The Rudolf Steiner Archive

I would like to say a few words about the building concept, with the direct support of the building. From the outset, the view could arise that if one has to talk about such a building, it indicates that it does not make the necessary impression as an artistic work; and in many cases, what is thought about the building of Dornach, about the Goetheanum in the world, is thought from a false point of view influenced by a [one-sided] view. For example, the opinion has been spread that the building in Dornach wants to symbolize all kinds of things, that it is a symbolizing building. In reality, you will not find a single symbol in it when you look at it, as they are popular in mystical and theosophical societies. The building should be able to be experienced entirely from the ki-based feeling and has also been created from these artistic feelings in its forms, in all its details. Therefore, it must only work through what it is itself.

Explaining has become popular, and one then complies with such requests for explanations; but in mentioning this here before you, I also say that such an explanation of an artistic work always seems to me to be not only half, but almost completely unartistic, and that I will now give you a kind of lecture in front of the building, a lecture that I fundamentally dislike, if only because I have to speak to you in abstract terms about what emerged in my mind as details when designing the building, the models and so on, and what was created from life. I would rather speak to you about the building as little as possible.

It is already the case that a new style, a new artistic form of expression, is viewed with a certain mistrust in the present day. I can still hear a word that I heard many decades ago when I was studying at the Technical University [in Vienna], where Ferstel gave his lectures. In one of them, he says: “Architectural styles are not invented, an architectural style grows out of the character of a nation.” Therefore, Ferstel is also opposed to any invention of a desired new architectural style, a new type of construction. What is true about this idea is that the style, which is supposed to stylize the characteristics of a people, must emerge not from an abstraction, but from a living world view, which is at the same time a world experience and, from this point of view, comprehensively encompasses the chaotic spiritual life of contemporary humanity. On the basis of this thoroughly correct idea, it becomes necessary to transform what was characteristic of previous architectural styles into organic building forms by incorporating the symmetrical, the geometric-static, and so on.

I am well aware of what can be said – and, from a certain point of view, justifiably said – by those who have become psychologically attuned to previous architectural styles against what has been attempted here in Dornach as an architectural style: the transference of geometrical-symmetrical-static forms into organic forms. But it has been attempted. And so you can see in these forms of building that this building here is an as yet inadequate first attempt to express the transition from these geometric forms of building to the organic. It is certain, of course, that the development of humanity is moving towards these forms of building, and when we again have the impulses of clairvoyant experience, I believe that these forms of building will play the first, leading role.

This building should be understood in the same way through its relationship with the organizing forces of nature as the previous buildings are understood through their relationship with the geometric-static-symmetrizing forces of nature. This building is to be viewed from this point of view, and from this point of view you will understand how every detail within the building idea for Dornach must be completely individualized here. Just think of your earlobe: it is a very small part of the human organism, but you cannot imagine that an organic form like the earlobe is suitable for growing on the big toe. This organ is bound to its place within the organism. Just as you find that within the whole organism a supporting organ is always shaped in such a way that it can have a static-dynamic effect within the organism, so too the individual forms in our building in Dornach had to be such that they could serve the static-dynamic forces. Every single form had to be organized in such a way that it could and had to be in its place what it now appears to be. Look at each arch from this point of view, how it is formed, how it flattens out towards the exit, for example, how it curves inwards towards the building itself, where it not only has to support but also to express support in an organic way, thereby helping to develop what only appears to be unnecessary in organic formation. Ordinary architecture leaves out what the organism develops, that which goes beyond the static. But one senses that the idea of building has been transferred to the organic design of the forms, and that this is also necessary.

You will have to consider every column from this point of view; then you will also understand that the ordinary column, which is taken out of the geometric-static, has been replaced by one that does not imitate the organic - everything is so that it is not imitated naturalistically - but transferred into organically made structures. It is not imitating an organic structure. You will not find it if you look for a model in nature. But you will find it if you understand how human beings can live together with the forces that have an organizing effect in nature, and how, apart from what nature itself creates, such organizing forms can arise. So you will see in these column supports how the expansion of the structure, the support, the inward pointing, and, in the same way as, say, in the upper end of the human thigh, the support, the walking, the walking and so on, is embodied statically, but organically and statically.

From this point of view, I would also ask you to consider something like the structure with the three perpendicular formations at the top of the stairs here below (Figs. 23, 24). The feeling arises here of how a person feels when he is striving to ascend the stairs. He must have a feeling of security, of spiritual unity in all that goes on in this building, indeed in all that he sees in this building. Everything came to me entirely from my feelings. Believe it or not, this form came to me entirely from my artistic feelings. As I said, you may believe it or not, it was only afterwards that it occurred to me that this form is somewhat reminiscent of the form of the three semicircular circles in the human ear, which, when injured, cause fainting, so that they immediately express what gives a person stability. This expression, that a person should be given stability in this building, comes about in the experience of the three perpendicular directions. This can be experienced in this structure without having to engage in abstract thought. One can remain entirely in the artistic realm.

If you look at the wall-like structures, you will find that natural-looking forces have been poured into the forms, but in such a way that in these forms, which are radiator covers (Fig. 26), the concrete material of the structure is worked out first, and then, further up, the material of the wood, so that they are metamorphosed. You will find that in these structures, the process of metamorphosis is elevated to the artistic. It is the idea of the building that should have a definite effect on such radiator covers, which are designed in such a way that you immediately feel the purpose and do not need to explore it intellectually first. This is how these elementary forms, half plant-like, half animal-like, came to be felt. One only realizes that they must be so when one has shaped them out of the material. And it also follows that it is necessary to metamorphose them depending on whether they are in one place or another, depending on whether they are long and low or narrower and higher. All this is not the result of calculating the form, but the forms shape themselves out of the feeling in their metamorphosis, as for example here, where we have come so far, where the building is a concrete structure in its basement and where one has to empathize with the design of what the concrete is. You enter here at the west gate. Here is the room for checking in your coat. The staircase, which leads up on the left and right, takes you up to the wooden structure containing the auditorium, the stage and adjoining rooms. Please follow me up the stairs to the auditorium.

We first enter a kind of vestibule (Fig. 27). You will feel the very different impression that the wooden paneling creates compared to the concrete paneling on the lower floor. I would like to note here: When one has to work with stone, concrete or other hard materials, one has to approach it differently than when one has to work with a soft material, for example, wood. The material of wood makes it necessary to focus one's entire perception on the fact that one has to scrape corners, concaves, and hollows out of the soft material, if I may use the expression. It is scraping, scraping out. You deepen the material, and only by doing so can you enter into this relationship with the material, which is a truly artistic relationship. While when working with wood you can only coax out of the material what gives the forms if you focus your attention on deepening, when working with hard material you do not have to do with the recesses. You can only develop a relationship with the hard material by applying it, by working convexly, by applying raised areas to the base surfaces, for example when working with stone. Grasping this is an essential part of artistic creation, and it has been partially lost in more recent times.

You will see when we enter the auditorium how each individual surface, each chapter, is treated individually. In this organic structure, a chapter can only be such that one feels: In what follows each other, no kind of repetition can be created, as is otherwise the case with symmetrical-geometric-static architectural styles. In this building, based on organic ideas, you have only a single axis of symmetry, which goes from west to east. You will only find a symmetrical arrangement in relation to this, just as you can only find a single axis of symmetry for a higher organism, not out of arbitrariness, but out of the inner organization of forces of the being in question.

At this point, I would also like to mention that the treatment of the walls also had to be completely different under the influence of the organic building idea than it was before. A wall was for earlier architects what demarcates a space. It had the effect of being inside the room. This feeling had to be abandoned in this building. The walls had to be designed in such a way that they were not felt as a boundary, but as something that carries you out into the vastness of the macrocosm; you have to feel as if you are absorbed, as if you are standing inside the vastness of the cosmos. Walls had to be made transparent, so to speak, whereas in the past every effort was made to give the wall such artificial forms that it was closed, opaque. You will see that the transparent is used artistically at all, and that was driven out of elementary backgrounds into the physical in these windows that you see here and that you will see in the building.

If you see windows in the sense of the earlier architectural style, you will actually have to have the healthy sense: they break through the walls, they do not fit into the architectural forms, but they only fit in through the principle of utility. Here, artistic feeling will be needed down to the last detail. It was necessary to present the wall in such a way that it is not something closed, but something that expands outwards, towards infinity. I could only achieve this by remembering that you can scratch out designs from single-colored window panes, as if using an erasing method, a glass etching method. And so, monochromatic window panes were purchased, which were then processed in such a way that the motifs one wanted to have were scratched out with the diamond stylus. So for this purpose, an actual glass etching technique was conceived, and from this the windows emerged.

When you consider the motifs of the windows, you must not think that you are dealing with purely symbolic designs. You can see it already on this larger windowpane (Fig. 109): nothing is designed on these window panes other than what the imagination produces. There are mystics who develop a mysticism with superficial sentences and strange ideas and constantly explain that the physical-sensual outer world is a kind of maja, an illusion. Often people approach you and say that so-and-so is a great mystic because he always declaims that the outer world is a maja. The human physical countenance has something that is maya, that is absolutely false, that is something quite different in truth. What appears on this windowpane is not something that symbolizes; it is an essence that is envisaged, which only does not look to the spiritual observer as it appears to the senses. The larynx is the organ of vision for the etheric; the larynx is already Maja as a physical larynx, and that which is a merely physical-sensual vision is not reality.

What is the spiritual meaning behind this? The spiritual fact is that the human being is truly being whispered in the ear, left and right, what the secrets of the world are. So that one can say: the bull speaks in the left ear, the lion in the right ear. If one wants to depict something like this as a motif in a picture or in words, one can only put into the word what is already in the picture itself. It must be clearly understood, however, that such a picture can only be understood by someone who lives in the world view from which it originated. A person who does not have a living Christian feeling will not be able to relate to the pictorial representations that Christian art has produced.

The artist experiences a great deal when he immerses himself in a vision; but such an experience must not be translated into abstract thoughts, otherwise it will immediately begin to fade. One example of the artist's experience is this: when Leonardo da Vinci painted his Last Supper, which has now fallen into such disrepair that it can no longer be appreciated artistically, people thought it took too long. He couldn't finish the Judas because this Judas was supposed to emerge from the darkness. Leonardo worked on this painting for almost twenty years and still hadn't finished it. Then a new prior came to Milan and looked at the work. He wasn't an artist; he said that Leonardo, this servant of the church, had to finally finish his work. Leonardo replied that he could do it now; he had always only sketched the figure of Judas because he had not found the model for it; now that the prior was there, he had found the model for Judas in him, and the picture would now be quickly finished. — There you have such an external, concrete experience. Such external, concrete experiences play a much greater role in all the artist's work than can be expressed in such brief descriptions.

You have [now] entered the building through the room below the organ and the room for musical instruments, dear attendees. If you look around after entering, you will find the building idea initially characterized by the fact that the floor plan (Fig. 20) represents two not quite completed circles that interlock in their segments. It seems to me that the necessity for shaping the building in this way can already be seen when approaching the building from a certain distance and if one has an idea of what is actually supposed to take place in the building. I will now explain further what is connected with the building idea. First of all, I would like to point out that you can see seven columns arranged in symmetry solely against the west-east axis, closing the auditorium on the left and right as you move forward. These seven columns are not formed in such a way that a capital shape, a pedestal shape or an architrave shape above it is repeated, but the capital, pedestal and architrave shapes are in a continuous development. The two columns at the back of the organ room have the simplest capital and pedestal motifs (Figs. 28, 33): forms that, as it were, strive from top to bottom, with others striving towards them from bottom to top. This most primitive form of interaction between above and below is then metamorphosed in the following architrave, capital and pedestal forms (Figs. 35-54).

This progressive metamorphosis came about through the fact that, when I was forming the model (Fig. 22), I tried to recreate what occurs in nature by force. What happens in nature, where an unnotched leaf with primitive forms is first formed at the bottom of the plant, and then this primitive form metamorphoses the higher you go, into the indented, more intricately designed leaf, even transformed into a petal, stamen and pistil, which must be imitated - although not in a naturalistic way - one must place oneself inwardly and vitally into it and then create from within, as nature creates and transforms, as it produces and metamorphoses. Then, without reflection, but from much deeper soul forces than from reflection, one gets such transformations of the second from the first, the third from the second, and so on.

It is possible to misunderstand that, for example, in the fifth column and in the architrave motifs above the fourth column, something like a caduceus appears (Figs. 41, 42). One could now believe that the caduceus was stuck in these two places by the intellect. I believe that someone who had worked from the intellect would probably have placed the caduceus in the architrave motif and, because the intellect has a symmetrical effect, the column motif with the caduceus below it. Someone who works as we have here finds something different. Here, with the motif that you see as the fourth capital motif, this Mercury staff emerged just as a petal emerges from the sepal, only through sensing the metamorphosing transformation, without me even remotely thinking of forming a Mercury staff. I did not think of a past style, but of the transformation of the fourth capital motif from the third. One can see how the forms that have gradually emerged in the development of humanity have developed quite naturally.

Then we come to the epoch when the human being intervenes in his or her psychological development. If we work this into the column in an individualizing way, what is worked on earlier on the surface of the architrave comes later. That is why you see the caduceus on the capital later than on the architrave. A plant that is thin and delicate develops different leaf shapes than a sturdy one. Compare just a shepherd's purse with a cactus, and you will see how the filling and shaping of space is expressed in the figurative design.

At the same time, a cosmic secret arises in this way of feeling evolution through. There has been much talk of evolution in recent times, but little feeling about it. One only thinks it through with the mind. One speaks of the evolution of the perfect from the imperfect. Herbert Spencer and others have done much harm to this, and the thought has arisen that is completely justified in front of the mind, but which does not do justice to the observation of nature: In intellectual thinking, one assumes that in evolution, the simpler forms are at the beginning and that these then become more and more differentiated and differentiated. Spencer, in particular, worked with such evolutionary ideas. But evolution does not show it that way. There is, however, a differentiation, a complication of the forms; but then one comes to a center, and then the forms simplify again. What follows is not more complicated, but what follows is simpler again. You can see this in nature itself. The human eye, which is the most perfect, has, so to speak, achieved greater simplicity than the eye forms of certain animals, which, for example, have the xiphoid process, the fan, which has disappeared again as the eye in evolution moved further up to become human.

It is therefore necessary for man to connect with the power of nature, to feel the power of nature, to make the power of nature his own power and to create from this feeling. Thus, an attempt has been made to design this building in an entirely organic way, to design every detail in its place as it must be individualized from the whole. So you can see, for example, that the organ (Figs. 28-30) is surrounded by plastic motifs that make it appear as if the organ is not simply placed in the space, but that it works out of the whole remaining organic design, as if growing out of it. So everything in this building must be tried to be made in this way.

Here you see the lectern (Fig. 68) on which I am standing. Initially, the idea was to create something here that would, as it were, grow out of the other forms of construction, but in such a way that it would also express the fact that from here, through the word, one strives to express everything that is to be expressed in the building. At the moment when a person speaks here, the forms of what is spoken must continue in such a way that, just as the nose betrays in its form what the whole person is through his or her countenance, so too can the forms of what is spoken continue in such a way that the whole human being is revealed through the form of the nose. Anyone who has made artistically inspired nose studies can create the 'architectural style', the physiognomy of the whole human being, from a nose study. No one can ever have a different nose than they have, and there could never be a different lectern than the one that is here. However, if you claim this, it is meant according to your own view; you can only act according to your own view.

That an attempt has been made here to truly metamorphose the body can be seen from the fact that the motifs here in the glass windows are in part really such motifs that arise as images of the soul's life. For example, look at the pink window here (Fig. 113). You will see on the left wing something coming out like the west portal of the building; on the right wing you see a kind of head. There you see a person sitting on a slope, looking towards the building, and another person looking towards the head. This has nothing to do with speculative mysticism; it has to do with an immediate inner visual experience. This building could not have been created in any other way than by sensing the shape of the human head in a mysterious way, and the organic power on the one hand and the shape of the human head on the other hand result in the intuitive shape of the building. Therefore, the person sitting on the slope sees the metamorphosis of the building in his soul, sometimes as a human head, sometimes as the building revealing itself to the outside world. This provides a motif that leads, if I may say so, to an inner experience.

There you will find in the blue windowpane (Fig. 111) a person who is aiming to shoot a bird in flight. In the right-hand pane you will see that the person has fired. The bird in the left-hand field is in a sphere of light. Around the man you find all kinds of figures vividly alive in the astral body, one when he is about to shoot, the other when he has shot. This is reality, but it is from mundane life. I can imagine that those who always want to be dripping with inner elevation take offence when they experience such things as they are meant here, that a human shooting is simply depicted. Yes, I was pleased when an Italian friend once used a somewhat crude expression about theosophists, who are such mystics. The friend who had already died said it, and I may say it in the very esteemed company here, because the person concerned was a princess, and what a princess says can certainly be said. She glossed such people, who always want to live in a kind of inner elevation, by saying that they are people with a “face up to their stomachs”. I also do not repeat her not quite correct German.

Now, dear attendees, the same idea was then also implemented in painting. I can only talk about the actual painting, about spiritual painting, by referring to the small dome. Only in the small dome was it possible for me to carry out what I have indicated as the challenge of a newer painting: that here, behind the emergence from the color experience, drawing disappears altogether. I had one of my characters in the first mystery drama express this as follows: that the forms appear to be the work of color. For when one feels with the feeling for painting, then one feels the drawing, which is carried into the pictorial, as a lie. When I draw a horizontal line, it is actually a reproduction of something that is not there at all. When I apply the blue sky as a surface and the green below, the form arises from the experience of the color itself. In this way, every pictorial element can be formed. Within the world of color itself lies a creative world, and the one who feels the colors paints what the colors say to each other in creation. He does not need to stick to a naturalistic model; he can create the figures from the colors themselves. It is the case that nature and also human life already have a certain right to shape the moral out of the colored with a necessity.

Yesterday, Mr. Uehli quite rightly pointed out how newer painters already have an intuitive sense of such effects created by light and dark, by the colors themselves, and how they come to paint a double bass next to a tin can. They are pursuing the right thing in and of itself, that it is more important to see how the light gradates in its becoming colored when it falls on a double bass and then continues to fall on a tin can. That is the right thing. But the wrong thing is that this is again based on naturalistic experience. If you really live in the colors, something other than a tin can and a bass violin arises from the colors. The colors are creative, and how they come together is a necessity arising from the mere colors, which you have to experience. Then you don't put a tin can next to a bass violin because that is outside the colors.

So here I have tried to paint entirely from the colors. If you see the reddish-orange spot and the black spot next to the blue spot, it is first of all a vivid impression from the colors. But then the colors come to life, then figures emerge from them, which can even be interpreted afterwards. But just as little as one can make plants here with the human mind, one can just as little paint something on them that one has thought up with the human mind. One must first think when the colors are there, just as the plant must first grow before one can see it.

And so a Faust figure with Death and the Child came into being (Figs. 69-74). The whole head emerged out of the colors, with all the figures in it. Only in the realm of the human soul does something spiritually real take shape of its own accord. For example, you can see above the organ motif how something is painted (Fig. 31) that a person with a philistine attachment to the sensual world would naturally perceive as madness. But you will no longer perceive it as madness when I tell you the following: if you close your eyes, you will, as it were, feel something like two eyes looking at each other, inside the eye. What takes place inwardly can certainly be further developed in a certain way. Then what, when viewed in a primitive way, looks like two eyes glowing out of the darkness and what is seen when it is experienced inwardly, can be projected outwards and experienced in such a way that an entire beyond, an entire world-genesis can be seen in it. Here again an attempt has been made to create out of color what the eye experiences when it looks into the darkness and sees itself. One need not merely read the secrets intellectually, one can see them – suddenly they are there.

In a similar way, attempts were made to bring other motifs into reality, again not from the naturalistic imitation of signs and forms, but entirely from color. The ancient Indians and their inspiration, the seven Rishis, who in turn were inspired by the stars, to paint with an open-topped head (Fig. 32, far right) is, if you do it that way, abstract, actually nonsense; I say that quite openly. But when one experiences what was experienced in the ancient Indian culture in the relationship between the disciple and the guru, the teacher, one feels as if the ancient Indian did not have a skullcap, but as if it had evaporated and as if he were not the one human being who lives in his skin, but one feels as a sevenfold being, as if his soul power was composed of the seven soul rays of the holy Rishis of ancient Atlantis, enlightening him, and that he then communicated to his world that which he revealed, not from his own spirit but from the spirit of the holy Rishis. The more one works out what is said here, the more one comes closer to what has been painted here. The intuitive perception has first placed itself in ancient India, in ancient Atlantis. That which can be seen there has been painted on the wall here, and only afterwards can one speculate when it is there. This is how the message can relate to artistic creation. This is how everything in this building should actually come about.

You will find this building covered with Nordic slate. The building idea must be felt through to the point of radiating outwards. The slate, or the material used to cover it, must shine in a certain way in the sunlight. It seemed to happen by chance here – but of course there is always an inner necessity underlying it. When I saw the Nordic slate in Norway from the train, I knew that it was the right thing to cover the building with. We were then able to have the slate shipped from Norway in the pre-war period. You will feel the effect when you look at the building from a distance in good sunshine.

My main concern during the construction was the acoustics. The building was of course also provided with scaffolding on the inside during construction so that work could be carried out above. This did not produce any acoustics, the acoustics were quite different, that is, it was a caricature of acoustics. Now it so happens that the acoustics of the building were also conceived from the same building idea. My idea was that I had to expect that the acoustic question for the lecturer could be solved from occult research. You know how difficult it is; you cannot calculate the acoustics. You will see how it has been done, but to a certain degree of perfection in the acoustics.

You may now ask how these seven pillars, which contain the secret of the construction, are related to the acoustics. The two domes within our building are so lightly connected that they form a kind of soundboard, just as the soundboard of a violin plays a role in the richness of the sound. Of course, since the whole, both the columns and the dome, are made of wood, the acoustics will only reach perfection over the years, just as the acoustics of a violin only develop over the years. We must first find a way to have a profound effect on the material in order to be able to feel through the building idea what is now sensed as the acoustics of this building. You will understand that the acoustics must be sensed best from the organ podium. You will also see that when two people talk to each other here in the middle, an echo can be heard coming down from the ceiling. This seems to be an indication from the world essence that one should only speak from the stage or the lectern within the building and that the building itself does not actually tolerate useless chatter from any point.

Now, dear attendees, I have tried to tell you what can be said in this regard while looking at the building. I will have to supplement what I have spoken today in my presentation of the building idea, which I will give at the final event next Saturday. Then I will say what can still be said. Now we have to clear the hall for the next lecture.

Dear attendees!

With your permission, I would like to expand on what I said during the tour of the Goetheanum by saying a few more words about our building today. For many years, our anthroposophical movement held its meetings in ordinary halls, just as they are available today. And even when we were able to present dramatic performances based on the impulses of the anthroposophical worldview, starting in 1909, we initially had to limit ourselves to having these performances in ordinary theaters and under ordinary theater conditions. As our anthroposophical movement grew, a large number of our friends came up with the idea of building a house for anthroposophy. And now I was given the task, so to speak, of creating a home for the anthroposophical movement. I would like to make it clear that the order to build did not come from me, but from friends of the anthroposophical worldview.

The question now arose: how should the construction of such a house be approached? If any other society, an association with any task or objective, builds a house for itself today – and today there are all kinds of associations with all kinds of objectives – then it consults with some architect. They agree on the style in which such a house is to be built: Greek, Gothic, Renaissance or some other style. This is the usual procedure today. If anthroposophy were a movement like all the others, it could have proceeded in this way. But anthroposophy takes into account the great demands of our time for a thorough renewal of our entire culture, and therefore it could not be built in this way.

