common interests combined in the various cities and supported each other. Thus, the associations extended from town to town.

At that time, humanity was not yet united by police rules, but by practical points of view. Who bothers to study the conditions, which were visible steadily in the towns of Europe at that time, notices very soon that we deal here with a particular phase of the deepening of the fraternity principle. This becomes apparent in particular, if we see which fruit developed from it. We could point to the highest summits, to the enormous artistic achievements of the 12th and 13th centuries. They would not have been possible without this deepening of the fraternity principle. Dante's tremendous work, The Divine Comedy, we understand cultural-historically only if we understand the development of the fraternity principle. Have a look further at that which originated in the cities under the influence of this principle, for example, how art of printing, copperplate engraving, paper preparation, horology, and the later appearing inventions prepared under the free principle of fraternity. What we are used to call bourgeoisie arises from the maintenance of the fraternity principle in the medieval cities. Many things that were produced by the scientific and artistic deepening would not have been possible without maintenance of this fraternity principle. If a cathedral should be built, for example the Cologne Cathedral or any other cathedral, then we see that at first an association, a so-called construction guild formed. A determined cooperation of the members of such a guild came into being that way. One can see—if one has an intuitive look—this fraternity principle expressed even in the architectural style, one can see it expressed everywhere almost in every medieval city, and you find it going northwards to Scotland or to Venice, looking at Russian or Polish cities.

However, we have to emphasise one thing, namely that the fraternity principle originated under the influence of a decidedly material culture and, therefore, everywhere we see the material, the physical in this developing higher culture and in that which remains as a fruit of that time. It had to be maintained once, and to maintain and to organise it properly this fraternity principle was necessary in those days.

From an abstraction, this fraternity principle arose at that time and our life was split by this abstraction, by this rational thinking, so that one does no longer know and understand exactly today how the struggle for existence and the fraternity principle mutually co-operate. On one side, the spiritual life became more and more abstract. Morality and justice, views concerning the political system and the other social conditions were considered under more and more abstract principles, and an abyss separated the struggle for existence more and more from that which the human being feels, actually, as his ideal. In those days, in the middle of the Middle Ages, a harmony existed between that which one felt as his ideal and which one really did. If ever it was shown once that one can be an idealist and practitioner at the same time, it might have been good so in the Middle Ages. In addition, the relation of the Roman law to life was still a harmonious one. However, look at this matter today, and then you see our legal relationships hovering over the moral life. Many people say: we know what is good, right, and proper, but it is not practical.—This comes from the fact that the thinking about the highest principles is separated from life.

From the 16th century on, we see the spiritual life developing more under rational principles. A member of a guild who sat with other twelve lay judges in judgement of any offence that another member of the guild had committed was the brother of that who should be judged. Life combined with life. Everybody knew what the other worked and tried to understand why he deviated from the right way. One looked, as it were, into the brother and wanted to look into him.

Now a kind of jurisprudence developed that the judge and the lawyer are only interested in the code that both only see a “case” to which they have to apply the law. Consider only how everything that is intended morally is detached from jurisprudence. We saw this condition more and more developing in the last century, while in the Middle Ages under the principle of fraternity something had developed that is inevitable and important to any prosperous progress: expertise and trust which disappear as principles more and more.

The judgment of the expert has almost completely withdrawn compared with the abstract jurisprudence, compared with the abstract parliamentarism. Today the ordinary intellect, the majority should be authoritative, not the expertise. The preference of the majority had to come. But just as little as one can vote in mathematics to get a right result—for 3 times 3 is always 9 and 3 times 9 is always 27, it is there also. It would be impossible to carry out the principle of the expert without the principle of fraternity, of brotherly love.

The struggle for existence is justified in life. Because the human being is a special being and must go his way through life as a single, he depends on this struggle for existence. In certain respects, the saying by Rückert (Friedrich R., 1788-1866, German poet and translator) also applies here: if the rose adorns itself, it also adorns the garden.—Unless we make ourselves able to help our fellow men, we are only able to help them badly. Unless we see to it that all our dispositions are trained, we are only less successful to help our brothers. A certain egoism must exist to develop these dispositions, because the initiative is connected with egoism.

Who knows not to be led who knows not to let any picture of the surroundings work on himself, but knows how to descend in his inside, where the springs of the forces are, becomes a strong and capable human being who is more capable to serve others than someone who complies with all possible influence of his surroundings. It is obvious that this principle, which is necessary for the human being, can be radically elaborated. However, this principle only bears the right fruit if it is paired with the principle of brotherly love.

Just for this reason, I have instanced the free city guilds of the Middle Ages to show how the practice became so strong just under the principle of the mutual personal, individual aid. Where from did they get their strength? From the fact that they lived fraternally together with their fellow men. It is right to become as strong as possible. However, the question is whether we are generally able to become strong without brotherly love. Someone who soars a real soul knowledge has to deny this question categorically.

We see models of cooperation of single beings in a whole in the whole nature. Take only the human body. It exists of independent beings, of millions and millions of single independent living beings or cells. If you look at a part of this human body under the microscope, you find that it is composed of such independent beings. How do they co-operate? How has that become unselfish which should establish a whole in nature? None of our cells asserts its selfhood egotistically. The marvellous tool of thinking, the brain, is likewise formed from millions subtle cells, but they all work on their place harmoniously with the others. What does the cooperation of these little cells cause, what does it cause that a higher being is expressed within these little living beings? It is the human soul, which produces this effect. However, never could the human soul work here on earth unless these millions little beings gave up their selfhood and serve the big, common being which we call the soul. The soul sees with the cells of the eye, thinks with the cells of the brain, and lives with the cells of the blood. There we see what union means. Union means the possibility that a higher being expresses itself by the united constituents. This is a general principle of life.

