The Rudolf Steiner Archive

My dear friends,

My dear friends, it is really difficult in our time to meet with full understanding when one speaks out of the sources of what we call Spiritual Science.

I have not in mind so much the difficulty of being understood among the individuals whom we encounter in life, but much more of being comprehensible to the cultural streams, the various world-conceptions and feelings which confront us at the present time.

When we consider European life we find in the first place a great difficulty which has sprung from the following cause. European life at the moment of passing over from mere sense perceptions to thinking about percepts—and this is effected by every individual in every moment of his waking life—does not feel how intimately connected is the thought-content with what we are as human beings.

People think thoughts, they form concepts, and they have the consciousness that through these thoughts and concepts they are, as it were, learning something of the world, that the images in fact reproduce something of the world. This is the consciousness people have. Each one who walks along the street has the feeling that because he sees the trees etc. concepts come to life, and that the concepts are inner presentations of what he perceives, and that he thus in some way takes the world of external percepts into himself and then lives them over again.

In the rarest cases, one can say practically never, is it brought to consciousness in the European world-conception that the thought, the act of thinking, is an actuality in our inner self as man, that we do something by thinking, that thinking is an inner activity, an inner work.

I called your attention here once to the fact that every thought is essentially different from what people usually believe it to be. People take it to be a reproduction of something perceptible. But it is not recognised as a form-builder, a moulder. Every thought that arises in us seizes, as it were, upon our inner life and shares (above all so long as we are growing) in our whole human construction. It already takes part in our structure before we are born and belongs to the forming forces of our nature. It goes on working continually and again and again replaces what dies away in us. So it is not only the case that we perceive our concepts externally, but we are always working upon our being through our thoughts, we work the whole time anew upon our forming and fashioning through what we conceive in ideas.

Seen with the eyes of spiritual science every thought appears like a head with a sort of continuation downwards, so that with every thought we actually insert in us something like a shadowy outline, a phantom, of ourselves; not exactly like us, but as similar as a shadow-picture. This phantom of ourselves must be inserted, for we are continuously losing something, something is being destroyed, is actually crumbling away. And what the thought inserts into our human form, preserves us, generally speaking, until our death. Thought is thus at the same time a definite inner activity, a working on our own construction.

The western world-concept has practically no knowledge of this at all. People do not notice, they have no inner feeling of how the thought grips them, how it really spreads itself out in them. Now and again a man will feel in breathing—though for the most part it is no longer noticed—that the breath spreads out in him, and that breathing has something to do with his re-building and regeneration. This applies also to thoughts, but the European scarcely feels any longer that the thought is actually striving all the time to become man, or, better said, to form the human shape.

But unless we come to a feeling of such forces within us we can hardly reach a right understanding, based on inner feeling and life, of what spiritual science really desires. For spiritual science is actually not active at all in what thought yields us inasmuch as it reproduces something external; it works in the life element of thought, in this continuous shaping process of the thought.

Therefore it has been very difficult for many centuries to speak of spiritual science or to be understood when it was spoken of, because this last characterised consciousness became increasingly lost to European humanity. In the Oriental world-conception this feeling about thought which I have just expressed exists in a high degree. At least the consciousness exists in a high degree that one must seek for this feeling of an inner experience of thought. Hence comes the inclination of the Oriental for meditation; for meditation should be a familiarising oneself with the shaping forces of thought, a becoming aware of the living feeling of the thought. That the thought accomplishes something in us should become known to us during meditating. Therefore we find in the Orient such expressions as: A becoming one, in meditation, with Brahma, with the fashioning process of the world. What is sought in the Oriental world-conception is the consciousness that when one rightly lives into the thought, one not only has something in oneself, not only thinks, but one becomes at home in the fashioning forces of the world. But it is rigidified, because the Oriental world-conception has neglected to acquire an understanding for the Mystery of Golgotha. To be sure, the Oriental world-conception of which we have yet to speak—is eminently fitted to become at home in the forming forces of thought life, but nevertheless in so doing, it comes into a dying element, into a network of abstract, unliving conceptions. So that one could say: whereas the right way is to experience the life of the thought-world, the Oriental world-conception becomes at home in a reflection of the life of thought. One should become at home in the thought-world as if one were transposing oneself into a living being; but there is a difference between a living being and a reproduction of a living being, let us say a paper mache copy. The oriental world-conception, whether Brahmanism, Buddhism, the Chinese and Japanese religions, does not become at home in the living being, but in something which may be described as a copy of the thought-world, which is related to the living thought-world, as the papier-mache organism is related to the living organism.

This then is the difficulty, as well in the West as in the East. One is less understood in the West, since in general not much consciousness exists there of these living, forming forces of thought; in the East one is not understood aright, since there people have not a genuine consciousness of the living nature of thought, but only of the dead reproduction, of the stiff, abstract weaving of thoughts.

Now you must be clear whence all that I have just analysed actually comes. You will all remember the account of the Moon evolution given in my book Occult Science. Man in his own evolution has taken his proper share in all that has taken place as Saturn, Sun and Moon evolutions, and he then further shares in what comes about as Earth evolution. When you call to mind the Moon evolution as described in my Occult Science you find that during that time the separation of the moon planet from the sun took place; that it proceeded for the first time in a distinct, definite way. Thus such a separation actually took place. We can say that whereas before there had been a kind of interconnected condition of the planetary world, at the separation of the moon from the sun there now took their course side by side the Moon evolution and the Sun evolution. This separate state was of great significance, as you can gather from Occult Science. Man as he now is could not have arisen if this separation had not taken place. But on the other hand, with every such event is intimately connected the emergence of a certain one-sidedness. It came about that certain beings of the Hierarchy of the Angeloi, who were at the human stage during the Moon evolution, at that time rebelled against, showed themselves in antipathy to, uniting again with the Sun. Thus the Moon broke away, and at the later reunion with the Sun they refused to take this step, and be reunited with the Sun.

All Luciferic staying behind rests upon an unwillingness to take part in later phases of evolution. And hence, on the one hand, the Luciferic element originated in the fact that certain beings from the Hierarchy of the Angeloi, who were human at that time, were not willing to reunite with the Sun in the last part of the Old Moon time. To be sure, they were obliged to descend again, but in their feeling, in their inner nature, they preserved a longing for the Moon existence. They were out of place, they were not at home in the existing evolution; they felt themselves to be actually Moon-beings. Their remaining behind consisted in this. The host of Luciferic beings who then in their further development descended upon our Earth naturally contained in their ranks this kind of being. They also live in us in the manner I have indicated in one of the last lectures. And it is they who will not let the consciousness arise, in our Western thinking, that thinking is inwardly alive. They want to keep it of a Moon-nature, cut off from the inner life element that is connected with the Sun, they want to keep it in the condition of separation. And their activity produces the result that man does not get a conscious feeling: thinking is connected with inner fashioning, but feels instead that thinking is only connected with the external, precisely with that which is separated. Thus in respect of thinking they evoke a feeling that it can only reproduce the external; that one cannot grasp the inner formative living element with it, but can only grasp the external. Thus they falsify our thinking.

It was in fact the karma of Western humanity to make acquaintance with these spirits, who falsify thinking in this manner, alter it, externalise it, who endeavour to give it the stamp of only being of service in reproducing outer things and not grasping the inner living element. It was apportioned to the karma of the Oriental peoples to be preserved from this kind of Luciferic element. Hence they retained more the consciousness that in thinking one must seek for the inwardly forming, shaping of the human being, for what unites him inwardly with the living thought-world of the universe. It was allotted to the Greeks to form the transition between the one and the other.

Since the Orientals have made little acquaintance with that Luciferic element I have just characterised, they have no real idea that one can also come into connection with the living element of thinking about the external. What they get hold of in this connection always seems made of paper mache they have little understanding of applying thinking to outer things. Lucifer must of course cooperate in the activity which I have just described, by which man feels the inclination to meditate on the outer world. But then it is like the swing of the pendulum to one side, man goes too far in this activity—towards the external. That is the common peculiarity of all life; it swings out sometimes to the one side, sometimes to the other. There must be the swinging out, but one must find the way back from the one to the other, from the Oriental to the Occidental. The Greeks were to find the transition from Oriental to Occidental. The Oriental would have fallen completely into rigid abstractions—has, indeed, partly done so, abstractions which are pleasing to many people—if Greece had not influenced the world. If we base our judgment simply on what we have now considered, we shall find in Greece the tendency to make thoughts inwardly formative and alive.

Now if you examine both Greek literature and Grecian art you will everywhere find how the Greek strove to produce the human form from his own inner experiencing; this is so in sculpture as well as in poetry, in fact in philosophy too. If you acquaint yourself with the manner in which Plato still sought, not to found an abstract philosophy, but to collect a group of men who talk with one another and exchange their views, so that in Plato we find no world-concept (we have only discussions) but men who converse, in whom thought works humanly, thoughts externalise, you will find this corroborated. Thus even in philosophy we do not have the thought expressing itself so abstractly, but it clothes itself as it were in the human being representing it.

When in this way one sees Socrates converse, one cannot speak of Socrates on the one hand and of a Socratic world-conception on the other. It is a unity, one complete whole. One could not imagine in ancient Greece that someone—let us say, like a modern philosopher—came forward who had founded an abstract philosophy, and who placed himself before people and said: this is not the correct philosophy. That would have been impossible—it would only be possible in the case of a modern philosopher, (for this rests secretly in the mind of them each). The Greek Plato, however, depicts Socrates as the embodied world-conception, and one must imagine that the thoughts have no desire to be expressed by Socrates merely to impart knowledge of the world, but that they go about in the figure of Socrates and are related to people in the same way as he is. And to pour, as it were, this element of making thought human into the external form and figure, constitutes the greatness in the works of Homer and Sophocles, and in all the figures of sculpture and poetry which Greece has created. The reason why the sculptured gods of Grecian statuary are so human is that what I have just expressed was poured into them. This is at the same time a proof of how humanity's evolution in a spiritual respect strove as it were to grasp the living element of man from the thought-element of the cosmos and then to give it form. Hence the Grecian works of art appear to us (to Goethe they appeared so in the most eminent sense) as something which of its kind is hardly to be enhanced, to be brought to greater perfection, because all that was left of the ancient revelation of actively working and weaving thoughts had been gathered up and poured into the form. It was like a striving to draw together into the human form all that could be found as thoughts passing from within outwards, and this became in Greece philosophy, art, sculpture. (See Diagram (a) p.8a)

A more modern age has another mission, the present time has an entirely different task. We now have the task of giving back to the universe that which there is in man. (Diagram (b)). The whole pre-Grecian evolution led to man's taking from the universe all that he could discover of the living element of the human form in order to epitomise it. That is the unending greatness of Greek art—that the whole preceding world is actually epitomised and given form in it. Now we have the task reversed—the human being, who has been immeasurably deepened through the Mystery of Golgotha, who has been inwardly seized in his cosmic significance, is now to be given back again to the universe.

You must, however, inscribe in your souls that the Greeks had not, of course, the Christian view of the Mystery of Golgotha; for them everything flowed together out of the cosmic wisdom:

And now picture the immense, the immeasurable advance in the evolution of humanity when the Being who had formerly worked from the cosmos and who could only be known from the cosmos, and whom man could express in the earthly stage in the element of Form:—when this Being passed out of the cosmos into the earth, became man, and lives on in human evolution.

That which was sought out in the cosmos in pre-Grecian times now came into the earth, and that which had been poured out into form, was now itself in human evolution. (c) Naturally (I have therefore indicated it with dots) it is not yet rightly known—it is not yet rightly experienced, but it lives in man, and men have the task of giving it back gradually to the cosmos. We can picture this quite concretely, this giving back to the cosmos of what we have received through Christ. We must only not struggle against this giving back. One can really cling closely to the wonderful words: ‘I am with you all the days until the end of the Earth period.’

This means: what Christ has to reveal to us is not exhausted with what stands in the Gospel. He is not among us as one who is dead, who once upon a time permitted to be poured into the Gospels what he wished to bring upon earth, but he is in earthly evolution as a living Being. We can work through to him with our souls, and he then reveals himself to us as he revealed himself to the Evangelists. The gospel is therefore not something that was once there and then came to an end, the gospel is a continuous revelation. One stands as it were ever confronting the Christ, and looking up to Him, one waits again for revelation.

Assuredly he—whoever he may have been—who said: ‘I should still have much to write but all the books in the world could not contain it’—assuredly he, John, was entirely right. For if he had written all that he could write, he would have had to write all that would gradually in the course of human evolution result from the Christ event. He wished to indicate: Wait! Only wait! What all the books in the world could not contain will come to pass. We have heard the Christ, but our descendants will also hear Him, and so we continuously, perpetually, receive the Christ revelation. To receive the Christ revelation means: to acquire light upon the world from Him. And we must give back the truths to the cosmos from the centre of our heart and soul.

Hence we may understand as living Christ-revelation what we have received as Spiritual Science. He it is who tells us how the earth has originated, the nature of the human being, what conditions the earth passed through before it became earth. All that we have as cosmology, and give back to the universe, all this is revealed to us by Him. It is the continuous revelation of Christ to feel such a mood as this: that one receives the cosmos from the Christ in an inward spiritual way, drawn together as it were, and as one has received it to relate it to the world with understanding, so that one no longer looks up to the moon and stares at it as a great skittles-ball with which mechanical forces have moved skittles in the cosmos and which from these irregularities has acquired wrinkles, and so on—but recognises what the moon indicates, how it is connected with the Christ-nature and the Jahve-nature. It is a continuous revelation of the Christ to allot again to the outer world what we have received from Him. It is at first a process of knowledge. It begins with an intellectual process, later it will be other processes. Processes of inner feeling will result which arise from ourselves and pour themselves into the cosmos, such processes as these will arise.

But you gather something else from what I have just explained. When you observe this motion- (Diagram (a) p.10a) where one has gathered up out of the cosmos, as it were, the component parts of the human being, which have in the Greek world-concepts, in Greek art, then flowed together to the whole human being, then you will understand: In Greece the evolution of humanity strove towards the plastic form, sculptured-form, and what they have reached in such form, we cannot as a matter of fact succeed in copying. If we imitate it nothing true or genuine results. That is therefore a certain apex in human evolution. One can in fact say this stream of humanity strives in Greece in sculpture towards a concentration of the entire human evolution preceding Greece.

When, on the contrary, one takes what has to happen here (b) it is what could be called a distribution of the component parts of man into the cosmos. You can follow this in its details. We assign our physical body to Saturn, the etheric body to the Sun, the astral body to the Moon, our Ego-organisation to the Earth. We really distribute man into the universe, and it can be said that the whole construction of Spiritual Science is based upon a distribution, a bringing again into movement, of what is concentrated in the human being. The fundamental key of this new world-conception (diagram (b)) is a musical one; of the old world (a) is a plastic one. The fundamental key of the new age is truly musical, the world will become more and more musical. And to know how man is rightly placed in the direction towards which human evolution is striving, means to know that we must strive towards a musical element, that we dare not recapitulate the old plastic element, but must strive towards a musical one.

I have frequently mentioned that on an important site in our Building there will be set up the figure of archetypal man, which one can also speak of as the Christ, and which will have Lucifer on the one side and Ahriman on the other. What is concentrated in the Christ we take out and distribute again in Lucifer and Ahriman, in so far as it is to be distributed. What was welded together plastically in the one figure we make musical, inasmuch as we make it a kind of melody: Christus-Lucifer-Ahriman.

Our Building is really formed on this principle. Our whole Building bears the special imprint in it: to bring plastic forms into musical movement. That is its fundamental character. If you do not forget that, in mentioning something like this, one is never to be arrogant, but to remain properly humble, and if you remember that in all that concerns our work on this Building only the first most imperfect steps have been taken, you will not misunderstand what is meant when I speak about it. It is of course not meant that anything at all of what floats before us as distant ideal is also only attained in the farthest future; but a beginning can be sought in that direction,—this one can say. More shall not be said than, that a beginning is desired.

But when you compare this beginning with that which has undergone a certain completion in Greece, with the infinite perfection of the plastic principle in, for instance, the Greek you find polaric difference. In Greece everything strives for form. An Acropolis figure of Athena, or in the architecture of the Acropolis, or a Greek Temple, they stand there in order to remain eternally rigid in this form, in order to preserve for man a picture of what beauty in form can be.

Such a work as our Building, even when one day it becomes more perfect, will always stand there in such a way that one must actually say: this Building always stimulates one to overcome it as such, in order to come out through its form into the infinite. These columns and in particular the forms connected with the columns, and even what is painted and moulded, is all there in order, so to say, to break through the walls, in order to protest against the walls standing there and in order to dissolve the forms, dissolve them into a sort of etheric eye, so that they may lead one out into the far spaces of the Cosmic thought-world.

One will experience this building in the right way if one has the feeling in observing it that it dissolves, it overcomes its own boundaries; all that forms walls really wants to escape into cosmic distances. Then one has the right feeling. With a Greek temple one feels as if, one would like best to be united for ever with what is firmly enclosed by the walls and with what can only come in through the walls. Here, with our Building, one will particularly feel: If only these walls were not so tiresomely there—for wherever they stand they really want to be broken through, and lead out further into world of the cosmos. This is indeed how this Building should be formed, according to the tasks of our age, really out of the tasks of our age.

Since we have not only spoken for years, my dear friends, on the subjects of Spiritual Science, but have discussed with one another the right attitude of mind towards what is brought to expression through Spiritual Science, it can also be understood that when something in the world is criticised, one does not mean it at all as absolute depreciation, absolute blame, but that one uses phrases of apparent condemnation in order to characterise facts in the right connection.