Furthermore, anthroposophy is not a one-sided body of ideas, but the body of ideas of anthroposophy arises from the whole of human experience, from deep sources of the human being. And that which lives in the ideas of anthroposophy has sprung from a primeval source, just as it did in the case of the older cultures. And just as the words of Anthroposophy can be proclaimed by human mouths and given as teachings, so too can that which flows from the sources from which the Anthroposophical ideas also flow be given for direct artistic contemplation. It is not a matter of translating or applying anthroposophical ideas to art, but rather of another branch growing out of the same source of life from which anthroposophical ideas come, and developing as art. What Anthroposophy has to reveal can be said from a podium in words that signify ideas. But it can also speak from the forms, from plastic forms, from painting, without sculpture or painting becoming symbolism or allegory, but rather within the sphere of the purely artistic. But that means nothing other than: If anthroposophy creates a physical shell for itself in which it is to work, then it must give this physical shell its own style, just as older world views have given their physical shells the corresponding style.

Take the Greek architectural style, as it has partly been realized in the Greek temple: This Greek temple has grown entirely out of the same world view that gave rise to Greek drama, Greek epic poetry, and Greek conceptions of the gods. The Greek felt that in creating his temple, he was building a dwelling for the god. And the god is again nothing other than what older cultural views saw in the human soul that had passed through death in its further development; a certain qualitative relationship between the god and the human soul that has passed through death was felt in older cultural currents. And so, as in ancient times, when people believed that the human soul had passed through death, they built dwellings for it while still on earth, thus constructing houses for the dead, they designed something similar for the older times, as the Greeks then designed in their temples at a later stage. The temple is the dwelling of the god, that is, not of the human soul that has passed through death itself, but of that soul which belongs to a different hierarchy, to a different world order.

Those who can see forms artistically can still feel in the forms that have been created by carrying and other loads for the Greek temple, as in older times the dead, who still remained on earth after death, who, so to speak, as a chthonic deity, as an earthly deity, this house was formed out of this earth; so that a continuation of the gravitational forces of the earth, as they can be felt by man when he somehow looks through his limbs, such a connection of forces as a temple was erected. The Greek temple is only to be regarded as complete when one looks at it in such a way that the statue of the god is inside. Those with a sense of form cannot imagine an empty Greek temple as complete. They can only imagine, they can feel, that this shell contains the statue of Athena, Zeus, Apollo and so on.

Let's skip some of the art historical development and look at the Gothic building. If you feel the Gothic building with its forms, with its peculiar windows that let in the light in a unique way, you actually always feel that when you enter the empty Gothic cathedral, it is not a totality, nothing complete: the Gothic cathedral is only complete when the community is inside, whose souls resonate in harmony in their effects. A Greek temple is the wrapping of the god who dwells on earth through his statue in the people; a Gothic cathedral is in all its forms that which encloses the community in harmony and with thoughts directed towards the eternal.

Greek world view, world view that created form in the Gothic, are dead worlds for humanity. Only the degenerate forces of decline that originated from them can still live today. We need a new culture, but one that is not only expressed in a one-sided way in knowledge and ideas, but one that can also express itself in a new art. And so the development of art history also points to the necessity of a building style for anthroposophy, which wants to bring a new form of culture.

The way in which Anthroposophy is to be lived is based on the idea that a higher being, which is in fact the human being himself, speaks to the person who lives in the ordinary life that unfolds between birth and death. By feeling this, the two-dome structure presented itself to me as the necessary building envelope for this basic impulse of the anthroposophical world view. In the small dome, what is inwardly large and wide is, as it were, physically compressed; in the large dome, what is inwardly less wide, what inwardly belongs to the life we lead between birth and death, is spatially expanded.

And when a person enters this structure in the sense of such an anthroposophical worldview, they must find their own being. This is based on what has just been said. And while he is inside, he must feel the structure in such a way that he, as a human being, as a microcosm, does not feel constrained by the structure, but is externally connected to the universe, to the macrocosm, through the entire structure. But if you look at the structure from the outside, you must have the feeling: Something is going on in there that brings something unearthly, something extraterrestrial, to earthly existence. Something is going on in there that is hidden in the earthly itself. So it must be possible to look at the building in terms of its overall form and also in terms of the sculptural extensions, which, as I said over there, must represent organic structure.

I ask you to view the slides from this perspective, which I will now take the liberty of showing you. Of course, they show nothing other than what you have already seen; they are only intended to conclusively present what can be seen of the building. We will start by showing an exterior view looking towards the west portal.

The building seen from a little further away (Fig. 6), looking towards the west portal.

The next picture (Fig. 7): looking more towards the south portal, the west and south portals seen more together.

Here (Fig. 2) is a view of the building from the east, with a simultaneous view of the building that contains the lighting and heating units for the building. This boiler house is, of course, particularly controversial in its form because it looks different from the buildings we are accustomed to seeing today. And this boiler house is not built according to any principle other than everything that has been built here at all. The original idea was to have a number of heating and lighting systems. That is, in a sense, the nut. And now, as with the nut, only the nutshell can arise as a covering from an inner, logical necessity, and that, when one has such a utilitarian building, one cannot proceed otherwise than that one perceives everything that must be inside this structure in its essence and then makes a shell that corresponds to this content in the same way that the nutshell corresponds to the nut.

Of course, this can only be felt; it cannot be discussed. Another person may feel differently. But if one criticizes the ground, I would like to ask the people who do so to consider what would be there if no attempt had been made – even if it was not immediately successful at the first attempt – to find the right covering for heating and lighting, but had stuck with the current one, then there might be a red chimney here. Perhaps the philistines would have liked it more, but art would have been less satisfied.

The next picture (Fig. 4) will show a view from a greater distance of the north-west portal.

The next picture (Fig. 1) is supposed to show the building from an even greater distance.

It was always my intention, despite the fact that the building was not originally intended for here, but in the middle of houses, to design it here so that it fits into the overall configuration of the landscape, the Jura landscape. I cannot, while trying to avoid any illusion, but say otherwise than that I think the building is already growing out of the plastic forms of the landscape.

Here I take the liberty of showing you the ground plan (Fig. 20), which expresses exactly what I have just said. The point was to feel through the effect, I would like to say, of one side of the human being on the other, in the ground plan and in the whole form of the building.

What now follows is a cross-section through the entire structure (Fig. 21).

Now I will try to show this cross-section; I will try to show what can be built on this cross-section by showing you the model that I originally made (Fig. 22). This is the original model of the construction, the large dome, the small dome, as I made it here from the fall of 1913. It is largely made of wax, insofar as one is dealing with plastic forms, and partly of wood.

The next one will show a side wing, seen from the side (Fig. 13), where you can particularly see the metamorphosis that the motif, which can be seen above the west portal, can undergo in a smaller form. The forms become quite different on the outside, but according to the idea, they are the same on the inside.

The next motif is depicted in the piece above the south portal, which is above the southern entrance door (Fig. 11): the same motif as on the west portal, but in a simpler, more primitive metamorphosis. Next, we present part of the room that one enters when going down into the concrete sub-room, which is intended for depositing the clothes (Fig. 23). One goes up there via the stairs. In any case, all the honored attendees have become aware of the underlying feelings behind the design of this room.

The staircase with its surroundings (Fig. 24), which we can pass over particularly quickly because they are only intended for recapitulation. The next thing I bring is a column from the interior, which one enters when one has gone up the stairs, that is, before one enters the main room (Fig. 27). Everything that is worked here is already worked in wood.

Here I present the organ motif, but not as you see it now, but as it was as a model (Fig. 30). It is a photograph of the organ motif model and you can see it here (Fig. 29) in an unfinished state at the same time. I said in the description over in the building that an attempt was made to design the whole sculpture around the organ so that the organ does not appear to be inserted into the space, but rather to have grown out of it. Here you can see the work of this organ sculpture still half-finished. First, I had to work out the general shape, and only later did I adapt the general forms to fit exactly with what emerged as the lines through the ends of the organ pipes upwards.

We now see in the next picture [the capital of the first column in the west] (Fig. 33), and I ask you to pay attention to the next three pictures. They are presented here to show two consecutive capitals. You should note that a single capital is actually not something that can be viewed on its own. The thing on which everything is based is the way in which each subsequent capital emerges from a preceding one. Therefore, I show two capitals emerging from each other [of the second and third columns] (Figs. 36, 38), and in between the two together [with the architrave above] (Fig. 37), thus each individual one in succession and in between the two together.

We see here the fourth capital (Fig. 40). Now the two capitals in succession, the fourth and fifth (Fig. 41). Now the fifth alone (Fig. 42).

Likewise, I will now show two bases that have been formed one after the other, again the individual one is not to be understood in isolation, but only as emerging from what has gone before.

The first pedestal, the fifth (Fig. 52).

Now the sixth (Fig. 53). The next picture will show the motif that arises when we look east, standing in the building and see what is in the east (Fig. 57).

A column order: This is the view after the organ motif when standing in the building, looking from east to west (Fig. 29).

Here you can see the motif carved into the wood above the curtain slit (Fig. 55). The curtain is open, we look into the small domed room, and below we can also see the carving of the small domed room, only a little indistinctly, and above it the painting.

The next one shows the motif that was carved in the small domed room: as a kind of synthetic conclusion of the individual forms (Fig. 67). If you look from the auditorium into the small domed room, you will see, immediately below the painted Christ-like figure, with Lucifer above him and Ahriman below him, a wood carving that combines all the forms that are otherwise distributed throughout the building – but initially, I would like to say, only in an organic, not yet spiritualized way.

Psychically, it is only summarized in the Christ group (Fig. 93), which is a nine-meter-high wooden group that will stand in the far east and show the representative of humanity in the middle, who can be understood as the Christ – but must be understood in the feeling – [and] has the Luciferic principle above him and the Ahrimanic principle below him. Psychically, this will synthesize all the individual forms.

I will now describe some of the motifs in the small cupola painting.

First, you see the child, depicted in an orange tone (Fig. 72), in front of the blue figure, which looks like a fist (Fig. 70), holding a tablet with the “I” – the only word that will be found in the entire structure, for very specific reasons. I would be pleased, ladies and gentlemen, if you would feel something absurd from these pictures, which, after all, could only be viewed in black and white, because here the painting is done in such a way that everything is brought out in color. You can actually only give something in the reproduction in which, according to perception, something must be missing, something absurd. Perhaps one should see here that something quite unfinished, something absurd stands before one, and then one should give oneself the answer: it must actually be so, because the thing has meaning only in color. Whoever understands the inner meaning of the colored world will thoroughly grasp that even the figurative can, to a certain degree, be created entirely out of color. Those who see the blue above in the neighborhood of the other colors will perceive it purely as a possible creation from the color that a kind of Faust figure appears here. The next picture (Fig. 71) shows Death below Faust. The modern discerning person is placed between Death, the end of life, and Birth, the other end of life, which has been depicted in the child.

The next image (Fig. 78): a kind of figure that resembles an Egyptian initiate.

The inspirers hovering above him, initiating world powers (Fig. 77). From the way the treatment is presented, it will be clear that I may say: Although Figural is distinguished here from the colored, what I have said about the creative in color still applies.

Here you can see a detail, a kind of ahriman head (Fig. 81). It is only conceivable to paint from the color used in the dome above: a peculiar brown-yellow.

Here together: Ahriman head and Lucifer head (Fig. 79). They are only truly contrasted in color. The lower one shows what is inspired by Lucifer and Ahriman when they are grasped in their objectivity, when one is not grasped by them oneself, which is then particularly effective in man or can become so because man is of a special kind, who stands to the child as indicated in the lower figure.

The next picture shows Lucifer's head on its own (Fig. 80), that is, painted; in sculpture, it looks different.

Here (Fig. 82) you see the [Germanic] man with the child, who has Ahriman and Lucifer above him, as shown earlier.

Here (Fig. 87) you can see Lucifer in a reddish-yellow painting above the representative of humanity in the central image of the small dome.

The next image (Fig. 88) then represents Ahriman under the representative of humanity – Ahriman, who is embraced with his love rays as if by a crushing lightning bolt.

This is the painted Representative of Man, that is, the head of it (Fig. 90). This (Fig. 91) represents my model as it is initially worked in profile view of the Representative of Man; while what was shown earlier is a painting, this here is a sculpture. This is the first model of the Representative of Humanity in sculpture, the Representative of Humanity who can be felt as Christ.

The next part will show the plastic group (Fig. 98). At the top left, this elemental being will show itself, an elemental being that has, to a certain extent, grown out of the forces of the rock. Below, you can see Lucifer striving upwards. The elemental being has grown out of the forces of the rock here in the wood group, whereby it becomes clear how one first dared here to work out ways of overcoming mere composition through organic design by means of asymmetry work out ways of overcoming mere composition through organic design, thus working in asymmetry. What is important here is that the form is worked out precisely from the place, with all its asymmetries, from the place where this being is located in the nine-meter-high group.

I will now show you my first Ahriman model (Fig. 99), which was created in 1915 in wax. The other Ahriman heads here are modeled after this Ahriman head. I would just like to note: This is what a person would look like if he had no heart at all and only reason. For the Ahrimanic represents the super-intellectual, the super-rational in man.

I will now show two views of the boiler house, the boiler and lighting house (Figs. 106, 107).

Now we come to the glass house below, in which you have held many a meeting here (Fig. 103). You can see the double-dome structure in a different form, a metamorphosis of the large building, metamorphosed in such a way that the two domes have to be the same size and do not adjoin each other, but are separate. I would like to illustrate the fact that everything about these buildings is individualized down to the last detail by showing you the gate of this glass house (Fig. 104), where you will see the individualization down to the stairs and the woodcarving.

Now another picture (Fig. 110 or 112), which should show how what is intended by scratching out the colored glass pane, what is created from the feel of the material, so that it can only appear in the color in question. I ask you to look at this and see for yourself that if this appears uncolored, it is hideous.

In recapitulating these things, I believe I have once again been able to point out how anthroposophy does not want to be just a science, but wants to be something that can act creatively in culture, that can speak in words, but that can also reveal itself in artistic forms. And now I just want to add at this point that perhaps it has emerged to you from what we have seen here in the building, what you have heard here in the building, what is intended and how it is connected with the signs of the times. The project that has come to fruition could only be realized through the great willingness of some of our members to make sacrifices; but the exchange rate situation in the world and the poverty of the Mediterranean countries have led us to a point where I I had to say, which was also spread by a small brochure that was sent to members: If we do not receive active help from the world, we will not be able to complete the building, but the building will have to come to a halt. If our members apply themselves with the same zeal to the completion of the building as they did to the founding of the World School Association, which is intimately connected with the building idea of Dornach, then we will soon be able to see a torso in the fall, which can be seen as a torso.

Since your time is limited, in particular the time of some of our esteemed visitors, I will not add anything further to what has been said, but ask you to come over to the building, where I will then take the liberty of saying a few closing words for this summer event.

[ 2 ] The building of the Goetheanum became necessary at a time when the anthroposophical movement had expanded to such an extent that it needed its own space. According to the whole nature of the anthroposophical movement, it could not be a question of having a building for its purposes constructed in this or that style. A movement which merely expresses itself in ideas and maxims can be wrapped up in any desired form, but not so a spiritual movement which is predisposed from the outset to let its currents flow into the whole of cultural life. The anthroposophical movement wants its impulses to flow into the artistic, religious and social spheres as well as into the scientific. When it speaks, its words, its ideas, are to come from the whole human being, and these ideas are to be only the outer language for experienced spiritual reality. But this experience of spiritual reality, of spiritual being, can also express itself in artistic forms, in outer social life, etc.

It had to be so, that in a place where that which stands behind the anthroposophical movement resounds in thoughts, resounds in words and ideas, is also revealed in the forms which surround the listeners, in the paintings which speak down from the walls.

[ 3 ] This is how it has always been when a civilisation, a culture wanted to manifest itself in the world. The content of such a culture does not form one-sidedly, but forms a cosmic or human totality. And the individual fields, science, art, etc., appear only as the individual members of such a totality, just as in an organism the individual members appear as born out of the totality of the organism.

Therefore, the anthroposophical movement had to create its own artistic style, just as it had to create a certain way of expressing itself in ideas. [ 4 ] The latter is still little considered today. It is, for example, necessary that anthroposophical spiritual-science should be expressed in a different way from what has hitherto been customarily contained in human civilisation.

Anthroposophy, for example, must in many respects depart from the principle, still habitually held today, of rigidly, one-sidedly, adopting a single point of view. Today, people are still often a materialist or a spiritualist, a realist or an idealist, and so on. For an unprejudiced, complete world-view this only means that when someone says “I am a materialist”, they are expressing just one side of reality, when someone says “I am a spiritualist”, they are expressing another side of reality. And anthroposophy requires all-sidedness. One is a materialist for material processes, a spiritualist for the spiritual, an idealist for the ideal, a realist for the real, and so on. Just as a tree, when seen from different standpoints, is always the same tree, but the representations of it are quite different, so the world can be represented differently from the most diverse points of view. [ 5 ] Therefore, in the field of anthroposophy, one must simply take this path when considering some spiritual or material aspect of reality. One then chooses a point of view from which to illuminate it, one feels and thereby shows a one-sidedness, but one then characterises the same thing from the opposite point of view. So that it is often necessary—let us say—to begin a lecture by speaking from the one side, and then to let the style of the lecture flow over into a characterisation using the converse forms of thought.

But this can also be necessary in an individual sentence! [ 6 ] And something else is necessary for the anthroposophical world-view. A world-view which adheres to the outer, naturalistic aspect, it can preferably work subjectively in, let us say, for example, one which is juxtaposed to it. Anthroposophy must make many things fluid, which are otherwise presented with rigid outlines, so that the sentence becomes elastic, inwardly mobile.

One then experiences that people call this style "terrible" because they have not got used to the fact that a particular spirituality also demands a particular form of expression. [ 7 ] However, it also happens, and this may perhaps be said, that from some quarters, spiritual-scientific content is taken up but clothed in the stylistic form which people are accustomed to today. Then, of course, it looks like a person wearing clothes that do not fit. Such presentations of anthroposophical content, which look like a person wearing ill-fitting clothes, are not even very rare today.

But all of this is only a sign that with anthroposophy something is to be created which is not only a new instance, a new standpoint, but which is a new, complete world-conception.

[ 8 ] And this is connected with the fact that the style, the artistic, architectural, painting and sculptural style, which had to be used in the Goetheanum, had to stand out from what had hitherto existed in the world in terms of style. In accordance with the fact that anthroposophy expresses the spiritual content of the present, which must represent progress in comparison with the spiritual content of earlier times, it was necessary to transform the old architectural styles, which were based on geometry, symmetry, a certain regularity, in short, on that which has a mathematical character, into an organic architectural style, a style which passes from the geometric-dynamic into the organic-living.

[ 9 ] I can well understand that those who feel firmly rooted in the older styles of architecture, and who see in these older styles something which they once had brought to a certain understanding, feel that what is now departing in such a radical way from everything they were accustomed to before is dilettantish. I can fully understand that. But we had to take the risk of transforming the more mathematical-dynamic style into an organic-living style.

This may still have happened as imperfectly as possible today, but a beginning had to be made. And it is as an expression of these efforts that the "Goetheanum" confronts you.

[ 10 ] Whoever approaches the "Goetheanum" from any direction will already find in its outer form that it is, without falling into abstract symbolism or arid allegory, a revelation of the particular spiritual life which wants to realise itself here. This spiritual life is more concerned with the human being as an expression of the world, a revelation of the world, than earlier stages of our human civilisation have been. This is expressed in the way the building is divided into two parts.

[ 11 ] In our present age, the human being is more dependent on sensory impressions than was the case in earlier times. In Greece, for example, human beings still had a life that perceived thoughts in the external world in the same way as we perceive only colours or sounds today, or sensory impressions in general. Just as we see red today, for example, the Greek still saw a thought expressing itself. The Greek did not have the feeling that the thought was something that they formed in their inner being, that they experienced in their inner being as separate from external reality. The separation of the human being, and with it the increase in the individuality of the human being, has progressed in the course of human evolution.

I explained this in the first chapter of my "Riddles of Philosophy". And so, it was quite natural—as I said, without symbolism, without allegorising—to perceive the building as something in two parts: as one part that contains within itself that which the human being experiences more when turned inwards, that which the human being experiences when contemplatively turned inwards, and the other part which the human being experiences when turned outward towards the world. This complete architectural idea of Dornach is not somehow thought out, symbolised, or spun from groundless thoughts, but is purely felt. It had to become so, this building, if it was thought and felt as that which should be in it. Entirely in accordance with the natural principle which I have already characterised on another occasion during these days. Just as the nutshell gets its form from the same forces which formed the nut inside, just as one can only feel that the nutshell corresponds to the nut that is inside it, so also this shell had to be the sheath for what pulsates here as art, as knowledge.

I have often used another comparison that looks more trivial, but I did not mean it trivially. I said, the building in Dornach must be like what they call a Gugelhupf mould in Vienna, pardon the expression. A Gugelhupf is a special kind of cake, a baked cake that has a special shape, baked from flour and eggs and many other beautiful things. And it has to be baked in a mould. This mould must be formed in a very specific way, because it is precisely this mould that gives the Gugelhupf its shape. So, there must always be a lovely Gugelhupf mould around the cake: that is, it must be there in the first place. The cake is baked in it, so the mould must be conceived and felt in such a way that the right thing can be baked.

Anthroposophy strives to bring into a living flow the ideas which are more adapted to the fixed forms of nature, and thus to bring into a living flow the mechanical-geometric style of architecture. Therefore, when you enter the building and look at its various areas, you will find everywhere that the attempt has been made to continue the geometric-symmetrical design in such a way that organic forms or forms reminiscent of organic forms are present everywhere.

First go to the main door, you will find that there is something like an organic form above the door. This organic form is not felt in a naturalistic way, by reproducing this or that organic thing, but is based on a living surrender to organic creation in general.

One cannot, as mere naturalists do, obtain a stylistic form by imitating leaf-like, flower-like, horn-like or eye-like forms, but by bringing oneself, with one's own soul-life, into such an inner movement as corresponds to the creation of the organic. Then, when one erects a building, which of course is not a plant or an animal, then, when the whole is conceived from the organic-living, natural forms do not arise, but forms that remind one of the natural, and which nowhere imitate the natural, but which remind one of the same.

And when you have entered the building, then go through the gallery, you will find certain forms which are intended to serve as heating elements. These forms are shaped in such a way that you have the feeling that they are growing out of the earth, that there is a living growth force in them, something that is not a plant, not an animal, but something that is growing, something organic. That takes shape. That even takes shape in such a dual form. It is something like beings speaking to each other, and their mutual relationship is also expressed.

All of this, by itself, creates according to the principle of Goethean metamorphosis, which was first created by Goethe in order to gain a cognitive overview of the organic. The organic is such that it repeats certain forms, but it does not repeat them in the same way. Goethe expresses this in such a way that in the living-organic the individual organs, let us say the leaves of a plant from the bottom up into the flower, the stamens, the pistils, and into the fruit organs, are according to the idea the same, but in their outer forms, appear in the most varied ways.

When one delves into the living, one does indeed have to form things in such a way that something which is only taken hold of spiritually, ideally, can, in its external shape, form itself in the most manifold ways. This, in turn, can be led up into the artistic, whereas Goethe first of all developed it cognitively to comprehend the organs, and must be led up into the artistic if the geometric, symmetrical, dynamic style of architecture is to be transferred into the organic style of architecture. The essential thing in such an organic style of architecture is that the whole is not only a unity through the repetition of the individual parts, but is also a unity as a whole. This means that each individual element that is there, must be as it can only be in that place.