Five human beings who are together and think and feel harmoniously, are more than 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1, they are not only the sum of five, just as little as our body is the sum of five senses. However, the living together and living in each other of the human beings signifies something quite similar as the living in each other of the cells of the human body. A new, higher being is among the five, already among two or three ones. “For where two or three meet together in my name, I am there among them” (Matthew 18:29). It is not the one, the other and the third, but something quite new originates from the union. However, it originates only if the single human being lives in the other, if the single human being not only gets his strength from himself only, but also from the other. However, this can happen only if he lives unselfishly in the other. Thus, the human unions are the mysterious sites, in which higher spiritual beings delve themselves to work using the single human being, as the soul works using the parts of the body.

In our materialistic age, one hardly believes that, but in the spiritual-scientific worldview, it is not only something pictorial, but also something real to the highest degree. Hence, the spiritual scientist does not only speak of abstract things speaking of the folk soul or of the folk spirit, of the family spirit or of the spirit of another community. One cannot see this spirit that works in a union, but it exists because of the brotherly love of the human beings working in this union. As the body has a soul, a guild, a fraternity also has a soul, and I repeat once again, I do not speak of anything figurative but of anything real.

The human beings who co-operate in a brotherhood are magicians because they draw higher beings into their circle. One does no longer need to refer to the machinations of spiritism if one co-operates with brotherly love in a community. Higher beings manifest themselves there. If we are merged in the fraternity, we harden and strengthen our organs. If we act or speak then as a member of such a community, the single soul does not act or speak in us, but the spirit of the community. This is the secret of the future human progress to work out of communities. As an epoch replaces the other and any epoch has its own task, it is also with the medieval epoch in relation to ours, with our epoch in relation to the future one.

The medieval guilds worked in the immediate practical life, in the basic useful skills. They showed a materialistic life only, after they had received their fruits, after the basis of their consciousness, namely brotherliness, had dwindled more or less, after the abstract state principle, the abstract, spiritual life had replaced real empathy. It is the future task to found brotherhoods again, namely out of the spiritual, out of the highest ideals of the soul. Human life produced the manifold unions up to now; it has caused a terrible struggle for existence, which has almost arrived at its peak today. The spiritual-scientific worldview wants to train the highest goods of humanity in the sense of the fraternity principle, and then you see that the spiritual-scientific world movement replaces the struggle for existence with this fraternity principle in all fields. We have to learn to lead a common life. We are not allowed to believe that the one or the other is able to carry out this or that.

Probably everybody would like to know how to combine the struggle for existence and brotherly love. This is very easy. We have to learn to substitute struggle by positive work, to substitute the struggle, the war by the ideal. Today one does not sufficiently understand what that is. One does not know of which struggle one speaks, because one speaks in life generally only of struggles. There we have the social struggle, the struggle for peace, the struggle for the emancipation of the woman, the struggle for land, et cetera, where we look, we see the struggle.

The spiritual-scientific worldview strives for replacing this struggle by positive work. Someone who has settled down in this worldview knows that the struggles lead to a real result in any field of life. Try to apply that which proves to be the right thing in your experience and knowledge to implement in life, to assert it without fighting against the opponent. Of course, it can be only an ideal, but such an ideal must exist, which is to be implemented today as a spiritual-scientific principle in life. Human beings who join human beings and who use their strength for everything are those who deliver the basis of a prosperous development in future. The theosophical society wants to be exemplary even in this respect; therefore, it is no propaganda society like others, but a society of brothers. One works in it by the work of every single member. One has to understand this correctly once. Someone works best who wants to push through not his opinion, but that which he guesses by looking at his co-brothers; who does research in the thoughts and feelings of the fellow men and serves them. Somebody works best of all within this circle who is able not to spare his own opinion in the practical life. If we try to understand this way that our best forces arise from the union and that the union is not only considered as an abstract principle, but also is to be operated above all theosophically with every handle, at every moment of life, then we advance. We must be patient advancing this way.

What does spiritual science show to us? It shows a higher reality, and it is this consciousness of a higher reality that furthers us in the activity of the fraternity principle.

One still calls the theosophists impractical idealists. It will not last long, and they will prove to be the most practical people because they envisage the forces of life. Nobody doubts that one injures a person if one throws a stone at his head. However, one does not consider that it is much worse to send a hatred feeling to the human being that injures his soul even more than the stone injures the body. It completely depends on it with which attitude we face the fellow men. However, our strength of a prosperous work in future also depends on it. If we try to live fraternally that way, then we carry out the principle of fraternity practically.

Being tolerant means, something else in a spiritual-scientific sense than what one normally understands by it. It means to pay attention also to the freedom of thought of other people. It is boorishness to push another away from his place; it is boorishness if one does the same, however, in thoughts, because nobody regards that as wrong. Indeed, we speak a lot of the appreciation of the other opinion; however, we are not inclined to apply this to ourselves.

A word almost does not have any significance to us; we hear it and have not heard it, nevertheless. However, we must learn to listen with the soul, we must know how to grasp the most intimate matters with the soul. That always exists in spirit at first, which originates later in the physical life. We must suppress our opinion to hear the other completely, not only the word, but even the emotion, also if in us the emotion should stir that it is wrong which the other says.

One is much more strengthened if one is able to listen, as long as the other speaks, than to interrupt him. This gives a completely different mutual understanding. Then you feel, as if the soul of the fellow man warms and illuminates you, if you consider it with absolute tolerance. We should not only grant freedom of the human being, but we should also esteem complete freedom, even the freedom of the other opinion. This is only one example of many. Someone who interrupts the other does—considered from a spiritual worldview—something similar as someone who gives him a kick. If one is able to understand that it is much stronger influencing to interrupt another than to give him a kick, then only one gets around to understanding the fraternity at heart, then it becomes a fact. This is the great thing of the spiritual-scientific movement that it brings us a new confidence, a new conviction of the spiritual forces flowing out from human being to human being. This is the higher principle of spiritual fraternity. Everybody may imagine how remote humanity is from such a principle of spiritual fraternity. Everybody may educate himself—if he finds time—to send thoughts of love and friendship to his dear. The human being regards this normally as something meaningless. But if you are once able to see that the thought is as well a force as the electric wave which goes out from an apparatus and streams to the receiving apparatus, then you also understand the principle of fraternity better, then the common consciousness becomes more distinct bit by bit, then it becomes practical.