When, therefore, one reproaches a world-historical personality, this does not imply that one would like to declare at the same time one's desire—at least in the criticism of this person—to be an executioner who cuts off his head—figuratively spoken—by expressing a judgment. This is the case with modern critics, but not with someone imbued with the attitude of mind of Spiritual Science. Please also take what I have now to say in the sense indicated through these words.

An incision had at some time to be made in mankind's evolution; it had at some time to be said: This is now the end of all that has been handed down from old times to the present: something new must being (diagram Page 109 (a)). This incision was not made all at once, it was in fact made in various stages, but it meets us in history quite clearly. Take, for instance, such an historical personality as the Roman Emperor Augustus, whose rule in Rome coincided with the birth of the current which we trace from the Mystery of Golgotha. It is very difficult today to make people fully clear wherein lay the quite essentially new element which entered Western evolution through the Emperor Augustus, as compared with what had already existed in Western civilisation till then, under the influence of the Roman Republic. One must in fact make use of concepts to which people are little accustomed today, if one wishes to analyse something of this sort. When one reads history books presenting the time of the Roman Republic as far as the Empire, one has the feeling that the historians wrote as if they imagined that the Roman Consuls and Roman Tribunes acted more or less in the manner of a President of a modern republic. Not much difference prevails whether Niebuhr or Mommsen speaks of the Roman Republic or of a modern republic, because nowadays people see everything through the spectacles of what they see directly in their own environment. People cannot imagine that what a man in earlier times felt and thought, felt too as regards public life, was something essentially different from what the present-day man feels. It was however radically different, and one does not really understand the age of the Roman Republic if one does not furnish oneself with a certain idea which was active in the conception of the old republican Roman, and which he took over into the age which is called the Roman Empire.

The ancient kings, from Romulus to Tarquinius Superbus, were to the ancient Romans actual beings, who were intimately connected with the divine, with the divinely spiritual world rulership. And the ancient Roman of the time of the kings could not grasp the significance of his kings otherwise than by thinking: In all that takes place there is something of the nature of what happened in the time of Numa Pompilius, who visited the nymph Egeria in order to know how he should act. From the gods, or from spirit-land one received the inspirations for what had to be done upon earth. That was a living consciousness. The kings were the bridges between what happened on earth and what the gods out of the spiritual world wished to come about.

Thus a feeling extended over public life which was derived from the old world conception—namely, that what a man does in the world is connected with what forms him from the cosmos, so that currents continually stream in from the cosmos. Nor was this idea confined to the government of mankind. Think of Plato: he did not chisel things out in his soul as ideas, but received them as outflow of the divine being. So too in ancient Rome they did not say to themselves: One man rules other men, but they said: The gods rule men, and he who in human form is governing, is only the vessel into which the impulses of the gods flow. This feeling lasted into the time of the Roman Republic when it was related to the Consular office. The Consular dignity in ancient times was not that genuine so-called bourgeois-element, as it were, which a state- government increasingly feels itself to be today, but the Romans really had the thought, the feeling, the living experience: Only he can be Consul whose senses are still open to receive what the gods wish to let flow into human evolution.

As the Republic went on and great discrepancies and quarrels arose, it was less and less possible to hold such sentiments, and this finally led to the end of the Roman Republic. The matter stood somewhat thus: People thought to themselves: if the Republic is said to have a significance in the world, the Consuls must be divinely inspired men, they must bring down what comes from the gods. But if one looks at the later Consuls of the Republic one can say to oneself: The gentlemen are no longer the proper instruments for the gods. And with this is linked the fact that it was no longer possible to have such a vital feeling for the significance of the Republic. The development of such a feeling lay of course behind men's ordinary consciousness. It lay very deep in the subconscious, and was only present in the consciousness of the so-called initiates. The initiates were fully cognisant of these things. Whoever therefore in the later Roman Republic was no ordinary materialistically thinking average citizen said to himself: 'Oh, this Consul, he doesn't please me—he's certainly not a divine instrument!' The initiate would never have admitted that, he would have said: He is, nevertheless, a divine instrument—Only ... with advancing evolution this divine inspiration could enter mankind less and less. Human evolution took on such a form that the divine could enter less and less, and so it came about that when an initiate, a real initiate appeared who saw through all this, he would have to say to himself: We cannot go on any further like this! We must now call upon another divine element which is more withdrawn from man. Men had developed outwardly, morally, etc., in such a way that one could no longer have confidence in those who were Consuls. One could not be sure that where the man's own development was in opposition to the divine, that the divine still entered. Hence the decision was reached to draw down, as it were, the instreaming of the divine into a sphere which was more withdrawn from men. Augustus, who was an initiate to a certain degree in these mysteries, was well aware of this. Therefore it was his endeavour to withdraw the divine world rulership from what men had hitherto, and to work in the direction of introducing the principle of heredity in the appointment to the office of Consul. He was anxious that the Consuls should no longer be chosen as they had been up to then, but that the office should be transmitted through the blood, so that what the Gods willed might be transmitted in this way. The continuance of the divine element in man was pressed down to a stage lying beneath the threshold of consciousness because men had reached a stage where they were no longer willing to accept the divine. You only arrive at a real understanding of this extraordinarily remarkable figure of Augustus, if you assume that he was fully conscious of these things, and that out of full consciousness, under the influence of the Athenian initiates in particular who came to him, he did all the things that are recorded of him. His limitation only lay in the fact that he could reach no understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha, that he only saw how human beings come down into matter, but could not conceive how the divine element should take anchor in the material of the blood. He had no understanding of the fact that something entirely new had now arisen in the Mystery of Golgotha. He was in a high sense an initiate of the old Mysteries, but he had no understanding for what was then emerging in the human race as a new element.

The point is, however, that what Augustus had accomplished was an impossibility. The divine cannot anchor in the pure material of the blood in earthly evolution, unless this earthly evolution is to fall into the Luciferic. Men would never be able to evolve if they could only do so as the blood willed, that is, developing from generation to generation what was already there before. However, something infinitely significant is connected with the accomplishment of this fact. You must remember that in early times when the ancient Mysteries were in force people possessed in the Mysteries a constant and powerfully active spiritual element, although that cannot be significant to us in the same way today. They knew, nevertheless, of the spiritual worlds; they came quite substantially into the human mind. And on the other hand people ceased in the time of Augustus to know anything of the spiritual element of the world; they no longer knew of it in consequence of man's necessary evolution. The Augustus-initiation actually consisted in his knowledge that men would become less and less fitted to take in the Spiritual element in the old way. There is an immense tragedy in what was taking place round the figure of Augustus. The ancient Mysteries were still in existence at that time, but the feeling continually arose: Something is not right in these ancient Mysteries. What was received from them was of immeasurable significance, a sublime spiritual knowledge. But it was also felt that something of immeasurable significance was approaching; the Mystery of Golgotha, which cannot be grasped with the old Mystery knowledge, with which the old Mystery knowledge was not in keeping. What could, however, be known to men through the Mystery of Golgotha itself was still very little. As a matter of fact even with our spiritual science we are today only at the beginning of understanding what has flowed into humanity with the Mystery of Golgotha. Thus there was something like a breaking away from the old elements, and we can understand that more and more there were men who said: We can do nothing with what comes to us from the Mystery of Golgotha. These were men who stood at a certain spiritual eminence in the old sense, the sense of the pre-Christian, the pre-Golgotha time.

Such men said to themselves: Yes, we have been told of one, Christus, who has spread certain teachings. They did not yet feel the deeper nature of these teachings, but what they heard of them seemed to be like warmed-up ancient wisdom. It was told them that some person had been condemned, had died on the cross, had taught this and that. This generally seemed to them false and deceptive, whereas the ancient wisdom which was handed down to them seemed enormously grand and splendid. Out of this atmosphere we can understand Julian the Apostate, whose entire mood can be understood in this way. More and more, individuals came forward who said: That which is given by the old wisdom, the way it explains the cosmos, cannot be united with that which blossoms, as if from a new centre, through the Mystery of Golgotha.—One of the individuals who felt this way was the sixth century Byzantine emperor Justinian (who lived from 527–565,¹ whose actions are to be understood from exactly this viewpoint. One must understand that he felt, through the whole manner in which he grew into his time, that something new was in the world ... at the same time there came into this new world that which was handed down from the old time. We will consider just three of these things which were thus handed down.

For a long time (five or six centuries) Rome had been ruled by emperors: The rank of consul, however, had existed for only a short time, and, like a shadow of the old times, these consuls were elected. If one looked at this election of consuls with the eyes of Justinian, one saw something which no longer made any sense, which had true meaning in the time of the Roman Republic, but was now without meaning: therefore he abolished the rank of consul. That was the first thing.

The second was that the Athenian-Greek schools were still in existence; in these was taught the old mystery-wisdom, which contained a much greater store of wisdom than that which was then being received under the influence of the Mystery of Golgotha. But this old mystery-wisdom contained nothing about the Mystery of Golgotha. For that reason Justinian closed the old Greek Philosophers' Schools.

Origenes, the Church Teacher, was well versed in what was connected with the Mystery of Golgotha, even though he still stood in the old wisdom, although not as strict initiate, yet as one having knowledge to a high degree. In his world-concept he had amalgamated the Christ-Event with the World-conception of the ancient, wisdom, he sought through this. to understand the Christ Event. That is just the interesting thing in the world concept of Origenes, that he was one of those who especially sought to grasp the Mystery of Golgotha in the sense of the old mystery wisdom. And the tragedy is that Origenes was condemned by the Catholic Church.

Augustus was the first stage. (see the lined diagram p.10a) Justinian in this sense was the second stage. Thus the earlier age is divided from the newer age, which- as regards the West—had no longer understanding for the Mystery wisdom. This wisdom had still lived on in the Grecian schools of philosophy, and had gradually to work towards the growth and prosperity of that current in mankind which proceeded from the Mystery of Golgotha. So it came about that the newer humanity, with the condemning of Origenes, with the closing of the Greek schools of philosophy, lost an infinite amount of the old spiritual treasure of wisdom. The later centuries of the Middle Ages worked for the most part with Aristotle, who sought to encompass the ancient wisdom through human intellect. Plato still received it from the ancient mysteries, Aristotle—he is, to be sure, infinitely deeper than modern philosophers—did not regard wisdom as a treasure of the Mysteries; he wished to grasp it with the human understanding. Thus what prevailed at that time in a noted degree was a thrusting back of the old Mystery Wisdom.

All this is connected with the perfecting in the new age of the condition which I described at the beginning of today's lecture. Had not the Grecian schools of philosophy been closed we should have possessed the living Plato, not that dead Plato whom the Renaissance produced, not the Platonism of modern times, which is a ghastly misconception of ^{1missing text}

• 1. According to the Encyclopaedia Britannica, Justinian lived from 482–565, and ruled from 527–565.

My dear friends, yesterday we were able to show how the intellect, all that is connected with the forming of our ideas and concepts, is in a certain way—especially in the case of Western thinking—set free from the inner upstreaming, the inner creating, and activity. We saw how through this fact man comes to the point of merely seeing images of something external in what he receives as concepts and ideas, and how he does not notice that at the same time as he is conceiving and thinking, something is also happening in him himself. An inner becoming is accomplished, an inner happening takes place. And I also referred yesterday to the polar opposite of this, namely, how the impulses of feeling and will are bewitched in the inner being of man, so that when he feels, when he brings his will into activity, he has the consciousness that he is then entirely and solely within himself, that he is concerned only with himself, and that what takes place in the impulses of feeling and will has nothing to do with anything in the outside world, in the cosmos. We believe that in our feelings we only bring to expression our inner life, we believe we are experiencing something which is connected only with this inner nature.

I have pointed out that this originates from the fact that certain spiritual beings of the hierarchy of the Archangeloi, at the time of the separation of the Old Moon from the Sun-evolution, did not take the step of separation, but remained, as it were, with the progressing Sun-evolution. What entered their destiny through their not having made this step of sharing in the Moon existence, they are now going through, in as much as they take part in our earthly existence. They interpenetrate us, interweave in us and shut off our feeling and our willing from the outer cosmic existence. They confine this feeling and willing of ours to our inner nature.

But now there arises through this, as you can readily imagine, a kind of pronounced separation between something in us that wishes to be confined to us ourselves, to live only within us as our impulses of feeling and willing, and something else which pays little heed to what is in us, and which are, far more turns outwards and tries to take a direction towards the external.

If we want to make a sketch of what this denotes we could perhaps say:

If this is the human being drawn schematically, we should first be concerned with our intellectual life (Diagram 1 yellow) which turns to the outer world and wishes to receive it and pays no attention to the fact that here within, it is raying out and continually calling forth our form. On the other hand we have an element of will and feeling here in the interior (violet), they radiate only within us and we are not aware that they now also go out into the cosmos, that they really bear something in them which is just as much derived from the cosmos as is the content of our thoughts.

There is, however, in us human beings a connection between these two centres within us. It is a connecting link (light red) but in ordinary life and existence it remains unknown, does not enter the consciousness. Man, in fact, experiences as his inner world, his feeling-and willing, and as his outer world his thinking, which leads over to perceptions, to the sense impressions. Thus, in ordinary life, the link between these two centres in us does not actually come to our consciousness. As a consequence of this, man can easily acquire the notion that truth is imparted to him from two sides, that he attains truth, or something like truth by observing the outer world through his senses, and then combining the observation with his intellect and so on.

Kant has examined this process of observation of the outer world and of the production of certain spheres of ideation on the basis of those observations. In his researches he found nothing to which one could come if one extended what tries to go out in the cosmos from the one centre. He came to a point where he asserted: ‘Yes, that (Drawing 1, yellow) must certainly go out to a ‘thing in itself,’ but one cannot find it.’ On the other hand he felt how from the inner being of man something thrusts up which lives in willing and feeling. But since the connection remained unknown to him there were two worlds for him; the world of the existing order and the world of the moral order. He only felt one thing to be clear. ‘Here, one does not come to anything at all. The thing in itself is nebulous, is unknown; but that which thrusts up as it were against man gives a certain inner compulsion.’ This Kant called the ‘categorical imperative,’ from which he derived all truths related to the inner nature—as he calls them: all higher truths of belief in contrast to the external truths, which, however, can tell nothing of the actual world.

We must, however, give our chief attention to this: that as a matter of fact, not merely through his own disposition, but because of his whole evolution during the Saturn, Sun, and Moon conditions, man thus shared in the separation which occurred in the Moon-evolution, and has therefore come to this dual partition and must experience it as a natural condition.

Now when we consider these matters still more closely, we come to an important and significant truth which is given us by Spiritual Science, on the ground of what has here been characterised. We can say; this state of our thinking, our intellect and conceptual life, is connected with the former separation of the Moon from the progressing Sun. The way in which we, as human beings, apprehend our thinking and conceiving is connected with the fact that certain Luciferic beings of the hierarchy of the Angels who, through what they had become, did not share in the return of the Moon to the Sun—that those are now living in our intellect, so that something Luciferic lives in our intellect and shuts us off from looking into the inner moving and forming. Thus Lucifer, as it were, dwells in our thinking.

What now is the essential character of this Luciferic influence? The essential is that we do not perceive what was established in us and developed by the normally progressive divine-spiritual beings but we perceive instead what has been made out of this normal evolution by Lucifer. And what is it for Lucifer himself, that what he should have experienced during the Moon-evolution, but did not, he now carries into the Earth-evolution, and in this evolution experiences for his own part what in that earlier time he did not share? What will be the nature of that which he must undergo during the Earth-evolution? I beg you to pay great attention to this, for it is full of importance, even if difficult. So what does Lucifer want? What do these Luciferic angels that are in our intellect want?

At that time they did not want to take the step of the union of the moon with the sun. Had they done so, they would, as it were, have united conceiving and thinking in the right way with human nature. This they did not do, so now they contribute nothing to it.

Now, however, during Earth-existence, they wish to do what they did not do formerly; they now wish to bind the intellect with the human being; they wish to do during the Earth-evolution what they ought actually to have done during the Moon-evolution. When you consider this earnestly you will understand that something of immense significance follows from it.

Had we not been misled by Luciferic beings in the way referred to, we should not relate thinking to ourselves as we do now, but we should look back to the Moon-evolution and say: ‘Long ages ago our thinking wished to unite with our inner being, wanted to belong to us.’ This we do not say, but instead: ‘We appropriate the thoughts of the world and now receive them within us.’ But that is sheer Luciferic temptation in the sense of the divine spiritual beings we should think: out there is extended the world of the senses as we see it; the moment we now pass over to thinking, we look back to the Old Moon-existence and attribute the whole earthly sense world to it.

The following is what we should experience: If we call that (see diagram) e earthly-perceived-sense world, we should then have the in us, i.e., the earth- contents, and we should not, as we do now, form concepts of the Earth-content, but we should say instead; All that we have in this way as earth-content, we relate to the ancient Moon,—and while we have sense-perceptions and the surroundings of earth appear to the senses there lights up in us the realisation that everything that lives and weaves upon earth, everything that exists and works and grows, appears upon the foundation of the old Moon existence.

There would light up something like a connection with a star apparently belonging to the past, but which was still there, living in our world of thought. We should feel in connection with the past existing in the present, and should see through the Luciferic deceptive picture which consists in this—that Lucifer holds before the shining Moon-existence a curtain, a veil, because at that time he omitted to unite himself with the Sun-existence. And he deceives us and makes us believe that what we ought to look upon as lighting up in us from the Old Moon-existence—that is from the eternally new Moon-existence is our thought-content, which is firmly established in us through our brain and rests within us as earthly men.