Just think, my dear guests, your earlobe—a small organ on you, it can only be at that place where it appears on the organism. It cannot be anywhere else on the organism. But it also cannot be formed in any other way than it is there. This earlobe could not be where the big toe is now, nor could it be shaped here like the big toe. In an organism, each element is in its place and can only be shaped in the way it is shaped in that place.

You will find this adhered to in this building. Wherever you look, you will feel (certainly, individual things are still imperfect, but this is the idea of the building) that the place for each individual thing is only found out of the whole and it can only be in this place.

If you look at the balustrades of the staircase with their curves, you will see that the curves are formed in a quite definite way where the building opens outwards, where nothing can be held in place, so to speak, by the forces; on the other hand, the forms dam up towards the building, they contract, as is also quite the case with the organic.

Therefore, the venture had to be undertaken to replace the columns and pillars with something organic in design. So, you see the attempt: in the staircase you see the balustrades supported by organic forms that appear as supports, which in turn are not modelled on anything natural, but which are found out of the architectural idea itself. And each individual thickening, each individual thinning, then again, the circumference of such a pillar-like structure are absolutely conceived in their size in the sense of the whole, and again conceived in such a way as they must be in their place.

I can understand that something like the two organically formed pillars in the concrete porch still seem strange to those who are not used to such things. A critic once went into this building and found it strange that such a thing should be placed there. He could only think: something must have been copied!—There is nothing imitated at all, the whole thing is just formed out of the architectural idea through original feeling. Nothing at all is copied. But the critic, who prefers to stick to the old, does not like to get involved in this creative-productive process. And so, it occurred to him: this must be an elephant's foot. But it seems that with one eye he saw an elephant's foot out there, but with the other eye it didn't seem like an elephant's foot, because as an elephant's foot it's too small for the building. What is too small for something appears rickety in the organic, and that is why he said with a strange inner contradiction: one sees "rickety elephant feet" in the anteroom!

The lower part of the building is made of concrete. Even today, when building in concrete, it is necessary to first find the forms out of the concrete material. This is something that is of the utmost importance for artistic creation: that one must build out of the feeling of the material, out of the feeling for the material. You have to build differently out of wood than out of any stone material. And of course, you have to create differently out of concrete than you would out of marble.

When you form sculpturally and you form out of stone, you have to consider, for example, that which is raised in the form. When you work out of the stone, you have to work out the elevations, the convexities in particular. If you are shaping the eyes of a sculptural figure of a human being, and you have stone as your material, then direct your attention to the elevations, to the convexities, and work the whole eye out of the convexities. If you make a figure in wood, you cannot proceed in this way, then you must direct your attention everywhere to the depressions, to the concavities, and you must, as it were, carve out what is becoming deeper from the wood. This must be out of feeling. It must come from the feeling for the material.

For concrete, one must find very particular forms. Our friends the Großheintz, provided us with the site for this building, and the house that is built outside for Dr Großheintz and his family is made of concrete. For this house, this very special concrete style had first to be used, as it still can today, given the imperfections. Perhaps it is precisely in such a building that one can see the struggle for an architectural style, for an artistic style out of the material.

This aspiration was therefore the basis for the lower part of the building, which is made of concrete. The upper part is made of wood. When you go up the stairs, you enter the anteroom. And here you can already see how the ceiling and the side walls are formed differently from what you were used to. And I would like to mention that, in accordance with this new architectural style, the details have also been given a different meaning than in previous styles. This is expressed, for example, in the treatment of the wall.

What is a wall in buildings of the past? That which closes off to the outside. Here the wall does not close off to the outside, here the wall becomes, to a certain extent, transparent to feeling, it does not close off, but opens feeling to the vastness of the world. There is a profound difference between the formation of the wall as we have been accustomed to it up to now and the formation of the wall here. Everywhere else, the formation of walls closes you off from the world. But here you should have the feeling that you are not closed off. Just as you can see through glass, you feel artistically through the forms that are artistically created, and you feel in harmony with the whole cosmos.

We were therefore able to use artificial lighting for the entire building. One might have the feeling that compared to the open buildings of Greece, something like this, which reflects artificial lighting, is like a closed off cave. Well, that may be, but that is due to the conditions of modern life. We are not within the culture of ancient Greece.

But if on the one hand, as is always the case in anthroposophy, one accepts our present civilisation, if in this way one relates quite positively to our present civilisation, then one must in turn also draw on all the consequences of this civilisation. That is why the walls here do not close off, but open one in the spirit to the whole cosmos. Even the paintings on the ceilings should not be such that they merely shine inwards with what they express in their colours, so that one merely has a painted ceiling that tells one something inwards. That should not be. Such a ceiling is first thought of in this way: there is the ceiling, there is the human being. It is painted in such a way that what is painted confronts you. That is not the case here. Here the colour is placed on the wall for the purpose of looking through the painting and having a connection with the whole cosmos. This is carried through to the physical form. You can see it in the windows that close off the building down here.

These windows are designed in such a way that they are created from single-coloured glass panes according to a method that one could call glass engraving: a single-coloured glass pane, from which the form is carved out with a diamond bit. This sheet of glass, when it is finished and placed somewhere, is of course not a work of art, any more than a score is a work of art. Only when it is put in its right place and the light of the sun shines through, then the work of art is there. Only with outer nature, with the outer world, does it make sense.

And so, it is with all the details here: they only have meaning together with the whole world, with the totality of the world. There is no need to ramble on in thought, interpreting this or that in this or, that way. One should feel, completely naturally, naively, then one will find one's way best here in this building. Because that's how the whole thing is felt. Better still than to speak of the architectural idea of Dornach, I could speak of the architectural feeling of Dornach.

It has been said many times: "Up there on the Dornach hill, there is a building with all kinds of symbols.” There is not a single symbol here. Everything is poured out in artistic forms, everything is felt, nothing is thought. However, all kinds of symbols live in the imagination of some people. Yes, I could also imagine that some anthroposophists, who still have some theosophical airs about them, have even been annoyed by the fact that there is no symbolism here at all, that nothing symbolic can be spun from fantastic thoughts here, but that everything is to be understood in a purely artistic way.

It was precisely on this occasion that the real way in which the anthroposophical impulse streams into art had to be shown. First of all, a movement of this kind, which leads to the spiritual, is naturally predisposed, as is the case with sectarian movements, to seek a meaning, an inner meaning in everything.

You experience the most amazing things there. We have performed mystery plays in Munich, in which characters appear, created characters, which one should understand as they walk across the stage. I was asked whether this character in these plays meant the etheric body, another manas, another buddhi. Yes, there are even treatises that have emerged from the theosophical movement, where "Hamlet" is interpreted in such a way that the individual characters, Hamlet himself—mean this or that: one character is the etheric body, another the astral body, another manas, another buddhi. Please forgive me for not being able to explain this in detail with regard to Hamlet, for I have never been able to really read through such a treatise.

And so, it was naturally also something unfortunate that one came into the various anthroposophical working groups where there were still theosophical airs and graces, and one found all kinds of symbolic designs, black crosses with seven red splotches, which were supposed to represent roses, trafficked all around. One imagined there was something great about it! The whole thing was enough to drive one crazy! But these are—one might say—the dross that first brings forth a movement. That's what it's all about, that real artistic feeling came out of all this dross, that something was attempted in which there is nothing at all of a pale symbolism, of an empty allegory, but where at least the attempt is made to shape everything artistically.

It is precisely the artistic that then becomes natural. You can see that in these columns. Column capitals are usually constructed according to the principle of geometric repetition. Column capitals usually repeat themselves. An organic style of architecture does not allow this. How did these column capitals, the architraves above them and the plinths, come about? They came about through the real incorporation of the principle of organic growth.

Here at the entrance—the simplest capital: a form is attempted that descends from above, another form that comes up to meet it. But all this is not thought out, but every surface, every line of the form is felt. And if one advances from the first column to the second column, and looks at the capital: it is the same feeling translated into the artistic, to which one must devote oneself to the sense of Goethean metamorphosis, when one has the simply formed leaves at the bottom of a plant and must find the transition to the leaves somewhat higher up. It reshapes itself, metamorphoses itself.

But if you look at these capitals, you will see that they really represent artistically that which appears so distinctly in abstract thoughts in the modern worldview: evolution, development. The second capital develops from the first, and so on.

But one peculiarity confronts you. If you look at the successive capitals, it contradicts the abstract idea of evolution, as it is often expressed. You will also find in Herbert Spencer, for example, the idea of evolution expressed in such a way that the first simply differentiates, then integrates again. But that is not how it is. That contradicts the natural course of evolution. Whoever delves into natural evolution will find that evolution rises to certain complicated forms, then again becomes simple, and the perfect is not that which is the most complicated, but the simple into which the complicated has again been transformed.

If I am to represent this in a simple way, I would have to represent it as follows: The middle form is the more complicated, the last form is the most perfect. You can see this, for example, in the evolution of the eye. The eyes of the lower animals are relatively simple, undifferentiated. In the middle series of animals, you find very complicated eyes, with the blade process and the fan inside the eye. These organs are again dissolved inside the human eye: the human eye is more perfect than that of the lower, the middle animal stage, but again more simplified. That which is in the middle stage is also spiritually within in the simplified form, but the perfect stage is again simplified for external observation. This simplification, however, is such that, as is the case with the capitals of the columns, with the architraves above, one feels in the simple that it has become, that it has been infused with that which was complicated.

I did not arrive at this design—if I may make this remark—when I worked out the model of this building, by trying to reproduce this abstract thought, which I have just expressed, externally in a symbolic way, but I arrived at it by surrendering myself to the creative forces of nature and trying to form something out of the same creative forces from which nature itself shapes. And that is how these forms came into being.

The most important thing that one encounters in the process is this: one creates quite naïve forms out of feeling. When they are finished, they show you all kinds of things that you did not intend to put into them at the beginning, just as natural forms show you all kinds of things that you discover in them. If, for example, you take the simple forms of base and capital there, and you accordingly make them somewhat elastic, then you can put the convexity of the first form into the concave part here. What is convex there is concave here, what is concave there is convex here. So that I later concluded—I did not intend it—that in terms of convexity and concavity the first column corresponds to the seventh column, the second column to the sixth column, the third column to the fifth column, and the middle one stands for itself.

That is precisely what is characteristic of artistic creation: that what one initially has in the mind is not everything that one then puts into the object. One is actually outside of oneself when creating artistically. One has only a little of what the creative forces are in one's consciousness. You create with the little that is alive, which then goes into the material. But what emerges surprises you, because you don't actually create alone, because you create together with the productive forces of the cosmos.

And purely out of feeling, the individual parts then acquire the character by which they fit into the whole, just as the members of an organism fit into the totality of the organism.

Look at this lectern here. You must feel, when you look at it, that it is a continuation of what proceeds from the mouth as the spoken word: there the words come down to you, but these forms say the same thing.

And again, if you take the columns as they are leaning here and think further about their form, if you combine them here: then the combination again becomes what stands here as a lectern. On the one hand, it leans towards the auditorium, on the other hand, it is a conclusion of what is present in the auditorium. The individual forms are conceived on this basis. However, the geometric-mathematical style of older forms is thereby transformed into a spatial-musical quality. But that, in turn, means something for human evolution, that the geometrical gradually passes over into the musical, so that the musical also confronts us in space.

However, if one wants to grasp this idea in its full livingness, one must not attach too much importance to the fact that the musical can be expressed in mathematical formulae. As a one-sided abstract scholar, one can be delighted when, let us say, a sequence of tones can be expressed by their mathematically calculated pitches and tonal ratios; one can feel that one has only now translated it into real knowledge. One can also feel it differently. One can also feel that when one has transferred the musical experience into the mathematical, one has buried the music, and that one finally has the corpse of the musical in the mathematical formulae.

These things must really be taken seriously here. The cognitive must be lifted up into artistic experience. Only by attempting this could these forms come about.

This Goetheanum is already felt to accord in many ways with Goethean impulses, but not according to the Goethean impulses that died with Goethe in 1832 within the physical world, but according to the impulses of that Goethe who is still lives today. Not as he is, however, according to the sense of ordinary Goethe scholars, but he is truly the reality of Goethe. For today's Goethe scholars, the very name "Goetheanum" is an abomination. One can understand that. The most one can do is to reply in private that everything that exists today as the "Goethe-Bund" and the "Goethe-Gesellschaft" is in turn—well, in private, you don't have to bring it out in the open—quite fatal to you. But something should be felt here of what Goethe meant when he travelled to Italy, out of a deep longing to find more intimate artistic impulses, to find the real essence of art. After looking at the works of art he saw in Italy, still feeling the after-effects of the Greek artistic principle, he wrote to his friends in Weimar: After what I see here in the works of art, I believe I have discovered the secret of Greek artistic creation. The Greeks followed the same laws in their artistic creation that nature itself follows.—And the pure abstract philosophy, which to his delight he encountered in Weimar through Herder, from the works of Spinoza, e.g. from the work "God" by Spinoza, this spiritual, essential quality in the world, this is what Goethe felt when he was confronted with the ideal works of art, and he wrote to his friends: There is necessity, there is God. And among his sayings we find the characteristic one: To whom nature reveals her open secrets, feels a deep longing for her most worthy interpreter, art.

That which appears in forms can be the same for a completely contemplated artistic impulse as that which expresses itself in thoughts. Only then the thoughts must be full of life and the forms must breathe spirit.

Translated by Peter Stewart

Allow me today to add something about the architectural idea of Dornach to what I said a few days ago. I have tried to interpret the sequence of columns and column capitals. The question can be raised: Why are there progressively seven columns on each side of the building? And one can think of all kinds of nebulous mysticism in relation to the number seven - just as anthroposophy is generally accused of bringing up all kinds of such things, which one thinks are rooted in all kinds of superstition. But to interpret the seven columns in any other than an artistic way would contradict what lay at the basis of the model's elaboration, of the original work. If one proceeds in such a way that the individual capitals emerge from one another, that is, each successive capital emerges from the previous one, as I described last time, then one concludes that in a certain respect a kind of conclusion is reached with the seventh column. This simply corresponds to the successive feelings in the creation of the form. If one wanted to make an eighth column, one would have to repeat the form - albeit on a higher level. And since everything in an organic building must be based on connecting with the creative forces of nature and of the world-being in general, it is only understandable that that number should emerge which is, so to speak, the leading number for manifold natural phenomena.

We have seven tones in the musical scale. The octave is the repetition of the prime. If we place the phenomenon of light in front of us in the familiar way, we have seven colours in the well-known colour scale where the light shades into colour. The newer chemistry sets up the so-called periodic system, which is also a structure of the atomic weights and properties of the chemical elements according to the number seven. And one who follows organic life finds these numbers everywhere. It is not some superstitious prejudice, but the result of deep observation. And if one's feeling is such that one simply surrenders oneself to observation, dreaming nothing, mystifying nothing, then one will also be able to find the right relationship to the sevenfold-ness of the columns. Everything here has been attempted in such a way that the principle of the organic has been firmly established.

Here you see how the organ has been placed within the whole building in such a way that it does not stand in a corner, but that it has grown out of the forms with the building, so to speak, so that the architecture and sculpture of the building approach the forms created by the arrangement of the organ pipes, do not encompass them, but let them grow out of themselves, so to speak.

What must be considered in such architecture and sculpture is the feeling for the material. It is absolutely a question of the fact that, especially when working in wood, this feeling for the material is perceived on the one hand as something connected with the specific quality of the material in which one is working. But then in wood, because one has essentially a soft form in which one works, one has at the same time, that which makes it easiest to overcome the form as such, and which makes that which is to be revealed, that which is to be revealed artistically, emerges most in such a way that when one works in wood one must directly enter into the secrets of the world's existence.

I just want to draw attention to the following. Assume that one wants to sculpt the human figure in wood. The building will finally be completed here in the east by the fact that under this motif, which is painted in the middle, there will be a wooden sculpture of the same motif.¹ There you will also see the figure of the Christ in connection with Luciferic and Ahrimanic beings. So, it was a question of creating a thoroughly idealised and spiritualised human figure out of the wood. With the prerequisites I have just described, it is quite different to work on the head of the human form than on the rest of the organism. These things cannot be approached with abstract knowledge.

The shaping, the forming, is of course just as much within the laws of nature as everything else that in some way arranges nature according to number, measure and the like. When one forms the human head, one has the feeling everywhere: one must work out the form from within, one must try to base it on the feeling that the head is formed from the centre outwards. With the rest of the human organism one has the feeling that one must enter from the outside and, as it were, form the outer surfaces from the outside. One has the feeling that in the case of the head the essential surface is that which lies below, which is therefore inside, which gives itself its curves, its surfaces, from the inside outwards; whereas in the case of the rest of the organism one must consider the outer surfaces as the most important.

By feeling such things, one comes close to the secrets of nature, especially in art. And it must be emphasised again and again that what is called knowledge today cannot lead at all to a real unveiling of the secrets of nature, that in a living comprehension of the ideas which are given to one in laws of nature and the like, one always feels the necessity of ascending from these ideas to that which can only be grasped in an artistic contemplation. And basically, one must not think of the mysteries of the world in any other way than in such a way that so-called scientific knowledge is a stage, but that it must rise to a living artistic comprehension of the world if one really wants to come close to the mysteries of the world. We must not think as we often think today, that art has nothing to reveal of the mysteries of the world, that everything must be left to science.

The only real natural view is the one on which Goethe's conception of the world was based, and which I have already characterised from various sides, - the one that led Goethe to say: art is a revelation of the secret laws of nature, - which would not reveal themselves without the very existence of art.

And so, one could say: In a building like this, a kind of extract of the world's secrets is at the same time presented to the human being. For this reason, many artistic problems arose during the construction of this building. They arose as something self-evident, above all the problem of painting.

On the one hand, it was necessary to express the feelings that could recognise a portrayal of certain mysteries of the world, but on the other hand, one had to direct attention to the artistic means of expression. You do not see in the paintings of the large dome anything symbolic or fantastically speculative, however much some people might believe that. If you look at the painting here at the west end, you will see that there is something in the compositions of colours that looks peculiar.

Now you all know that when you close your eyes, you see something like a mysterious shadow-eye opposite the eye. That which every human being can have before them in this way when the eye is closed, like a kind of shadow-eye, can, however, when one’s inner seeing is particularly formed, come before the soul in a much more elaborate, much more substantial way. It is then, however, no longer as robust, as coarse as the two eyes which one sees as shadow-eyes when one's real eyes are closed, but it contains that which, in a certain way, can be seen spiritually when one's inner attention is directed towards that part of the periphery of the human being which is situated towards the eyes. It is that which then appears to this inspired inner gaze, one might say - a whole world. And the sensation already arises: by looking, as it were, into one's own power of vision, into one's own visual space with one's eyes closed as a human being, one sees before oneself something that is like the beginning of creation.

The beginning of creation is what confronts you here at the west end of the large dome.² And it is not a mere figment of the imagination that up there is the Tree of Paradise, above it a kind of Father-God, that then these two eye-shaped forms appear. All this is something that definitely comes before the inner eye, before the soul's eye with a deepened inner feeling.

In the same way, what you see in the large dome at the eastern end is a kind of impression of the self. This I, which is, if one may say so, a kind of trinity, also reveals itself in these inner perceptions in such a way that it goes on the one hand to the luminous clarity and transparency of the thinking I, on the other hand, at the other pole, as it were, to the will side, to the willing I, and in the middle to the feeling I. At first, this can be expressed abstractly as the thinking, feeling, willing I, as I have just said it, but it is to be felt concretely as a human being who is able to look with love at the colours of nature, who is able to look with devoted love at everything that confronts them in nature for all the senses. When one experiences the I in such a way that at the same time one lets it flow out into the whole of nature, one is aware of the following perceptions:

If you look at a plant in its green colour, in the colour of its blossom, then what you bring before your soul as an image of the plant is basically what you also find when you look, as it is called, into your own inner being. That which is spread out in nature as a carpet of colour, colours itself in that you look into your inner being. And if you, as a human being who loves the world, turn your gaze outwards, turn towards the vastness of the daylight, which stretches into infinite expanses of space, then you feel connected with these expanses of space. By connecting the colours and sounds of these expanses of space with yourself, and by feeling all the configurations that present themselves to you, you feel something that you cannot translate into a symbol with your intellect, but which you can also directly paint artistically and intuitively.

And again, when you let your gaze wander in the direction of the earth's surface, this horizontal plane, let it wander over trees that cover the earth, over all that which expresses itself in the moving trees when the wind rushes through them, then you feel your feeling I, and you get the impulse not to construct this I an abstract design, but to paint it in colours.

If you direct your gaze downwards, so that you feel connected with all that is fruitful on earth, you then feel the need to express your willing I in a colour that imposes itself on you quite naturally.

One must think of the configuration of the ceiling as having been expressed in this way. And because in this way the mystery of the world, which expresses itself in the relationship of the human being to the world, as it can be felt, has been brought here to the ceiling, it was natural that onto this ceiling was also painted some of that which can be felt out of these mysteries of the world.

You will therefore find individual areas covered with that which results from a spiritual cognition of world evolution. These figures that you see here on the left and on the right, which seem to represent mythological figures, they are meant to represent approximately the situation as it was before the great Atlantean catastrophe.

The materialistic theory of evolution is not at all correct in the light of spiritual observation. If we go back in the evolution of humanity, we first come back to the Greek-Latin period, which begins around the eighth century BC. We then come back to the Egyptian-Chaldean period, which begins around the turn of the fourth and third millennia before Christ. We return to older periods, and finally we come back to a time which, in terms of spiritual science, must be called the time of the Atlantean catastrophe. There was a great rearrangement of the continents. We gaze back in contemplation to a time in the evolution of the earth when that which is now covered by the Atlantic Ocean was covered by land. But at the same time, one comes back to a period of earthly evolution in which the human being could not yet have existed in the form in which they now exist, in a form shaped in the same way as the muscles and bones of today. If, for instance, you take sea creatures, jellyfish, which you can hardly distinguish from their surroundings, then you come to the material form in which the human being once was on earth, during the old Atlantean time, in which the earth was still covered everywhere with a permanent, dense fog, in which the human being lived and was therefore also had a completely different organic nature. And to the contemplative gaze, the clairvoyant gaze, there arise - if the word is not misunderstood - precisely these forms which are painted here on the left and right of the ceiling.

Something else has been attempted, I would like to say, as a painterly venture. Here you see a head.³ It is not true that when one paints naturalistically, a head must be closed off at the top because that is simply the way naturalistic human heads are. Here the head is not closed off at the top, for the soul and spirit of the ancient Indian, the first civilised human being after the Atlantean catastrophe, is painted here on the wall. And it was necessary to take the risk of not closing off the top of the head, but to leave it open, because in fact, when the Indian is grasped in their time, they present themselves in such a way that they feel in touch with the heavens through their primeval wisdom, that for them, I would like to say, the physical top of the head is lost in the unconscious, and they feel their soul to be reaching out into the vastness of the heavens. That is captured here in painterly form. And this ancient Indian felt connected with the so-called seven Rishis, who poured into them the wisdom of the world in seven rays.

Such things have been tried to be captured here on the ceiling of the auditorium through colours. You can see the truly artistic element that was to be attempted here in this building with regard to painting in the small dome here.