From this point of view, we can realise how the spiritual-scientific worldview understands the struggle for existence and the fraternal relationship. We know for sure that quite a few people who are put to this or that place in life simply would perish if they did not do in Rome as the Romans do, if they did not fight this struggle for existence as cruelly as many others. For somebody who thinks materialistically there is almost no escape from this struggle for existence. Indeed, we should do our duty at the place where karma has put us. However, we do the right thing if we understand that we would perform much more if we refrained to see the results, which we want to get, in the immediate present. If you are in the struggle for existence with bleeding soul, have the heart to let flow your thoughts affectionately from soul to soul to anybody whom you hurt in the struggle for existence. As a materialist, you maybe think that you have done nothing. After these discussions, however, you see that this must have its effect later; for we know that nothing is lost which takes action in the spiritual.

Thus, we may wage the struggle for existence with hesitating soul sometimes, with melancholy in the heart and transform it with our cooperation. Working in this struggle for existence in such a way means transforming it in practical respect. This is not possible overnight, but no doubt, we can do it. If we work on our soul in the sense of brotherly love, we benefit humanity mostly because we benefit ourselves. For it is true that our abilities are uprooted as a plant is eradicated from the ground if we remain in selfhood. As little as an eye is still an eye if it is torn out of the head, as little a human soul is still a human soul if it separates from the human society. You will see that we develop our talents, best of all, if we live in brotherly community that we live most intensely if we are rooted in the whole. Of course, we have to wait holding communion with ourselves until that which takes roots in the whole becomes fruit.

We must not get lost neither in the outside world, nor in ourselves, for that is true in the highest spiritual sense, which the poet said that we have to be quiet with ourselves if our talents should appear. Nevertheless, these talents are rooted in the world. We can strengthen them and improve our character only if we live in the community. Therefore, it is true in the sense of the principle of real fraternity that brotherliness makes the human being the strongest just in the struggle for existence, and he will find most of his forces in the silence of his heart if he develops his whole personality, his whole individuality together with the other human brothers. It is true: a talent forms in the silence—, however, it is also true: a character and with it the whole human being and the whole humanity form in the perpetual current of the world.

In a series of talks, I have spoken of the ideas about the supersensible world and its connection with the sensuous world. It is only a matter of course that the question appears repeatedly, where from does the knowledge of the supersensible world come? Today we want to deal with this question, or with other words, with the question of the inner development of the human being.

Inner development of the human being is meant here in the sense that the human being advances to such abilities that he must acquire to himself if he wants to make that supersensible knowledge his own. Do not misunderstand the intention of this talk. This talk is remote from establishing rules or principles that have something to do with general human morality or with the demands, which belong to the general zeitgeist. I must note this expressly because over and over again in our time of equalisation where one does not accept any difference between human being and human being the misunderstanding appears, as if anybody who speaks of occultism establishes any general human demands, moral principles or the like which apply to everybody without distinction. This is not the case. This talk must not at all be confused with a talk on general principles of the theosophical movement. Occultism is unlike theosophy. The Theosophical Society has not only and indeed not exclusively the task to maintain occultism. It could be even possible that anybody who joins this Theosophical Society considers occultism as something completely unacceptable.

Among those matters that are maintained in the Theosophical Society to which also a general ethics belongs is also occultism, which encompasses the knowledge of those principles of our existence that escape from the usual sensory observation in the everyday human area of experience. However, by no means the principles are those, which have nothing to do with this everyday experience. “Occult” means: concealed, mysterious. However, I emphasise again and again that occultism is something that needs certain preconditions. As incomprehensible as higher mathematics is for the usual farmer who has never heard of it, it is occultism for many people of our time.

However, occultism stops being occult if one has taken possession of it. With it, I have strictly limited the field of this talk. Thus, nobody can object—and this must expressly be emphasised after the millenniums-old experiences and often performed experiments—that the demands which occultism puts up could not be fulfilled, they would contradict a general human culture. The fulfilment of it is required from nobody. If, however, anybody comes to me and wants to get the convictions which occultism conveys, but refuses to deal with occultism, he is in the very same situation as the schoolchild who wants to make a glass rod electric, but refuses to rub it. It will not become electric without friction. Somebody who behaves like that who has to make any objection to the methods of occultism.

Nobody is asked to become occultist; everybody must come voluntarily to occultism. Someone who objects that we do not need occultism does not need to deal with it.

Occultism does not appeal to the general humanity today. Moreover, in our present civilisation, it is exceptionally difficult to fulfil the demands of a life, which makes the supersensible world accessible.

Two preconditions are completely absent in our civilisation. The first demand is the isolation, that which esoteric science calls the higher human loneliness. The second one is the overcoming of an egoism that has risen high concerning the innermost soul qualities, in large part unaware to humanity.

The lack of these preconditions makes the developmental way of the inner life almost impossible today, because life is dispersed more and more, demands external sensuousness. In no other culture, the human beings lived in the exterior in this way as just in ours. Now I ask you again not to take anything that I say as criticism but only as a characteristic.

Of course, someone speaking that way as I do today knows exactly that this cannot be different, that just the great advantages and significant achievements of our time are based on these qualities. However, that is why our time is without any supersensible knowledge and without any influence of supersensible knowledge on our culture. In other cultures—and there are some—the human being is able to maintain his inner life more and to withdraw from the effects of the outer life. Then, within such cultures, that prospers which one calls inner life in the higher sense. In the Eastern cultures, there is something that one calls yoga and those who live according to the rules of yoga yogis. Therefore, a yogi is someone who aims at the higher spiritual science, but only, after he has looked for a master of the supersensible for himself. Nobody looks for yoga in another way than under the tutelage of a master, a guru. If he has found him, he must use a big part of the day regularly, not irregularly, to live completely in his soul. All forces that the yogi has to develop are already in his soul, they are there as certain as it is true that the electricity in the glass rod appears by friction. It is true that no one knows on his own how to cause these forces as also no one knows on his own that he can make the glass rod electric by friction.