So through what has happened we have been shut off from that wonderful and mighty memory of the Old Moon. We do not see continually in the background, shining, as it were, into the nape of our neck, the explanation of all that the senses conjure up before us. We ought to go through the world, our senses turned outwards to sense-existence, and ought to feel as though our neck and the back of our head were shone upon by the ancient Sun and Moon-existence. And this would proffer the explanation of real, living concepts, concepts which are cosmic, and do not work into us from the external earthly objects.

Thus two world-pictures are projected through one another; the Earth-picture and the Moon-Picture. We ought to be able to hold them apart; the one, inasmuch as we turn our senses outwards, the other, inasmuch as we receive the shining from behind, and we ought to prevent their weaving into each other in our intellect. We cannot do this. Lucifer confuses the one with the other. Ideas, concepts, sense impressions, he mixes together, and philosophers have for a long time endeavoured to crack open a beautiful problem, which they call ‘antimony.’

You can refer to Kant: There on the one page you always have proofs brought forward, for instance, that the world is infinite as regards space; on the other page you have just as strict proofs advanced, that the world is not spatially infinite but is limited. For both there are equally conclusive proofs. They must be there, because the one point of view is just as true as the other, only one is the earth -view and the other the moon-view. To one who cannot hold them apart, they become insoluble contradictions, contradictions which cannot be solved in any case with earthly understanding. But we have seen that a still older kind of deviation from the forward course of evolution was that brought about by the spirits from the hierarchy of Archangeloi who live in our impulses of feeling and will. Therefore we can say: Lucifer through his existence shuts us off from the cosmos; he only allows us to feel the impulses of feeling and will which live in our inner nature. If he were not to shut us off like this, then, instead of feeling that will impulses and feeling arise as though from the subconscious inner being, man would be aware of all that shines into him, illumines him from the cosmos through the Sun-evolution. As man ought to be aware in his intellect of the Old Moon behind the ordinary sense-existence, so he ought to see behind his impulses of feeling and willing the radiating cosmic sun arise. In feeling and willing he should see—as the kernel in the fruit-the essence of the Sun shining through.

But we are shut off from this through Lucifer. We think that feeling and will are only something within us, we do not realise that they contain within them living sun-forces, sun-forces that are actually within them. If we were to feel these sun-forces, were we really to feel the spirit-light shining within feeling and will; then we should have an insight into the cosmos precisely through this lighting up of the spirit-light of the world. We should have a direct vision of the external through our inner nature. That has been destroyed for us through those Luciferic spirits who have an archangel nature and who did not share in the step of the separation of the Moon from the Sun. It had to be brought to us again through the coming of this cosmic sun-nature into the evolution of mankind. This cosmic Sun-nature came into earthly evolution through the Mystery of Golgotha, that Mystery, the entire reality of which man must first of all accept in himself, must inwardly experience :Not I, but Christ in me.

And proceeding thence, more and more that inwardly shining, shaping force is formed in him. Cosmic light penetrates feeling and willing like the sunlight and unites itself with the intellectual life so that we attain a uniform cosmic picture by learning to allow the Christ-impulse to live, not only in feeling and willing, but to let it flow into the world of our concepts and understanding. Thus, instead of merely looking to Christ Jesus, a whole cosmology is really born for us, a Christened cosmology. We come to learn what the cosmos was before the Mystery of Golgotha, when the Christ was united with the Sun-nature outside the earth realm, and what the cosmos is after the Mystery of Golgotha, when the Christ is now no longer separated from the earthly aura, but lives on further within the aura of the earth. Only through first feeling ourselves to be identified with the Christ-impulse, regarding, as it were, this Christ-impulse as the centre from which, as shown yesterday, we can receive the continuous, the eternal, ever-enduring revelation,—only through this do we press forward increasingly to the possibility of attaining to a concrete Christianity, full of content, which will then be completely one with the content of spiritual science, even as regards cosmology.

Take the whole nerve- let me say -of Christology,—take what a man must really understand to comprehend Christology. Why do so many people not understand it? Why do they connect no right ideas with the Mystery of Golgotha? Because it is asking too much of them to describe as reality something which they are not otherwise accustomed to call real.

A sentence is to be found in a book of Haeckel's which reads something like this: ‘The Immaculate Conception is an impudent mockery of human reason.’ But why of human reason? Well, the next sentence reads: because in all other cases, in the animal and human kingdoms, it is not possible to observe such a birth. That is obviously a logical contradiction in itself.. For one ought to bring forward ground based not on observation but on reason. But just here again we encounter a fact of such a nature that it is incompatible with the ideas which man receives from external reality. All that man otherwise calls ‘real’ is incompatible, with the reality of this fact, with the whole fact of the Mystery of Golgotha.

Thus a man must grasp something that contradicts his ideas of reality. Now to those who approach more closely to Spiritual Science a way should open to ideas which permit an understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha. You see, in ordinary life and also in modern science what one observes with the outer senses is called real, or at least, something that is founded on reality. Real science rests upon what one observes by means of the senses. People endeavour, however, to make use of the senses for other purposes, they try to grasp everything after the manner of sense observation of external things. Biologists try to grasp the living being, the living organism as though it were only a complicated cooperation of purely mechanical forces, a complicated machine, since it is only a complicated machine that they can actually regard as a reality.

What actually lies behind this? What lies behind it is the fact that men call something real,—and indeed nowadays, throughout the whole of their life—which is not real at all, which is not in the least what it is said to be. Consider a corpse. Can you say that this corpse is the man? No, this disintegrating corpse is not the man, it is the form of man which is breaking in pieces. And so it is with the whole of outer nature. People investigate the inanimate, and have no idea that everything which is inanimate has once been alive. Men must find the transition from the concept of ‘inanimate nature’ to the concept of ‘Nature that has died,’ men must really grasp the fact that all inanimate things were once living and have died, that what we can find today as stone and rock was alive during the Moon age and has died, has become lifeless stone through a process such as that passed through by the human corpse.

If we were to grasp this actively, and look upon Nature as a corpse, then we should know that what we call existence is not something that contains existence, but rather something out of which existence has already fled. This is of infinite importance. Men do not realise that they cling to the inanimate, not realising that it is something that has died, and that they are trying to learn to understand the living through what has died.

When men look at the living organism that has not yet died, but lives before their eyes, and reduce it to a mechanism which is only an image of the dead, they are trying to understand and explain the living from the dead. That is the ideal and goal of the whole modern world concepts: to grasp the living out of what has died. Spiritual Science must take pains, always take pains to replace an understanding through the dead by an understanding through the living. The whole trend of modern science must disappear, since its only aim is to grasp the living through that which has died, not merely through the inanimate, the inorganic, but through what has died. This whole science must disappear. In its place must arise an understanding of the world out of the living. And of all the non-living, the inorganic at the present time, it must be realised that in the past it too was a living being. Had we not been luciferically hindered, from perceiving behind the sense impressions what has been characterised as the Moon existence, which stands behind them,—then we should realises there lies the corpse of what still appears to us from the Old. Moon. Just as on seeing a human corpse we remember how the man appeared as he was in life, how he went about and spoke with us, so, on looking at the earth we should look back on what it was when it was still alive during the Old-Moon existence.

It must be the earnest endeavour of Spiritual Science that we should be led out of the dead into the living; that must be an active, true goal although it may be difficult to attain; for all that is contained in our modern science touching a conception of the world is thoroughly foreign and hostile to such an aim. We must not deceive ourselves about this, but be quite clear that the world conception of modern science is absolutely opposed to it.

It will be intensely difficult to gain a living grasp of the cosmos in place of ther dead one. But when we hold living ideas, then we shall no longer be wanting in an understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha. For we shall know that what, in general, is subject to death, is derived from the Moon-existence, but that the Christ is from the Sun-existence. He held back in order to bring to us the Sun-element again. He has nothing to do with all the concepts that are lifeless, but will replace them by living ones. Therefore it is necessary to unite with Him in a living way, not through a dead science. Therefore it is necessary to recognise that only under specially abnormal conditions, could that which cannot die, cannot become dead, enter into the earthly course.

When one studies the special connection which the Christ Being had during the three years with the body of Jesus of Nazareth, one comes to realise that Actually, in the different members which were united through the inter-connection of the two Jesus boys, through the fact that Zarathustra lived in the Nathan Jesus, something entirely special was created (I have already referred to this in other lectures), something which, during those three years made this whole body different from an ordinary human body. An ordinary human body is actually not the same as this body was already—and through the particular kind of union throughout the three years with the Zarathustra-being still- remained different from other earthly bodies. As the earth began to recapitulate the Moon-existence, there remained behind, as I have explained, that essential substance which then appeared in the Luke Jesus, the Nathan Jesus boy; something which had not entered into death, or passed through the illusion of earthly death, which in the course of earthly phenomena was reserved for Christ Jesus, this held back. This was in Christ Jesus, and guided him through these three years and through death,—through the Maya of death, in a different way from other human beings.

This extraordinarily central phenomenon of earthly evolution must, however be understood, must be really grasped, as standing outside everything that is derived solely from the Moon-existence, it must be understood as being inwardly connected with the regularly progressive Sun-existence. Nor, therefore, after the Mystery of Golgotha had been accomplished, could this Christ-Being be dependent on anything which is derived, only from the Moon-existence, derived, that is, from a Moon which had separated from the Sun, when during this separation Luciferic beings had taken part in the splitting off, but not in the reunion.

The Christ-Being remains completely untouched by all that is in the earth through this aberration from Luciferic spirits. He would immediately have been affected by it had He been incorporated in an ordinary human body. Hence He could only appear physically upon earth through these special and abnormal occurrences, not covered by earthly laws. And since this Being had taken possession of an earthly body through the Mystery of Golgotha, He is now upon earth spiritually and not subject to those laws which came into earth-existence through the Moon evolution. These are the laws of Space and Time.

Space and Time ... I have already indicated in Occult Science (as you will find in the passages there) that it is difficult to form a picture of the ancient Saturn and Sun conditions, because one must leave out the concepts of space and time. What one pictures as space and time in regard to this ancient existence, is only an analogy, only an image, does not as yet correspond with reality. The concepts of space and time have no reality if applied earlier than the Moon-existence. One cannot use this concept for the previous conditions of evolution. But that which comes through the Christ into the spatial-temporal is likewise not bound up with the laws of space and time. Therefore a genuine Spiritual Science recognises it as the greatest imaginable error to suppose that the Christ, as He is united now with earth-existence, could appear before mankind spatially limited in one single human being. It would be the gravest misapprehension of the Christ to assert that there could be a re-embodiment of Christ at the present day, and that if He perhaps wished to speak in the future to—let us say—a person in Europe and then to someone in America, He would have to take train and steamer and thus travel from Europe to America. That will never happen. He will always be raised above the laws of space and time. And we must conceive of His appearance in the 20th century as being raised above these laws. Never could the Christ, rightly understood, be embodied in a single human beings.

It would therefore be or rather it is a blow in the face of genuine Spiritual Science, wherever it is asserted that there could ever be a human re-embodiment of Christ Jesus.¹ But with this, it is also shown that Christology, that which the Christ really is, has nothing to do with any divisions of man and mankind.

We see there, my dear friends, a way open: how the cosmic, the sun-nature comes again into our whole human race, how again the sun-nature, lost through Lucifer, rises in our feeling and willing, how it rises again through the Christ in our feeling and will how from there it can take hold of our intellect. That is the way which all spiritual understanding of the world must take in the future. But for a long time there will be errors and mistaken paths; for—I have often stressed it—only slowly and gradually can the Mystery of Golgotha in its depths find its way into the whole course of humanity's evolution. Only quite slowly and gradually can that come about. And inasmuch as it is gradually accomplished, more and more, it will create an accord between man's, intellectuality and his feeling and willing. That will increasingly fill out the human being with an inner Man, with a second man.

In man as he is without this filling out through the Christ Impulse, the head&'s inner nature, one might say, is hidden. If a man feels his head, he has headache; the inner quality is physically completely veiled as regards the head. Man carries the head about with him in normal life without actually feeling it, he makes use of it for registering external impressions.

The other part of man, which is at the same time the seat of the world of lower desires, this is within us; this to begin with, takes up nothing from outside, lives in itself. And the Jahve-God has concealed in a world of law not entering human consciousness, all that lives down below, as the sum total of man's desire world, so that the Luciferic rumblings or egotism, do not become too great. Through Lucifer we should really only be organised as Earthly men, to use our lower nature—disregarding the intellect -solely and only for ourselves. We should develop not a single altruistic instinct but purely egoistic instincts. There would be in the world no natural foundation for love. The human being would merely use the instincts that live in his lower nature, for manifesting himself in the world, for putting himself into the picture. Hence this lower nature has been rendered dim and dulled by the Jahve Godhead.

The Jahve Godhead himself lives in this lower nature and implants the instinct of love and altruism, but of a kind more or less unconscious for ordinary human life. These instincts and impulses have to become conscious again through the Impulse of the Mystery of Golgotha. But in this whole unconsciousness of the desire world something of a twofold nature lies concealed. In the first place, the connection of the intellect, of the conceptual with the desire world remains in the subconscious. But nevertheless it works upwards, works definitely upwards and it works upwards through the fact that something enters which I have already often explained.

This whole desire world, which is actually an egotistic world belonging only to the human being, can, as it were emancipate itself from the Jahve Godhead living in it. Then it works upward, but—unconsciously and without man's knowledge—it presses through and interpenetrates the conceptual world with its imaginations. Then man becomes clairvoyant, that is to say, he his visions. He experiences as Imaginations all that lives in his desire world. In reality he only experiences his desire world; it shows itself to him as the Imaginative world. But since in this whole desire world of ours only the cosmos lives—though veiled from man—the Imaginations which rise up from his desire world like a mirage conjure up for him a complete cosmos. He can now experience a whole Cosmos, which Consists of nothing but that down below where the fire of the lower desires burns. This fire of the lower instincts then shoots upwards, and now a cosmos arises, here above in the intellectual system. This is essentially the process of self- mediumship. The medium who becomes a medium through his own desires and instincts succumbs to these processes. Such mediums are usually very proud of their Imaginations. They look down with arrogance upon those people who have no Imagination, whereas those in their turn can often very well see that such Imaginations, as are from time to time described as marvellous pictures are nothing more than what boils and bubbles in the instincts and in the digestive processes and loses its way upwards as cosmic images. It rises as a mist into the world of concepts and takes on the form of false cosmic pictures, expressing itself through these.

But the effect of this duality of human nature can appear in yet another way. For let us suppose that a second man meets the first man, a second who is naturally, as human being so constituted that his inner nature of willing and feeling hides the cosmos, and his intellectuality hides his own inner self. (Diagram II. Man) (Pg. 17)

Now let us suppose that such a second man, by means of various processes of which we have still to speak, came to the point of having more or less consciousness. Thus here would be man #1 and man # 2 (Pg 17) had reached a consciousness of this relation (Diagram II, Light red).

Now let us suppose that this man (II) was not disposed to employ all that came to him through such a consciousness in the pure sense of a universal and Christianized spiritual science, but that he had his own particular aims in the world. Let us suppose that this man belonged to a region which had framed a special world-concept in the course of historical development, and he had grown up within this region with such a world conception; and let us suppose that he had special, egoistic grounds to impose it upon the world quite intensively. The true occultist as we know has no other desire than to make valid that which can benefit all men; he has no lust of domination; but let us suppose that such a man II had a desire of power, and wished to make the world-conception of a limited territory dominate in other territories. Now if he simply goes ahead and represents in his own way the world concept that he wished to make dominant the following will happen: Some will believe him others will not believe him. Those who are of different opinion will not believe him, will repulse him- we know from experience how European missionaries are often repulsed by other races if they say things that these people do not understand or have no intention of understanding—another way. Since this whole process is a conscious one, he has the power of working upon another person e.g., upon Man #1 (Diagram Pg 2) and if he does not work merely through his intellect, but through his whole personality, he can act upon the intellect of the other.

Now if the other man is so organized that he has mediumistic tendencies—i.e., can receive something in an abnormal way—and so simply accepts it as truth because it is advanced by the second then there streams from the second into the first man the world concept held by the second, and the first allows it to pass through his unspoiled intellect if then the former appears before mankind, what is now presented comes out in quite a different way. People would notice in the case of man # 2 that acts purely on his own behalf in the world, and he has the power of clothing in an intellectual system what arises out of his inner being, for what he gives out is his own position. The ego of man #1 has not got it as its own possession but takes it from the other as something objective and advocates it with his intellect in such a way—since it is not his own personally—as to give it a more universal character. It seems to come from the unspoiled intellect of man #1 as if it were a universal truth. Here you have the facts as to how, from a certain grey or black direction, one-sided information is carried into the world. The particular one-sided grey or black spiritual-scientists do not bring it to the world by standing up and presenting their views, but they pour them into a mediumistic person. This person takes them over, passes them on and lets them work upon other people through their intellect. Hence such grey or black spiritual scientists often remain in the background as Mahatmas, and those who stand before the world speak of the Mahatma standing behind them, and what they proclaim is given out as a communication of the Mahatma.

This phenomenon leads up to much that has happened in a terribly psychologically-tragic way, one night call it, in the case of poor H.P. Blavatsky, who in the most eminent sense of the word, was a mediumistic personality. Her intellect was, however, never adequate to examine what was passed over to her by people who were not always honourable, but who could work precisely through Madame-Blavatsky. These persons concocted things which were not always irreproachable; in an egoistic sense and through the mediumistic intellect of Blavatsky they made this into something which then worked on people in a suggestive way. To those, however, who wish to take their stand honourably on the ground of spiritual science, quite definite rules and regulations of conduct are inseparable from it.