Attempts have been made to create what I would like to call - albeit in an as yet imperfect form - painting out of colour itself. And that seems to me to be connected with the future of the art of painting in general. On the one hand, in the further progress of humanity, we will come closer and closer to the spirit, and on the other hand we will strive more and more to find the spiritual in outer sensory reality.

Then, however, one will be compelled to penetrate oneself inwardly with that which is particularly needed in art: an intense sense of reality. With an intense sense of truth, artistically conceived, one is led to see the true essence of painting in that which is coloured. Is the line a truth? Is the drawing a truth: actually, it is not. Let us look at the line of the horizon: it is there when we capture in colours the blue sky above and the green sea below. If we paint the blue sky at the top and the green sea at the bottom, then the line comes into being by itself as the boundary of the two. But if I draw the line of the horizon with a pencil, that is actually an artistic lie. And you will find that if you have a feeling for the infinite fullness revealed by colour, you can actually create a whole world out of what is coloured.

Red is not just red, red is that which, when one confronts it, means an experience like an attack on our self from the outside world. Red is that which causes one’s soul to flee from that which thus reveals itself as red. Blue is that which invites us to follow it, and a harmony of red and blue can then result in a balance between moving backward and moving forward. In short, if the coloured is experienced, it produces a whole world. And out of the coloured, one can create the form by merely letting the colour in its mutual relationships have an effect on one.

In my first mystery drama, I had a person say that the form of the colour must be the deed in the kind of painting that we are striving toward.⁴ If you look at the small dome here, and if the tinting is just so, that you cannot see the individual figures with it at all, but merely let what is brought as a patches of colour onto this small dome have an effect on each other in their mutual relationships, then you will also get an impression: the impression of a ground of surging colours.

This is first of all that out of which the various forms arise. For those who are able to live into the life of the coloured within themselves, the truly human form, the actions between human forms, the relationships between human forms arise out of the coloured. One has the need to have a blue patch in a certain place, and orange and red nearby. And if one studies this inwardly, intuitively, something like this Faust-like figure, with a floating, angel-like figure in front of it, emerges of its own accord. And one gradually comes to the conclusion, that the blue patch of colour forms itself into a figure reminiscent of the medieval Faust. You will see everywhere in the painting of the small dome that the colouring is the essential thing, and that the forms that are with it have arisen from the colour. Whoever would say: Yes, but one must first think, interpret, if one really wants to feel these individual motifs - is right in a certain sense, if they feel at the same time that here is realised that which I have just characterised as an experiencing of the world of colours.

You can then see how this blue Faust-like figure has emerged here,⁵ underneath it a kind of skeleton, the brown figure, then this orange angel, actually a child, floating towards the face of Faust.

If one first takes the coloured as a basis and then rises from the coloured to the living, then, however, one is faced with the riddle of knowledge of the present human being. The figure of Faust is something that has survived from the 16th century. I would like to say that Faust expresses the protest of the modern human being, who seeks the secrets of the world within themself, versus the human being, who in the Middle Ages still stood in a completely different relationship to the world. The legend of Faust is not something that merely stands for itself alone.

Goethe took up this Faust legend because Goethe was a truly modern human being. But he also transformed the Faust legend of the 16th century. This Faust legend culminates in Faust's encounter with the devil, Faust's confrontation with the forces of the adversary of humanity, his struggle with them. This was intended to express how, as the human being approached modern times, they really became entangled in this struggle. The sixteenth century still felt that those who were brought into this struggle with the devil had to be defeated if they became involved with the devil in any way.

We have the polar opposite of the Faust legend in the Luther legend. Luther at the Wartburg - he is tempted by the devil just like Faust, but he throws the inkwell at the devil's head and drives him away. The Luther legend and the Faust legend are polar opposites for the 16th century.

As you know, anyone who comes to Wartburg Castle will still find the stain preserved from the ink that Luther poured on the devil's head. The custodians tell you, however, that this is always renewed from time to time. But it is there for the visitors.

After Lessing had already pointed out this necessary alteration of the Faust legend, Goethe then transformed the Faust legend of the sixteenth century and portrayed the man Faust as the one who, however, wrestles with the adversary of humanity, with Mephistopheles, but who does not fall prey to him, despite the fact that he responds to him in a certain way, but who achieves his human victory over this adversary who is hostile to humanity.

In this Faust legend, in the whole figure of Faust, is contained the riddle of knowledge of the modern human being. Really, what is called scientific knowledge is basically a caricature of knowledge. That which we develop today by taking possession of the laws of nature and expressing them in abstract propositions, is basically something in which, if we feel it profoundly, we feel to be completely lifeless. When we give ourselves over to abstract ideas, we feel something like a dead soul in us, like a soul corpse. And one who has enough lively feeling, feels in this soul corpse, precisely in what is valued today as the correct, as logical knowledge, something like the approach of death.

This is the feeling that underlies this figure here. And as the counter pole to death, there is the angel-like child floating towards us in orange.

Then the other figures, which are hidden in the whole harmony, are such that the next figures are more or less the figures of a Greek wisdom initiation: a kind of Pallas-Athena figure with the inspiring Apollo, an Egyptian initiate further up, with its inspiring being. Then we come to the whole region of evolving humanity, which strives to experience the human by perceiving duality in the world, good and evil, the Luciferic and the Ahrimanic. It is represented where this figure below, carrying a child in its hand, has above it the bright, seducing Lucifer and the dark, sinister Ahriman.⁶

This corresponds to the whole region of humanity which extends from Persia to Central Europe and the West, where the human being, if they strive cognitively, has to struggle with dualism, where all the doubts which are caused by being caught between truth and error, between good and evil, are triggered in one’s feelings.

If we approach the middle, in the east, we have this double form there. It is that which will one day grow out of the chaotic Russian. In the Russian soul we have, so to speak, the preparation for the soul-nature of the future, even if it has to work its way through the most diverse chaotic conditions. The human being exists in such a way that they basically always have a second person with them, and this also reveals itself to the contemplative gaze. Every Russian actually has their own human shadow which they carry with them. This then leads to feeling something like an inspiration from the gloomy soul, as is attempted here in the blue, on the other side in the orange angel figure and in the centaur-like figure that is above it. That relationship to nature and to the world, which the Russian soul has as a kind of soul of the future, is depicted there.

And all of this should come together to form the central image, which will then have its counterpart below in the wooden sculpture already mentioned. In the middle, in the east, you see the figure of Christ, above it the figure of Lucifer in red hues, below it, in various shades of brown, the figure of Ahriman. In this is to be felt what actually represents the essence of the human being.⁷

One does not get to know the human being if one only looks at how the human being’s external contours appear to the physical eye. In the physical, the soul and the spirit, the human being carries a trinity within. Physically the human being bears a trinity in the following way. Physically we have within us everything that constantly causes us to age while we are alive, that makes us sclerotic, that makes our limbs calcify, that makes death, as it were, always present in us with its force. That is the physical-ahrimanic working. If this were to get the upper hand, we would fall into old age even as children. But it works in us, and it works physically precisely because it is the solidifying, heavy, calcifying element that leads us towards death.

Above the figure of Christ, we see the figure of Lucifer. It is that physical element in the human being which brings about fever and pleurisy, which in a certain sense always cause us to dissolve, these are the forces of youth, which, if they alone were present, would dissolve the human being.

This polar, circular opposition can be perceived throughout the whole human being. If one feels it in colour, then one feels the luciferic upwards in a red hue, the ahrimanic downwards in a brown hue. And the human being themself is the equilibrium between the two. The human being is actually always the inner state of equilibrium, which, however, must be sought for at every moment, between that which dissolves in warmth, in fever-fire, and the hardening, petrification and solidification which brings death. One will only have a real physiology of the human being when one sees this polarity in each individual organ. Heart, lungs, liver, everything becomes comprehensible only when one sees them in this polarity.

Well, I mean, you can feel all that in what is painted on the ceiling. One could say: so these are symbols after all! - The Austrian poet, Robert Hamerling, composed a poem "Ahasver", in which he did not depict human figures in a naturalistic way, but in a spiritual way. He was accused of creating symbols and not real people. He defended himself by saying: "If at the same time one feels so vividly that the figures are living people after all, then they may make a symbolic impression, for who can prevent Nero from being a symbol of cruelty? But one cannot say that Nero was not a real human being because of that!”

These things must be seen in the right light. And to those who do not want something like this to emerge in a new way from the experience of colour, who find it too complicated to look into these things, one must answer: Yes, what should someone who has no sense of anything Christian experience, for example, in Leonardo da Vinci's Last Supper or Raphael's Sistine Madonna? Just as Christianity is necessary there, but even then, when Christianity is present, everything can be perceived from the coloured elements on the surface: so, when there is that very elementary, natural way of looking at the world, to which this building wants to bear witness, all that can be grasped not in abstract terms but in direct, living contemplation.

And that is what is really important about this building: that it is not fantasised about, not interpreted, but that the people who enter it, or who look at it from the outside, become absorbed in the forms, in the colours, and take in what is there in their immediate inner perception. Then we shall see, when we gradually find our way into this building, that it does indeed represent at least an attempt - everything is imperfect at the beginning - at least an attempt to come so close to the meaning of human evolution that it produces, precisely out of the spiritual life necessary for the present, something artistic, just as the various ages have produced something artistic out of their particular conception of the world.

Let us put ourselves back for a moment into the Greek heart, into the Greek soul. Let us put ourselves back into that soul which, with inner sincerity and honesty, could make the traditional statement: Better a beggar here on earth than a king in the kingdom of shadows. The Greek felt bound to the earth by the peculiarity of the spirit of the age. If one may say so, the Greeks appreciated everything that was on earth through the forces of the earth's gravity as something that adorned and covered this earth. They felt the forces of the earth's gravity. And in the building of their temples they expressed how they experienced the forces of this earthly gravity. When in primeval times, the human being looked up to the immortal, to the eternal in the human soul, they looked back to the ancestors. Those souls, which were the souls of the ancestors, the souls of the forefathers, gradually became for them the souls of the gods. And the graves of the ancestors remained for them a sacred place which enclosed something spiritual within itself. For a certain cultural current, the tomb is the first building, the building of the human soul that has left the earthly. In the construction of the Greek temple, one still feels something of an echo of the construction of the tomb. And the melancholy building of the tomb has risen in a joyful way in the building of the Greek temple, in that the departed human soul, which was once divinely worshipped as the ancestral soul, has become the god. The building over the ancestral grave, where the soul, the divinely worshipped ancestral soul was to be given a resting place, became the temple of the god Apollo, Zeus, Athena. And the temple enclosure became the extension of that which once existed as an ancestral tomb. As the ancestral soul became the god, so the tomb became the Greek temple. Just as the ancestral soul was looked upon as the past, and the building of the tomb thus took on a tragic aspect, so the building of the tomb became the building of the temple in its cheerfulness, in its joyfulness, because it had now become the envelope not of the departed soul but of the immortal soul of the gods existing in the present.

One can only think of a Greek temple as the dwelling house of the god. The Greek temple is not perfect in itself. There can only be a temple of Apollo, a temple of Zeus, a temple of Athena. The Greek went to the temple knowing that this was where the god lived.

If we leave out some of the architectural styles, we can then move on to the example of the Gothic building, the cathedral. Let us look again at the form of the cathedral: We no longer see in it any reminiscence of the tomb, at most this is preserved in an inorganic way through tradition, in that the altar is reminiscent of the gravestone, but this is brought into the whole in an inorganic way; the Gothic architectural idea is something different. The Greek temple is that which has shaped its forms through the conquest of the earth's gravitational forces. How could one form that which grows out of the construction of the tomb, that which rises over the earthly tomb, over that which has been lowered into the earth, in any other way than by conquering the forces of the earth's gravity through the force-dynamics, through the form of the building, by mastering in the supporting column, in the supported beam, the forces of gravity which are the forces of the earth. Later, feeling does not go to the earth, not to the ancestral soul that has disappeared: it lifts itself out and goes into the expanses of the world to the God above. Accordingly, the Gothic architectural forms take on their special form.

The striving form of the gothic building is not the overcoming of weight: the most important thing in the form of the gothic building is mutual support. Nowhere do we actually see bearing, we see striving upward. We do not see weight, but a striving upwards toward heaven.

Therefore, the Gothic cathedral is not the dwelling place of any gods, like the Greek temple, but the Gothic cathedral is the meeting place of the faithful, the meeting place of the congregation. If one enters a Greek temple from which the image of the god has been removed, the Greek temple has no meaning. A Greek temple without the image of the god is meaningless. The image of the god must be supplemented in the imagination. If you go into a Gothic cathedral without mass being said and preached, or without a congregation praying together - it is not complete. The living congregation belongs there. And the word for cathedral, “Dom”, also expresses the flowing together of the congregation. Duma and Dom have the same origin. And when the Narodnaya Duma got its name, it was out of the feeling of working together, just as the Gothic cathedral got its name out of the feeling that people must flow together with their souls and together direct their feelings upwards in the direction of the striving Gothic forms.

We see how the perception of artistic forms demonstrates a certain progress in the course of human evolution. Today we no longer live in a time in which one feels as one did in the period when the Gothic flourished. Today we live in a time in which the human being must penetrate deeper into their own inner being. Today we can only establish a social community by each person experiencing "know thyself" in a higher sense than was previously the case - even if it resounds through the ages as the old Apollonian demand of "know thyself" - and fulfilling it in a deeper sense. Only by becoming individualities in the most intensive sense can we form human communities today.

When one immerses oneself in the forms of this Goetheanum, in a feeling way, what do they speak to us? What do they reveal to our gaze? If we want to speak about them, we must try to place before the human soul exactly the same thing that can be expressed through the anthroposophical world view as the mystery of the human being and the mystery of the world, as they reveal themselves to the human being, precisely through ideas, through concepts. The Greek temple represented the dwelling place of the God who descended to earth. The Gothic cathedral represented that which evokes in one the urge to feel "know thyself" and to be together with other people precisely out of this recognition.

When you enter this house, you should have the feeling: In the forms, in the paintings, in everything that is there, one finds the mystery of the human being, and one likes to unite with other people here, because here everyone finds that which reveals their human value, their human dignity, in which one likes to unite lovingly with other people.

In this way, this building wants to welcome all those who enter it, who approach it.

• 1. See the illustration in Der Baugedanke der Goetheanum. Published by Philos.-Anthrop. Verlag.
• 2. See the designs for the painting of the large dome in the first Goetheanum, picture 2 and 3.
• 3. See Rudolf Steiner's designs for the large dome in the first Goetheanum (an art portfolio executed by Alinari in Florence), Plate VI: The Indian. (Philos.-Anthropos. Verlag)
• 4. The Portal of Initiation. A Rosicrucian Mystery, through Rudolf Steiner. (Philos.-Anthropos. Verlag)
• 5. See: Spiritual Science explanations of Goethe's Faust, Volume I (with 2 picture supplements: Faust, Flying child from the small dome of the burnt Goetheanum) Faust, the striving human being, and Der Baugedanke der Goetheanum, with 104 illustrations. Philos. Anthropos. Verlag.
• 6. See Der Baugedanke der Goetheanum, Figure 75-79.
• 7. We refer to the colour print by Hanfstaengl of the design sketched by R. Steiner for this picture of the painting of the dome. (Philos.-Anthropos. Verlag am Goetheanum)

Herman Grimm, the cultured Art-Critic of the nineteenth century, has pronounced what one might call a profound utterance about Goethe. He has aid that mankind would not realize the full importance of Goethe till the year 2000. A goodish time, you will agree. And when one looks at our epoch, one is hardly inclined to contradict such a statement. For what does Herman Grimm consider as the most important fact about Goethe? Not that he was a poet, nor that he produced this or that particular work of art, but that he created all he did out of the complete man, that the impulses of his full manhood underlay every detail of his creations. One may say that our epoch is very far from comprehending this full manhood that lived in Goethe. In saying this I do not want in any way to refer to the oft-denounced specialized method of observation of Science. This method is to a certain extent a necessity. There is, however, something much more striking than the specialization of Science, and that is the specialization of our life! For it leads to the situation that the soul which is confined to this or that specialized circle of ideas or sensations can understand less and less the other soul which is specialized in another direction. And to a certain extent all men are now specialists. This aspect of the specialist and soul particularly strikes us when we consider the Art-development of mankind. And precisely for this reason is it necessary—if only in primitive beginnings—that a kind of pulling together of spiritual life will result in artistic form. We need not take a very comprehensive view to prove what I have said. AS we shall probably understand each other best if we proceed from something close at hand, I should like to refer to one of the many instances of those misunderstanding and often ridiculous attacks on our spiritual movement which are at present so conspicuous.

In quarters where they are anxious to blacken us before the world, it is considered cheap and common-place in us to make our rooms as we please. We are reproached for decorating our meeting places with coloured walls and are ridiculed for what is called the freakishness of the (first) Goetheanum at Dornach, which is said to be quite unnecessary for a real Theosophy, as the expression goes. Well, in certain circles, one considers as a “true Theosophy” a physic hotch-potch, interspersed with all sorts of dark feelings, and which revels in the fact that the soul can unfold in itself a higher ego, though all the time having no other than egoistic ideas in view. And from the point of view of this psychic hotch-potch, this cloudy dreaming, it is found unnecessary for a spiritual movement to express itself in an outward form, even if this outward form has to be admittedly a tentative and primitive one. In these circles it is imagined that one could chatter wherever one happened to be about this hotch-potch and this misty dreaming about the divine ego in man. Why is it necessary, therefore, that all sorts and kinds of expression in such peculiar forms should be attempted?

Well, my dear friends, it is of course not to be expected that such people who turn this sort of thing into a reproach are also capable of thinking: such a demand can only be made of a very few. But we must get clear on many points, so that we can answer the questions raised at least in our own souls rightly.

I want to draw your spiritual attention to an artist of the eighteenth century, who was greatly gifted as draughtsman and painter, Carstens. I do not want to discuss the value of his art, to unroll the tale of his activity or give you his life-story, but I want you to note that in Carstens lay a great gift for drawing, if not for painting. If we look into his soul, and at an artistic longing there, we can in a way see what was wrong. He wants to set pencil to paper, he wants to draw ideas and embody them in paint, only he is not in the position in which—let me say—Raphael or Leonardo still were, or to take an example from poetry, in which Dante was. Raphael, Leonardo and Dante lived in a full, rich culture, one which was really alive in men's souls, and surrounded them. When Raphael painted Madonnas, there lived in human hearts and souls the understanding for a Madonna, and—be it said in the noblest sense—out of the people's soul there streamed something towards the creations of these artists. When Dante led the human soul into spiritual realms, he needed only to take his matter and material from something that in a way echoed in every human soul. One might say these artists had some substance in their own souls which was present in the general culture. If one picks up some even obscure work of science of the time, one will find there is everywhere some kind of connection between it and what was alive in all souls, even in the lowest circles. The educated people of those circles of culture from which Raphael created his Madonnas recognized fully the idea of the Madonna, and in such a way that this idea of Madonnas lived in them. Thus the creations of art appear as an expression of the universal and unified spiritual life. This is what arose again in a single man, in Goethe, as he was at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. And it is this which is so little understood in our time, namely, that Herman Grimm was inclined to wait for the year 2000 for such an understanding to become possible for the world again.

On the other hand let us look at Carstens. He takes Homer's Iliad and imprints its events he reads into the forms his pencil creates. Just think how different was the attitude of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries to the Homeric figures from Raphael to the figures of the Madonnas or the other motives of the time! One might say the content of art was inevitable in the great periods because it flowed from things that touched the very inmost hearts of men. In the nineteenth century the time began when the artist had to look for the content of what he purposed to create. It was not long before the artist became a kind of cultural hermit who was really dependent only on himself, of whom one might ask: What is his own relation to his world of forms? One could unroll the history of human art in the nineteenth century to see how Art stands in this respect.

And so it has come about that not only that cool, but cold relationship of mankind to Art began which exists at present. One may imagine a man today going through a picture gallery or exhibition in a modern city. Well, my dear friends, he is not faced with something that moves his soul, something that echoes inwardly, but he is faced with a number of riddles which he can solve only when he has deeply studied the special attitude of this or that artist to Nature or to something else. We are confronted with a lot of individual problems or tasks. And—this is the significant thing—while one thinks one is solving artistic problems, one is solving really for the most part problems that are not artistic ones but psychological. The way in which this or that artist regards Nature today is an exercise in philosophy or something of the sort, which simply does not come into account at all when one steeps oneself in the great Art-periods. On the contrary there enter these real artistic questions, for the onlooker also, because the “How” is something which makes the artist creative, whereas the substance is merely something that surrounds him, in which he is steeped. We may say that our artists are not artists at all any more, they are world observers from a particular point of view, and they put into form what they see and what strikes them. But these are psychological tasks, tasks of historical interpretation and so on; the essential thing about the artistic view of “How” has disappeared almost completely from our time. The heart is often lacking for such artistic considerations as “How.”

A great deal of the blame for all this to which I have briefly drawn your attention must be ascribed to our thoroughly theoretic world-philosophy. Men have become as theoretic in their thought as they have become practical in their industry and technique and commercial relations. To build a bridge between, for example, the pursuits of modern science and the artist's conception of the world is not only difficult, but also few people feel the need to do it. And a saying like Goethe's: “The beautiful is a manifestation of the secret laws of Nature, which, without this revelation, would for ever have remained hid.” Is completely unintelligible to our time, even if here and there somebody believes he understands it. For our time clings to the most superficial, most abstract laws of Nature, to those which approach, one might say, the most abstract Mathematics, and will allow no importance to any research into reality which transcends the abstract-mathematical, or anything that is similar to the abstract-mathematical. And so it is not surprising if our time has lost that living element in the soul which finds that substantiality in world relationships which must spring from them actively if Art is to arise at all.

Art can never be evolved from scientific concepts, or abstract-theosophical concepts, at the most it would be an allegory of straw or a stiff symbolism. The representations that the present time makes of the world is in itself inartistic, and makes an effort to be inartistic. Colours—what have they become in our scientific view? Vibrations of the most abstract kind in the material of the ether, vibrations of the ether-waves so and so much in length, etc. Imagine how far removed the waves of vibrating ether, which are science seeks today, are from the direct and living colour. How is it possible to do anything but forget completely to pay any attention to this living element in colour? We have already pointed out how this element in colour is fundamentally a flowing, living one, in which we with our sols are also living. And a time will come (I have pointed this out)_ in which the living connection of the flowing colour-world with coloured beings and objects will again be realized.

It is difficult for man, my dear friends, because man, on account of having to perfect his ego in the course of earth's evolution, has risen from this flowing sea of colour to a pure Ego perception. Man raises himself from this sea of colour with his ego; the animal-world is still deep in it, and the fact that an animal has feathers or hair of this or that colour, is connected with the animal's soul-relation with this flowing sea of colour. An animal regards objects with its astral body (as we do with the ego) and there flows into this astral body whatever forces there are in the group-souls of animals. It is nonsense to believe that even the higher animals see the world as man sees it. But the truth of this point is quite unintelligible to modern man. He believes that if he is standing beside a horse, it sees him exactly as he sees it. What is more natural? And yet, it is complete nonsense. For just as little as a man sees an angel without clairvoyance, does a horse see a man without clairvoyance, for the man is not a physical being to the horse, but a spiritual being, and only because the horse is endowed with a certain clairvoyance does he perceive man as a kind of angel. What the horse sees in man is quite different from what we see in the horse. As we humans wander about, we are very ghostly beings to the higher animals. If they could talk a real language of their own, man would soon see that it does not occur to animals at all to regard man as a similar being to themselves, but as a higher, ghostly being. If they regard their own body as consisting of flesh and blood, they certainly would not regard man as consisting of flesh and blood. If one expresses this today, it sounds to modern minds the purest rubbish—so far is the present age removed from truth.