One has to use the observations made in millenniums and the esoteric methods developed thereby to evoke the soul forces. This is very difficult in our time, which demands from every human being because of the struggle for existence that he splits himself. He does not come to the big inner contemplation, not even to a concept of contemplation, which one had in yoga. No consciousness is there of the deep loneliness which the yogi must search for. He has to repeat the same thing rhythmically, even if only for a short time, with tremendous regularity every day, with complete seclusion of anything that lives in him otherwise. It is necessary and essential that all life, which surrounds us, dies down before the yogi that his senses become unreceptive to any impression of the outside world. The yogi has to make himself blind and deaf to the environment for the time, which he dictates to himself. He must be so composed—and he has to acquire the practise in this contemplation—that one may shoot a gun beside him, and he is not disturbed directing his attention upon his inner life. In addition, he has to become free from any memory of the everyday life.

Consider now how exceptionally hard these preconditions are to be produced in our civilisation, how little one has an idea of such isolation, of such spiritual loneliness. You have to achieve all that on one condition, namely on that never to lose the harmony, the complete balance compared with the outside world in any way. This is exceptionally easy with such a deep sinking in your inside. What settles down deeper and deeper in your inside has to produce the harmony with the outside world even more distinctly at the same time. Nothing that is reminiscent of estrangement, of distance from the outer practical life is allowed to appear with you, otherwise you go astray, and otherwise, perhaps, you are not able to distinguish your higher life from insanity to a certain degree. It is really a kind of insanity if the inner life loses its relations to the outer one. Imagine once—to give you an example—you are clever concerning our earthly conditions; you have all experience and wisdom that can be collected on earth. You fall asleep in the evening, but you wake in the morning not on the earth, but on Mars. However, on Mars are conditions quite different from those on the earth. Any science, which you have collected on earth, benefits you by no means. There is no longer any harmony between your inner life and that, which takes action outside you. Hence, you would be probably put into a Mars lunatic asylum already after an hour because you cannot find the way in the new conditions. To such a road, anybody can be easily directed who loses the connection with the outside world developing his inner life. One strictly has to pay attention to it that this does not happen. All that causes big difficulties in our civilisation.

The other obstacle is a kind of egoism concerning inner soul qualities, an account of which the present humanity normally gives to itself. This is tightly connected with the spiritual development of the human being. For it belongs to the preconditions that one does not strive for it from egoism. Who strives for it from egoism cannot come far. However, our time is selfish until the inside of the human soul. You can hear repeatedly: on the other hand, how useful are these teachings to me which occultism propagates if I myself cannot experience them?

Who starts from this condition and also does not desist from it, can hardly get a really higher development, because the most intimate consciousness of human community belongs to the higher development, so that it is irrelevant whether I myself or another experience this or that. Hence, I must meet somebody whose development is higher than mine is with boundless love and full trust. First, I have to bring myself to this consciousness, to the consciousness of infinite trust towards my fellow man if he says I have experienced this and this. Such trust must be a condition of the community life, and wherever such occult abilities are used more extensively, there it is unlimited trust; there one has the consciousness that the human being is a personality in which a higher individuality lives. The basis is trust and confidence at first because we are searching not always only in ourselves for our higher selves, but also in our fellow men. Everybody who lives round us is according to his inner nature in undivided unity with us.

As long as it depends on my lower self, I am separated from other human beings. However, if it concerns my higher self—and only this can ascend to the supersensible world—, then I am no longer separated from the fellow men, I am a uniform being with my fellow men, then is that who speaks to me of the higher truth: I myself. I must drop this difference between him and me completely, I must overcome the feeling completely that he has something over me. Try to settle down in this feeling completely, so that it penetrates till the thinnest little fibres of the human soul and any egoism disappears, and the other who is farther than you stands like your own self before you, then you have understood one of the preconditions that are necessary to wake the higher spiritual life.

You can hear just where the instructions of the occult life are given—often very incorrectly and erroneously—: the higher self lives in the human being, he only needs to let his inside speak and the highest truth is revealed.—Nothing is more correct on the one hand and, on the other hand, more infertile than this assertion. If the human being tries once to let his inner human being speak, he will see that as a rule his lower self speaks, even if he imagines ever so much that his higher self appears. We do not find the higher self in ourselves at first. We have to look for it outside ourselves first. From anybody who is farther advanced we can learn a piece, because we keep it in sight as it were. We can never profit anything from our own selfish ego for our higher self. Where anybody is who has farther advanced than I have, there I am in the future. According to my disposition, I really bear the seed in myself of that which he is. However, first the ways to Mount Olympus must be illumined, so that I can pursue them.

A feeling is the basic condition of any esoteric development, you may believe it or not—every practical occultist who has experience confirms it to you—, a feeling which is mentioned in the different religions. The Christian religion calls it with the known sentence that one must understand as an occultist completely: “Whoever does not accept the kingdom of God like a child will never enter it” (Mark 10:15, Matthew 18:3). Only that understands the sentence who has learnt reverence in the highest sense of the word. Assume once that you would have heard of an adorable person in your earliest youth, a personality by which in you the highest idea has been woken in a direction, and the opportunity is offered to you to get to know this personality closer. A holy shyness of this personality lives in you during the day, which should bring you the moment where you see him in person for the first time. Standing before the door of this person, you can have the feeling to be afraid to touch the handle and to open the door. If you look to such an adorable personality this way, you have understood the feeling approximately which also Christianity means if it says that one should become like the little children to participate in the kingdom of God. It depends not so much on whether that to whom the feeling is directed deserves it in full measure, but it depends on the fact that we have the ability to look up reverentially at something from our inside. This is the important aspect of admiration that you yourselves are drawn up to that at whom you look up.