You see, from all that has now been expounded, that under all circumstances, when it is a question of spreading spiritual science, one sentence must hold good. It is obvious that anything coming from some kind of mediumism is interesting and significant, for it comes, of course, out of another world, but it must never be taken just as it stands. Otherwise it will fare with humanity as it did in the whole development of spiritism in the second half of the 19th century.

The whole development of the movement in the second half of the 19th century was really undertaken from a certain side in order to test men and ascertain how ripe they were to recognize not only the material sense world which men perceive with their senses lives around them, but also a spiritual world; for the modern material world concept of the 19th century had, under Ahrimanic suggestion, brought wide-spread belief in the sense word as the only existence. Already in the middle of the 19th century, it was a great question among occultists as to whether they should oppose this whole spiritistic movement. It was decided at the time not to not to oppose it, for it was assumed—though this was short-sighted—that when men saw how all sorts of things came from the spiritual world through the medium, they would most certainly bethink themselves that there were actually things and forces in the world which worked from one to another in a spiritual way. Instead of this the whole spiritistic movement plunged into a very egoistic materialistic channel. The majority of mediums everywhere said that they were in contact with this or that deceased person. They brought to light all sorts of things inasmuch as they said: this or that soul who died here or there communicated one thing or another through the medium. To be sure they brought to light very many things. But in far the greater number of cases a colossal error lay at the root of their claims. For if we imagine here the medium as Man 1, we have to imagine the experimenter or hypnotizer, i.e., the one who arranged everything, as Man 2.

Now in every man whilst he is alive here, all that is his dead part is already in him. But that reverberates below; during the waking day life it reverberates below in the sense perceptions. The dead part of man rumbles below in the sense perceptions. Now imagine the following: The medium is there, the experimenter also is there; he passes over to the medium or to whatever else may be manifesting in the arrangements, that which is actually pulsating in his own sense impressions, and often in his lower instincts and will reappear one day when he himself dies. Truths may be contained in all this, but one must understand the whole nature of what arises; one must not listen to the medium when he asserts that what comes to him by revelation is a communication from the departed.

The people who did not immediately offer resistance to spiritism, said to themselves: what it is will soon be evident. They wanted to know whether the working upon the medium of the living, of what lives in the embodied person, was really furthered. The mediums completely misunderstood this, always believing that they stood in connection with the departed. So we see how mediumism certainly formed a connection with the other world, though a deceptive one. Lucifer is not somehow driven away from the path of normality to mediumism but he is drawn in still more, the deception becomes still greater. What is in the inner being is not set free and distributed in the cosmos, but what is within spreads out like a mist in the conceptual world and becomes an imaginative world. What is in man's inner being can proceed from himself or rise up within him through the influence of another person.

But out of this will follow an infinitely significant and important law for the spread of spiritually scientific truth and for work in the stream of spiritual science. One should take care that all direct belief in a man's authority must be the less, the more this person shows marks and traces of mediumship. The more such a person comes and says; ‘I have received this or that as an impression somewhere or other,’ yet is not fully conscious of this and cannot furnish proof, all the less is there authority in his mediumship.

Therefore when H.P. Blavatsky brought certain teachings into the world, one had of necessity to say: This personality shows strong evidences of mediumship, and so it is impossible to credit her with authority, or at least only in a very slight degree. Authority must dwindle in proportion as the person shows traces of mediumship.

In the same way, it is an axiom, so to speak, in the spreading of the truths of spiritual science, that in this spreading there must never be any kind of appeal, when the truths are made public, to unnamed Masters or Mahatmas. No matter how many unnamed Beings and personalities stand behind such a movement, that which has significance as proceeding from such Beings is only significant for the one who directly confronts them; it is his affair whether he believes in them or not, and whether he can prove that they are worthy of trust. But it can never be his business when he is making public statements to claim that he has had it from unnamed Masters or Mahatmas, (in a small circle, if someone simply says... ‘This or that was said to me and I believe it,’ that is different, those are things that pass from one personality to another). The moment, however, that it becomes a question of presenting a teaching to the world, then the one who represents it must himself accept the responsibility for it. And only he who makes it clear though the type of man he is, that he does not appeal to unreal or unknown Mahatmas when he wishes to substantiate what he is propagating but who rather makes it intelligible and obvious that he, as personality, standing there on the physical plane, takes complete responsibility for his teaching, only he is living up to his full duty. And one who cannot do this, can refer to someone to be found by name on the physical plane, or who, if he is dead, can be found among the dead by historical paths.

It is therefore most important for the transmission of teachings that the one who communicates them with his own personality, as he stands there in the physical world, should accept full responsibility for the teachings, and must not appeal to unknown Masters. And those who spread the teachings further, may also only appeal to living personalities, who as physical persons are prepared to take full responsibility for their teachings. This gives a sure and certain way for dissemination of the teaching to a wider circle, but gate and door are barred against all persons unnamed and to all hints and allusions. Whoever asserts that he has received this or that from here or there, from unknown masters or from the dead (through which one can so regale oneself on one's own arrogance) against him is door and gate locked. For in spreading spiritual science the question is to know the path taken by the threads of confidence which lead to its original sources.

Hence, it was wrong when, in the so-called Theosophical Society one began to found certain society procedures on the utterances of unknown Mahatmas. That ought never to have been done. For anything that takes place and is propagated on the physical plane, a physical personality is answerable, as much as when teachings are circulated. He who spreads the teachings of another, has equally to show that he appeals, not to some unknown powers or impulses found along mediumistic paths, but to historical or living personalities. This means that he appeals to those who show the whole method of entry of spiritual truth into the physical world, who moreover, take full responsibility for their teachings and also show through their conduct that they take that responsibility. That is it above all! It is this latter above all!

These are two very important rules. The first is that we must possess the feeling that authority vanishes, if mediumism arises in the communication of the statements of personalities, and the second is that responsibility is never laid upon beings who are introduced to the world as unknown. One can, of course, speak of such unknown beings, but one must not appeal to them as authorities. That is a very different matter.

I only wished to place these indications before you today, since it is important to have the right feeling as to how the whole spirit and nature of the strivings of spiritual science should live in us. We must stand within this movement in the right way, otherwise the spiritual science movement will be immeasurably injured by being mixed up with unclear, mediumistic things, with appeals and references to all sorts of Mahatmas and beings who stand behind it. Everything that those standing in the movement so much enjoy shrouding in the magic breath of mystery (although it really proceeds from sense-instincts)—all this must be gradually ejected, otherwise we shall really not make progress in the sphere of spiritual science.

If every impact of a disordered gastric juice with the walls of the stomach causes an impetus that arises as a mist into the intellect and manifests there in the form of an Angel-Imagination, and the person in question then tells his fellow-men about this angel, that can of course make a very fine story! But what is instigated through this sort of thing only causes injury to the spiritual-scientific movement, endless injury. For the important part about these things is that they not only cause injury through what is said, but also through what they are—for they are, in fact, realities. The moment that one puts a false garment on them, one makes them appear before the world in a false form.

Obviously no one would make a special impression if he were to say: ‘I have had something going wrong in the stomach. The action of my gastric juices upon the stomach walls has appeared to me as an Angel.’ Anyone speaking thus would make no particular impression on his fellow-men; if, however, he were to leave out the first part, he would make a strong impression. It is extraordinarily important for people to have a thorough knowledge that this can happen. Naturally one cannot distinguish straight away between a true Imagination and a false one; but neither is it necessary to bring one's Imaginations immediately to people's notice. All that must be taken thoroughly into account. It is necessary, really earnestly necessary, to consider how the spreading of the spiritual science outlook can best take place in the world. We have had, up to now the instrument of the Society, no doubt too, in the future of our Anthroposophical Society we shall have it. But we must really so conceive of this Anthroposophical Society—or speaking more loosely—of our standing within the movement of Spiritual Science, that we shall consider in what way it is an instrument for something that is to take place spiritually in the whole earthly evolution.

You see, my dear friends, it happens all too often that one may become a member of the Anthroposophical Society, and yet carry into that Society all the various habits, inclinations, sympathies and antipathies that one had before becoming a member, and continue to exercise them. It is necessary to think this over. I have therefore today made the subject of our studies something that closely concerns us and that is real—and that is: how it is possible for imposters to appear who want to make propaganda for some one-sided world concept and make use of a mediumistic personality in order to introduce this one-sided world concept to the world. Just as the one who appeared in the place of the Master Kut-Humi stood there as an imposter and implanted a one-sided world concept in Blavatsky, so also was it possible for people not to see that behind her stood a grey magician who was in the pay of a narrowly circumscribed human society, and wished to promulgate a definite human world conception.

This is something very, very real, and shows us how keenly we must be on the watch when it is a matter of fostering and cultivating this sublime treasure of spiritual science, so necessary to mankind. One must strive for honesty—really into the inmost fibres of feeling; naturally faults may arise—but one must strive for the purest integrity. One must not, through laziness, be quickly satisfied that one can believe in anyone who gives one something of value, but must test every step, prove whatever comes to light. That is absolutely essential. It is a reality, not a mere theory, that steams into mankind in this spiritual science. Human evolution receives something actual and real through what steams into mankind through the world concept of Spiritual Science.

We must therefore become conscious that we must take a different stand on earth from that otherwise taken when we do not ally ourselves to such a Spiritual-Science stream.

• 1. This had to be especially emphasised in view of the propaganda of ‘The Star in the East.’

My dear friends, I should like to put together various things today which will give us the possibility of going into some important matters that we will speak of in connection with our present subject.

Let us suppose that here were the surface of the earth—arable land, meadow, or what you will (a drawing was made), and plants, any kind of plants grew in this meadow. And suppose that here were a worm or some little creature, that lives and burrows under the earth and has its home under the earth and never comes above the surface. This little grub or caterpillar, or whatever it is, creeps about inside and learns by its creeping about to know the roots of these plants. Naturally, as this creature never comes out above the surface of the earth, it only learns to know the roots of the plants, it learns to know nothing else; it creeps about and learns to recognise the roots. And what will happen is the following, is it not?

When a certain time comes in this creeping about of the caterpillar, processes are going on up above in the plants, in the whole plant nature; real processes are going on which are dependent on the sunshine, on the sun's giving out a certain warmth. The processes which the plants are undergoing naturally also bring about changes in the roots. When the plant above begins to put out fresh shoots and to bear blossoms, changes occur similarly in the roots. All the roots processes are affected when something occurs above. So we can say: when this worm is creeping about underneath, up above, caused by sun-activities, shoots, leaves, fruits are called forth, and processes are then brought about in the roots. But the caterpillar only crawls about in the earth; it creeps from root to root.

Now let us for once suppose—hypothetically we can accept it—that this caterpillar or grub were a worm-philosopher or a caterpillar-philosopher, and evolved a world-conception. Thus it creeps about there down below the earth and makes itself a world-conception. In the picture that it devises as world-conception, there can naturally never play a role, the fact that the sun comes and the shoots spring forth—for the caterpillar can know nothing of this; it creeps around, this caterpillar, this worm, and studies the changes in the roots, and notices quite clearly that something is going on, that the roots become different, and also that in the part of the earth lying round something is happening, and he now expresses all he knows, this worm. He expresses all of this, but in the picture of the world which he makes for himself, never a word is to be found about the existence of the sun, the coming forth of the plants; this indeed is self-evident. That is to say, a world-conception arisen in this worm-philosopher which will give a proper picture of the condition under the earth, whether it becomes damper, becomes warmer ... To be sure he does not know, this worm, whence this warmth comes ... That it becomes warmer, that all sorts of processes go on in the roots, all that he comprehends. And let us suppose the worm were not an ordinary worm-philosopher but was inspired by some modern philosopher of the opinion so current today, that all depends on cause and effect, everything is subjected to causality, as it is expressed in a scientifically philosophical-technical way. Then this worm will creep about down below and will call one thing a cause and another an effect and say: Now the earth becomes somewhat warmer from above downwards; that causes alterations in the roots. With the further processes he will represent the one as cause and the further processes in the roots as effects, and so on ... and a consistent picture will emerge, which classifies all the processes under the earth as cause and effect. But it would not include that fact that the sun shines, and the plants come out, and through this the processes in the roots are changed. Still, the worm's world-picture would be quite a consistent one. It could be a genuine picture of causality, there need be nothing lacking in the chain of cause and effect.

Now you see, it is quite clear to you, I think, that this worm-philosophy represents a one-sided world-conception which is quite correct ... except that it lacks what man considers the most important of all. That is, that the sun comes with its warmth and light and brings about what the worm actually observes down there below; it is clear, indeed, how in fact his whole causality only depends on the fact that he does not come up above the surface of the earth.

You see, as a matter of fact, such worms are the people who philosophize today on the chain of causality, of causes and effects. The image is completely opposite: men makes researches into what their senses see; and move about in what—well, not in what is shut off spatially from above—but in what is shut off through sense observation, and they simply do not perceive the spiritual extended everywhere, that causes the causes. They do not distinguish the spiritual which is behind cause and effect. It is really an exact analogy.

Now if the worm should suddenly come out and see the sun, he could discover that the cause of all he has puzzled out down below is, as a matter of fact, what other beings up above are seeing, and that his world-conception simply does not hold good. He would have to realize that what he himself underneath has had as perceptions of differences, is up above. It is just the same when one raises oneself from ordinary human sight to spiritual sight, for one notes how then something comes into the sense-world which cannot be perceived under ordinary circumstances.

You also see from this how the much vaunted inner completeness of a world-conception means nothing for its correctness. One who can set himself genuinely with his whole heart and soul into this worm-existence can give the assurance that nothing at all in this worm-conception need rest on a logical error. Hence all logic can be correct and complete in itself, there need be no logical error in it, it can be a world-conception completely tenable inwardly. You will realize from this, however, that it is in no way a question of being able or not able to prove something with the instruments of the world in which man is. I have often referred to this from other aspects. This we are not concerned with, whether or not a man can prove something with the means offered by the world in which he dwells. World-conceptions can have ever such fine proofs in themselves, they still remain—well—let us say: worm-world-conceptions. When we let this really work upon our soul, we see what stands behind of great importance: we note how—when we once guess that there are yet other worlds—a kind of general world -the duty arises of entering into those other worlds. For no matter how complete in itself is a world-conception, it does not follow that it gives one any knowledge of the actual events and processes. And this is truly what one finds with the majority of the philosophies of today and the immediate past; they are worm-conceptions. They are complete in themselves in a really extraordinarily logical way, they have an immense amount of value for the worlds in which man dwells; but they are only constructed with the means of the worlds in which man dwells. You see from this that you cannot rely on so-called proofs, unless you first come to understand where these proofs originate. For our time, it is truly a matter of getting a feeling for the way other worlds permeate our world, for the way other worlds allow themselves to become manifest. Certainly, this is difficult. For truly, conditions for the worm are such that he lives underground; the worm would not endure well up above, if he were forced to go out there; first he would have to adapt himself to the new conditions. Thus it is also difficult for the human being, when he detaches himself as soul from his bodily nature, to adapt himself to the new conditions.

Now you can raise a question, my dear friends, you can say: ‘Fine, you have now compared the world in which the human being lives with his senses to the world under the earth. Show us something, anything at all, that limits, truly limits our ordinary sense-world conception in any such way.’ One can raise this point quite seriously. In the course of the process of consecutive formation of Saturn, Sun and Moon, Time (during the Moon-existence) and Space (during the Earth-existence) first entered into humanity's world conception. When we speak of Saturn, Sun and Moon, and use spatial conceptions to aid is that description, we actually speak only in Imaginations, and we must remain conscious throughout of the fact that when we speak of these three worlds in spatial conceptions, these space-conceptions have only as much to do with what was brought to completion in those worlds as ... well, let us say, as the forms of the letters of the alphabet have to do with the meanings of the words. We must not take contemporary conceptions as they are, but rather as signs, as images of these worlds. For Space only has meaning for that which evolves within the span of Earth-existence, and Time has actually only become meaningful since the separation of the Old Moon from the Sun; that is the strict point in which the Old Moon separated from the Sun. Then for the first time it is possible to speak of events occurring in time, as we speak today.

Since, however, we have our mental concepts in time and space—for everything external that we conceive is in space, everything that we bring to consciousness and let arise within, runs its course in time—we are thereby between birth and death, but only between birth and death, shut in by space and time, as the worm dwells down there in its earth. Space and time are our boundaries, just as the earth substance is the worm's boundary. We are worms of space and worms of time; we are so, truly, in a quite high, in a quite exact sense. For as incarnated men we move about in space; we observe things in space, and that which observes is our soul, which itself lives in the concepts (Vorstellungen). Between birth and death time goes on, from falling asleep to awakening time goes on. The comparison is by no means a bad one, when one sees the reality. Insofar as our soul is enclosed in the body, as regards the world-picture it forms, it is truly a worm, who creeps about in space and who, if it wishes to arrive at realities, must come out of space. Then it must also get accustomed to viewing things not merely under time-conditions, but under conditions, for which that which takes its course in time is nothing but an outer sign, like a letter of the alphabet.

Now after I have called attention to this, I will lead these studies over to the realm of soul and spirit. Just as the coming plant is already actually contained in the seed, so, naturally, there was already contained in an earlier germinal state, what has developed for man today on earth in perceptions of space and time. I have already pointed out here in one connection that rudiments were already contained in Saturn, Sun, Moon. So that when here on earth we assign a certain meaning to what goes on around us, we must as it were see this meaning already present, in the old evolution of the Moon, the Sun, etc. With the forming of time and the forming of space, the meaning of life on earth must in some way have prepared itself. The forming of space and time must have so come about that then the meaning of the earth-life was added to it like a kind of flower. Now we can picture these processes—Saturn, Sun and Moon in the following way. We can say: We have an Old Saturn existence which is surrounded by the cosmos; we have an Old Sun-existence, again surrounded by the cosmos; we have an Old Moon-existence but already developing out of it a sort of neighbouring planet (you may read this in my Occult Science and we have then learnt to know that the Earth separates from the Sun and again from the Moon.