The susceptibility for the living, creative element of colour flows into animals because of their peculiar connection between astral body and group-soul. And just as we look at an object which rouses our desire and seize it with a movement of the hand, so in the case of animals, the whole of their organization is such that the directly creative element of colour makes an impression, and it flows into the feathers or wool and colours the animal. I have already expressed my opinion that our time cannot even realize why the polar bear is white; the whiteness is the product of his environment and that the polar bear makes himself white has approximately the same significance, on another plane, as when, through desire, a man stretches out his hand to pick a rose. The living productive element in his environment works on the polar-bear in such a way that it releases in him an impulse and he completely “whitens” himself.

Now this living weaving and existence in colour is suppressed in man, for he would never have been able to perfect his ego if he had stayed in the colour-sea, and he would never, for example, have developed the urge regarding a certain red colour, let us say the red of dawn, to impress it on certain parts of his skin. Such was still the case during the old Moon-Period. Then the effect of contemplating such a drama of nature as the red of dawn was such that it impressed the man of that time and the reflection of the impression was at the same time thrown back into his own colouring, it permeated his being and then expressed itself again outwardly in certain parts of his body. Man had to lose this immersion of his body in this flowing colour-sea during his earth-period, so that he could develop in his ego his own world-outlook. And man had to be come in his form neutral towards the flowing colour-sea. The colour man's skin in the temperate zones is in essentials the expression of the ego, the expression of absolute neutrality towards the colour-waves streaming without, and it denotes the rising above the flowing colour-sea. But, my dear friends, if we take even primitive scientific knowledge, we shall remember that it is man's task to find the way back again. Physical, etheric and astral body were formed during the epochs of Saturn, Sun and Moon respectively, the ego during the earth-period. Man must find the means to spiritualize the astral body again, to permeate it with what the ego gains for itself by working upon it. And in spiritualizing the astral body and thus finding the way back again, man must once more find the flowing and ebbing colour-waves, from which he arose in order to develop the ego, just as when he rises out of the ocean, he sees only what is outside. And we really do live at a time when a beginning must be made—unless man's living in accordance with the universe is to cease altogether—with this diving down into the spiritual waters of Nature's forces, what is, the spiritual forces that lie behind Nature. We must make it again possible not merely to look at colours and to apply them outwardly, but to “live” with the colour, to share its inner power of life. We cannot do it if we study the effect of this or that colour from a painter's point of view, as we stare at it; we can do it only if we experience with our souls the manner in which red, for example, or blue flows; if this flowing of colour becomes directly alive for us. We can only do it, my dear friends, if we are able so to instill life into the colour, that we do not produce mere symbolism in colour—that would of course be the worse way—but that we really discover what actually lies in the colour itself, as the power to laugh lies in a laughing man.

If a man in feeling the sensation of red or blue has no other reaction to it than in feeling—here is red, and here is blue, he can never proceed onwards to a living experience of the real nature of colour. Still less can he do so if he clothes the colour-content with intelligence and finds one symbol behind the red, and another behind the blue; that would lead still less to experiencing the element of colour. The point is we must know how to surrender our whole soul to the message of colour. Then, in approaching red, we shall feel something aggressive towards ourselves, something that attacks us. Red seems to “come for” us. If all ladies went about the streets in red, anyone with a fine feeling for the colour might inwardly believe that they might all fall upon him, on account of their red clothes. Blue, on the contrary, has something in it which goes away from us, which leaves us looking after I with a certain sadness, perhaps even with a kind of longing.

How far the present day is from such a living understanding of colour can be seen from something I have already pointed out: in the case of the excellent artist Hildebrandt it was expressly emphasized that the colour is on the surface, and there is nothing else but surface-colour, thus differing from form, which gives us, for example, distance. But colour gives us more than distance, and that an artist like Hildebrandt does not feel this must be taken as a deep symbol of the whole modern manner. It is impossible to steep oneself in the living nature of colour, if one cannot have a direct transition from immobility to movement, if one is not directly made aware that the red disk is coming nearer and the blue retreating; they move in opposite directions. In steeping oneself in this living element of colour, one gets to a stage of realizing that if we had two coloured balls, for instance, of this kind, one is quite unable to conceive the possibility of their standing still; it is inconceivable. If it were conceived it would mean the death of living feeling, which gives the direct idea that the red and the blue balls are revolving, one towards the spectator, the other away from him. And the red on a figure, in opposition to the blue, results in giving to a figure composition life and movement through colour. And what is portrayed, my dear friends, is made part of the living world, because it shines in colour. If you have

The form before you, it is restful, it remains stationary; but the moment the form receives colour, the inner movement of the colour stands out from the form, and the whirl of the world, the whirl of spirituality, permeates it. If you colour a figure you vivify it directly with soul, with the world-soul, because the colour does not belong only to the form, the colour which you apportion to the single figure places the latter in its full relationships with its environment, yes, in its full relationship with the world. One might say that when one colours a form one must have the feeling: “Now you are going to approach the form so that you endow it with soul.” You breathe soul into the dead form, when you animate it with colour.

You need only get a little closer to this inner weaving of colour to feel as if you are not approaching it directly, but are standing slightly above or below it; one feels how living the colour itself inwardly becomes. For a lover of the abstract, who stares at the colour without that living inner sympathy, a red ball can revolve round a blue one and he has no desire to alter the movement in any way. He may be the greatest mathematician or the greatest metaphysician, but he does not understand how to live with colour, because for him it moves from one place to another like a dead substance. In reality, if one lives with it, colour does not do this. It radiates, it changes in itself, and a colour such as the red colour drives in its advance something before it like an orange or yellow or green aura. And the blue in its movement drives something different before it.

So you have here a kind of colour-game. You experience something, when you enter into the life of colours, which makes the red appear to be attacking and the blue retreating—which makes you feel that you must flee from the red and follow the blue with longing. And when you can feel all this, you would also actually feel yourself in harmony with the living, moving flow of colour. You would feel in your soul also the onslaughts and longings superimposed on each other as in a vortex, the fleeing and the prayer of devotion, which follow each other and pass by. And if you were to transform this into a detail on a figure, of course as an artist would do, you would tear away the figure from its natural repose. The moment you paint, let us say, a figure in repose, you would have a living weaving movement, which belongs not merely to the form, but also to the forces and weaving elements round the figure: this is what you would have. You take away the mere immobility of the figure, its mere form, by means of soul. One would like to say that something of this sort must some day be painted into this world, something depicting the elementary powers of this world; for all that man is able to receive through the power of longing could be expressed in the blue colour. Man would have to represent this plastically in his head, and everything that is expressed in red, man would have to have in such a form that it flows out of his organism up to the brain: outside him the world, the object of his longing, which is ever permeated by that which rises upwards from his own body. By day the blue half flows stronger than the red, or the yellow half. At night it is the reverse in the human organism. An accurate reproduction of this is what we usually call the two-leaved lotus flower, (See Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and its Attainment by Rudolf Steiner) in which the beholder sees both such movement and such colouring. And no one will ever be able to investigate what lives in the world of form as the productive element, as the upper part of the human head, unless he is in a position to follow this flow of colour which is hidden in man.

Art, my dear friends, must make an effort again to get down to the bottom of elemental life; it has studied Nature long enough, and tried long enough to solve all kinds of enigmas in Nature, and to reproduce in works of art in another form what can be seen by penetration into Nature. But that which lives in the elements, that is still dead for modern Art: air and water and light, as they are painted today are dead; form, as exemplified in modern sculpture, is dead. A new Art will arise when the human soul learns to steep itself in the living elemental world. One can argue against this, one can be of the opinion that one should not do this. But it is only human indolence arguing against it; for either man will come to live with his whole manhood in the elemental world and its forces, will acknowledge the spirit and soul or outer things, or else Art will become more and more the hermit-like work of the individual soul., whereby perhaps extremely interesting things may appear for the psychology of this or that soul, but never will those things be attained with Art alone can attain. One speaks of a very distant future, my dear friends, in speaking thus, but we have to approach this future with an eye strengthened by spiritual science, otherwise we look out only upon what is dead and decaying in the future of mankind.

Therefore it is that an inner connection must be sought between all that in form and colour is created in our domain, and that which stirs our soul in its deepest depths as spiritual knowledge, as something that lives in our spirit, just as the Madonnas lived in Raphael, so that he could thus become the painter of Madonnas, because they lived in him as they did in the scholar, the peasant and the artisan of his time. This is what made him the true painter of Madonnas. Only if we succeed in bringing into form livingly, artistically, without symbolism or allegory, what in our whole world outlook lives in us, not as abstract thoughts, not as lifeless knowledge, nor as science, but as the living substance of the soul, can we get an idea of what is meant by this future to which I have just alluded.

For this there must be a unity, as there was, one might say, with Goethe through a special Karma, between outward creation and what permeates the deepest recesses of the soul. Bridges must be thrown between what or many is still today abstract idea in the content of spiritual science, and the produce of our hand, our chisel, and our paint-brush. The obstacle to building this bridge today is the superficial, abstract culture, which does not allow what is being done to become living. Only so is it comprehensible that the completely unfounded belief has grown up that spiritual knowledge can kill Art. It has certainly killed much in many people; all the dead allegorizing and symbolizing, all the inquiry—what is the meaning of this, or of that? I have already pointed out that one should not always be asking: What does this or that mean? We do not have to ask what the larynx “means,” we know it is the living organ of human speech, and in the same way we must look upon what lives in form and in colour as the living organ of the spiritual world. As long as we have not accustomed ourselves to stop asking about symbols and allegories, as long as we represent myths and sagas allegorically and symbolically, instead of feeling the living breath of the spirit surging through the whole Cosmos, and realizing how the cosmic content enters livingly into the figures of the myths and legends, we shall never attain a true spiritual knowledge.

But a beginning must be made! It will be imperfect. No one must think that we regard the beginning as perfect: but the objection is as silly as many other objections which the present age makes against our spiritual movement, namely that what we have tried to do in our building has nothing to do with this spiritual stream. What these people think they can prove, we know already ourselves. That all the silly nonsense about the “higher Ego,” all the sentimental talking about the “spiritualization of the human soul,” that all this can of course be babbled about in the present-day outward forms, we know ourselves also. And we know of course as well that spiritual science can be pursued in its ideal and conceptual character anywhere. But we feel that a living spiritual science demands an environment which is different from that supplied by a dying culture, if it is to be pursued beyond theory. And there is really no need for that platitude to be announced to us by the outer world, that one can carry on spiritual science in the ideal sense in other rooms than those enlivened by our forms. But the ideal of our spiritual science, my dear friends, must be poured into our souls seriously and ever more seriously. And we still require much in order to instill this seriousness, this inner psychic energy completely into ourselves. It is easy to talk of this spiritual science and its practice in the outer world in such a way as to miss its nature and its nerve. When one often sees nowadays how the strongest attacks against our movement are formed, and how they are only directed at us, one has a remarkable sensation. One reads this or that onslaught, and if one is of sound mind, one must say to oneself: what is really being described here? All sorts of fantastic things are described which have not the remotest connection with us! And then these are attacked. There is so little capacity in the world to accept a new spiritual element, that it sketches a completely unlike caricature, discusses this and marches into battle against it. There are even some who think that we should refute these matters. We might reply, though we cannot refute every sort of thing which a person may imagine for himself and which has no resemblance whatever to that which he wishes to describe. But whatever sense of truth and sincerity lies at the bottom of such matters, this, my dear friends, we must carefully and earnestly consider. For thereby we may become strong in that which ought to arise in us through Spiritual Science—in that which out of spiritual Science, I would say, should with living force come to realization externally in material existence. That the world has not grown more tolerant in understanding is shown precisely in the attitude it takes up towards this spiritual science.

Perhaps we can celebrate the more intimate union of our souls with spiritual science in no greater way than in steeping ourselves in such problems as the problem of colour. For by experiencing the living element in the flow of colour we come, one might say, out of our own form, and share the cosmic life. Colour is the soul of nature and of the whole Cosmos, and by experiencing the life of colour, we participate in this soul.

I wanted to allude to these things today, in order to investigate next time further into the nature of colour and of painting.

My dear friends, I had to introduce into these remarks some allusions to the attacks which are now pouring in upon us from all sides. They originate in a world which cannot have any idea of what is the object of our movement. One can only wish, my dear friends, that through a deepening in all directions those who are in the movement will find the possibility of being clear about a fact which is indeed symptomatic of our time: the intrusion of unreality and untruthfulness in the comprehension of what is trying to find its place in the spiritual world. We shall certainly not be the cause of shutting out our spiritual movement from the world; it can have as much of it as it wishes. But what it will have to accept, if it wishes to understand our direction, is the unifying principle in the whole nature of man, whereby every detail of human accomplishment arises from the whole of man's nature.

What I have been saying is not an attack on the present age, but I have said it with a certain sadness because one sees that the wider our movement spreads, the more spiteful the forces of opposition become—perhaps not consciously, but more or less unconsciously and because the way one should judge such things is not sufficiently known, even in our ranks, for one should earnestly take up the standpoint that something new, that a new beginning is at least intended in our movement. One can only wish, my dear friends, that through a deepening in all directions those who are in the movement will find the possibility of being clear about a fact which is indeed symptomatic of our time: the intrusion of unreality and untruthfulness in the comprehension of what is trying to find its place in the spiritual world. We shall certainly not be the cause of shutting out our spiritual movement from the world; it can have as much of it as it wishes. But what it will have to accept, if it wishes to understand our direction, is the unifying principle in the whole nature of man, whereby every detail of human accomplishment arises from the whole of man's nature.

What I have been saying is not an attack on the present age, but I have said it with a certain sadness because one sees that the wider our movement spreads, the more spiteful the forces of opposition become—perhaps not consciously, but more or less unconsciously and because the way one should judge such things is not sufficiently known, even in our ranks, for one should earnestly take up the standpoint that something new, that a new beginning is at least intended in our movement. What the “intention” will lead to will no doubt appear. And also our “building” is surely only expressive of an “intention.” People will come who can do more than “intend”—if perhaps only at the date Herman Grimm assumes that Goethe will be fully understood. A certain modestly is requisite to understand such a saying and this is rare in the intellectual life of today. Spiritual science is well adapted to bring this modesty, as well as the earnestness of the situation, near to our souls.

These attacks from all sides on our spiritual movement make a saddening impression, since the world is beginning to see something of it; as long as it was only spiritually there, the world could see nothing; now, when it can see something it cannot understand, it begins to blow its cacophonous sounds from all nooks and corners; and this will become ever stronger and stronger. If we are able to see this, we shall at first be filled with a certain sadness; but the strength to stand for what we accept, not merely as a conviction but as life itself, will increase in us. Etheric life will also permeate the human soul, and what will live in it will be more than theoretic conviction, of which the people of today are still so proud. The man who imbues his soul with such earnestness, will find also the assurance that the foundations of our world, the foundations of our human existence can support us if they are sought in the spiritual world—and one needs this assurance, my dear friends, at one time more, at another time less.

And if one can speak of regrets, in considering the relation of our spiritual movement to the echo it finds in the world, if this is regret, then from this mood of melancholy must proceed the feeling of strength which rises from the knowledge that the sources of human life are in the spirit, and that the spirit will lead man out of everything concerning which, like disharmony, he can feel only regret. From this mood of strength one will also receive strength.

One would have to speak today, my dear friends, of spiritual affairs with a still greater regret than is caused by the discrepancy between the intentions in our spiritual movement and the echo which they arouse in the world. The disharmony in the world would disappear in another way if mankind once realized what our spiritual science means by the spiritual light which can illuminate in the human heart. And if we look at the fate of Europe today, the anxiety concerning our movement is but relatively small. Filled and shaken by this anxiety, I have spoken these words to you, but at the same time I am filled with the living conviction that with whatever painful experiences Europe is faced in the near or distant future, we can be reassured by the living knowledge that the spirit will lead man victoriously through all perplexities. Truly in days of anxiety, in hours so fraught with seriousness as these, we not only may, we must speak of the sacred concerns of our spiritual science, for we may believe that however small its sun appears today, it will grow and grow and become brighter and brighter—a sun of peace, a sun of love and harmony over all men.

These are earnest words, my dear friends, but they are such as justify us in thinking of the narrower affairs of spiritual science with all our souls and hearts, just because such terribly serious times are looking in at our windows.

The understanding of the spiritual-scientific view of life not merely with the mind but with the heart has as a result a corresponding revolution in artistic creation and enjoyment. The forces which we derive from this world-outlook can also flow into the understanding of the world from the point of view of Art. We have recently tried to indicate with our building (the Goetheanum at Dornach) at least a small part of the spiritual-scientific impulses which can flow into artistic forms. We would see a time, before us, if we examine closely the experiences and feelings to be derived from spiritual science, when the path to Art would be in many respects different from what it has been in the past, when the means of artistic creation will be experienced in the human soul much more intensively than before, when colours and sounds will be much more intimately felt in the soul, when, as it were, colours and sounds can be felt morally and spiritually in the soul, and when in the creations of the artists we shall meet the traces of their souls' experiences in the Cosmos.

In essentials the attitude of artistic creation and artistic appreciation in the past epoch was a kind of external observation, an appeal to something that affects the artist from outside. The need to refer to Nature and to the model for outward observation has become greater and greater. Not that in the Art of the future there is to be any one-sided rejection of Nature and outward reality. Far from it, but there will be a much more intimate union with the external world; so strong a union with it, that it covers not merely the external impression of colours and sound and form, but that which one can experience behind the sound and colour and form, in what is revealed by them.

In this respect mankind will make important discoveries in the future; it will unite its moral-spiritual nature with the results of sense-perception. An endless deepening of the human soul can be foreseen in this domain. Let us take first of all a single point. We will take the case when we direct our gaze to a surface evenly covered with vermilion. Let us assume we succeed in forgetting everything else round us and concentrating entirely on experiencing this colour, so that we have the colour in front of us not merely as something that works upon us, but as something wherein we ourselves are, with which we ourselves are one. We shall then be able to have the experience: you are now in the world, you yourself have become colour in this world, your innermost soul has become colour. Wherever you go in the world, your soul will be filled with red, everywhere you live in red and with red and out of red. But we will not be able to experience this in intensive soul-life, unless the feeling is transformed into the corresponding moral experience, into real moral experience. If we float through the world as red, and have become identical with red, we shall not be able to help feeling that this red world in which one is oneself red is pierced with the substance of divine wrath, which pours upon us from every direction on account of all the possibilities of evil and sin in us. We shall be able to feel we are in the illimitable red spaces as in a judgment court of God, and our moral feelings will be like what a moral experience of our soul would become in all-embracing “illimitable” space. Then when the reaction comes, when something rises in our soul one can only describe it by saying that one learns to pray.

If one can experience in the colour red the radiation and fusion of the divine wrath with all that can lie in the soul as the possibility of evil, and if one can experience in red how one learns to pray, then the experience of the colour red is enormously deepened. Then we can also experience how red can express itself plastically in space.

We can then understand how we can experience a Being who radiates goodness, who is filled with divine goodness and mercy, a Being such as we long to experience in space. Then we shall feel the need of expressing this divine mercy and goodness in a form which arises out of the colour itself. We shall feel the need of allowing space to recede, so that the goodness and mercy may shine forth. As clouds are driven asunder so space is rent by goodness and mercy and we shall get the feeling: you must make that a red which is fleeing.

Here we shall have to indicate faintly a kind of rose-violet streaming into the fleeing red. We shall then be taking part with our whole soul in a self-forming of colour, and with our whole soul shall feel an echo of what those beings have felt who specially belong to our earth, and who, when they had ascended to the Elohim-existence, learnt to fashion the world of forms out of colours. We shall learn to experience something of the Spirits of Form, who as spirits are the Elohim. And we shall then understand how the forms of the colours can be realities as is indicated in my first and second Mystery Plays, and we shall understand a little of how the colour-surface becomes something we have overcome, because we go out with colour into the Universe. If this is accompanied by strong desire, a feeling can arise like that in Strader when, looking at the picture of Capesius, he says: “I fain would pierce this canvas through and through ...”

If you consider this you will see that an attempt has been made in these Mystery Plays to present something of this sort really artistically, how something appears before our soul when it attempts to expand in the cosmic forces, when it feels one with the cosmic spirits. That was in fact the beginning of all art. Then the materialistic time had to come, and this old art, with its inner divine subtlety, had to be changed into the secondary “After-Art, Post-Art” which is essentially the art of the materialistic age, the art which cannot create, but only imitate. It is the sign of all secondary art, all derivative art that it can only imitate, and that it does not create form directly out of the material itself.

Let us assume something else, that we do what we did with the red surface, only with a more orange colour. We shall have quite different experiences with it. If we sink ourselves in the orange surface and become one with it, we shall not have the feeling of the divine wrath bearing down upon us; we shall rather have the feeling that what meets us here, though having something of the seriousness of wrath in a modified form, is yet desirous of imparting something to us, instead of merely punishing us, is desirous of arming us with inner power. If we go out into the Universe and become one with the orange colour we move in such a way that with every step we take we feel that this experience, this living in the orange forces, gives us the impression of becoming stronger and stronger, not merely that the judgment-seat is shattering us. So that orange gives us something strengthening, and does not bring only punishment with it. Thus we experience orange in the Universe.

We feel then the longing to understand the inner side of things and to unite it with ourselves. By living the red we learn to pray, and by living in the orange we experience the desire for knowledge of the inner nature of things. And if it is a yellow surface, and we do the same thing, we feel ourselves transferred to the beginning of our time-cycle. We feel: now you are living with the forces out of which you have been created, when you entered upon your first earth-incarnation. One feels an affinity between what one was during the whole of the earth's existence, and what comes towards one from the world into which one carries the yellow oneself.

And if one identifies oneself with green, and goes with it through the Universe, which can quiet easily be done by gazing at a green field, and by shutting out all else and concentrating entirely upon it, and by then trying to dive down into it—as if green were the surface of a coloured sea—one experiences an inner increase of strength in what one happens to be in that one incarnation. One experiences a feeling of inner health, but a the same time of inner selfishness—a stimulus of the inner egoistic forces.

And if one did the same with a blue surface, one would go through the world with the desire, as one proceeded, to overcome the egoism, to become macro-cosmic. One would feel the desire to develop self-surrender, and one would feel happy to remain in this condition to meet the divine mercy. Thus one would go through the world feeling as I blessed with the divine mercy.

So one learns to know the inner nature of colour, and as I said, we can get an idea of a time when the preparation through which the painter as artists will go, will mean a moral experience in colour of this kind; when the experience preparatory to artistic creation will be much more inward, much more intimate than it has ever been.

These are, after all, only a few indications I am giving you, which will be developed much further in the future, and will take hold of the souls of men and instigate them to artistic production. The adaptation of the material culture of old to modern times has dried up the soul and made it passive. Souls must be taken hold of and stimulated again by the inner forces of things.

It is a one-sided view of the world to consider it, like Hegel, as permeated by what one might call cosmic thought. It is equally one-sided to consider, like Schopenhauer, that Nature has a basis of free-will. These two particular tendencies apply to western human nature, which leans more towards the side of thought. Hegel's philosophy has another form in the eastern view of the universe. In Schopenhauer's there is a tendency which really suits the oriental, and is shown by the fact that Schopenhauer has a particular preference for Buddhism, and the oriental view in general.