The feeling of admiration is the raising force, the magnetic force that pulls us up to the higher spheres of the supersensible life. This is the principle of the occult world that everybody who looks for higher life has to write into his soul as with golden letters. From this basic mood of the soul, the development has to begin. Without this feeling, one can generally attain nothing. Then that who looks for inner development must be clear in his mind that he does something tremendous concerning the human being. What he looks for is nothing more and nothing less than a new birth, namely in the proper sense. The higher soul of the human being should be born. As well as the human being was born with his first birth from deep inner reasons of existence as he came to the sunlight, somebody who looks for inner development steps out of the sunlight, out of that which he can experience in the sensory world, to a higher spiritual light. Something is born in him that rests in the usual human being, who represents the mother, as deeply as the child in the mother before it is born. Who is not aware of the far-reaching consequences of this fact does not know what is called occult or esoteric development. The higher soul that is deep in the whole human nature at first and is interwoven with it is got out. If the human being stands in the everyday life before us, his lower and higher natures are closely related, and this is a piece of luck in the everyday life.

Somebody, who lives among us, would perhaps bring evil, bad qualities to light if he followed his lower nature, but within him, mixed with the lower nature, the higher one lives which keeps it in check. You can compare this mixture with a mixture of a yellow liquid and a blue one in a glass, resulting in a green liquid in which we can no longer distinguish yellow and blue. The lower nature is mixed with the higher one in the human being that way and both are not to be distinguished. As you can extract the blue liquid from the green liquid by chemical means, so that only the yellow fluid remains, and the uniform green is separated into a duality, in blue and yellow, you separate the lower nature from the higher one by means of the esoteric development. You pull the lower nature out of the body like the sword from the scabbard, which remains alone then for itself. This lower nature comes out in such a way that it appears almost nightmarish.

When it was still mixed with the higher nature, nothing of it was to be noticed. Now, however, when it is separated, all evil, bad qualities come out. Human beings who had seemed benevolent before often become quarrelsome and envious. These qualities sat already in their lower nature, however, were controlled by the higher one. You can observe this with many people who are led on anomalous ways. The human being becomes a liar very easily when he enters the supersensible world. He easily loses the ability to distinguish true from wrong. It belongs inevitably to the esoteric training that the strictest training of the character is paralleled by it. What history tells of the saints as their temptations is not a legend but literal truth.

Someone who wants to develop in any way to the higher world is easily exposed to this temptation if he has not developed the strength of character and the highest morality in himself to be able to hold down everything that approaches him. Not only that desire and passions grow, this is not even so much the case, but—and this seems miraculous at first—also the opportunities increase. Like by a miracle, opportunities of the evil, which were concealed to him before, lie in wait of someone who ascends to the higher world. In every fact of life, a demon lies in wait for him which tries to lead him astray. What he has not seen once, he sees now. The splitting of his nature conjures up such opportunities as it were everywhere from the secret sites of life. Therefore, the so-called white magic—that school of esoteric development which leads the human being to the higher worlds in good, real and true way—demands a particular development of character as essential. Every practical esoteric says to you that nobody should dare to pass that narrow gate—one calls the entrance to the esoteric development that way—without practicing these qualities repeatedly. They are a necessary pre-school of the esoteric life.

The first ability that the human being must develop is to separate the unimportant from the significant, the transient from the imperishable on all his ways through life. One can demand this easily, but it is often difficult to carry it out. It is, as Goethe says, indeed, easy, however, the easy is difficult. Have a look, for example, at a plant or at a thing.

You learn to recognise that everything has an important and an unimportant side and the human being mostly is interested in the unimportant, in the relation of the thing to him or in a subordinated quality. Someone who wants to become an esoteric has to get into the habit of seeing and looking for a being in everything. Seeing a watch, for example, he has to be interested in its principles. He must be able to disassemble it in the minutest detail and develop a feeling of its principles. Suppose further that a mineralogist looks at a rock crystal. He gets already by an external view to a significant knowledge of the crystal. However, the esoteric must take a stone in hand and can vividly feel what is indicated in the following monologue: in certain respect, you are below humanity, but in certain respect, you outrank humanity by far. You are below humanity because you cannot conceive ideas of human beings because you do not feel. You cannot imagine, you cannot think and you do not live, but you have something over humanity, you are chaste in yourself, you do not have any wish and desire. Every human being, every living being has wishes, cravings, desires; you do not have them. You are perfect and contented with that which was bestowed on you, a model for the human being with which he has still to connect his other qualities.

If the esoteric can feel this rather deeply, he has grasped the significant that the stone can say to him. Thus, the human being can take something important from everything. If this has become a habit that he separates the significant from the unimportant, then he has appropriated another of the feelings, which the esoteric must have. Then he must connect his own life with the significant. The human beings are deceived in that in particular very easily in our time. The human beings believe very easily that the place on which they stand is not commensurate with them. How often are people inclined to say, my destiny has put me in a place in which I do not fit. I am, we say, for example, postal clerk. If I were put to another place, I could provide high ideas to the people; I could give great teachings and so on.

The mistake of these human beings is that they do not connect their lives with the significant of their occupations. If you see anything significant in me because I can talk to the people here, you do not see the significant in your own life and occupation. If the postmen did not carry away the letters, the whole exchange of letters would come to a standstill, a lot of work, which has already been performed by others, would be in vain.

Hence, everybody is of extraordinary importance for the whole on his post, and nobody is higher than the other is. Christ tried to indicate this the nicest in the downright marvellous way in the thirteenth chapter of the St. John's Gospel with the words: “a servant is not greater than his master, nor a messenger than the one who sent him” (13:16). These words were spoken, after the master had washed the disciples' feet. With it, he wanted to say, what would I be without my disciples? They must be there, so that I can be there in the world, and I have to pay tribute to them degrading myself before them and washing their feet.—This is one of the most significant hints to the feeling, which the esoteric must have towards the significant. One is not allowed to confuse the externally significant with the internally significant. One has to pay strict attention to that.

Then we must develop a number of qualities. First, we have to become masters of our thoughts, of the chains of our thoughts in particular. One calls that the control of thoughts. Consider once how in the human soul the thoughts are bustling about, how they are wandering around aimlessly: here appears an impression, there another, and every single one changes the thought. It is not true that we control the thoughts; rather the thoughts control us completely. However, we must advance so far that we are engrossed in a certain thought during a certain time of the day and say to ourselves, no other thought is allowed to enter my soul and to control me.—With it, we ourselves lead the reins of the thought life for some time.