If the man of materialistic thought (I will suppose what is most favourable for our Spiritual Science) could prevail on himself to believe in these developments, he would still have to overcome the next step, which consists fundamentally in the fact that the whole evolution (origin of Saturn, of the Sun, further development to Moon, separation of the Moon, separation of Earth, Sun and Moon) all really occurs in order to make Man possible, as he is on earth. Just as the processes of a plant's root- and leaf-building happen in order to make possible the blossom and the fruit, so do all these processes, these macrocosmic processes, happen in order to make possible our life on earth; they arise so that we may live on earth in the way we do. One could also say: These processes are the roots of our earth-life; this life is there so that we can develop on Earth as we do. Let us be quite clear that we have to do with the separation of the Sun on the one hand, the separation of the Moon on the other hand—that we have to do with separations so that our Earth could come into existence as Earth. That is to say, we were left behind on the Earth planet, and Sun and Moon separated from us and work on the earth from outside. That had to come about, otherwise nothing could have developed in us as it does on earth. For everything to develop on Earth in the way it does it was necessary that once in primeval times Sun and Moon were united with the earth and that then they separated, and now let their activity shine in from outside upon the earth. That is absolutely necessary.

Now I should like to show that our inner soul life has taken on quite distinct configurations through the fact that this has taken place. Among the very varied ideas which we have—I could adduce many as examples—and which play a certain role in the whole state of our earth existence, is the idea of ‘possessing something,’ ‘having something.’ This implies that our own person unites itself with something which is outside the personality. We speak in the rarest cases of possessing our arm and our nose, for most people experience their arm or nose as so much belonging to them that they do not speak of a possession. But what could be separated and then belongs to us we describe purely in the legal sense as a possession, a genuine possession. Now the concept of possessing something which is outside could not be formed in us at all, if there had not arisen the separation of what had formerly belonged to the earth, and the being drawn in again of the Sun and Moon to the earth. Our life was quite different on the Old Sun. There Sun and Moon were united as Sun with what were processes of Earth; they were inwardly united with the whole human existence. There the human being could say: ‘Sun activity in me,’ ‘I Sun activity’ (if he could have said ‘I’ already, as the archangels could) ‘I Sun activity’; not ‘the sun shines on me, Sun activity comes toward me.’ This Planet or Fixed Star Sun had to be separated so that we as earth men could develop this special configuration of the possession-concept.

Now this is connected with something else. Imagine an Archangel on the old Sun-existence; he says: ‘I Sun.’ That we see something rests upon the fact that the sun's rays or other light-rays shine on the object and are thrown back to us. Were the sun to shine from the midst of the earth, we should see nothing of the objects which are upon the earth. We should then say: ‘I Sun,’ ‘I Light,’ but we should not separate the individual objects, we should not see them. Thus something else still is connected with this. In the Earth's evolution from Saturn, Sun, Moon to Earth, we have for the first time, through this macrocosmic constellation, the possibility of seeing and perceiving objects as we do now. Such perceptions were naturally not present during the Sun-existence. Although the first rudiments of our sense-organs had already been prepared on Old Saturn, they were only opened upon the Earth, only there were they made organs of perception. These rudiments on Saturn were blind and unperceiving sense-organs. The sense-organs were first opened by the separation of the Sun and the departure of the Moon from the earth. You see from this that two processes go parallel—the activity of our sense-perceptions and the sight of external objects, and running parallel with this, the possession-concept. For how do we come to the concept of possession? You could not imagine that an Archangel during the Sun-existence wished to possess anything. He does not behold things; he is everything. If all objects and beings of the earth were like this, they would never have the urge to want to possess anything. With this development of the senses develops for the first time the possession-concept, the possession-concept is not separable from the development of the senses; these two things run parallel. The senses were on the one side, and something like the possession-concept on the other side. Other concepts can also be taken.

And when we consider in a more comprehensive sense what stands in the religious records, in the Bible (for in such records as the Bible very many things lie concealed)—then we can say: What is given at the beginning of the Bible about the Luciferic temptation is connected with the promise of Lucifer to man that his senses shall be developed: ‘Your eyes shall be opened.’ He means that all senses shall be opened—the eyes only stand for the senses as a whole. In this way he has guided the senses to external things and at the same time called forth the concept of possession. If we wished to relate somewhat more in detail what Lucifer promised to the woman we should have to say: You will become as gods, your senses will be opened; you will distinguish between what pleases you and does not please you, what you call good and evil, and you will wish to possess all that pleases you, that you call good.—One must connect all this with the Luciferic temptation.

Now we must reflect about something, if we wish to grasp aright such a conception as I have now developed. Here is one of the points where it is necessary in a lecture on Spiritual Science to call upon the reflection and meditation of each individual who wants to assimilate what is given. One must reflect upon something; In developing for you the arising of the senses, the perception of objects, and the evolution of the possession-concept, we have not been obliged to introduce any concept of space or time. To be sure, if a man wants to picture these things to himself, if he sketches them on a board, he avails himself of the assistance of the space and time idea. But in order to grasp what this means: 'the senses are opened' or 'the possession-concept is developed' one does not need the idea of space and time. These things are independent of space and time. You do not need to think you are spatially distant from something when you want to possess it; nor do you need to call on the time-processes. I have said, here one must summon self-reflection, for everyone can object: ‘I cannot do it’ ... But if he makes sufficient effort, he can imagine such things without the aid of space and time concept. Indeed, something else is true: when you try to bring such concepts clearly to consciousness, that is, to meditate them as I have just done with you, you gradually come out beyond the idea of space and time. You come out into a world where space and time really do not-play the eminent role in your experience that they play in everyday life.

Now there exists in the evolution of humanity a peculiar longing. Wherever in history we meet with the human race in its innermost striving, we come upon a certain longing. And that is the longing to have concepts which are independent of space and time, which have nothing to do with space and time. Historical events are transformed into myths, or in the historical presentation there is an indication of the spiritual in order to make it possible to show how historical events take a mythical form. And the further we look back in history, for instance, the more we find as historical traditions, the historical facts veiled in the myth. Only reflect how already in ancient Greek history all is veiled in myth and in regard to earlier mid-European history all is enveloped in myth and legend! The further one goes back the more one is removed from the external, merely physical feeling of facts, and the presentation plunges into symbolism. When you study myths you will remark that in the arising of myths there is clearly to be seen the desire to work oneself out of space and time. Not only that fairy tales—the most elementary myths—often depict how some human being (I am thinking of the Sleeping Beauty) passes out of time and enters the timeless, but when you examine myths you will see that you do not rightly know which facts are meant to be spiritual. Something that lies centuries earlier may be related later. Sometimes, too, facts which lie hundreds of years apart in history are welded together in a myth. The myth seeks to lift itself above space and time. This means that there lives in man's existence the longing to rise above this space-condition which makes us think and visualise in space and time. There is a longing to live in such concepts as depict, free of space and time, those realities which rule as the eternal things in the succession of events in our space and time existence, or, if they have once been formed, remain as the eternal things.

You see, if you take what I have just said together with something which I said last time you will see a wonderful connection. I said that if a Luciferic quality was not active in us, we should see that our world of concepts is really in the Old Moon. But now it follows from this that the Old Moon is actually present, has remained, and that it is only Lucifer who bewitches us into thinking that our concept is now in ourself. Thus time becomes there a means of deception and illusion for Lucifer. The ancient Moon-existence endures and so also do things that arise, endure. Our possession-concepts are enduring. This means that what earthly man develops as social earthly-order, by reason of his possession-concept, this remains, this will also still be in existence when the Jupiter and Venus conditions are one day there. And then if corresponding temptations do not come as Luciferic and Ahrimanic temptations, one will see how social orders were formed on earth through the possession-idea. They will then present something like physical orders. For that is a part of Maya-existence, of illusion—the idea that things pass away; in reality they are enduring, in reality they go on subsisting. And already, if one understands things aright, one finds the enduring behind the actual past. You can grasp it to some extent in what I have just related.

But now, if we truly grasp what I have said, we are really looking into profoundly important foundations of our whole earth-existence. For do we not see how beneath the spatial and temporal earth-existence the eternally enduring earth-existence, or existence in general, is veritably spread out? How we have a spatial, a temporal-spatial condition on the surface, and within, the condition of duration. And now comes our mode of viewing things when it takes its course in space and time, our views and concepts that live in space and time. Just consider, how one can picture that concretely in detail, think for once ... nowadays men no longer grasp this thoroughly ... but somewhere or somehow, think simply 'red.’ In order to think 'red' you need no space and you need no time; you can think 'red' to yourself anywhere; it does not have to be there in time or space, because it is thought of just as quality. (red was put on the board.) It is difficult nowadays for a man to picture it because he wants to give the red a boundary. It was not difficult like this for the angels on the Old Moon for they had no desire to distribute red over separate objects. They had time already, but not space. Actually they pictured, that is they experienced 'red' or 'green' or any other colour as flowing current. Try to conceive this vividly: blue = flowing current; red = flowing current; conceive, too, of the other sense-experiences in the same way—streaming, but only in time, letting no real spatial concept, intermingle ... we can say: at the transition from Moon- to Earth-existence one can feel how the mere time-quality was yoked into the spatial. What then actually determines the essential nature of earth existence, that a 'red' is in this way given a boundary and yoked in? On the Moon it would have been impossible to see an enclosed 'red,’ on Earth it is possible to see red enclosed in a boundary. (A sketch of a flower was drawn.) This, however, is connected, inwardly connected, with the separation of the sun from the earth, and with the falling of the sun's rays from outside upon the earth. So that in a true sense I can say: the sunbeam falls on earth from outside. That already shows you that our present existence is inconceivable without the space-concept. Yes, for our present perception and life, this external position of the sun betokens something real.

Now from what I have brought forward you can easily gather that we can really say: colours are harnesses into space. In ‘Theosophy’ I have called that which lives in man after death ‘flowing sensitivity,’ since there he is not bound to space. I therefore spoke of the first world through which he lives as the ‘world of flowing sensitivity.’ For the sun's must first come in from outside, must harness sense-perceptions into space. With this is connected, as I have explained, the fact that man evolves ideas of possession; for in a world of flowing sensitivity a person can never think of possession -time at most is present there—and he would soon see the futility of it if he were to think of possession. It would be rather like thinking of possessing a piece of water, flowing along in a brook. This only arises inasmuch as the sun, separating from the earth, brings the sense-perceptions into the framework of space.

You see, something like this that I have just expounded must be transformed into an experience, a feeling; one cannot leave it as a mere theoretical concept. One must change it into a feeling, one must really get an inner living sensation how as man, as microcosm, one is placed into the macrocosm, and how this very yearning, i.e. to possess something, is connected with the whole development of the macrocosm, with the course of events through which sense observation has developed. When one feels this rightly, when one begins, so to say, to feel cosmically how, for instance, the simple concept: thou wouldst like to possess what thou seest and what pleases thy sight ... how this is born out of the macrocosm, then for the first time one really gets the truly living idea that the human soul nature is dependent on the whole cosmos. Then one gets a strong and vividly living feeling of how in every concept of ordinary life one is connected with the macrocosm, and how actually in all that we picture and conceive and experience in the soul, the macrocosm lives in us. And there exists a continual longing in man to experience such hidden connections as actually exist in life, and to express the experience. This exists—this longing in the human soul, in the heart of man. And let us imagine that there arose in a human soul a vivid feeling and sensation ( I wish to express the cosmic connection of this single soul experience): ‘My eye falls there on an external object; I want to possess it; I will appropriate it’ ... then from such a feeling, one can experience what I might call—the tragedy of Nature. I say 'the tragedy of the world of nature.’ We really take from a whole world,—extending to the Moon and still present as the basis of our world,—we take from it what we wish to possess. What we desire to possess we take away from this world which rests on the basis of our natural world. That we take away. And this it is which must be consistently felt by a human soul felt by a human soul that is really sensitive to nature: that there, in the background of Nature, lies something which she must continually submit to; namely, that man contests Nature, who will give all to all, and says: ‘This belongs to me!’ And now consider with full human feeling this gainsaying of Nature, who gives all to all: This I will have for myself, and that I will have it for myself is induced by the fact that my senses find it good or less good for me, sympathetic or antipathetic. Here one can enter deeply with one's own soul into natural existence, can feel with Nature how something is taken away from her. And it is taken away because the human being, under the impression of his senses, forms the thought that he wants to have for himself what Nature wishes to give to all.

I once felt in my soul, my dear friends, suddenly and with special profoundness, how one can experience this whole relationship that I have just sought to characterize. How one can learn to feel with Nature when she says: Protect myself as I will, world evolution has gone so far that the human being declares that my things are his things. Yes, in a certain moment years ago, I felt that experience most warmly and intimately in my soul. It was years ago in a society where there was to be a programme of Recitations. And as it happens from time to time, especially in Recitation programmes, that the persons concerned are prevented from coming and excuse themselves; so it happened here too, a lady reciter sent her excuses and at once a substitute had been found. And now one may think as one will about the value of the declamation that followed and about the substitute—I will not go into that now,—but he was of a quite particular kind, namely, there was found ready to recite the programme in place of the actress who had fallen out, one of the purest, noblest Catholic priests that I have ever come to know in the world. And one had then, or could have, a quite specially significant experience, which in effect condensed for me into what I just now expressed to you.

For this grave and earnest priest—with all that Catholicism brings with it for the really true and upright priest—had according to the programme to recite the ‘Heidenröslein’ of Goethe. And in this recitation one could really experience something, for the man was not only a priest in the ordinary sense, but he, was so learned and so purely given up to spiritual studies, that many said: ‘This man (I will not mention his name) knows the whole world ... and in addition, three villages ...’ for they found him so wise and experienced in things one can know. Now although the recitation was not particularly good, there actually lay in the whole mode and manner in which he gave the ‘Heidenröslein,’ something immensely significant, since one could feel that his whole perception of the world was derived, one might say, from a perception that had been turned away from everything of a sense nature. One could feel how, precisely through the fact that a priest came forward instead of an actress, the whole cosmic power, the immense cosmic power and fineness that lies in this unique poem ‘Das Heidenröslein’ (see end of lecture for poem and translation) came into the recitation. This poem has, indeed, what one might call a prelude; it is an old folksong. And I have already said that men have ever the longing to experience what lives cosmically in the subsoil of existence. And precisely in this poem ‘Das Heidenr&öslein’ there enters something of this quite grandly sublime cosmic subsoil in infinitely simple images. Therefore one must count ‘Das Heidenröslein’ among the very finest pearls of poetry that ever have been given to the world. Years ago I have also heard of people who have attributed something or other, I know not what, of everyday human, all-too-human, connexions to ‘Das Heidenröslein’; that merely comes from a perverted condition of mind. If people can do that—interpret anything which is not quite pure into the ‘Heidenröslein,’ this appertains to a mind that from its sense-exhalations likes continually to revel in all sorts of ‘sacred love.’ One can indeed revel continuously in ‘sacred love’ from sensations of sense-exhalations but that which underlies as cosmic foundations such a poem as ‘Das Heidenröslein’ can only be felt with pure, with chaste heart, and every misconstruction would show a complete desolation and emptiness of mind.

For let us take the wonderful thing which this ‘Heidenröslein’ has actually become as it has been given us by Goethe, and through the fact that the folk song passed over into the youthful lyric depths of his art. Something quite remarkable it has become: in every line always the very thing that ought to be there! Consider for a moment that one felt what lies in the activity of sense-perceptions and how they have developed throughout cosmic evolution ... and that one wished to describe this. How could one do it better than by taking the red in an object, eliminating the space-boundary and letting echo: ‘Röslein, Röslein, Röslein rot’ ... ‘rot’ (red) echoing in ‘Röslein,Röslein,Röslein rot.’ Immediately there confronts us the whole mystery as it is set before us out of the cosmos. The sense-world stands there: ‘Röslein,Röslein,Röslein rot,’ in the continuous ‘Röslein,Röslein,Röslein rot.’ Now in the first line we are shown at once that we are concerned with this mystery—this being able to look out from the senses,’sah ein Knab' ein Röslein stehn, Röslein auf der Heiden.’ Now already in the next line in a wonderful enhancement, which is rarely so beautiful in poetry, a nuance is brought out that now the little red rose begins to become sympathetic—‘War so Jung undmorgenschön’ ... it thus already becomes something which warrants sympathy with what is revealed from the senses. So the next line is inserted with precisely what belongs to it: ‘lief er schnell, es nah zu sehn’: there you have the whole correspondence of the senses with what is presented to them: he runs to see it close to! And now the next line, again an enhancement, but this time in himself; to begin with, the intensification was outside,—‘Röslein auf der Heiden,’—simply the object; then ‘was so young and morning-fair,’ the enhancement outside, and in him ‘ran he fast, it near to see’ ... inasmuch as he ran fast to see it near, ‘Sah's mit vielen Freuden’ (saw it with much joy). You see how the outer corresponds with the inner. Now comes the refrain, ‘Röslein, Röslein, Röslein rot, Röslein auf der Heiden,’ in order to show us quite particularly how the correspondence is between him and that which appears outside as the object ‘red.’ And the mysterious connection with possession: ‘Knabe sprach: ich breche dich.’ He wants to possess it, he wants to pluck the little rose, he wants to take it home with him. There is nothing else in it, but what is in it is of wonderful cosmic depth.‘Knabe sprach: ich breche dich, Röslein auf der Heiden. Röslein sprach: ich steche dich ...’We can see in this sentence, ‘ich steche dich’ (I prick thee) the whole mystery of Nature, who wants to protect herself from man's assertion: ‘I will take thy things home.’ She, Nature, would like to do with all her objects as she would have done with the little rose ‘ leave it for all to see who pass by. For in this ‘Röslein sprach: ich steche dich’ is indeed uniquely contained what I have described as a feeling that shares in the tragedy of Nature. ‘bass du ewig denkst an mich’ (that thou must think of me eternally); he must think of Nature forever, for he transforms her permanence into something fleeting, he brings the possession-relation into what has first arisen in space and time. The human being must atone for his having come out of permanence and must therefore at least think of it eternally, it must be perpetuated, made eternal; the untruth must not persist that it is not perpetuated. Then again: ‘und ich will's nicht leiden’ (and I will not suffer it). The little rose simply stands as the representative of the whole of Nature—every natural object actually says this when one wants to possess it. And again, so that attention may be fully fixed on the real subject, ‘Röslein, Röslein, Röslein rot, Röslein auf der Heiden...’ And the next verse again shows a wonderful enhancement: he will not let himself be held back—‘und der wilde Knabe brach's Röslein auf der Heiden’—thus he nevertheless determines to possess it! ‘Röslein wehrte sich und stack’ ’¦ Again as the representative of the whole of Nature. ‘Half ihm dock kein Weh und Ach’—this is the general experience of Nature, and we feel that tragedy which expresses itself like a mood in Nature when man wishes to possess her: ‘Musst' es eben leiden’ (she must after all permit, suffer it.) Infinitely profound are these words ‘musst' es eben leiden!’