But really every such method of observation can be judged only if surveyed from the point of view which is given by Spiritual Science. From this point of view such a grouping together of the world under the heading either of thought of will appears to be something abstract, and, as we have often said, the more modern development of man still leans towards such abstractions. Spiritual Science must bring man back again to a concrete view of the world, in agreement with reality. And it is precisely to such a view that the inner reasons for the presence of these one-sided philosophies will appear. What such men as Hegel and Schopenhauer, who are after all great and important intelligences, see, is of course visible in the world; but it must be seen in the right way.

Now let us today, to begin with, understand clearly that we, as human beings, experience thought in ourselves. When a man speaks of his thought-experiences, it means that he has this thought-experience direct. He could naturally not have it unless the world were filled with thought. For how should a man, who perceives the world by his senses, be able to think, as a result of this sensory perception, unless the thought were already in the world?

But as we know from other studies, the organization of the human head is constructed in such a way as to be specially capable of taking in thought from the world. It is formed indeed from thought. It points at the same time to our previous existence on earth. We know that the head is really the result, the metamorphosed result of the previous life, while the organization of the human limbs points to a future life on earth. Roughly speaking, we have our head because our limbs have been metamorphosed from the previous life into the head. The limbs we now have, with everything belonging to them, will be metamorphosed into the head we shall carry in our next earth-life. At present, in our life between birth and death, thoughts function in our head. These thoughts, as we have also seen, are the reshaping of what functioned as will in our limbs in our previous existence. And again, what functions as will in our present limbs will be reshaped and changed into thoughts in our next life on earth.

The will thus appears as the seed, as it were, of thought. What is at first will becomes thought later on. If we look at ourselves as human beings with heads, we must look back to our past, for in this past we had the character of will. If we look into the future, we must take into account the character of will in our present limbs and must say: This is what in future will become our head: thinking man. But we continually carry both these in us. We are created out of the universe because thought from a previous age is organized in us in conjunction with will, which leads over into the future.

Now that which thus arranges the composition of man in this way becomes particularly observable if considered from the point of view of spiritual-scientific research.

The man who can develop himself so far as to have knowledge of Imagination, of Inspiration and of Intuition sees not merely the head of a human being, but he sees objectively the thinking man which his head makes him. He looks, as it were, in the direction of the thoughts. So that we may say with those abilities which man normally requires between birth and death, the head appears in the shape and form in which we see it. Through developed knowledge of Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition the strength of thought, which is after all the basis of the head's organization, that which comes down from earlier incarnations, becomes visible—if we use the term metaphorically. How does it become visible? In such a way, dear friends, that we can only use the expression: it becomes as if it gave forth light.

Certainly, when people, who want to keep to the materialistic point of view, criticize these things, one sees at once how little the present generation is capable of understanding at all what they mean. I have in my Theosophy and in other writings, points out sufficiently clearly that it is not a question of thinking in terms of a new physical world, a new edition of it, as it were, if we contemplate thinking man in Imagination, Inspiration, and Intuition; on the contrary, this experience is exactly the same as one has in regard to light in the physical external world. Put accurately it is like this: Man has a certain experience in connection with external light. He has the same experience, in imagination, in connection with the thought-element of the head. Thus the thought-element (See Diagram 1) viewed objectively, is seen as light, or better, experienced as light. Being thinking men, we live in light. We see the external light with physical senses; the light which becomes thought we do not see, because we live in it, because as thinking men, it is ourselves. You cannot see that which you yourselves are. If you emerge from this thought and enter upon Imagination and Inspiration, you put yourself opposite to it and can see the thought-element as light. So that in speaking of the whole world, we may say: We have the light in us; only it does not appear to us as light because we live within it, and because while we use the light, while we have it, it becomes thought within us. You control the light, as it were, you take up the light in yourself which otherwise appears outside you. You differentiate it in yourself. You work in it. This is precisely your thinking, it is a working in light. You are a light-being. You do not know it, because you live within the light. But your thinking which you unfold, is living in the light. And I you look at thought from the outside, you see, altogether, light.

Think now of the Universe (Circle.) You see it radiated with light—by day of course; but in reality you are looking at this Universe from the outside ... we now do the opposite. First we had the human head (Thought in the diagram), which contains thought in its development. Seen from outside, it has light. In the Universe we have light which is seen by the senses. If we come out of the Universe, and regard it from outside, what does it look like then? Like a web of thoughts. The Universe from within—light; from outside—thought. The head from within—thought, from outside—light.

This is a way of viewing the cosmos which can be extremely useful and suggestive to you, if you wish to make use of it, if you really penetrate into such things. Your thought and whole soul-life will become much more active than it otherwise is, if you learn to put this thought before you: if I were to come out of myself—as indeed a person who goes to sleep I continually do, and look back at my head, at myself therefore as a thinking man, I should see myself radiating forth light. If I were to leave the light-flooded world, and look at it from outside, I should see it as a picture of thought, as a thought-being. You observe, light and thought go together; they are identical, but seen from different sides.

Now the thought that is in us is really a survival from earlier times, the most mature thing in us, the result of former lives on earth; what formerly was will has become thought, and thought appears as light. As a consequence you will find: where light is, there is thought—but how? In thought or put differently, in light, a previous world continually dies.

That is one of the world-secrets. We look out into the Universe. It is full of light, in which thought lives. But in this thought-filled light there is a dying world. The world is continually dying in light.

When someone like Hegel regards the world, he really looks at the perpetually dying part of it. Those who have this particular tendency, become, for the most part, men of thought. And in dying the world becomes beautiful. The Greeks, who were really people of innate human nature, had their external pleasure when beauty shone in the dying world. For the world's beauty shines in the light in which it dies. The world does not become beautiful if it cannot die, for in dying the world becomes luminous. So that it is really beauty which is created from the radiance of the continuously dying world. Thus we regard the world quantitatively. The modern world began with Galileo and others to consider the world quantitatively, and our Scientists today are particularly proud when they can put natural phenomena into terms of lifeless mathematics. It is true Hegel used more pregnant concepts than the mathematical ones to understand the world; but what attracted him most was maturity and decay. Hegel's attitude to the world was like that of a man in front of a tree laden with blossom. At the moment when the fruit is about to develop, but is not yet there, when the blossom is at its fullest, there works in the tree that power of light, which is light-borne thought. That was Hegel's position. He looked at the blossom at its maximum, at that which becomes most completely concrete.

Schopenhauer was different. In order to test his influence, we must look at the other side of human things, at the beginnings. It is the will-element which we carry in our bodies. And we experience this—I have often pointed out—just as we experience the world in sleep. It is unconscious in us. Can we look at this will-element from outside, as we look at thought? Let us take the will developing in some human limb or other, and let us ask ourselves: if we were to look at this will from the other side, from the standpoint of Imagination, of Inspiration, and of Intuition, what then happens? What is the parallel here to seeing thought as light? What do we regard the will if we look at it with the trained power of sight, with clairvoyance? Yes: if we do this, we also get something which we can see from outside. If we look at thought with the power of clairvoyance, we perceive light. If we look at will with the power of clairvoyance, it becomes always thicker and thicker till it becomes matter. You have no other option, if you agree with Schoenhauer, but to believe that man is really a being of will. Had Schopenhauer been clairvoyant, this being of will would have confronted him as a matter-machine, for matter is the outer side of will. Within, matter is will, as light is thought. From outside, will is matter, as thought is outwardly light. For this reason I pointed out tin former addresses: If man dives down mystically into his will-nature, then those who only toy with Mysticism and really only strive after a sensuous experience of their Ego and of the worst egoism, believe they will find the spirit. But if they went far enough with this introspection, they would discover the true material nature of man's interior. For it is nothing less than a diving down into matter. If you dive down into the will-nature, you will find the true nature of matter. The scientific philosophers of today are only telling fairy-stories when they talk about matter consisting of molecules and atoms. You find the true nature of matter by diving down mystically into yourself. There you find the other side of will, and that is matter. And in this matter, that is in Will, is revealed finally the continually beginning, continually germinating world.

You look out onto the world. You are surrounded with light, and the light is the death-bed of a previous world. You tread on hard matter, the strength of the world bears you up. In light shines beauty in the form of thought, and in the gleam of beauty the previous world dies. The world discloses itself in it strength and might and power, but also in its darkness. The world of the future discloses itself in darkness, in the elements of material will.

If physicists were for once to talk sense, they would not produce speculations about atoms and molecules, but they would say: The visible world consists of the past, and carries in it not molecules and atoms, but the future. And you would be right in saying of the world that the past appears to us in the present, and the past wraps up everywhere the future, for the present is only the total effect of past and future. The future is what lies in the strength of matter. The past is what shines in the beauty of light, which includes, of course, sound and warmth.

And thus man can understand himself only if he takes himself as a seed of futurity, enclosed in the past, in the light-aura of thought. We might say that looked at spiritually man is the past in so far as he shines in his beauty-aura, but in this past-aura is incorporated a darkness mingling with the light, which rays forth out of the past, a darkness which carries over into the future. Light shines out of the past; darkness leads into the future. Light is nature in terms of thought, darkness is nature in terms of will. Hegel leaned toward the light that develops in the processes of growth and in the ripest blooms. Schopenhauer, as philosopher, is like a man standing in front of a tree, who has really no joy in the magnificence of its flower, but has an inner urge to wait till the seeds of the fruit bursts forth. That pleases him, that the power of growth is there, it stimulates him and makes his mouth water to think peaches are going to grow out of the peach-blossom. He turns from light-nature to light. What stirs him, viz., what develops from the light-nature of the bloom as the stuff that he can roll round with his tongue, or the future fruit, is as a matter of act the double nature of the world. To see the world properly you must see it in its double nature, for only then do you realize the concreteness of the world, whereas otherwise you see only its abstractness. When you go out and look at the trees in blossom, you are really living on the past. You look at nature in spring and you can say: What the gods have done to the world in past ages is revealed in the beauty of spring blossom. You look at the fruitful autumn world and say: There begins a new act of the gods, there falls something which however has the power of further development, of development into the future.

Thus it is a question not merely of making for oneself a picture of the world through speculation, but of taking in the world with the whole man. One can in actual fact comprehend the past in plum blossom, and eel the future in the plum. The taste of it on the tongue is closely connected with that out of which one rises again, like the Phoenix from his ashes—into the future. There you comprehend the world in feeling, and it was in this way that Goethe really pondered on everything he wanted to see and feel in the world. For instance he considered the green plant-world. He had not, of course, the advantages of modern Spiritual Science, but in considering the greenness of the plant-world, which had not quite reached the stage of bloom, he had after all the element that has come down from the past into the present; for in the plant the past appears already in the bloom; but what is not quite so much of the past is the leaf's greenness.

The greenness of Nature is that which, as it were, has not yet decayed, which is not so much in the grip of the past. It is this which unfolds itself as green. (See Diagram 2) But that which points to the future is what emerges from the darkness. There where the green is graded off to the bluish tone, there is that which proves itself to be of the future (blue.) On the other hand, there where we are directed to the past, where the ripening force is, which brings things to flower, there is warmth (red,) where light not only shines forth, but inwardly fills itself with force, where it becomes warmth. Now one ought really to draw the whole thing so that one says: You have the green, the plant-world (thus would Goethe feel, even if he has not transformed it into Spiritual or Occult Science;) bordering on it you have the darkness, where the green is darkened into blue. The part that increases its light and becomes filled with warmth, would close again towards the top. But you yourself—as man—are there, there you have within you what you have externally in the green plant-world; there you are, as human etheric body, and I have often said, peach-coloured. And that is the colour which appears here when the blue crosses over to the red. That is our own colour. So that, looking out on the coloured world, one can say: There one is oneself in the peach-colour, and has the green opposite; one has on the one hand the bluish, the dark, on the other side the light colour, the reddish-yellow. But because one is inside the peach-colour, because one lives in it, one can in ordinary life perceive it as little as one perceives thought as light. One does not perceive or observe one's own experience, and therefore one overlooks the peach-colour and sees only the red which one enlarges on the one side, and the blue which one enlarges towards the other side; and thus we see such a rainbow-spectrum. But this is only a deception. You would get the real spectrum if you bent this colour-strip into a circle. In actual fact one does bend it just because as human being one stands within the peach-colour, and so sees the coloured world only from blue to red and from red to blue through green. Were you to have this aspect, precisely then every rainbow would appear as a self-contained circle, as a circular section of a cylinder.

I mention this last only to call your attention to the fact that a philosophy of Nature such as Goethe's is at the same time a spiritual philosophy. In approaching Goethe, the researcher of Nature, we may say that he has as yet no Spiritual Science, but his view of Natural Science was such that it was quite on the lines of Spiritual Science. The essential thing for us today is that the world, including man, is an inter-penetration of thought-light, light-thought with will-matter, matter-will; and the concrete element in it is built up in the most various ways, or permeated with the content of thought-light, light-thought, matter-will and will-matter.

You must look at the Cosmos qualitatively in this way, not merely quantitatively, to get the truth of it. Then also there creeps into this Cosmos a continuous dying away, a dying of the past in light, and a opening up of the future in the darkness. The old Persians, when they felt the past decaying in light, with their instinctive clairvoyance, they called it Ahura Mazdao, and when they felt the future in the darkening will, they called it Ahriman.

And now you have these two world-entities, light and darkness—the living thought, the decaying past, in light, and the growing will, the coming future, in darkness. If we get so far that we regard thought no longer merely in its abstractness, but as light, that we regard the will no longer merely in its abstractness, but as darkness, in its material nature; if we get so far as to be able to regard the warmth-content, for example, of the light-spectrum, as being connected with the past, and the material side, the chemical side of the spectrum as being connected with the future, we pass over from the purely abstract to the concrete. We are no longer such dried-up, pedantic thinkers, merely working with the head; we know that what does work in our heads is really the light that surrounds us. And we are no longer such prejudiced people as to have only pleasure in light: we know also that in the light is death, a dying world. We can sense the world-tragedy in the light. We can also get from the abstract thought to the rhythm of the world. And in darkness we see the seeds of the future. We find indeed therein the impetus for such passionate natures as Schopenhauer. In short, we penetrate from the abstract into the concrete. World-pictures rise before us instead of mere thoughts or abstract will-impulses.

In the next lecture we shall seek—in what has developed concretely for us so remarkably,—thought into light and will into darkness—we shall seek the origin of good and evil. We shall penetrate from the world within into the Cosmos and there seek not only in an abstract or religious-abstract world the causes of good and evil, but we shall see how we break through to a knowledge of good and evil, after having made a beginning by realizing thought in its light, and having felt will in it darkness.

In our last exposition we discussed the possibility of seeing what connection there is, on the one hand, in the Kingdom of Nature with the moral or the soul, and on the other hand, to see, in the soul, that which pertains to Nature. On this point modern humanity faces a disquieting riddle. I have frequently stated in public lectures that when man applies natural laws to the universe, and looks into past times, he says to himself: Everything surrounding me has come out of the past, out of some nebular condition, and thus out of something purely material, which then was somehow differentiated and transformed, giving rise to the mineral, the vegetable, the animal and the human Kingdoms; a condition however which would somehow, even if in another form than in the beginning, also obtain at the end of the universe. But then what is born in us as morality, as our ideals, will be faded and forgotten and there will be the great graveyard of the physical and in this final condition of the physical that which has arisen in man like foam-bubbles of psychic development will have no meaning, just because it is only a kind of foam-bubble. The only reality then would be that which has developed physically out of the primeval mists into the marked distinctions of the various beings, only to return to the universal state of cinders. Such a view of things, to which one must come if one acknowledges honestly the modern outlook on nature, such a view can never build a bridge between the physical and the moral or psychic.

Therefore this philosophy, if it is not to be completely materialistic, seeing physical events as the only thing in the world, requires as it were, a second world—created out of the abstract. This second world, if one recognizes the first as given only to science, would be given only to faith. This faith, again indulges in the thought: Surely everything moral that arises in the human soul must have its compensation in the world; there must be something which rewards good and punishes evil, and so on. However philosophically you look at it, the result is the same. And in our time there are certainly people who acknowledge both views, in spite of the fact that they exist side by side without a bridge between them. There are people who believe everything the purely natural scientific view has to say, who subscribe to the Kant-Laplace theory of primeval mist, and everything in favour of a final cindery, slaggy condition of our evolution; and at the same time they acknowledge some religious view of things—that good works somehow find their reward, and evildoers are punished, and so on. This fact, that today there are many people whose souls are influenced by both the one and the other arises because in our time there is no little real activity of the soul, for, if there were, the same soul could not simply assume on the one hand a world-order which excludes the reality of the moral, and on the other acknowledge some power which rewards good and punishes evil.

Compare with this bridgeless and lazy thought of so many modern people—these moral and physical points of view—what I explained to you here last time as a product of Spiritual Science. I pointed out to you that we see around us, first of all, the world of light-phenomena, that we therefore see in the outer world everything which is apparent to us through what we call light. I pointed out to you how dying world-thoughts are to be seen in everything that surrounds us in the form of light: world-thoughts which one in the untold past were thought-worlds of definite beings, thought-worlds from which world-beings in their time drew their world-secrets. We meet these thoughts as light today, they are, as it were, the corpses of thought, world-though that is dying. This meets us as light. You know (to know it we need only open my Occult Science at the right place) that if we look back into the far distant past, man was not the same as we know him today; there was only a sort of sense-machine during the Saturn epoch, for instance. You know also that at that time the universe was inhabited, as it is also now. But these other beings occupied the position within the universe which man holds today. We know that those spirits which we call the Archai or Primeval Powers, stood during the old Saturn epoch on the plane of humanity; they were not like the human beings of today, but they were on a corresponding footing; during the old Sun epoch Archangels stood on the human plane, and so on. We look back therefore into the past and say: as we now go through the world as thinking men, these also went as thinking beings with human character through that world. That which lived then in them has become external world-thought; and that which lived then in them as thought, so that it would be visible from outside as their light-aura, that appears in the realities of light. So that in the realities of light we have to see dying thought-worlds. Now darkness interplays with these light-realities, and opposite to the light there lives in the darkness what psychically and spiritually can be called the will, or with a more oriental application, love. If we look out into the world therefore, we see on one side the light-world, if I may so call it; but we should not see this light-world, which was after all always transparent to the senses, unless the darkness was perceptible in it. And in darkness we have to seek on the first plane of the psychic that which lives in us as will. Just as the outer world can be regarded as a clash of darkness and light, so our own inner selves, in so far as they expand in space, can be regarded as light and darkness. Except that for our own consciousness light is thought, imagination; the darkness in us is will which becomes goodness, love and so on.

You see, we get here a philosophy of the world in which the soul contains not only what is psychic, and nature contains not only what is natural. We get here a philosophy in which nature is the result of former moral events, where light is “the dying world of thought.” Therefore we can also say: when we carry our thoughts in us, in so far as they live in us as thoughts, they are produced from our past. But we continually penetrate our thoughts with the will, out of the rest of our organism. For precisely what we call purest thought is the remains of our ancient past, penetrated by the will. So that even pure thought is penetrated by the will—as I have clearly expressed in the new edition of my The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity. But what we carry in us goes on into distant futures, and then what now is laid in us as the first seed, will shine in external phenomena. There will then be beings who look out into the world as we do now, and they will say: Nature shines round about us; why? Because men acted in a certain way on earth. For what we see now around us is the consequence of seed borne by former dwellers on earth. We stand here now and survey Nature. We can stand like dry, barren, abstract creatures, as the physicists do, and analyze light and its phenomena: we will then analyze them, being inwardly as cold as laboratory-workers; in the course of it some very beautiful, very intelligent things will be found, but we do not stand face to face with the outer world as complete human beings. We do that only when we can feel the message of the dawn's red, of the blue sky and of the green plant, when we can experience the sound of plashing waves. For “light” does not refer only to what is apparent to the eye, but I use the expression for all sense-perceptions. What do we see in all we observe around us? We see a world which certainly can uplift our soul, and in a sense is revealed to our soul as the world that we must have in order to be able to look with our sense on to a physical world. We do not stand there as complete beings if our attitude is that of a dry physicist. We are complete beings only if we say to ourselves: there the light and the sounds are the last presentation of what in long ages past beings formulated in their souls: we have to thank them. Our view then is not that of dry physicists, but of gratitude to those beings who so many millions years ago, let us say during the old Saturn time, lived as human beings as we do today, and who felt and experienced in such a way that we have today the wonderful world around us. That is an important result of a philosophy, steeped in reality, which leads to our realization of this. You realized it with the necessary intensity, you fill yourself with this necessity for feeling gratitude towards our far distant predecessors because it is they who have created for us our surroundings. Not only are you filled with this thought, but you must make up your minds to say: We must regulate our thoughts and feelings, according to a moral ideal which floats before us, so that those beings who come after us may look upon a world for which they can be as thankful to us as we can be to our far-off predecessors who now literally surround us as spirits of light.

A complete philosophy leads, you see, to this world-feeling or this cosmic concept. A philosophy that is not complete leads indeed to all kinds of ideas or conceptions and theories of the world, but it does not satisfy the complete man, for it leaves his feeling empty. The first has its practical side, though man today scarcely realizes it. The man who takes the world today seriously, and who knows that he may not let it head for collapse, should look at the school and university of the future, which people do not enter at eight o'clock in the morning with a certain feeling of slackness and indifferent, and leave at eleven or twelve or one o'clock in the same mood, or at most with a slight pride that they are so and so much wiser ... let us assume they are! But we can envisage a future in which those people who leave at eleven or twelve or one o'clock step out from their places of learning with feelings towards the world that reach out into the universal: because side by side with their cleverness there is planted in their souls the feeling of gratitude towards the far-off past in which beings have worked to form our surrounding Nature as it is; and a great feeling of responsibility towards the world to b e, because our moral impulses will later become shining worlds.

Of course it remains a question of faith, if you want to tell these people that the primeval mist is real and the future state of slag or cinders is real, and in between there are beings creating moral illusions which rise in them as foam. Faith does not lay down the last, though to be honest, it should. It is not essentially different for a man to say: There is a kind of compensation, for Nature itself is so arranged that a compensation takes place; my thoughts will become shining light. The moral organization of the world is revealed. What at one period is moral organization, is at another physical organization; and what at one time is physical organization was once moral organization. All moral things are therefore destined to emerge into physical things. Does the man who looks at Nature spiritually need still another proof that the world is morally organized? No; in Nature itself, spiritually seen, lies the justification of the moral order. One rises to this image when one regards man in his complete manhood.

Let us start from a phenomenon we all experience every day. We know that the phenomenon of sleeping and waking means that man is released in his ego and his astral body from the physical and etheric body. What does this mean in reference to the Cosmos? Let us imagine it in a diagram. Imagine physical and etheric body, astral body and ego bound together during wakefulness and separated during sleep: What now is—I might call it—the cosmic difference between the two?

Now if you consider the state of sleep, you experience light. And by experiencing light, you experience the dying world of past thoughts; and in doing so, you have a tendency to become aware of the spiritual as it stretches out into the future. That man today has only a dim perception of it doesn't alter the fact. What is for the moment essential is that we are in this state susceptible to the light.

Now if we dip down into the body we become inwardly psychic—by which I mean that we are souls and not scales—we become psychically sensitive to darkness in contradistinction to light. This contradistinction is not merely a negative one, but we become aware of something else: as in sleep we were receptive of light, so in wakefulness we are sensible of weight. I said we are not scales, we are not sensible of weight in the sense that we weigh our bodies; but by diving down into our bodies we become inwardly and psychically sensible of weight. Do not be surprised if this at first seems somewhat vague. The ordinary consciousness is, for real psychic experience, as dormant in wakefulness as in sleep. In sleep man today does not consciously notice how he lives in light. Awake he does not notice how he lives in weight. But it is so. The fundamental experience of man in sleep is the life in light. In sleep he is not psychically sensible of weight, of the fact of weight; weight is, as it were, taken away form him. He lives in imponderable light; he knows nothing of weight; he learns to recognize this only inwardly, above all subconsciously. But it reveals itself at once to the imagination; he learns to recognize weight by diving down into his body.