The second quality is that we behave in a similar way to our actions, that is that we control our actions. It is necessary that we reach so far at least to commit such actions now and again to which we are caused by nothing that comes from outside. Nothing that is induced by our state, our occupation, and our position leads us deeper into the higher life. The higher life depends on such intimacies, for example that we make the decision to do something for the first time, something that arises from our very own initiative, and even if it is a quite unimportant fact. All other actions contribute nothing to the higher life.

The following, the third quality is endurance. The human beings alternate between joy and grief, once they are on top of the sky, then they are down in the dumps. Thus, the human beings drift on the waves of life, of joy and grief. However, they have to attain equanimity, calmness. The biggest grief, the biggest joys must not confuse them, they must stand firm, get endurance.

The fourth quality is the understanding of any being. What it means to understand any being is nowhere better expressed than in a legend about Christ Jesus, which has been preserved to us not in the Gospels, but in a Persian story. Jesus walked with his disciples overland, and they found a rotting dog on the way. The animal looked awkward. Jesus stopped and glanced admiring at it, saying, “However, what nice teeth has this animal.” Jesus spotted the beautiful of the awkward. Strive for approaching the marvellous everywhere in such a way, and then you see something in everything outdoors to which you can say yes. Make it like Christ who admired the beautiful teeth of the dead dog. This direction leads to great tolerance and to the understanding of anything and any being.

The fifth quality is the complete impartiality towards everything new that faces us. Most people judge something new according to something old that they know already. If anybody comes to say anything to you, you immediately answer: I am of another opinion about that.—However, we are not allowed to confront a communication, which we get with our opinion immediately, we must be on the lookout for something new that we can learn. We can still learn something from a little child. Even if one is the wisest human being, he must be inclined to restrain his judgment and to listen to others. We must develop this ability of listening to anybody, because it enables us to face the things with maximal impartiality. In esotericism, one calls this “confidence,” and this is the strength to maintain the impressions, which the new makes on us, by that which we hold against it.

The sixth quality is that which everybody receives by itself after he has developed the cited qualities. This is the inner harmony. The human being who has the other qualities has the inner harmony. Then it is also necessary that the human being who looks for the esoteric development has developed the feeling of freedom to the highest degree. This feeling of freedom which enables him to look for the centre of his being in himself and to stand firm on own feet so that he does not need to ask anybody what to do, but that he stands straight and acts freely. This is also something that one has to acquire.

If the human being has developed these qualities in himself, he is above any danger that could cause the splitting of his nature in him. Then the qualities of his lower nature can no longer work on him, and then he can no longer lose his way. Hence, these qualities must develop very exactly. The esoteric life comes then whose expression causes a certain rhythmisation of life. The term rhythmisation of life expresses the corresponding ability. If you look at nature, you find a certain rhythm in it. You will consider it as a matter of course that the violet blossoms annually at the same time in the spring that the grain on the field, the grapes on the grapevine become ripe at the same time. This rhythmical succession of the phenomena is found everywhere outside in nature. Everywhere is rhythm; everywhere is repetition in regular sequence. If you go up to the higher beings which, you see this rhythmical sequence more and more decreasing. You also see with the animal, still in a higher degree, all qualities rhythmically arranged. At certain time of the year, the animal gets particular functions and abilities. The higher the being is developed, the more life is given in own hands of the being, the more this rhythm ceases. You must know that the human body is only one of the members of his being. Then the etheric body comes, the astral body, and finally, the higher members, which form the basis of those.

The physical body is highly subject to the rhythm to which the entire external nature is subjected. As the plant life and animal life proceed in their external form rhythmically, the life of the physical body proceeds. The heart beats rhythmically, the lung breathes rhythmically and so on. Everything proceeds so rhythmically because it is ordered by higher powers, by the wisdom of the world, by that which the scriptures call the Holy Spirit. The higher bodies, and in particular the astral body, are left, I would like to say, by these higher spiritual powers in a certain way and have lost their rhythm. Can you deny that your activity is irregular concerning wishes, desires, and passions that it cannot be compared with the regularity that prevails in the physical body? Who learns the rhythm of the physical nature finds the model of spirituality in it. If you look at the heart, this marvellous organ with the regular beat and its implanted wisdom, and compare it to the desires and passions of the astral body that release all possible actions against the heart, then you recognise how disadvantageously the passion works on its regular way. However, the functions of the astral body must become as rhythmical as the performances of the physical body are.

I want to state something that will seem absurd to most people, namely concerning the fasting. We have completely lost the consciousness of the importance of fasting. However, from the point of view of the rhythmisation of our astral body, fasting is something exceptionally meaningful. What is fasting? It means to control the desire of eating and to eliminate the astral body concerning the desire of eating. He who fasts eliminates the astral body and has no appetite. This is in such a way, as if you switch off a force in a machine. Then the astral body sleeps, and the rhythms of the physical body and its implanted wisdom work on the astral body and make it rhythmic. As well as the seal is imprinted by a signet, the harmony of the physical body is imprinted in the astral body and it would be transmitted much more permanently if it were not always made irregular by the desires, passions and wishes, also by spiritual desires and wishes.

The modern human being needs more than in former times to bring in rhythm to his entire higher life. Just as God planted rhythm into the physical body, the human being must make his astral body rhythmic. The human being must dictate the course of the day to himself; arrange it for the astral body in such a way as the spirit of nature arranges it for the lower realms. Early in the morning, at a particular time, one must do a spiritual exercise, at another time, which must be again observed strictly, another exercise, in the evening another exercise again. These spiritual exercises must not be chosen arbitrarily, but must be suitable to the continuing development of the higher life. This is a kind to take charge of life and to control it. Determine an hour in the morning where you concentrate. You must observe this hour. There you have to produce a kind of calm, so that the great esoteric master can wake in you. There you have to meditate on big contents of thought, which have nothing to do with the outside world, and to liven these contents of thought up in you.