But this microcosmic mystery has in fact a macro-cosmic counterpart, and if one now leaves the microcosm for the macrocosm one may say—who then in the macrocosm is the wild boy who plucks the little rose on the heath? It is the sunbeam, which separated from the earth with the Sun and which now falls on earth from outside. It actually calls forth on the one hand the little rose on the heath, but then when it sees it, when it is there, quickly gathers it again, makes it wither and fade.

Thus it is in nature everywhere. Nature still gives us a memory of the ‘Musst’ es eben leiden’: next to the rose the thorns, the shrivelled thorns which are a token that Nature nevertheless remembers how the sunbeam takes from her what she possesses. But when we do not merely observe as the materialist does, but include the whole cosmic feeling, the thorn near the rose is also the expression of the grief of nature in contrast to Nature's great joy; the jubilation of nature when the rosebush stands there with all its roses, the grief when the wild boy, the sun-ray comes and makes the roses wither. That is the Goethe-poem in the macrocosm: and one can only say: if anything is fitted to stimulate esoteric feelings, it is such poems, where there is no need to think and attribute all sorts of dry allegories to them, but where one only needs to remember a great truth:—when the true poet goes beyond nature it is because he seeks to put into words what can be felt behind the surface of facts, and beyond space and time.

And when a poet produces something in such simple incidents as a boy's plucking a rose on the heath, which yet speaks so deeply to our hearts, it is because this heart of ours received its rudiments when we ourselves were not yet united with the earth, when we were still united with the ancient Sun existence—and were able to feel with the whole world. Although through the Luciferic-Ahrimanic illusion we now ascribe our feelings to ourselves as I have shown, yet all the same they arise out of the cosmos, and on this rests the fact that we can so inwardly accompany the true poet although he describes the simplest incident of the plucking of a rose. For into what arises from the human soul in the simplest events, the whole cosmos is placed. And we need not make assertions and think it out, but we feel it, when we let such a marvellously delicate poem as ‘Das Heidenrösslein’ work upon us. We feel that the whole world is secreted in it, world mysteries are laid within it,—so that the secrets of art too gradually reveal themselves to us. They unfold as we ascend from the perception and experiencing of objects in a purely external way to an inward perception, as we ascend from microcosmos to macrocosmos and seek gradually to learn the hidden but active mysteries in our souls.Das Heidenröslein—¹

• 1. ‘rosebud’ is not strictly ‘Röslein,’ but is used for the sake of the metre. (Translator)

My dear friends,

Let us remember that the human being was built up in a long, complicated evolution through the Saturn, Sun, Moon stages and the Earth as far as its development has progressed. We have stressed that the first rudiments of the sense-organs were present in the time of ancient Saturn, and that of course they were not then adapted for making perceptions as the human being makes perceptions today. During the Saturn condition they were still lifeless germinal organisms, which then underwent changes and only through the various processes which have acted on man from the cosmos have become capable of perceptions.¹

The first thing, however, which is revealed with particular clearness, when we regard the whole course of human evolution, is that these sense-organs as such have to do with what we can call physical operations. On Old Saturn the first germ of the sense-organs arose as a purely physical rudiment, for the development of the human sense-organs advances by the incorporation of the physical into whatever else is forming in man, so that the sense-organs are today essentially physical organs. You will easily be able to recognize the eyes, the ears, etc., as physical organs. To be sure, the lower sense are more of a chemical nature, but nevertheless that all has to do with the physical-chemical.

We must grasp the matter thus—the human being thrusts forward into the world as the most external of evolved members; what we can call his physical quality (Physikalisches). This physical nature of the sense-organs can be seen in the fact that during sleep the ears are naturally influenced just as they are during waking life; only the ego and astral body are not concerned with them. If we had our eyes open during sleep, it is obvious that just the same would happen as during waking. We can summarise it by saying: man thrusts out into the world his external faculties of perception.

The diagram I have sketched here is to be understood as the incorporation of the entire sense apparatus in our organism. And if I now include the etheric body, it naturally interpenetrates to some extent the sense apparatuses, else they would not be life apparatuses; but outside the sphere of the etheric something remains which is entirely physical. So the relationship must be drawn in this way, with something left outside the ether-body.

In a similar way I must then draw the relation of the astral body in its activity to the other organs. I must draw it so.

And if I further wished to insert the ego I must do it schematically in the following way. This ego would open itself naturally to the spaces of the whole cosmos.

Naturally, this is drawn schematically and we must be clear that if we did not sketch it as a diagram, but really made a drawing of the human being, it would look far more complicated.

Now you can conclude from this that the sense is, as it were, a thin zone, a thin outer zone of the physical, of what in fact works as the external world. You can indeed follow this with physical cognition: the eye can be looked on as a camera obscura, where the objects from outside create their images as in a photographic apparatus, and what is created within is then seized upon by the etheric body, astral body and ego. Thus we have a physical reciprocal action with the outer world which takes place in our periphery. And it is on this reciprocal action with the outer world that we first build up our soul process, insofar as the process is perception of the outer world and working-over of the perception in the soul.

What I have now depicted is how things would have stood with man if he had developed purely in the way the divine-spiritual beings had planned. But we know that Luciferic-Ahrimanic beings have asserted themselves. And here we can clearly and plainly on one spot seize the Ahrimanic and Luciferic spirits—regularly lay hold of them, one might say.

I might only draw the etheric body as far as here (see sketch).

This is the etheric body as it has developed from the time of the Sun-existence and through the Moon and Earth-existence. Thus, there remains, as it were, outside this etheric body which has progressed in the normal regular manner, the physical sense-zone. But if this were really to be the case in man (as in the drawing), if he had really only developed in this way, then the human being would always have had to wait for the physical processes to arise in his eye, his ear, etc.; and he would grasp these physical processes with his astral body and ego. He would always have a pictured image: in my eye is a colour, in my ear is a tone; he would not have his sense opened outwards, he would only have perceived what was within him, he would have the feeling: in me is a zone which is entirely interpenetrated with activities of the macrocosm, and I perceive them.

It is interesting that in the first years of childhood the child really has this consciousness, even if it is feeble and dreamlike. It pays no attention to the outer world, but observes the perceptions it has in its own inner being. This gradually comes to an end. Children are primarily interested in their own bodies, do not notice the outer world, but have a dreamy consciousness that they are enclosed as if in a sphere which really brings in the activities of the outer world like pictures. The child really feels its skin as a kind of enclosing sheath and pays attention to what takes place in it as paintings and tones.

We could now ask: why does that not remain so the whole life long? Because the Luciferic influence has entered and because it actually fills out that which has been formed as the normal progress in the etheric body from the time of ancient Sun. This means that Luciferic spirits thrust their influence from outside into the interior (see drawing).

Whereas man's etheric body works so from the inner periphery outwards, Lucifer works so inwards. And it is even true that something like etheric tentacles from Lucifer project into the physical apparatus of the eyes and the same in the case of the ears, etc. Everywhere Lucifer presses his arms into the senses, thrusting them in from outside. And in our senses there is the meeting between our own etheric activity, life activity, and that of Lucifer who thrusts his tentacles into them. So that we can say: the child's innocence only ceases because Lucifer gradually struggles through, he takes possession of the physical part of our senses, opens the eyes, opens the ears, so that we no longer perceive pictures as the effect of what the Gods give us, but our senses are opened outwards and we see the world itself.

It is extraordinarily important to grasp this. For only when science will one day be real spiritual science and what is now being said is understood, only then will the time have come when it will also be realised that Lucifer was somewhat audacious, when, in addition, he projected his activities behind the senses. There where the nerves terminate in the brain the Luciferic activity meets with the divine-spiritual activity which also moves along the nerve strands. If one wishes to draw the course of a nerve from outside one must so draw it that Lucifer thrusts forward and meets with and interlaces himself with the normal divine-spiritual activities. Thus the direction of the Luciferic working radiates from without inwards.

You see from this that it lay in the original divine-spiritual intention to give man up to himself, and inasmuch as he saw himself through himself, he would have worked upon the world inwardly. Lucifer has caused man in this respect to be torn away from himself and to behold the world round about him and be aware of it. This means: Lucifer has given man to the world, he has established him in earthly existence, he has led him out of himself. Deeply, deep significant are the words in the Bible: ‘Ye shall be as gods, your sense shall be opened ...’ for it was not intended to open them, but so to leave them that man in his thinking would look back to the old Moon-existence, and in this thinking would apprehend what the macrocosm brings about at his periphery, what had been given to it by the Gods.

Now the human being is, however, also set into the world as an ethical-moral being; for there is much we could not experience as human beings if we had not this projection into us of Lucifer's activity. We should never be angry, for instance, or frightened, we should never hate, never believe ourselves persecuted, develop no antipathy against anyone—none of this should we be able to do. If Lucifer had not previously worked upon him, man would never have arrived at incorporation in the language any abusive word or a word injuring another. Only through the working of Lucifer is it possible for us to be angry, anxious, develop hatred or injurious feeling toward another, or for us to insult him, etc., etc.

And one must not give oneself up to the slightest illusion in this respect. He who believes when he hates someone, that it is justified—may say so, it may be justified, but all the same Lucifer stands at the side. There is no other cause of anger, hatred or antipathy, than the Luciferic influence.

And now, through this having been possible, something else has become possible. It is only because Lucifer thus projects his tentacles in from outside, for instance, that it has become possible for the normally progressive gods to admit Ahriman from the other side, so that he takes hold from the other side. He penetrates not only speech but thinking, and out of this intermingling arises what has become hypocrisy, intentional or unintentional untruthfulness. We must never flatter ourselves that when we are hypocritical towards someone it is to be traced to anything but the alliance of Lucifer and Ahriman.

People are inclined, however, to skim over such things very lightly. For how often a man says: ‘I do this or that not for my own sake, but in the service of the world.’ I have often related the anecdote of the ‘Society for Selflessness.’ There was an esoteric section in which everyone was to think quite objectively, never in a relation to himself. The consequence was that once a member ...² came to another member and said: ‘I dare not, as you know, speak of myself, for that would be personal and against the rules of our Society. But I may speak about others; for I am quite selfless when I tell you what the others are like and all the bad things they are doing!’ ... and then he let himself go about the others. It is not a question as to whether a matter is personal or impersonal if someone believes he is selfless and then only unburdens his subjective opinions onto other people. Since the members of this Society might not speak of themselves, they always spoke about others, and what the others did to them. They did not become more selfless through this.

I desire by this example to say that it is not the point what one believes. A man can believe that he is employing every means in order to escape Lucifer and Ahriman: he is then only in the position of being somewhat more untruthful through this endeavour than he was before. At least, he did not say before that he wished to do the best, etc.; afterwards he expresses it all the same, inasmuch as he deceives himself as to the true situation in which he is.

We shall be clear about all these things, my dear friends, if we regard the true facts of the case, if we are clear that Lucifer and Ahriman are necessary in our earth-existence. One cannot escape them but can only come to the point of controlling them, of having them in full control.

One must be clear that with regard to the cooperation of Lucifer and Ahriman, precisely when one advances in spiritual science, the most varied complications are possible. A case which frequently occurs is the following. Someone has an antipathy to another person. It can be that the anger against this man, which is in the subconscious, presses up into the upper consciousness, presses outwards, and the consequence of this is that, whereas one has a subconscious ground for the antipathy, the anger alone becomes conscious. The hatred or antipathy presses outwards, presses into the sphere of Lucifer, and there, in Lucifer's sphere, arise the most vivid visions and imaginations of every possible thing this man is doing to one. And now in the subconscious the anger can press out and there then arise all sorts of imagined things that could proceed from the hated person. And the true causes of the antipathy are hidden behind what the man alleges he has undergone.

It is obvious that in face of such facts of the spiritual world, it can be asked: how does one protect oneself from such things? The answer could only be given by referring the questioner to a gradual working himself out of the illusions of life in which he is only too deeply held. The grounds of self-deception are above all present when a man thinks he does not in the least deceive himself but only looks at facts. Only the good will, therefore, to undertake one's self-development from this standpoint, only this helps one to escape from these things. One thing above all, my dear friends, is necessary: to understand how the impulses of spiritual science work when we strive for self-perfecting, but how much we are inclined to attribute far more selflessness to ourselves than we are really entitled to do. By saying this I wish to give you a golden rule.

Above all things we must be quite clear that as we advance in the spiritual scientific self-training, we must in the first place thoroughly work ourselves out of our dependence on the outer world. Lucifer has placed us in the outer world. We do not make progress if we let Ahriman transform for us something that we are really desiring, inasmuch as we say, ‘We will now carry out missions,’ and so on. The next step that we must take is a diverting of the world from us. We thereby confront the danger of being really more egotistic than we were before and this danger is not a slight one. One is, of course, not to let oneself be held back through this from making the way into the spiritual world, but the temptation to egotism is there. And as regards those people who, one must say, unhappily cannot yet see that the spiritual scientific world conception is necessary for our time and who, standing outside, say: these spiritual scientists certainly do not appear very agreeable (liebevoll). ... as regards these people we should not at once be arrogant and pooh-pooh this reproach, but should see its justification, its relative justification.

I do not know, my dear friends, if the man was right who lately asserted that, through his enhancement of egotism in a spiritual scientific movement, it was to be proved as a fact that there are people in spiritual scientific movements who after they have been there a short time quarrel far more than they did before. It may be softly whispered that discrepancies in such societies will most certainly not cease without further ado! But how much it would bring us forward if the following picture could be shown—that outside the contesting that surrounds this circle, Lucifer and his hosts were assuredly lurking—but could not get right in!

When, therefore, a man is in his ordinary waking state, there meet together in the periphery of his sense, the etheric of his own being and the etheric of the Lucifer-being. This is what underlies the words ‘Your eyes shall be opened’ ... Very special reference has always been made by all occult schools to this fundamental truth.

Cognition is, to be sure, on the one hand something that is to bring quite accurately to our consciousness what lies before us,—on the other hand, however, it is to guide us to accept things as they are. As long as we cannot take these things into our thoughts they remain in the sphere of sympathy and antipathy, and there they burrow. They are not somehow not there, if we know nothing of them: they are always there. And in this particular age mankind has reached the point of its evolution where such things must be known.

So we have furnished ourselves with a few items of more exact knowledge regarding our sense-periphery. Yesterday we spoke of how desire enters into sense-perception; now we have the actual reason for it. For Lucifer draws near and does not allow sense impressions to approach us as neutral objective happenings, but mixes his nature into them.

And if we pass inwards from the sense-periphery, my dear friends, we come to thinking, to the conceptual life. (Vorstellungsleben) We know that this conceptual life through Lucifer's influence seems to belong to us, whereas in reality we must perceive what we think in the sphere of the Old Moon which still endures. This gives us the whole meaning of the separation of the Old Moon from the Sun-Earth existence. For the fact that man today can at any time bring thoughts into his soul, is connected with the separation of the Old Moon from the Sun. The thought nature, as we men can grasp it, comes from the fact that something separated itself, as Old Moon, from the progressive Saturn-Sun-Moon existence. But how is it with what happened there, with what separated itself?

We men as physically incarnated beings can only understand this through spiritual science. The question is how these thoughts work upon that which separated, upon what lies outside thought. Our thought is stimulated by our astral body, but it works down into the etheric body. Now, one can observe: if this is a part of our etheric body to which one directs the trained eye of the spirit, one finds that when thoughts are stimulated in the astral body they then stream down as it were into the etheric body. (See diagram—MISSING). You must not imagine this spatially, but as forces: then one sees that these thoughts call forth movements, activities in the etheric body. The thoughts dissolve, as it were, and movement appears in the etheric body. It is as if the thought flows into the etheric substance out of the astral body and produces movement. Let us suppose that someone says, ‘I will now go away’ ... then the clairvoyant would perceive how the thought stream into the etheric body and calls forth movements, inner movements there, at first only such as these (see lower diagram). Thereby the etheric body can work in its turn on the physical body. And this working upon the physical body is now so that ... now just imagine for a moment: here this movement gets more and more active, and hence the etheric substance to some extent withdraws from the surroundings, it draws itself together ... there that will be very active, that is taken out of the surrounding ether.