For spiritual-scientific research this is shown in the following manner. When you have risen to the stage of knowledge known as Imagination, you can observe the etheric body of a plant. In doing so you will feel inwardly that his etheric plant-body draws you continually upward, it is without weight. On the other hand when you look at the etheric body of a man, it has weight, even for the imaginative picture. You simply have the feeling it is heavy. And from this point you come to realize that the etheric body of man, for instance, is something which transfers the weight to the soul within. But it is a super-sensible primeval phenomenon. Asleep, the soul lives in light, and therefore in lightness. Awake, it lives in weight. The body is heavy; this force transfers itself to the soul: the soul lives in weight. This means something which is now carried over into the consciousness. Think of the moment of waking: what is it? When asleep—you lie in bed, you do not move, the will is crippled. It is true, vision is also crippled, but only because the will is. Vision is crippled because the will is not in your own body, and does not make use of the senses. The main fact is the crippling of the will. What makes the will active? This: that the soul feels weight through the body. This combined life with the soul produces in earthly man the fact of the will. And the will ceases in man himself when he is in the light.

Thus you have the two cosmic forces, light and weight, as the great antitheses in the Cosmos. In fact, light and weight are cosmic antitheses. Think of the planets: weight draws towards the central point, light goes out from it into the whole universe. One imagines light only as quiescent: in reality it is directed outwards from the planet. Whoever thinks of weight as a force of attraction, with Newton, really things very materialistically; or he imagines some sort of demon or something sitting in the middle of the earth and pulling the stone with an invisible string. One speaks of a force of attraction which no one can every prove except in imagination. Now people are not able to realize it actually, but they speak of it, with Newton as the force of attraction. In western civilization the time will come when whatever exists must be somehow represented materially. Thus, someone could say to these people: Well, you want to represent the force of attraction as an invisible string, but then you will have to represent light at best as a kind of swinging away, as a shooting off. One could then represent light as a force of dispersion. It is enough for him who prefers to remain nearer reality, if he can simply realize the opposition, the cosmic opposition of light and weight.

And now, many things that concern man are based on what I have been saying. If we have considered the daily event of going to sleep and awaking, we say: In going to sleep, man passes out from the field of weight, into the field of light. By living in the field of light, when he has lived long enough without weight, he gets again a strong longing to feel weight around him, and he returns once more to weight—he awakes. It is a continuous oscillation between life in light and life in weight, between going to sleep and awakening. If a man has developed his powers of perception sufficiently, he will be able to feel this sort of rising from weight into light, and the feeling of being possessed again by weight on awaking, as a personal experience.

Now, think of something else: think of this: between birth and death man is bound to the earth, because his soul, having lived a time in light always hungers again for weight, and returns to the condition of weight. When a condition has been set up—we shall speak further of this—in which this hunger for weight no longer exists, man will follow light more and more. He does this up to a certain point, and when he has arrived at the outermost periphery of the universe, he has exhausted that which gave him weight in his lifetime; then begins a new longing for weight and he begins his path over again, back to a new incarnation. So that in that interval also between death and a new birth, at the midnight hour of existence, there arises a kind of hunger for weight. This is man's longing to return to a new earth-life. Now while he is returning to earth he has to go through the spheres of the other adjacent heavenly bodies. Their effect on him is various and the result of these influences he brings with him into the physical life. So you see the question is important: What influence have the stars in the spheres through which he travels? For according to his passage through his stellar sphere, his longing for earth-weight is variously formed. Not the earth alone radiates, as it were, a certain weight which is the object of man's longing, but also the other heavenly bodies, through whose sphere he travels, as he moves towards a new life, influence him with their weights. So that man, while returning, can get into different situations, which justify one in saying this: Man while returning to earth longs once more to live in the earth-weight. But first he passes through the sphere of Jupiter, who also radiates a weight of such a kind as to add something joyful to the longing for the earth's weight. Thus the longing takes on a joyful mood. Man passes through the sphere of Mars. Mar's weight influences him also, and implants activity in his soul, which is joyfully longing for the earth's weight, so that he may use forcefully the next life from birth to death. The soul has reached the stage of possessing in its subconscious depths the impulse clearly to long for the earth's weight, and to use earthly incarnation forcefully, so that the joyful longing is expressed with intensity. Man passes also through the sphere of Venus. With this joy and strength and longing is mingled a loving understanding of life's tasks.

You note, we are speaking of several different weights, issuing from the heavenly bodies, and are connecting them with the living contents of the soul. We are seeking, again, in looking out into universal space, to assess what is spread out in physical space in moral terms. Knowing that will lies in weight, and that light is the opposite of will, we may say that Mars radiates light, as do Jupiter and Venus also, and that in the forces of weight lies at the same time modification through light. We know, in light are dying world-thoughts, in the forces of weight lie worlds to come through the seeds of will. All this streams through the souls moving in space. We are looking at the world physically, and, at the same time, morally.

The physical and moral do not exist side by side, but in his limitations, man is disposed to say: here, on one side, is the physical, there on the other, the moral. No, they are only different aspects, in itself the thing is one. The world which develops towards light, develops at the same time towards a compensating revelation. Moral world-order reveals itself out of the natural world-order. You must be clear that such a view of the universe is not reached through a philosophical interpretation, but that one grows into it by learning gradually through Spiritual Science to spiritualize physical concepts: for thus it takes on a moral quality of its own accord. And if you learn to look through the physical world into the world in which the physical has ceased to be and the spiritual exists, you will find the moral element is present.

It would be possible even now to explain quite “learnedly” what I have just said. You have this line, which is not an ellipse, because it is more rounded, here. (See Diagram 2)

[Dr. Steiner was here describing on the blackboard the three variations of the curve of Cassini. One of them is similar to an ellipse, the second to a figure of eight (Lemniskate) the third is composed of two separated parts. –Ed.] An ellipse would be like this: but that is only a special form of this line, this line could also, if we altered the mathematical equation, take this form. It is then the same line as the other: one time I go round like this and close here ... under certain conditions I do not go up here to the top like this—but round here—and return again, closing at the base. But the same line has still another shape. If I begin here, I must apparently close here also; now I must leave the level, the space, must cross here and return here. Now I must leave space again, continuing here, and closing at the base. The line is only modified somewhat; these are not two lines, but only one; it has also only one mathematical equation; it is a simple line, only I have gone out of space. If I continue this demonstration another possibility arises: I can simply take this line (Lemniskate) (figure 8), but I can also represent it so that half of it lies in space; by coming round here—I must leave space and finish it off so: here is the other half, but outside ordinary space, not inside. It is also there. And if one developed this method of perception which mathematicians, if they would, could certainly do today, one would come to the other conception—of leaving space and returning into it. That is something which corresponds to reality. For every time you undertake something, you think: before you will it, you go out of space, and when you move your you return again. In between, you are outside of space: then you are on the other side. This conception must be thoroughly developed—from the other side of space. Then you arrive at the conception of what is truly super-sensible, and above all at the conception of the moral element in its reality. Today it is so difficult, because people will divide everything they want to experience according to dimension, weight and number, whereas in fact the reality leaves space at every point, I might say, and returns again to it. There are people who imagine a solar system with comets in it. They say: the comet appears, traverses a huge ellipse, and after a long time returns. In the case of many comets that is not true. It is like this: comets appear, go out, disintegrate there, cease to be, but form themselves again on the other side and return again, describe in fact lines which do not return at all. Why? Because comets leave space and return at quite another place. This is certainly possible in the Cosmos, that comets somehow disintegrate out of space and return again at a totally different place.

I must point out that Spiritual Science could deal with the most learned scientific concepts if it had the chance or possibility of permeating with spirit that which is today carried on without spirit, particularly in the so-called exact sciences. Unfortunately this possibility does not exist; things especially like Mathematics, etc., are pursued today for the most part in the most materialistic way. And therefore Spiritual Science is called upon to make itself known to educated laymen, there were many with pretensions to learning to reproach it. Spiritual Science can deal with the highest scientific conceptions, and this with full exactitude, because it is conscious of its responsibility. Among all its other tasks, Spiritual Science has the task of purging our mental atmosphere from those mists of untruthfulness which obtain not only in outward life, but which can be shown to exist in the very heart of every science. And, again, there emerges from these depths, something which has such a devastating effect on the social life. We must summon up the courage to illumine these things with the right light. But for this it is necessary to cultivate an enthusiasm for an outlook on life which really does combine the moral and physical world-orders, in which the light-giving sun can be regarded not only as the concentration of crumbling thought-worlds, but also as that which springs forth from the depths of the earth as the preparation for what lives on into the future, seedlike, permeating the world in accordance with Will.

Colour, the subject of these three lectures, interests the physicist and—though we shall not speak of it from this aspect today—it interests also—or should do—the psychologist; more than all these, it must interest the artist, the painter. In a survey of the modern idea of the world of colour, we notice that although the psychologist may, admittedly, have something to say about the subjective experience of colour this is nevertheless of no value for the knowledge of the objective nature of the world of colour—a knowledge which really lies only in the province of the physicist. In the first place, Art is not allowed to decide anything at all about the nature of colour and its quality in the objective sense. At the present time people are very far from what Goethe intended in his oft-repeated utterance: “The man to whom Nature begins to reveal her open secret feels an irresistible longing for her most worthy interpreter—Art.”

Any one who, like Goethe, really lives in art, can never doubt that what the artist has to say about the world of colour must be bound up with the nature of colour. In ordinary life colour is dealt with according to the surface of the objects presenting themselves to us as coloured, according to the impressions received through the nature of the coloured object.

We obtain the colour fluctuating, in a sense, varying, as it were, through the well-known prismatic experiment, and we look into, or try to look into the world of colour in many ways. In so doing we have always in mind the idea that we ought to estimate colour according to subjective impressions. For a long time it has been the custom—we might say, the mischievous custom—in some places, to contend that what we perceive as a coloured world really exists only for our senses, whereas in the world outside, objective colour presents nothing but certain undulatory movements of the very finest substance, known as ether. Any one who wishes to form an idea from definitions and explanations such as these is able to make nothing of the concept that what he knows as colour-impressions, his personal experience of colour, has to do with some kind of ether in motion. Yet when people speak of the quality of colour, they really have only the subjective impression in mind, and seek for something objective. They then wander away from colour, however, for in all the vibrations of ether which are thought out, there is really nothing further from the content of our real world of colour. In order to arrive at the objective nature of colour we must try to keep to the world of colour itself and not leave it; then we may hope to fathom its real nature.

Let us try for a while to sink ourselves into something which can be given us from the whole wide, varied world of colour. Then in order to penetrate into the nature of colour, we must experience something in regard to it which raises the whole consideration into our life of feeling. We must try to question our feeling as to what colour is in our surrounding world. In a sense we shall best proceed by means of an inward experiment, so that we may have before us not only the processes which on the whole are difficult to analyze and are not easily seen, but we will proceed at once to the essential thing. Suppose we colour a flat surface green. We shall only sketch this roughly. (see Diagram 1)

If we simply allow the colour to stimulate our feelings, we can experience something in green as such, something which we need not define further. No one will doubt that we can experience the same thing when gazing on the green plant-covering of the earth; we must do so, of course, because it is green. We must disregard everything else offered by the plants, as we only wish to look at the greenness. Let us suppose we have this greenness before our mental eyes.

When painting, we can introduce different colours into this greenness. Let us picture three. We have before us three green surfaces. Into the first we will introduce red; into the second, peach-blossom colour; into the third, blue.

You must admit that the sensation aroused is very different in the three cases, that there is a certain quality of sensation when red, peach-blossom colour, or blue forms are pictured in the green. It is now a question of expressing in some way the content of the sensation thus presented to our soul.

If we wish to express such a thing as this, we must try to characterize it, for extremely little can be attained by abstract definitions. We must try to describe it somehow. Let us try to do so by bringing a little imagination into what we have painted before us. Suppose we really wish to produce the sensation of a green surface in the first place, and in it we paint red figures. Whether we give them red faces and red skin, or whether we paint them entirely red, is immaterial. In the first example we paint red figures; in the second, peach-blossom colour—which would approximate human flesh-colour—and on the third green surface we paint blue figures. We are not copying Nature in this experiment, but placing something before the soul in order to bring a complex of sensation into discussion.

Suppose we have before us this landscape: Across a green meadow red, peach-blossom colour or blue figures are passing; in each of the three cases we have an utterly different complex of sensation. If we look at the first we shall say: These red figures in the green meadow enliven the whole of it. The meadow is greener because of them; it becomes still more saturated with green, more vivid because red figures are there, and we ought to be enraged on seeing these red figures. We may say: That is really nonsense, an impossible case. I should really have to make the red figures like lightning, they must be moving. Red figures at rest in a green meadow act disturbingly in their repose, for they are already in motion by reason of their red colour; they produce something in the meadow which it is really impossible to picture at rest. We must come into a very definite complex of feeling if we wish to make such a concept at all.

The second example is harmonious. The peach-blossom coloured figures can stand there indefinitely; if they stand there for an hour it does not trouble us. Our sensation tells us that these peach-blossom coloured figures have really no special conditions; they do not disturb the meadow, they do not enhance its greenness, they are quite neutral. They may stand where they will, it does not trouble us. They suit the meadow everywhere; they have no inner connection with the green meadow.

We pass on to the third; we look at the blue figures in the green meadow. That does not last long, for the blue figures deaden the green meadow to us. The greenness of the meadow is weakened. It does not remain green. Let us try to realize the right imagination of blue figures walking over a green meadow; or blue beings generally, they might be blue spirits. The meadow ceases to be green, it takes on some of the blueness, it becomes itself bluish, it ceases to be green. If the figures stay there long we can no longer picture them at all; we have the idea that there must be somewhere an abyss, and that the blue figures take the meadow from us, carry it away and cast it into the abyss. It becomes impossible; for a green meadow cannot remain if blue figures stand there; they take it away with them.

That is colour-experience. It must be possible to have it, otherwise we shall not understand the world of colour. If we wish to acquaint ourselves with something which finds its most beautiful and significant application in imagination, we must be able to experiment in that sphere. We must be able to ask ourselves: What happens to a green meadow when red figures walk therein? It becomes still greener; it becomes very real in its greenness. The green begins veritably to burn. The red figures bring so much life into the greenness that we cannot think of them in repose. They must really be running about. If we wish to portray it exactly and to paint the true picture of the meadow, we should not paint red figures standing quietly in it; they must be seen dancing in a ring. A ring of red dancers would be permissible in a green meadow.

On the other hand, people clothed not in red but entirely in flesh-colour might stand for all eternity in a green meadow. They are quite neutral to the green; they are absolutely indifferent to the meadow; it remains as it is, not the slightest tint is altered.

In the case of the blue figures, however, they run from us with the meadow, for the entire meadow loses its greenness because of them. We must, of course, speak comparatively when speaking of experiences in colour. We cannot talk like pedants about colour-experiences, for we cannot approach them so. We must speak in analogy—not, indeed, as those who say that one billiard ball pushes another; stags push, also bullocks and buffaloes, but not billiard balls in actual fact. Nevertheless, in Physics we speak of a “thrust” because everywhere we need the support of analogy if we are to begin to speak at all.

Now this makes it possible to see something in the world of colour itself, as such. There is something in that world which we shall have to seek as the nature of colour. Let us take a very characteristic colour, one we have already in mind, the colour which meets us everywhere in summer as the most attractive—green. We find it in plants; we are accustomed to regard it as characteristic of them. There is no other such intimate connection as that of greenness with the plant. We do not feel it as a necessity that certain animals which are green could only be green; we have always the subconscious thought that they might be some other colour; but as regards the plants our idea is that greenness belongs to them, that it is something peculiarly their own. Let us endeavour by means of the plants to penetrate into the objective nature of colour—as a rule the subjective nature alone is sought.

What is the plant, which thus, as it were, presents green to us? We know from Spiritual Science that the plant owes its existence to the fact that it has an etheric body in addition to its physical body. It is this etheric body which really lives in the plant; but the etheric body is not itself green. The element which gives the plant its greenness is, indeed, in its physical body, making green peculiar to the plant, but in reality it cannot be the essential nature of the plant, for that lies in the etheric body. If the plant had no etheric body it would be a mineral. In its mineral nature the plant manifests itself through green. The etheric body is quite a different colour, but it presents itself to us by means of the mineral green of the plant. If we study the plant in relation to its etheric body, if we study its greenness in this connection, we must say: if we set on the one hand the essential nature of the plant, and on the other the greenness, dividing it abstractly, taking the greenness from the plant, it is really as though we simply made an image of something; in the greenness withdrawn from the etheric we have really only an image of the plant, and this image peculiar to it is necessarily green. We really find in greenness the image of the plant. While we ascribe the colour green very positively to the plant, we must ascribe greenness to the image of the plant and must seek in the greenness the special nature of the plant-image.

Here we come to something very important. Anyone entering the portrait gallery of some ancient castle—such as may still frequently be seen—will not fail to say that the portraits are only the portraits of the ancestors, not the ancestors themselves. As a rule, the ancestors are not there, only their portraits are to be found. In the same way, we no more have the entity of the plant in the green than we have the ancestors in the portraits. Now let us reflect that the greenness is characteristic of the plant, and that of all beings the plant is the being of life. The animal possesses a soul; man has both spirit and soul. The mineral has no life. The plant is a being of which life is the special characteristic. The animal has, in addition, a soul. The mineral has as yet no soul. Man has, in addition to the soul, a spirit. We cannot say of man, of the animal or of the mineral, that its peculiar feature is life; it is something else. In the case of the plant its characteristic is life. The green colour is the image. Thus we remain entirely within the world of objective fact in saying that green represents the lifeless image of life.

We have now—we will proceed inductively, if we wish to express ourselves in a scholarly way—we have now gained something by means of which we can place this colour objectively in the world. When I receive a photograph I can say that it is a portrait of Mr. N. In the same way we can say that green is the lifeless image of life. We do not now think merely of the subjective impression, but we realize that green is the lifeless image of life.

Let us now take peach-blossom colour. More exactly, let us call it the colour of the human skin; of course, it is not the same for all people, but this colour, speaking generally, is that of the human skin. Let us endeavour to arrive at its essential nature. As a rule we see this human skin-colour only from outside. The question now arises as to whether a consciousness of it, a knowledge of it, can be gained from within, as we did in relation to the green of the plant. It can, indeed, be done in the following way.

If a man really tries to imagine himself inwardly ensouled, and thinks of this ensouling as passing into his physical bodily form, he can imagine that in some way that which ensouls him flows into this form. He expresses himself by pouring his soul-nature into his form in the flesh-colour. What this means can best be realized by looking at a man in whom the psychic nature is withdrawn somewhat and does not ensoul the outer form. What colour does he then become? Green; he becomes green. Life is there, but he becomes green. We speak of green men; we know the peculiar green of the complexion when the soul is withdrawn; we can see this very well by the colour of the complexion. On the other hand, the more a person assumes the special florid tint, the more we shall notice his experience of this tint. If you observe the constitutional humour in a green person and in one who has a really fresh flesh-colour, you will see that the soul experiences itself in the flesh-colour. That which rays outwards in the colour of the skin is none other than the man's self-experience. We may say that in flesh-colour we have before us the image of the soul, really the image of the soul. If, however, we go far into the world around, we must select the lifeless peach-blossom colour for that which appears as human flesh-colour. We do not really find it in external objects. What appears as human flesh-colour we can only attain by various tricks of painting. It is the image of the soul-nature, but it is not the soul itself; there can be no doubt about that. It is the living image of the soul. The soul experiences itself in flesh-colour. It is not lifeless like the green of the plant, for if a man withdraws his soul more and more he becomes green. He can become a corpse. In flesh-colour we have the living. Thus peach-blossom colour represents the living image of the soul.

We have now passed on to another colour. We endeavour to keep objectively to the colour, not merely to reflect upon the subjective impression and then to invent some kind of undulations which are then supposed to be objective. It is palpable that it is an absurdity to separate human experience from flesh-colour. The experience in the body is quite different when the colour of the flesh is ruddy and when it is greenish. There is an inward entity which really presents itself in the colour.

We now pass on to the third colour, blue, and say: We cannot in the first place find a being to which blue is peculiar as green is to the plant. Nor can we speak of blue as we have spoken of the peach-blossom-like flesh-colour of man. In the case of animals we do not find a colour as innate to the animal as green is to the plant and flesh-colour to man. We cannot in this way start from blue in regard to Nature. We nevertheless wish to go forward; we will see whether we can proceed still further in our search into the essential nature of colour. We cannot continue by way of blue, but it is possible to proceed first of all to the light colours; we shall, however, progress more easily and quickly if we take the colour known as white. We cannot say that white is peculiar to any being in the outer world. We might turn to the mineral kingdom, but we will try in another way to form an objective idea of white. If we have white before us and expose it to the light, if we simply throw light upon it, we feel that it has a certain relationship to light. At first this remains a feeling. It will at once become more than a feeling if we turn to the sun, which appears tinged quite distinctly in the direction of white, and to which we must trace back all the natural illumination of our world.

We might say that what appears to us as sun, what manifests itself as white—which at the same time shows an inner relationship to light—has the peculiarity that of itself it does not appear to us at all in the same way as an external colour. An external colour appears to us upon the object. Such a thing as the white of the sun, which for us represents light, does not appear to us directly on objects. Later on we shall consider the kind of colour which we may call the white of paper, chalk and the like, but to do this we shall have to enter upon a bypath. To being with, if we venture to approach white, we must say that we are led by white first of all to light as such. In order fully to develop this feeling, we need do no more than say to ourselves that the polar opposite of white is black. That black is darkness, we no longer doubt; so we can very easily identify white with brightness, with light as such. In short, if we raise the whole consideration into feeling, we shall find the inner connection between white and light. We shall go more fully into this question later.

If we reflect upon light itself, and are not tempted to cling to the Newtonian fallacy; if we observe these things without prejudice, we shall say to ourselves that we actually see colours.

Between white, which appears as colour, and light there must be a special relation. We will therefore first of all exclude true white. We know of light as such, not in the same way as other colours. Do we really perceive light? We should not perceive colours at all if we were not in an illuminated space. Light makes colours perceptible to us, but we cannot say we perceive light just as we do colours. Light is indeed, in the space where we perceive a colour, but it is in the nature of light to make the colours perceptible. We do not see light as we see red, yellow, blue, etc. Light is everywhere where it is bright, but we do not see it. Light must be fixed to something if we are to perceive it. It must be caught and reflected. Colour is on the surface of objects; but we cannot say that light belongs to something, it is wholly fluctuating. We ourselves, however, on awakening in the morning when the light streams upon us and through us, feel ourselves in our true being; we feel an inner relationship between the light and our essential being. At night, if we awake in dense darkness, we feel we cannot reach our real being; we are then, indeed, in a sense withdrawn into ourselves, but through the conditions we have become something which does not feel in its element. We know, too, that what we have from the light is a “coming to ourselves.” That the blind do not have it, is no contradiction; they are organized for this, and the organization is the essential point. We bear to the light the same relationship as that of our ego to the world, yet, again, not the same; for we cannot say that when the light fills us we gain the ego. Nevertheless, for us to gain this ego, light is essential, if we are beings which see.