A short time is enough, maybe a quarter of an hour, even five minutes if one does not have more time. However, it is worthless and useless if one exercises irregularly. If one exercises regularly, so that the activity of the astral body becomes regular like a clock, then these exercises have value. The astral body gets another appearance if you exercise regularly. Sit down in the morning and exercise; the forces develop which I described to you. However, it must happen regularly because the astral body expects that the same is carried out with it at the same time, and it gets into a mess if it does not happen. One must have a mind to exercise regularly at least. If you make your life rhythmic in such a way, you perceive the results in not too long a time, namely the spiritual life, which is hidden to the human being at first, becomes apparent to some extent.

As a rule, the human life changes between four states. The first state is the perception of the outside world. You look with the senses and perceive the outside world. The second state is that which we can call imagination which is somewhat related to the dream life, even belongs to it. There the human being is rooted not in the surroundings, but is detached from them, there he has no realities before him, memories at the most. The third state is the dreamless sleep. There the human being has no consciousness of his ego, and the fourth state is that in which the human being lives in his memory. This is different from perception; this is something abstract, spiritual. Had the human being no memory, he could not get any spiritual development generally.

Inner life starts developing by means of tranquillity and meditation. The human being notices then eventually that he is no longer dreaming chaotically, but that he dreams in extremely significant way and that to him strange things manifest, which he recognises gradually as manifestations of spiritual truths. Of course, one can easily raise the trivial objection: all that is just dreamt, what does this concern to us?—However, if anybody invented the dirigible airship in his dreams and carried out it, this dream would just have revealed the truth. Thus, an idea can be grasped still in a way different from the usual, and then the truth of it must be found in the realisation. We have to be convinced of its inner truth from the outside.

The next stage of the spiritual life is that where we grasp truth using our own qualities and direct our dreams consciously. If we start directing the dreams regularly, we are on that level where truth becomes transparent to us. One calls the first stage the material knowledge where the object must be there. The other stage is the imaginative knowledge. One develops this by meditating, organising life rhythmically.

It is laborious to gain it. If it is obtained, the time also comes when there is no longer any difference between the perception in the usual life and the perception in the supersensible. If we live among the things of the everyday life, in the sensuous world, and change our spiritual state, we experience the spiritual supersensible world perpetually if we have exercised enough in this way. This is the case, as soon as we are able to become blind and deaf compared with the sensory world, to remember nothing of the everyday life and still to have a spiritual life in us. Then our dream life starts becoming conscious. If we are able to pour something of it in our everyday life, then also that quality appears which makes the spiritual qualities of the beings round us perceptible.

Then we do no longer see the outside of the things only, but then we also see the inside, the concealed essence of the things, the plants, the animals, and the human beings. I know that most people say: these are other things.—This is quite right; these are always things quite unlike those, which the human being sees, who do not have such senses. The third state is usually completely empty, but starts to be animated if the continuity of consciousness occurs. The continuity comes completely by itself, and then the human being does no longer sleep unconsciously. He experiences the supersensible world during the time when he sleeps otherwise.

What does sleep consist of, otherwise? The physical body lies in the bed and the astral body lives in the supersensible world. In this supersensible world, you are strolling. As a rule, the human being of the present disposition cannot go far away from his body. If anyone has now developed organs of the astral body, strolling during sleep, by the rules which spiritual science gives, he starts realising during sleep. The physical body would be blind and deaf if it had no eyes and ears, and the astral body that strolls at night is blind and deaf because it still has no eyes and ears. However, these develop by meditation; it is the means of forming its organs. This meditation must then be performed regularly. It is performed in such a way that the body of the human being is the mother and the spirit of the human being is the father. The body of the human being, as it stands physically before us, is in every member, which it shows to us, a mystery, namely in such a way that any member belongs in certain but concealed way to a part of the astral body. The esoteric knows these matters. He knows, for example, where to the point between the eyebrows belongs in the physical body. It belongs to a certain organ in the astral organism. While the spiritual scientist indicates how to direct your thoughts, feelings and sensations to the point between the eyebrows, you connect something that develops in the physical body with the corresponding part of the astral body and you get a certain sensation in your astral body.

However, it must happen regularly, and one must know how. Then the astral body starts being structured. It develops from a lump to the organism in which the organs form. I have described the astral senses in the magazine Lucifer-Gnosis. One also calls them lotus flowers. These lotus flowers develop using certain formulae. If they have developed, the human being is able to perceive the spiritual world. This is the same world, which he enters when he walks through the gate of death. The saying by Hamlet is then wrecked that from that unknown land no traveller has come back.

You can go or, better said, you can slip from the sensuous world into the supersensible world, and live here and there. This is no life in a cloud-cuckoo-land, but a life in that area which only makes the life in our area explicable and clear. As well as a usual human being who has not studied the principles of electricity goes into an electrically powered factory, sees the miraculous activities and does not understand them, he also does not understand the activities in the spiritual world.

The ignorance of the visitor of this factory exists as long as he does not know the principles of electricity. Thus, the human being is also ignorant in the fields of the spiritual, as long as he does not know the principles of the spiritual. There is nothing in our world that does not depend on the spiritual world wherever one goes. Everything that surrounds us here is an external expression of the spiritual world. There is no material. Every material is compressed spirit. To somebody who looks into the spiritual world, the whole material, sensuous world, the world generally spiritualises itself. As the ice melts before the sun to water, everything sensuous melts to something spiritual before the soul, which looks into the spiritual world. The primal ground of the world reveals itself bit by bit before the spiritual eye and the spiritual ear.