Thus the thought streams in, calls up movement in the ether-substance, and the etheric substance calls forth hollowness here in its surroundings. For what the etheric substance requires it takes from its surroundings, and hollow spaces ensue. And these hollow spaces ensue when man thinks, or when the higher beings, Angels, Archangels, let their thoughts flow into him ... which indeed occurs continuously.

This means, we stand there, we see the etheric agitated through the thought activity, and in between are hollow spaces: and these hollow spaces are actually, fundamentally, the physical body. It is truly the case that the Real exists everywhere that the physical is not, and the physical, that is really nothing, it is a hollowness in the world.

What the ordinary materialistic physiologist studies by way of our head, my dear friends, is naturally not the thought in the astral body, nor the thought motion in the etheric body, but it is in reality the hollow head. And the reason why one cannot penetrate into this hollow space is because one can only advance as far as the real extends and there one comes up against the hollow space. So one cannot enter the hollow spaces. It is exactly as if you picture a column of Seltzer-water and there are bubbles of air in it: the thinner elements appear to the being who lives in the denser element as frightfully hard. So too we cannot penetrate into the actual hollow spaces, but only because there is nothing there, because it is a hollow. Thus if one would draw the human head occultly, one must not draw it so, but in the negative, and what remains inside as empty, that would be the human being (see diagram p.l2a). This means that where the painter generally lays on the colours and thinks he is painting man, he ought really to leave it empty: then one would be painting spiritually-realistically, for otherwise one paints where there is nothing and leaves free the part where there is something.

But this one already does in quite ordinary human sense perception, for human sense perception follows no other course than this. You see how we must take in hand an alteration in our ideas, if we wish to press forward to realities.

• 1. This important lecture was unfortunately only available in a much abbreviated transcript.
• 2. The rest was not incorporated in the notes. The contents are briefly given.

My task today will be to discuss how hard it is for people to keep to the truth of a situation in their ordinary trains of thought. I want to convey to you how far from easy it is in thinking to keep all the factors involved so before us that the course of our thoughts doesn't go astray from reality, that we follow the thread of reality.

The theme proposed for us today is certainly more difficult than others we might choose. But there is inner moral value to be derived from the realization that truth is hard to get at and that it is very easy to go astray as we forge ahead in a train of thought in the attempt to arrive at the truth by means of strict logical reasoning.

You will find that what I am going to tell you today will make it easier to understand certain matters that will occupy us in the next lecture. I will be speaking then about the important concepts chance, necessity, and providence. And I want to begin today with an introduction that, though it has its difficulties, will nevertheless contribute something vital and significant, not only to our theoretical understanding, but to the feeling we will then be able to develop for the way to seek truth.

I have often had occasion to mention the fact that there is a contemporary philosopher by the name of Fritz Mauthner who has written a Critique of Language.¹ This Critique of Language was intended to provide our period with something better suited to it than Kant provided for his time with his Critique of Pure Reason.² For Mauthner no longer believes—if that expresses it—that people seek knowledge in the form of concepts. It is rather his conviction that it is fundamentally just language to which people attach their insights. He believes that they don't really have true concepts when they are thinking, but merely have what words convey, and that words simply suggest this or that to them. He pictures people as having certain inner experiences in connection with words, putting their faith in words, jumbling them up, putting them together, and deriving insights from these processes. This is a total misconception of the entire cognitive process, but one that was bound to emerge eventually in an age working its way through to the worst consequences of materialism.

I want to convey just a sense of how Mauthner came to hold this view by quoting a passage from his Dictionary of Philosophy, written after his Critique of Language.³ Since we will be concerning ourselves with chance, necessity and providence, I will quote a passage from his article on the word “chance.” As I read it you will see that the materialistic age has gradually learned to talk about certain things. I am not so much interested in touching on any theoretical aspects involved in what I'll be reading you as I am in getting you to examine your feelings as you are exposed to what a materialistic philosopher of the present has to say on such a subject. I'd like to have you try to sense the way he speaks. He says of chance in his treatise on it “And it would be like going back to childhood and taking out of a magic package the surprises some kindly merchant has concealed in it.” He believes that looking at all the things that happen by chance is like becoming a child again and taking out of a magic package all the surprises put into it by a kindly merchant! “As though one were to keep on making God responsible, as Spinoza, Hume, Kant, and Schopenhauer did ...” is his sense of it. Trying to explain the world by ascribing everything to a kindly God would, in his opinion, be to regress to the state of a child gradually discovering what some kind merchant has hidden in a surprise packet. The child explores its content and comes upon one lovely thing after another. That is how Mauthner sees anyone who, attempting to find a wise explanation of the phenomena of the world, makes God responsible by regarding Him as the world's Creator. And he goes on to say, “... if one wanted to follow the example of Spinoza, Hume, Kant, and Schopenhauer in making Schopenhauer's elderly Jew” (he calls Him that because the term “God of the Christians” strikes him as unsuitable) “responsible for unscrambling this confusion of chance and purpose.”

You see the type of expression into which a materialist lapses if he takes himself seriously. Of course it is true that many people do not take materialism (which inevitably is also atheism) any more seriously than did the man who exclaimed “As surely as God is in heaven I am an atheist!” But anyone who takes it seriously today has to ridicule providence and similar matters; there is really no other possibility for those who have adopted materialism.

Though Fritz Mauthner is bound to give deep offense to our feelings and our sense of the fitness of things, I have brought him up because he is an honest, upright seeker after truth in the current materialistic sense. It is not my intention to do battle with individuals who are philosophers by profession, but rather with someone who comes to philosophy out of inner necessity from a quite different professional background and attains a certain degree of competency in it. For what one misses so greatly today in the way world views are evolved is a really serious coming to grips with what the various branches of science have brought forth up to the present. Fritz Mauthner has really grown into a learned gentleman, enabling me, as I take him for my point of departure and describe the difficulties inherent in the search for truth, to base my commentary on the thoughts developed by a very learned, very brilliant man. I am not basing it on what just any person thinks, but on the thinking of a very scholarly, clever man.

To begin with, I must take a very simple concept to show you at hand of a very special example from Mauthner's work how hard the search for truth is. You all know that there has long been what is called in mathematics the calculus of probability. It's quite easy to grasp the principle involved. Let's assume, for example, that you have some dice. I don't want to lead you astray into gambling with them, but let us say you have some dice. You know that they are so arranged that there is a single dot on one side, two on another, and so on, up to six dots on one of the six sides. If you roll these dice, they can turn up any one of the six sides; there are six possibilities. Now we can ask what the chances are of turning up a 6. You might really want to know what the chances are of getting a 6 when you shake the dice cup and throw the dice. The mathematician makes his calculation and says there are six possibilities; there is thus one-sixth of a chance of turning up a 6 on a single throw. You see how unlikely this possibility is. You would have to run through all six possibilities to be certain of a particular outcome. The numerator and the denominator would have to be identical, since certainty would equal 1 (6/6 = 1). Probability is therefore six times smaller than certainty in throwing dice.

Now we can pursue the matter further and ask what the chance is of throwing two sixes if two dice are thrown. This can also be calculated. You will get one divided by thirty-six if you calculate as follows: Throwing a 2 with one dice, you can get anything from a I to a 6 with the second. Getting a 2 with the first throw, you can also get anything from a 2 to a 6 with the second, and so on, until you have counted thirty-six different possible throws. The probability of getting any particular outcome is thus 1 in 36, or 1/36. If you wanted to calculate probability with 3 dice, you would get 1/6 x 1/6 x 1/6, or 1/216, a very unlikely event indeed. The probability gets smaller and smaller the more dice are involved. The more possibilities there are, the less probable is any particular outcome.

You see, then, that it is possible to express in mathematical formulas the degree of probability of any particular outcome, and calculations of this kind can be applied to all sorts of cases. But I don't need to explain more than this principle to you; you see that it is possible to express in mathematical formulas what one feels. One can always feel that there is a certain degree of improbability that a 6 will be thrown, but the actual probability is 1/6, with two dice 1/36, and so on. Such feelings can, in a sense, be expressed in mathematical terms.

Now there is a certain way of thinking about divine providence. Materialists say something like this about it: We want to examine the reasoning of those who believe in God and providence; what are their thoughts? Believers in providence say, Let us take a work like Goethe's Faust or Homer's epics. What is Goethe's Faust in the last analysis? If we think as the materialists do, picturing the world as composed of atoms or molecules, we would really have to conceive Faust in its entirety as composed of letters, of single letters, unless we wished to go deeper. People who believe in providence and also believe in atoms and molecules formulate the situation more or less like this: Let's imagine that we have a container of type and in it all the letters that make up Faust, and some machinery—not some intelligence—spreads out these letters. The believers in providence could now ask how great the probability is of Goethe's Faust emerging from a typesetting machine that simply put the letters one after the other as they happened to fall on being thrown out of the container. They ask the question, perhaps, but have to admit that the probability of such a thing happening is so slight as to be nonexistent. One cannot assume that a haphazard scattering of type could possibly result in a chance (Voltaire's “His Majesty, Chance”) printing of Goethe's Faust. Since that can't be the case with Goethe's Faust, we can scarcely think that this world, which is much, much more gloriously put together, could have been flung down so thoughtlessly and simply.

This is approximately how a person with the current atomistic outlook would think if he could not avoid accepting providence as necessary in the scheme of things because of the impossibility of the world's having put itself together out of chaos.

Now Fritz Mauthner is a thorough gentleman, so he has let himself in not just for producing this train of thought but for correctly calculating how improbable it is that, for example, Goethe's Faust could have originated from a mere scattering of the letters it consists of. He has really figured it out, and I want to show you how he did it. He makes a fairly thorough job of it. He says,

God's existence is proved by the fact that the world's beauty and order are just as improbably the product of pure chance, achieved without purpose on the part of a creator, as we would regard the production of Faust as a consequence of upsetting a huge container of type and an accidental arranging of the letters and punctuation in the sequence found in Faust. The improbability of such a production is truly vast, beyond anything fantasy could conjure up, even if one disregards the utterly nonsensical assumption that letters could arrange themselves into sentences, and assumes the probability of an immeasurably favorable special case—something, say, along the lines of a German typewriter or typesetting machine getting into the hands of a Chinaman who, totally unfamiliar with the German language and letter-symbols, nevertheless experiments tirelessly with the keys for weeks or months, handling the machine correctly, with the result of this mere experimenting producing Faust!

Mauthner goes on to say:

I entertained myself working out an approximate calculation of the probability of a chance emergence of Goethe's Faust from this experiment. There was no need to bother about a few decimal places in the decimal part of the logarithm, and I magnanimously upped the probability by allowing for one hundred typographical errors and still recognizing the product as genuinely Faust, thus giving it a more than generous benefit of the doubt. Faust contains approximately 300,000 letters. Now the probability of striking the right key at every touch is not exactly small; it is almost 1 out of 100, since there are about 100 different symbols.

So one can light upon 100 symbols. Blindly tapping away, the probability of getting the right one is 1 in 100, according to the principle explained at hand of the dice. Thus the probability of the Chinaman totally ignorant of the language in which Faust is written striking the right key is 1/100. “But since, according to elementary rules, the chance of accidentally producing the whole of Faust with its 300,000 letters equals the product of 300,000 partial probabilities, the probability of an accidental production of Faust must be calculated as (1/200)300,000.”

You see, the probability of Faust coming into existence in the above way is not 1/6 or 1/36, and so on, but equals the fraction obtained by dividing 1 by 100x100x100, and so on, until we have done it 300,000 times. That is a fraction with a gigantic denominator, as you can see; in other words, the probability is exceedingly tiny. Mauthner continues, “We have here a fraction whose numerator is 1, whose denominator consists of 600,000 digits. Even the conceptual power of the Indians,” (which Mauthner rates very highly), “even the mathematical genius of Archimedes is not up to grasping so vast a denominator. There is not even a name for such a number. The Greeks and the Romans were right, then, when they considered the chance production of any organized whole as extremely improbable. Here we reach the limits of the possible”—but only for human conceiving, he means. One cannot obtain Faust this way.

And the Greeks and Romans would also have concluded that the meaningful production of a Faust on the part of a creator could most probably—or even quite certainly—equally prove the existence of a world-creator if the whole proof or metaphor or line of reasoning were not so unspeakably foolish. I could never even bring myself to believe that the marvelous build of a mosquito could be the product of chance in a materialistic sense. The chance material production of a mosquito is just as improbable as that of Faust. Darwinism has not really lessened the incomprehensibilities. But the headwork on the part of a God Who would have had to organize not merely 3 times 100,000 elements or letters (with repetitions) but all the elements that make up the cosmos an endless number of times (with repetitions) is, if possible, even more improbable for human conceiving (and we really have no other!) than a chance production of Faust. I have no wish to extend my calculations to figuring out the degree of the improbability of a world- dominion and providence.

You see what tremendously learned reflections one can engage in. You will have thought them quite learned enough to arrive at the logical conclusion: what must God not have had to keep in mind, if He wanted to put the world together out of all its elements, if producing Faust out of an upset typecase or the chance striking of typewriter keys represents such an improbability as to be practically out of the question? Therefore, says Mauthner, both the concept of chance and that of divine providence are inconceivable. For if the degree of probability in the case of Faust is so minuscule, one can certainly not presuppose in the world's case that it could have been the chance creation of an upsetting of a cosmic typecase, so to speak. But then, one can just as little presuppose God—for what wisdom would He not have had to possess to have built the world out of all its elements!

So one can take neither God nor “His Majesty, Chance” for granted. Mauthner therefore maintains that neither has validity, that all that is involved here is just concepts in language, and people deal with them as they do with languages themselves and with translations. And he calls this a Critique of Language! We have here a truly incisive train of thought indeed, pursued with a great deal of effort. It leads to two alternatives: one has either to presuppose that the world came into being by chance—an exceedingly tiny probability, of course—or, still less credibly, to conceive of a kind God with a head so full of wisdom that He could use it to build a world out of chaos.

Now, since we are concerned in spiritual science not only with getting to know things but with thinking correctly, taking into account all the factors involved in developing a sound train of thought, let us examine this particular train of thought in a way commensurate with the serious approach of spiritual science. Let us review again the proposition that the probability of Goethe's Faust resulting from a jumbling up of the contents of a typecase is so infinitesimal as to be represented by a fraction with a numerator of 1 over a denominator consisting of 600,000 digits. The probability of the world's coming into being as the result of a similar accident would, of course, be infinitely smaller. But the fact is that Faust did come into being in its entirety! Now did this happen because the good Goethe—not the good God in this case—had in his head the laws whereby, according to the principles of typesetting, 300,000 letters taken from the typecase could be set in soldierly rows to eventuate in Faust? Was Goethe thinking of the right way to reach into that container to get hold of the right letters?

Certainly not! When we think of the origin of Faust, we don't picture it as having anything to do with selecting type. The creator of Faust proceeded quite differently. It would never have occurred to him that Faust could have resulted from the placement of 300,000 letters. It was totally unnecessary for Goethe to know that Faust could be composed of 300,000 letters, and yet he composed it! We might, on the one hand—and indeed we even must—picture a chaos, with things in a state of utter disorder, but conceive on the other of a good God with all the various laws in mind according to which He would arrange the world, exactly as Goethe would have done if he had been set before a typecase to bring forth his Faust. But neither God nor Goethe went to work in this fashion. What we have to picture going on in God's soul has nothing whatever to do with the whole train of thought about composition, any more than such an incredibly cleverly conceived composition applies in the case of the creation of Goethe's Faust. In other words, this whole train of thought leads to absurdity. It is brilliant, it is well reasoned, it is conscientious—all these things; yet it ends in absurdity. That comes of a conscientious person engaging in a train of thought and pursuing it, but losing sight of the actual factors that could have led to a sound conclusion.

This is a much more important matter than we might suppose, for it demonstrates how extraordinarily difficult it can be, no matter how scientifically one proceeds, to avoid losing sight of reality as we pursue a train of thought. We must imbue our feelings with this realization and learn a great deal from just such an example. Two things are required as we mull it over. One is that we educate ourselves through an outstanding example of this kind to an awareness that the search for truth is far from easy, and that we badly need to develop a feeling for the fact that not just any thought sequence that strikes us at first glance as correct is actually a sound one. The more we can imbue ourselves with the feeling that we could err, that even at our most conscientious we might be wrong, the more easily will we avoid a rigid clinging to our own opinions, to a stubborn belief in the correctness of our views.

It is a very common thing, these days, to encounter people who declare that they think this or that to be a fact. The typical reaction one has in such encounters is how fortunate and at the same time how simple-minded such people are—fortunate, because they have no idea what it really means to believe in something they have figured out, and simple-minded because they don t have a glimmering of how far removed from reality their thoughts may be. But we should be aware that we mustn't allow this realization to depress us. It will make us very modest indeed, but not to the point of driving us into melancholia, to a sense of despair about human life because of the great difficulty of achieving truth. For we know that the life of the human soul is unending and must be a quest, that it may even be due to a wise ordaining that the quest for truth is so difficult. And we will find that life rests upon this fact.

It would be the death of our souls if the quest for truth were easy, if those people who say they have found out how to arrange things in a way to make the whole world happy were right. If, confronted by the world's complexity, it were such a simple matter to discover truth as most individuals believe it to be, that would mean the death of the soul. For the soul's life depends on our inability to find any access to the totality of truth; it requires a long slow search for truth, and the preservation of a profound degree of modesty as one progresses in it, step by step. Error is the more likely the more comprehensive the truth we seek. So it was natural for even one of the most learned men to fall into childish error such as that demonstrated in connection with solving the cosmic problem of chance and providence.