What underlies this fact? In light we have what is represented in white—we have yet to learn the inner connection—we have in light what really fills us with spirit, brings to us our own spirit. Our ego, that is, our spiritual entity, is connected with this condition of illumination. If we consider this feeling—all that lives in light and colour must first be grasped as feeling—if we consider this feeling we shall say: There is a distinction between light and that which manifests itself as spirit in the ego, in the “I.” Nevertheless, the light gives us something of our own spirit. We shall have an experience through the light in such a way that by means of the light the ego really experiences itself inwardly.

If we sum up all this, we cannot but say that the ego is spiritual and must experience itself in the soul; this it does when it feels itself filled with light. Reduced to a formula, it may be expressed in the words: White or light represents the psychic image of the spirit.

It is natural that we should have to construct this third stage from pure feeling; but if you try to sink yourselves deeply into the matter according to these formulae, you will see that a great deal is contained in them:

Green represents the lifeless image of Life.

Peach-blossom colour represents the living image of the Soul.

White or Light represents the psychic image of the Spirit.

Let us now pass on to black or darkness. We see that we can speak of white or light, brightness, in connection with the relation which exists between darkness and blackness. Let us now take black, and try to connect something with a black darkness. We can do so. Certainly black is easy to find as a characteristic of something even in Nature, just as green is an essential peculiarity of the plants. We need only look at carbon. In order to represent more clearly that black has something to do with carbon, let us realize that carbon can also be quite clear and transparent; but then it is a diamond. Black, however, is so characteristic of carbon that if it were not black, if it were white and transparent, it would be a diamond. Black is so integral a part of carbon that the latter really owed its whole existence to the blackness. Thus carbon owes its dark, black, carbon-existence to the dark blackness in which it appears; just as the plant has its image somehow in green, so carbon has its image in black.

Let us place ourselves in blackness, absolute black around us, black darkness—in black darkness no physical being can do anything. Life is driven out of the plants when they become charcoal, carbon or coal. Thus black shows itself to be foreign in life, hostile to life. We see this in carbon, for when plants are carbonized they turn black; Life, then, can do nothing in blackness. Soul—the soul slips away from us when awful blackness is within us. The spirit, however, flourishes; the spirit can penetrate the blackness and make its influence felt within it. We may therefore say that in blackness—and if we endeavour to investigate the art of black and white, light and shade on a surface—we shall return to this later—then, by drawing with black on a white surface we bring spirit into the white surface by means of the black strokes; in the black surface the white is spiritualized. The spirit can be brought into the black. It is, however, the only thing that can be brought into black. Therefore we obtain the formula:

Black represents the spiritual image of the lifeless.

We have now obtained a remarkable circle respecting the objective nature of colour. In this circle we have in each colour an image of something. In all circumstances colour is not a reality, it is an image. In one case we have the image of the lifeless, in another the image of life, in another the image of the soul, and the image of the spirit (see Diagram 2). As we go around the circle, we have black, the image of the lifeless; green, the image of life; peach-blossom colour, the image of the soul; white, the image of the spirit. If we wish to have the adjective, we must start from the previous, thus: Black is the spiritual image of the lifeless; Green is the lifeless image of life; Peach-blossom colour is the living image of the soul; White is the psychic image of the spirit.

In this circle we can indicate certain fundamental colours, Black, White, Green and Peach-blossom colour, while always the previous word indicates the adjective for the next one; Black is the spiritual image of the Lifeless; Green is the lifeless image of the Living; Peach-blossom colour is the living image of the Soul; White is the psychic image of the Spirit.

If we take the kingdoms of Nature in this way—the lifeless kingdom, the living kingdom, the ensouled kingdom, the spiritual kingdom, we ascent—precisely as we ascend from the lifeless to the living, to the ensouled, to that possessing spirit—from black to green, to peach-blossom colour, white. As truly as I can ascend from the lifeless, through the living, to the psychic, to the spiritual as truly as I have there the world which surrounds me, so truly have I the world around me in its images when I ascend from black to green, peach-blossom colour, white. As truly as Constantine, Ferdinand, Felix, etc. are the real ancestors, and I can ascend through this ancestral line, so truly can I go through these portraits and have the portraits of this line of ancestry. I have before me a world; the mineral, plant, animal and spiritual kingdom—in as far as man is the spiritual. I ascent through the realities; but Nature gives me only the images of these realities. Nature is reflected. The world of colour is not a reality; even in nature itself it is only image; the image of the lifeless is black; that of the living is green; that of the psychic, peach-blossom colour; and the image of the spirit is white.

This leads us to the objective nature of colour. This we had to set forth today, since we wish to penetrate further into the nature, the peculiar feature of colour; for it avails us nothing to say that colour is a subjective impression. That is a matter of absolute indifference to colour. To green it is immaterial whether we pass by and stare at it; but it is not a matter of indifference that, if the living gives itself its own colour, if it is not tinged by the mineral and appears coloured in the flower, etc., if the living appear in its own colour, it must image itself outwardly as green. That is something objective. Whether or not we gaze at it, it is entirely subjective. The living, however, if it appear as a living being, must appear green, it must image itself in green; that is something objective.

We tried yesterday to understand the nature of colour from a certain point of view and found on the way—white, black, green, peach-blossom colour; and in such a manner that we were able to say: these colours are images or pictures, they are already present in the world with the character of pictures; but we saw also that something essential proceeded from something else giving rise to the pictorial character of the colour. We saw, for example, that the living must proceed from the lifeless, and that in the lifeless the image of the living, the green arises. I shall continue today from our yesterday's experience, and in such a way as to differentiate between, so to speak, the receiver and the give, between that in which the picture is formed, and the originator of it. Then I shall be able to put the following division before you: I differentiate (you will understand the expression if you take the whole of what we did yesterday)—I differentiate the shadow-thrower from the Illuminant. If the shadow-thrower is the spirit, the spirit receives that which is thrown upon it; if the shadow-thrower is the spirit and if the illuminant (it is an apparent contradiction, but not a real one) is the dead, then black is pictured in the spirit as the image of the dead, as we saw yesterday.

If the shadow-thrower is the dead, and the illuminant the living, as in the case of the plant, then, as we saw, you have green. If the shadow-thrower is the living and the illuminant the psychic, then, as we saw, you get the image of peach-colour. If the shadow-thrower is the psychic and the illuminant the spirit, you get white as the image.

So you see, we have got these four colours with the pictorial character. We can therefore say: with a shadow-thrower and an illuminant, we get a picture. So we get here four colours—but you must reckon black and white among the colours—with the picture-character: black, white, green, peach-colour.

When the lifeless appears in the Spirit you get black.

Now, as you know, there are other so-called colours, and we have to search also for their natures. We shall not search for them through abstract concepts any more than before, but approach the matter according to feeling, and then you will see that we come to a certain understanding of the colours if we put the following before our eyes.

Think of a quiescent white. Then we will let beams of different colours from opposite sides play on to this quiescent white—it can be a quiet white room—from one side yellow and from the other blue. We then get green.

In this way therefore we got green. We have to visualize exactly what happens: we have a quiescent white, into which we throw rays of colour from both sides, one yellow and the other blue and we get the green we have already found from another point of view.

You see, we cannot look for the peach-colour as we looked for the green, if we confine ourselves to the living production of colour. We must seek it in another way, as follows: Imagine I paint here a black, below it a white, another black, below it a white and so on—black and white alternately—now imagine that this black and white was not quiescent—they would vibrate, as it were. In fact, it is the opposite of what we had up here: here we had a quiescent white and let beams of colour into it from both sides in a continuous process, yellow and blue from left and right. Now I take black and white; I cannot of course paint that at the moment, but imagine these undulating through each other; and just as I let in yellow and blue before, allow now this undulation, with its continual interplay of black and white, to be shone through, pierced with red: if I could select the right shade, I should, through this play of black and white into which I let the red shine, get peach-colour.

Notice how we must resort to quite different methods of producing colours. With one we must take a quiescent white—and thus we must destroy one of the picture-colours in the scale we already have here—and let two other colours which we have not yet got play upon it. But here we have to go about it differently; here we have to take two of the colours we have, black and white, we must instill movement into them, take a colour we have not yet got, namely red, and let is shine through the moving white and black. You will also see something which will strike you if you observe life: green you have in nature; peach-colour you have (as I explained yesterday, in my sense) only in a fully healthy man. And, I said, the possibility is not easily present of reproducing this shade of colour. For one could really reproduce it only if one could represent white and black in motion and then let fall on them the beam of red. One would really have to produce a circumstance—it is after all present in the human organism—in which there was always motion. Everything is in movement and from that fact arises this colour of which we are speaking. So that we can get this colour only in a roundabout way, and for this reason the majority of portraits are really only masks, because flesh-colour can be realized only by means of all sorts of approximations. It could be achieved only, you see, if we had a continual wave movement of black and white, with red rays through it.

I have here pointed out to you from the nature of things a certain difference in relation to colour. I have shown you how to use the colours which we get as pictorial colours, how in one case we used white, in a condition of rest, and by throwing upon it two colours which we have not yet got, we obtained another pictorial colour, namely, green.

Again, we take two colours, black and white, in a scale of reciprocated movement, and let them be penetrated or illuminated by a new colour, that we have not yet got, and the result is another colour—peach-colour. We get peach-colour and green, therefore, in quite different ways. In one case we required red, in the other yellow and blue. Now we shall be able to go a step further towards the nature of colour if we consider another thing.

Taking the colours we found yesterday, we may say as follows: By its own nature green always allows us to make it with definite limits. Green can be enclosed or limited: in other words it is not unpleasant to us if we paint a surface green and give is a circumscribed area. But just imagine this is the case of peach-colour. It does not agree with our artistic sense. Peach-colour can be represented really only as a mood, without reference to a defined area, without expecting one. If you have a sense of colour, you can feel that. If, for instance, you think of a green—you can easily think of green card-tables. Because a game is a limited pedantic activity, something very Philistine, one can think of such an arrangement—a room with card-tables covered in green. What I mean is that it would be enough to make you run away, if you were invited to play cards on mauve tables. On the other hand, a lilac coloured room, or a room furnished throughout in mauve, would lend itself very well, shall we say, to mystical conversation, in the best and the very worst sense. It is true, the colours in this respect are not anti-moral, but amoral. Thus we note that as a result of its own nature, colour has a inner character; whereby green allows itself to be defined, lilac and peach or flesh-colour tend to spread into vagueness.

Let us try to get a the colours which we did not have yesterday, from this point of view. Let us take yellow, the whole inner nature of yellow, if we make here a yellow surface. Yes, you see, a defined surface of yellow is something disagreeable; it is ultimately intolerable for someone with artistic feeling. The soul cannot bear a yellow surface which is limited and defined in extent. So we must make the yellow paler towards the edges, and then still paler. In short we must have a full yellow in the centre and from there it must shade off to pale yellow. You cannot picture yellow in any other way, if you want to feel it with your own being. Yellow must radiate, getting paler all the time. That is what I might call the secret of yellow. And if you hem in the yellow, it is in fact as if you laughed at it. You always see the human factor in it, which has bounded the yellow. Yellow does not speak when it is bounded, for it refuses to be bounded, it wants to radiate in some direction or other.

We shall see a case in a moment, where yellow consents to be bounded, but it will just go to show how impossible it is, considering its real inner nature. It wants to radiate. Let us take blue on the other hand. Imagine a surface covered equally with blue. One can imagine it, but it has something super-human. When Fra Angelico paints equal blue surfaces, he summons, as it were, something super-terrestrial into the terrestrial sphere. He allows himself to paint an equal blue when he brings super-terrestrial things into the terrestrial sphere. In the human sphere he would not do it, for blue as such, because of its own nature, does not permit a smooth surface. Blue by its inner nature demands the exact opposite of yellow. It demands that the colour is intensified on the circumference and shades off towards the center. It demands to be strongest at the edges and palest in the middle. Then blue is in its element. By this it is differentiated from yellow. Yellow insists on being strongest in the center, and then paling off. Blue piles itself up at the edges and flows together, to make a piled-up wave, as it were, round a lighter blue. Then it shows itself in its very own nature.

We arrive therefore on all sides at what I might call the feeling or longing of the soul in face of colours. And these are fulfilled; that is, the painter really responds to them, if he paints in accordance with what the colour itself demands. If he consciously thinks—now I've dipped my brush in the green, now I must be a bit of a Philistine and give the green a sharp outline; if he thinks: now I am painting yellow—I must make that radiate, I must imagine myself the spirit of radiation; and if he thinks when painting blue: I draw myself in, into my innermost self and build, as it were, a crust round me, and so I must also paint by giving the blue a kind of crust: then he lives in his colour and paints in his picture what the soul really must want if it yields itself to the nature of colour.

Of course, as soon as we touch upon art, a factor comes in which modifies the whole thing. I'll make circles here for you which I fill in with colour. (Diagram 1)

One can of course have other figures than these; but the yellow must always radiate in some direction and the blue must always contract, as it were, into itself.

The red I might call the balance between them. We can accept the red completely as a surface. We understand it best if we differentiate it from peach-colour, in which it is, you remember, incorporated as an illuminant. Take the two shades side by side, red and peach-colour. What happens when you let the red really influence your soul? You say, this red affects me as a quiet redness. It is not the case with peach-colour. That wants to split up, to spread. It is a nice difference between red and peach-colour. Peach-colour wants to disintegrate, it wants to get ever thinner and thinner till it has disappeared. The red remains, but its effect is one of surface. It does not want to radiate or pile itself up, or to escape; it asserts itself. Lilac, peach-colour, flesh-colour, do not really assert themselves: they want always to change their form, because they want to escape. That is the difference between this colour, peach, which we already have, and red, which belongs to those colours which we have not yet got. But we have not three colours together: blue, red and yellow.

Yesterday we found the four colours: black, white, peach-colour and green; now red, blue and yellow are before us and we have tried to get inside these three colours with our feeling, to see how they interplay with the others. We let the red interplay with a motionless white and we shall easily find the distinction if we now examine what we have brought before the soul. We cannot make such a distinction in the colours we found yesterday as we now have made between yellow, blue and red. We were compelled today to let black and white move in and out of each other when we produced peach-colour. Black and white are “picture-colours” which can do this; let us leave it at that.

Peach-colour we must also leave; it disappears of its own accord, we cannot do anything with it, we are powerless against it. Nor can it help itself, it is its nature to disappear. Green outlines itself, that is it nature. But peach-colour does not demand to be differentiated in itself, but to be uniform, like red; if it were differentiated it would level itself out at once. Just imagine a peach-coloured surface with lumps in it! It would be awful. It would promptly dissolve the lumps, for it always strives for uniformity. If you have an extra green on green, that is a different matter; green has to be applied evenly and has to be outlined. We cannot imagine a radiating green. You can imagine a twinkling star, can't you; but hardly a twinkling tree-frog. It would be a contradiction for a tree-frog to twinkle. Well—that is the case also with peach-colour and green.

If we want to bring black and white together at all we must make them undulate into each other as pictures, even if as moving pictures. But it is different with the three colours we have found today.

We saw that yellow wants, of its own nature, to get paler and paler towards the edges; it wants to radiate; blue wants to heap itself up, to intensify itself, and red wants to be evenly distributed without outline. It wants to hold the middle place between radiating and concentrating; that is red's nature. So you see there is a fundamental difference between colours that are in themselves quiet or mobile, quiet as green, or mobile as mauve, or isolated like black and white. If we want to bring these colours together, it must be as pictures. And red, yellow and blue, in accordance with their inner activity, their inner mobility, are distinguished from the inner mobility of lilac. Lilac tends to dissolve—that is not an inner mobility—it tends to evaporate; red is quiet—it is movement come to rest—but, when we look at it, we cannot rest at one point: we want to have it as an even surface, which, however, is unlimited. With yellow and blue we saw the tendency to vary. Red, yellow and blue differ from black, white, green and peach-colour. You see it from this: Red, yellow and blue have, in contrast to those other colours which have pictorial qualities, another character and if you consider what I have said about them you will find the term I apply to this different character justified. I have called the colours black, white, green and peach-colour pictures—“pictorial colours” (Bildfarben,) I call the colours yellow, red and blue “lusters”—luster colours. (Blanz-farben,) in yellow, red and blue, objects glisten: they show their surfaces outwards, they shine or glisten.

That is the nature and the difference in coloured things. Black, white, green, peach-colour have a pictorial colour, they take their colour from something; in yellow, blue and red there is an inherent luster. Yellow, blue, red are external to something essential. The others are always projected pictures, always something shadowy. We can call them the shadow-colours. The shadow of the spiritual on the psychic is white. The shadow of the lifeless on the spirit is black. The shadow of the living on the lifeless is green. The shadow of the psychic on the living is peach-colour. “Shadow” and “picture or image” are akin.

On the other hand with blue, red and yellow we have to do with something luminous, not with shadow, but with that by which the nature advertises itself outwardly. So that we have in the one case pictures or shadows and in the other, in the colours red, blue and yellow we have what are modifications of illuminants. Therefore I call them lustrous. The things shine, they throw off colour in a way; and therefore these colours have of their own accord the nature of radiation: yellow radiating outwards, blue radiating inwards, and red the balance of the two, radiating evenly. This even radiation shining on and through the combination of white and black in motion produces peach-colour.

Letting yellow flash from one side on to stationary white and blue from the other side, produces green.

You will observe, we come here upon things which upset Physics completely—you can take everything known today in Physics about colours. There one just writes down the scale: Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet. One does not mention the reciprocal interplay. Let us run along the scale. You will see that starting with the luster red, the lustrous property ceases more and more till we come to a colour in picture, in shadow-colour, to green. Then we come again to a lustrous colour of an opposite kind to the former, we come to blue, the concentrated luster-colour. Then we must leave the usual physical colour-scale entirely in order to get to the colour which can really not be represented at all except in a state of movement. White and black, pierced by rays of red give peach-colour. If you take the ordinary scheme of the physicist, all you can say is: All right—red, orange, yellow, green blue, indigo, violet ...

Notice I start from a luster, go on to what is properly a colour, on again to a luster and only then come to a colour.

Now, if I did not do that as it is on the physical plane, but were to turn it as it is in the next higher world, if I were to bend the warm side of the spectrum and the cold side so that I drew it like this (Diagram 2) red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet; if I were to bend this stretched-out line of colour into a circle, then I should get my peach-colour up here at the top.

Thus I return again to colour. Colour I and Colour II to and bottom, Luster III and Luster IV left and right. Now there still lurks hidden only that other colour—white and black. You see, if I go up here with the white (from the bottom upwards) it would stick in the green, so the black comes down here to meet it (from the top downwards,) and here at V they begin to overlap; thus, together with the rays from the red, they produce the peach-colour.

I have therefore to imagine a white and a black, overlapping and interplaying (See Diagram 2) and in this way I get a complex colour combination, which however corresponds more closely to the nature of colours than anything you see in the books on Physics.

Now, let us take luster: but luster means that something shines. What shines? If you take the yellow (and you must take it with your feeling and colour-sense, not with the abstract-loving understanding,) you need only say: In receiving the impression of yellow, I am really so moved by it that it lives on within me, as it were. Just think, yellow makes us gay; but being gay means, really, being filled with a greater vitality of soul. We are therefore more attuned to the ego through yellow, in other words we are spiritualized. So, if you take yellow in its original nature, that is, fading outwards, and think of it shining within you, because it is a luster-colour, you will have to agree: Yellow is the luster of the spirit. Blue, concentrating, intensifying itself outwards, is the luster of the psychic. Red, filling space evenly, is the luster of the living. Green is the picture of the living; red, the luster.

You can see this very well if you try to look at a fairly strong red on a white surface; if you look away quickly, you see green as the after-image, and the same surface as a green after-image. The red shines into you and it forms its own picture within you.

But what is the picture of the living in the inner being? You have to destroy it to get an image. The image of the living is the green. No wonder that red luster produces the green as its image when it shines into you.

Thus we get these three colour-natures of quite different kinds. They are the active colour-natures. It is the thing that shines which contains the differentiation; the other colours are quiescent images. We have something here which has its analogy in the Cosmos. We have in the Cosmos the contrast of the Signs of the Zodiac, which are quiescent images, and that which differentiates the Cosmos in the Planets. It is only a comparison, but one which is founded on fact. We may say that we have in black, white, green and peach-colour something whose effect is static; even when it is in movement; something of the fixed stars. And in red, yellow and blue we have something essentially in motion, something planetary. Yellow, blue, red give a nuance to the other colours; yellow and blue tinge white to green, red gives peach colour when it shines into the combined black and white.

Here you see the Colour-Cosmos. You see the world in its inter-action, and you see that we really have to go to colour if we want to study the laws of coloured things. We must not go from colours to something else, we must remain in the colours themselves. And when we have a grasp of colours, we come to see in them what is their mutual relationship, what is the lustrous, the luminous, and what is the shadow-giving, the image-producing element in them.

Just think what this means to Art. The artist knows if he is dealing with yellow, blue and red that he must conjure into his picture something that has a dynamic character, that itself gives character. When he works with peach-colour and green on black and white, he knows that the picture-quality is already there. Such a colour-theory is inherently so completely living that it can be transferred directly form the psychic into the artistic. And if you so understand the nature of the colours that you recognize, as it were, what each colour wants—that yellow wants to be stronger in the middle and to pale off towards the edge, because that is the inherent quality of yellow—then you must do something if you want to fix the yellow, if you want to have a smooth, even yellow surface somewhere. What does one do then? Something must be put into the yellow which deprives it of its own character, of its own will. The yellow has to be made heavy. How can this be done? By putting something into the yellow which gives it weight, so that it becomes gilded. There you have yellow without the yellow, left yellow to a certain extent, but deprived of its nature. You can make an even gold background to a picture, but you have given weight to the yellow, inherent weight; you have taken away its own will; you hold it fast.

Hence the old painters who had a susceptibility to such things found that in yellow they have the luster of the spirit. They looked up to the spiritual, to the light of the spirit in yellow; but they wanted to have the spirit here on earth. They had to give it weight, therefore. If they made a gold background, like Cimabue, they gave the spirit habitation on earth, they evoked the heavenly in their picture. And the figures could stand out of the background of gold, could grow as creations of the spiritual. These things have an inherent conformity to law. You observe, therefore, if we deal with yellow as a colour, of it sown accord it wants to be strong in the centre and shade off outwards. If we want to retain it on an evenly-coloured surface, it is necessary to metallize it. And so we come to the concept of metallized colour, and to the concept of colour retained in matter, of which we shall say more tomorrow.

But you will notice one must first understand colours in their fleeting character before one can understand them in solid substantial form. We shall proceed to this tomorrow. We come in this to what ordinary people—and “extraordinary” people, for that matter—alone call colour. For they know only the colours which are present in solid bodies, and therefore they say—“If one speaks of the spirit, as, for instance, of thought (pretty sentence, isn't it?), then the spirit either is coloured—or not coloured.” Well, then, in this case there is not the least possibility of rising to the volatility of colour!

You will observe that what I have been explaining provides a way to recognize the materialization of the colours in the physical colour-spectrum. It stretches right and left endlessly, that is indefinitely; in the spirit and in the psychic realm, everything is joined up. We must join up the colour-spectrum. And if we train ourselves to see not only peach-colour, but the movement in it; if we train ourselves not only to see flesh-colour in man, but also to live in it; if we feel that our bodies are the dwelling-place of our souls as flesh-colour, then this is the entrance, the gateway into a spiritual world. Colour is that thing which descends as far as the body's surface; it is also that which raises man from the material and leads him into the spiritual.