In reality, this life, which the human being gets to know in this way, is the spiritual life that the human being has already led inside perpetually about which he knows nothing because he does not know himself until he has developed the organs for the higher world. Imagine once that you would be a human being with the qualities, which you have now, however, you would have no senses. You would know nothing about the world round you, you would have no understanding of the physical body, and, nevertheless, you would belong to the physical world

Thus, the human soul belongs to the spiritual world, however, it does not know it because it does not hear and see. As our body is taken from the forces and materials of the physical world, our soul is taken from the forces and materials of the spiritual world. We do not recognise ourselves in ourselves, but only in our surroundings. As true as you cannot see the heart and brain, without perceiving them with your fellow men by your senses—even with the help of the X-rays your eyes can only see the heart—, it is true that you cannot see or hear your own soul, without recognising them by the spiritual senses in the environment. You can recognise yourselves only by your environment. There is no inside knowledge in reality, no introspection, there is only a knowledge, a revelation by organs of the physical as well as of the spiritual life around us. We belong to the worlds around us, to the physical, astral, and spiritual worlds. We learn from the physical world, if we have physical organs and from the spiritual world, from all souls if we have soul organs, spiritual organs. There is no other knowledge than world knowledge.

It is idle and empty tranquillity if the human being is brooding in himself and believes to be able to reach anything by mere introspection. The human being finds God in himself if he wakes the divine organs in himself and then finds his higher divine self in his environment, as he can only find his lower self in the surroundings using his eyes and ears. We understand ourselves as physical beings by the contact with the sensory world, and we understand ourselves in a spiritual respect while we develop spiritual senses in ourselves. Developing the inside means opening ourselves to the divine life in the outside world round us.

You understand now why it is necessary that someone who ascends to the higher world experiences an infinite consolidation of his character first. The human being can get to know by himself at first how the world is because his senses are already opened. For a benevolent divine spirit that had seen and heard in the physical world stood beside the human being aeons ago, before he could see and hear, and opened his eyes and ears. Just from such beings, the human being has to learn to see spiritually, from the beings, which are already able to what he has to learn. We must have a guru who says to us how to develop our organs who says to us what he did to develop the organs. Who wants to instruct has to acquire a basic quality: absolute veracity, and this is also a main demand, which must be made on the student. Nobody is allowed to be trained as an esoteric, unless he has acquired this basic quality of absolute veracity before.

Concerning the sensuous experiences, one can examine what is said. However, if I tell you anything of the spiritual world, you must have confidence because you are not yet so far that you can check it. Who wants to be a guru must have become so true that it is impossible for him to take such statements slightly with regard to the spiritual world and the spiritual life. The sensuous world immediately corrects the mistakes, which we do concerning this world, however, in the spiritual world, we must have that guideline in ourselves, we must be rigorously trained, so that we are not forced to control by the outside world, but have the control in ourselves. We can only acquire this control, while we appropriate the most rigorous veracity already here in the world. Therefore, the Theosophical Society also had to accept the principle: no law above truth, when it began revealing some elementary teachings of esotericism to the world.

A few understand this principle. Most people are content with it if they can say to themselves, I am aware that it is true, and if it is wrong, they say, I have erred. The esoteric is not allowed to insist on his subjective honesty. There he is on the wrong track. He must always comply with the facts in the outside world and he must regard an experience, which speaks against it as a mistake, as an error. The esoteric is no longer responsible or not. He must absolutely harmonise with the facts of life. He must start feeling responsible in the strictest sense of any statement, which he makes. Then one educates himself to the unconditional assurance that that must have for himself and others who wants to be a spiritual guide.

Thus, you see that I had to indicate—we have to speak about this subject once again to add the higher parts—a number of qualities and procedures. They seem to you too intimate to speak about them with others, every soul has to sort them for itself and they may seem to you inappropriate to attain the great aim, which should be attained, namely the entrance of the supersensible world. That will absolutely arrive at the entrance who walks on the way, which I have characterised.

When? About that, one of the most superior members of the theosophical movement, our long since deceased member Subba Rao (Tallapragada S. R., 1856-1890), appropriately expressed himself. He answered to the question, how long it lasts: seven years, maybe also seven times seven years, maybe also seven incarnations, maybe also only seven hours.—It completely depends on that which the person brings into life along with him. A person may face us, who is apparently quite silly who has brought a higher life along with him, which is concealed now and must only be got out. Today, most human beings are farther advanced in esoteric relation than it seems, and this would become known to many people if our material conditions and our material time did not strike back so much into the inner soul life. A big percentage of modern humanity advanced rather far in earlier times. It depends on different matters whether that which is in the human being comes out. However, one can give some help. Imagine that a human being faces me. In his former incarnation he was a far advanced individuality, however, he has an undeveloped brain now. An undeveloped brain may sometimes conceal great spiritual talents. However, if one teaches him the usual profane abilities, it is possible that also the inner spiritual ones come out. However, it does not depend only on this, but also on the surroundings in which the person lives.

In quite significant way, the human being is a reflection of his surroundings. Assume that a human being is a highly developed personality, but lives in surroundings, which only wake and form certain prejudices in him that work so vigorously that the higher disposition cannot come out. If such a human being does not find anybody who gets out it, then it just remains concealed in him.

I could only give you a few indications about that; however, we speak again about the other and deeper matters after Christmas. The one idea I wanted to wake is that the higher life develops not tumultuously but quite intimately, in the deepest soul, and that the great day when the soul awakes and enters the higher life really comes like the thief at night.

The development of the higher life leads the human being into a new world, and after he has entered this new world, he sees the other side of existence, so to speak, then that presents itself to him, which was hidden to him before. Everybody should say that to himself, perhaps, not everybody is able to do this, maybe only a few are able. However, this should not discourage him from entering that way which at least is open to everybody to hear something of the higher worlds. The human being is destined to live in community, and who separates himself cannot get to spiritual life. However, it is a seclusion in the higher sense if I say, I do not believe this, this is not related to me, this may have validity for the other life; this does not apply to the esoteric. The esoteric has the principle to regard the other human beings as a revelation of his own higher self because he knows then that he has to find the others in himself.

A subtle difference exists between both sentences “find the others in yourself” and “find yourself in the others.” That is in the higher sense: you are that. In the highest sense, it means, you recognise yourself in the world and understand the word of the poet, which I quoted some weeks ago in another connection: “Somebody was successful to lift the veil of the goddess of Sais.—But what did he see? He saw—miracle of miracles—his self!” You do not find true self-knowledge in your selfish inside but unselfishly in the world.