But dismay and depression over the fact that truth can be discovered only with such difficulty cannot touch us if we bear in mind that life derives from our having to seek truth. The quest is what matters. You might say, Well, if it were to mean the death of the soul not to have to search for truth, that fate is surely going to claim us now, for we have currently reached a high point in human evolution in the lack of feeling for a true quest for truth. In the whole course of history there have never been more people with programs, more individuals who believe that they can solve the whole cosmic riddle with a word or two. So we do have the very outlook right now that can be described as leading to the death of the soul. And it would indeed mean the death of the soul if what these program-people think were true. But it is not true, fortunately!

The thinking of people like Fritz Mauthner is more typical than one might assume, and there are many of them. The volumes of his Philosophical Dictionary are a perfect example of the current outlook. They really reflect the way most people think who aren't interested enough in freeing themselves from the trend of contemporary thought to move in a direction such as spiritual science has taken. People like Mauthner say, We come, on the one hand, to the untenable concept of a world that has come into being by chance (for this has the degree of improbability I have been demonstrating). But the alternative concept of an all-wise God is just as untenable since our human minds find it impossible to credit the existence of a god, a good God, who created in His head everything He needed to assemble out of initial chaos the various “letters” that compose the universe. Mauthner believes that people used to make do with concepts like chance and providence, but that we have now advanced beyond them since we realize today that they have no cosmic significance, no objective meaning; as mere figments of our human minds they hold meaning for ourselves alone. They are judged entirely on the basis of whether they are presently applicable to the world at large. People like this always say, Look how childish people used to be! They talked on the one hand of “divine providence and on the other of the concept “chance.” We must recognize the fact that both concepts exist only in the thoughts of human beings and are not even remotely applicable to the world.

And on what do they base this judgment? They say, When we survey the whole range of philosophical thought, the philosophical procedure followed by many philosophers (and Mauthner has really sat down and studied the world's philosophers and is as familiar with all of them as anyone can be in a single lifetime), we see what trouble they took to arrive at concepts. But all these are just human concepts; they can't be applied to reality. There is no reality in the concept of divine providence. And Mauthner's article on chance ends with the statement that divine providence, the cosmic order, cosmic harmony, and the beauty of the world used to be looked upon as concepts in the following context: “Yes, there are elements of chance in the world, but the world is also endowed with order and beauty.” And Mauthner ends: “But we realize that the concept of chance is man-made, and so are the concepts of beauty and order, of God, of causality.” We know, in other words, that they are all of human origin and lack objective applicability. “Thus it is the height of literal-mindedness even to ask the question whether chance or God is the origin of universal order and beauty, and worse to try to answer it with a childish simile.”

Now what have Mauthner and all the other philosophers who agree with him done to arrive at the insight that the concepts of God and chance and order are human products, and that neither order nor beauty and so on really exist outside us? You needn't believe me, but they have demonstrated with all possible philosophical incisiveness how profoundly human reason goes to work to produce such concepts and how true it is that they are human products. They have demonstrated this. He has offered proof when he says, “But we know ...” etc. He has proved it! But if we look at how he proved it, we have to say, Yes, dear Mr. Mauthner, you are right. But we are familiar with the fact that the concepts of chance, beauty, God, and the June bug are all the work of man. That is true, looked at in the right light. Now you would have to spend years making a really thorough study of it, but if you were to examine the penetrating thinking that has gone into demonstrating how all the concepts mentioned above are the fruits of human thinking, you would find trains of thought that can very properly be applied to the assertion that the June bug concept is also man-made. That is certainly true, but does that say anything about whether June bugs can fly around outside there and are real? What is childish is to say that the concept of the June bug is just a human product. One can think really penetratingly and be totally convinced of the correctness of one's conclusions, and yet have lost the thread on which the true facts are strung. All the proofs adduced in support of the finding that the above concepts are simply fruits of human thinking do not say anything about the objective existence of these things; just as calling the June bug concept a human product does not help us when its objective existence is in question.

You see what tremendous certainty the modern scientific way of thinking generates. It is reflected in such a statement as “We know that the concepts of chance, beauty, order, God, and causality are all man-made. So it seems to us to be the very height of literal-mindedness even to ask the question whether chance or God is the origin of universal order and beauty.”

Well, then, one must comment, you believe—since you can prove that the June bug concept is man-made—that it is being childish, being a victim of literal-mindedness to apply the June bug concept to an insect flying around there outside the window? It is all exactly the same thing, you simply don't notice the similarity.

What is the point of bringing up such matters? Why, to call attention to how difficult it is to get at truth by stringing logical concepts together; to show what the outcome can be, no matter how penetratingly one proceeds; to illustrate how thoroughly we must imbue ourselves with a sense of the difficulty of the quest for truth, both in great and small concerns. The more you develop a feeling for this as a result of what has been discussed today, the better it will be.

On Hegel's birthday, August 27, we will build on the foundation laid today in a spiritual scientific approach to the concepts chance, necessity, and providence.

• 1. Fritz Mauthner, 1849–1923, German philosopher and writer. Critique of Language, 1901.
• 2. Immanuel Kant, 1724–1804, German philosopher of the Enlightenment, Published Critique of Pure Reason in 1781.
• 3. Fritz Mauthner, Dictionary of Philosophy, 1909.

In the preceding lectures, I have been calling attention to the fact that there will still be a great deal to say about a certain problem or question, even though it has already been the subject of discussion here from a great variety of viewpoints. That is the question of the alternating states of waking and sleeping in human beings. I have repeatedly spoken in public lectures of how this problem of sleep has occupied a more materialistically oriented science also, and how it is being handled. On several occasions I have referred to some of the various attempts that have been made to solve it. There is the so-called exhaustion theory, which is only one of the many that have been advanced in recent decades. This theory holds that we secrete substances resulting from the wear and tear of work and of our other activities during waking life, and that the sleeping state somehow eliminates these exhaustion products, which are then formed anew in the following period of waking consciousness.

Now we must always take the position that such a theory—I mean, what it describes—does not have to be wrong from the standpoint of spiritual science just because of its purely materialistic origin. The materialistic rightness of this particular theory need not now be gone into at any further length; other theories have been advanced in the same matter, as I have just mentioned. But from the standpoint of spiritual science no question will be raised as to whether such a process can take place, whether exhaustion products are really secreted during day-waking consciousness and destroyed again at night. This actual process will not be brought into question or further discussed. It must be a main concern of spiritual science to examine a problem, to study life's riddles, in a way that really relates the standpoint from which they are studied to the insights that can be gained in a particular age. That will provide the right basis for bringing the right light to bear on facts such as the secretion of exhaustion products. In most of life's problems—indeed, in all of them—the point is to know what questions to ask, to avoid pursuing a mistaken line of questioning.

In the case of the alternation between sleeping and waking the development of a viewpoint from which to study these two human states is all-important. And the proper light can be brought to bear upon certain phenomena of human life only if matters introduced in a very early phase of our spiritual scientific efforts are kept in mind. In the very early days I called attention to the fact that if we want to get an overview of world evolution we have mainly to consider seven stages of consciousness, seven life-conditions and seven form- states. Certain life-questions can be answered simply by considering changes in form; other questions can be illuminated by studying life-metamorphoses. But certain phenomena in life, certain facts of life cannot be illuminated any other way than by rising to a consideration of the various states of consciousness involved.

It is quite natural, in considering the problem of waking and sleeping, to concern ourselves with questions of the difference involved in the two states of consciousness. For we have certainly learned from a great variety of studies that we are here dealing with different states of consciousness, so that the question of consciousness is the all-important one here. We must realize that our most important concern in dealing with this question is to base it on the matter of consciousness. We will have to ask ourselves what the real difference is between the waking and the sleeping states.

And this is what we find: When we are awake—we need only to register what each one of us is conscious of—we look at the world around us and perceive it. And we will be able to say that when we are in the day- waking state, we cannot observe our own inner life as we do our surroundings. I have often called your attention to the fact of what a crude illusion it would be if we were to conceive of the study of anatomy as leading to observation of the inner man. Only what is external in us, though it lies beneath our skin, can be studied by material anatomy; our inner aspect cannot be studied during ordinary waking consciousness. Even what a person comes to know of himself while he is awake is the world's outer aspect, or, more exactly, that aspect of him that belongs to the external world.

But if we now observe the human being from the contrasting aspect of the sleeping state, its essential characteristic, as you can see from the various discussions that have previously taken place here, is that he is observing himself. While we are in that condition, the object of our attention is the human being; our consciousness is occupied with ourselves. If you examine some of the most commonplace phenomena from this standpoint, you will find them readily comprehensible.

Now if what materialistic science states on the subject of sleeping and waking were all that could be said about it, it would seem to contradict an observation I once made here, namely, that an independently wealthy person who hasn't made any particular effort is more often seen to fall asleep at lectures than someone who has been exerting himself at work. This observation would have to be wrong if tiredness were the real cause of sleep. What we have to consider here is that the coupon clipper who listens to a lecture is not focusing his day- waking interest on it, is perhaps not particularly interested in it, may even find it impossible to take an interest in it because he doesn't understand it and is therefore justified in his apathy. He is much more interested in himself. So he withdraws his attention from the lecture to concentrate upon himself. One could, of course, ask: why particularly upon himself? That too can easily be explained. There are certain reasons why the lecture doesn't interest him, and they are usually that he is more interested in other aspects of life than in those under discussion in the lecture, or, at least, in their relevance. But the lecture keeps him from occupying himself with what would otherwise be interesting him. A person who has no interest in hearing a lecture might conceivably prefer to spend the time eating oysters instead of attending the lecture. Perhaps he is more interested in the experience of eating oysters than in that provided by the lecture. But the lecture disturbs him; there is no way for him to eat oysters if he attends it. He behaves as though he wanted to hear it, but it keeps him from eating oysters. Since he can't be eating them, he settles for the only thing available besides the lecture that is disturbing him. The hour ahead is taken up with something that he can only hear, something without interest for him. So he turns his attention to the only other available interest: his own inner being, and enjoys himself! For his falling asleep is self-enjoyment.

You can gather from what we have studied that sleeping consciousness is still at the stage that prevailed in man during the ancient sun period. It is the same consciousness we share with plants. We know both these facts from previous lectures.

Now our sleeping man at the lecture is not in the same state of consciousness in which we would find him if he were enjoying the external world. He is working his way back into sub-consciousness as it were. But that doesn't matter; he enjoys himself anyhow. And his enjoyment comes from his interest in himself. So we must find it understandable that sleep takes over, not as a result of inner weariness but because his interest moves away from the outer scene, the lecture or the concert or whatever, to what does interest him. This is always the fact of the matter if one studies the alternation between sleeping and waking with thoroughness, and in its inner aspect.

When we are awake, we may look upon our condition as one in which we turn our attention outward, to the world around us. We withdraw our interest from our inner life.

The opposite is true of the sleeping state. Attention is directed inward to the self and withdrawn from what lies outside it. Since we have left our bodies during sleep, we actually see them from outside.

We can, as you see, trace the alternation between sleeping and waking to another cause, and say that we live in successive cycles, in one of which our interest is awake to the world outside us, and in the other to our inner world. This alternation between outer and inner is one that belongs every bit as much to our life as the fact that the sun shines on the earth and then goes down, leaving it in darkness, belongs to the earth's life. In the latter case the spatial constellation is the factor involved in the alternation between light and darkness, bringing about the cycle of daytime and nighttime.

Now you can easily see how mistaken it would be to say that the day is the cause of the night, and the night of the day. That would be what I have described to you in preceding lectures as a worm's philosophy. It is simply nonsense to call the day the cause of the night and vice versa; both result from the regular alternation in the spatial relationship between sun and earth. It makes just as little sense to say that sleep is the cause of waking, and waking the cause of sleep. Just as in the earth's case the only thing that makes sense is to say that it undergoes an alternation between day and night because of its position in space, so human life undergoes an alternation between interest for the inner and interest for the outer scene. These conditions have to succeed each other; anything else is out of the question. Life decrees that human beings must focus their attention on their surroundings for awhile, and then turn it inward, just as the sun, descending in the west, has no choice about what its further course will be.

But we enter a realm here where the following must always be kept in mind: The sun has to make a certain period of hours into daytime, and another period into night. But human beings are in a position to vary things and upset routines, like the coupon clipper who sleeps even though he isn't tired, voluntarily turning his attention inward, enjoying himself, really enjoying his body, or like a student cramming for examinations who, to some extent, overcomes his need for normal sleep. Many students sleep very little before examinations. But this brings up the big questions we will be concerning ourselves with, questions about necessity in outer nature, questions about the frequently discussed subject of chance, both in nature and in human life, questions about providence that apply to the entire universe.

As soon as we touch on the sphere of human life we come upon an element that belongs in the field of necessity, something necessary to man if he is to live and have his being in the world. There is much that we will be discussing in regard to this.

What I've been telling you has been said not only—and please note the “not only” as well as a “partly”—to call your attention to the fact that we must try to get a proper perspective on the alternation between sleeping and waking. This means asking what sort of consciousness we have when we are awake. The answer is that the outer world rather than the human being is its object, that we forget ourselves and turn our attention to the surrounding world. Conversely, consciousness in sleep is such that we forget the world outside us and observe ourselves. But we return first to the state of consciousness we had on the sun; the fact that we enjoy ourselves is of secondary importance.

But that is not the only reason why I have referred to this perspective; it was also to call attention to the importance of noting the ways consciousness is related to the world and to the fact that we can come to know the essential nature of certain things only by inquiring into the kind of consciousness involved. It is, for example, quite impossible to know anything of importance about the structure of the hierarchical order of higher spiritual beings unless we concern ourselves with their consciousness. If you go through the various lecture cycles, you will see what trouble was taken to characterize the consciousness of angels, archangels, and so on. For it is essential in any study to give careful thought to what constitutes the right approach. A person might say that he is quite familiar with the hierarchical order: first comes the human being, then the higher rank of angels, then the still higher archangels, then the archai, and so on. He writes them down in ascending order and claims to understand: each hierarchy is one step above the one before it. But if that were all one knew about these beings, one would know as little about the hierarchical order as one knows about the levels of a house from the fact that each higher story is superimposed upon the one below it; one could make a drawing that would fit both cases. What really matters is to note the salient facts in the case under study. We only know something about these higher beings if we are familiar with the state of consciousness in which the various hierarchies live and if we can describe it. This must form the basis of a study of them.

The same thing holds true in the study of human beings. We know very little indeed about our inner being if we can say nothing further on the subject of the sleeping state than that our ego and astral body are outside our physical and etheric bodies. Though that is true, it is a totally abstract pronouncement, since it conveys no more information about the difference between sleeping and waking than one possesses in the case of a full and an empty beer glass; in the one case there is beer in it, and in the other the beer is elsewhere. It is true enough that the ego and the astral body have left the physical and etheric bodies of a sleeping person, but we must be of a will to go on to ever further and more inclusive concrete insights. We try to do this, for example, when we describe the alternation of interest in the two states of consciousness.

I once made you a light red drawing of man, and then a blue one in illustration of my statements to the effect that, for the clairvoyant, the human being is in the hollow part shown in the drawings. If a person falls asleep and possesses a higher consciousness (it can be just the beginning of it; but even then we can really perceive, for we begin by observing ourselves), he sees this hollow part. At such moments we see clearly how mistaken the belief is that we are made of compact matter, that what seems to day-waking consciousness to be substantial is actually empty space. Of course, we must keep in mind that human beings are really outside their bodies during sleep. So they see the empty space surrounded by this aura. They are not in their bodies; they are looking on from outside them, so they see the empty space within the aura. It is a shaped yet hollow space. Looked at from outside, other kinds of spaces are of course filled with something. Therefore a person naturally appears in the shape he has when looked at with day-waking consciousness, but he is seen surrounded by what might be described as an auric cloud, an aura. We don't see him entirely clearly at first, but rather in an auric cloud that we must first penetrate: we see an auric cloud, outlining a shadowy form. It is as though we see the person in a more or less brilliant aura; viewed from outside, the space occupied by his physical form is left empty. I will resort to a trivial comparison to convey an adequate impression of this phenomenon, perceived when we become conscious during sleep. We have all had the experience of going about in a city when it is foggy or misty and have seen how the lights there appeared as though in a rainbow aura, without sharp outlines. This impression of lights like empty spaces in the surrounding fog is an experience everyone has had, and it is very similar to what I have been describing. The area imaginatively perceived is seen as though in a fog or mist, and the physical human beings are the empty dark spaces there inside it.

We may say, then, that we see human beings through an aura when we attain to clairvoyance in our sleep. We became materialists when we learned to look directly at our fellow human beings instead of seeing their auras. That was brought about as a result of luciferic developments that made it possible to begin to see ourselves with day-waking consciousness. And this helps us to understand an important passage in the Old Testament, the one that says that people went about naked prior to the seduction by Lucifer. This is not to be taken as meaning that their state of awareness in their nakedness at all resembled what yours would be if you were to do the same thing now; it means that they previously saw the surrounding aura. So they had no such awareness of the human being as we would have now if people were to run about in the nude, for they perceived human beings spiritually clothed; the aura was the clothing. And when that innocence was lost and human beings were condemned to a materialistic way of life, meaning that they could no longer perceive auras, they saw what they had not seen while the aura was still perceptible, and they began to replace auras with clothing. That is the origin of clothing; garments replaced auras.

And it is actually a good thing in our materialistic age to know that people clothed themselves for no other reason than to emulate their aura with what they wore. That is especially the case with rituals, for everything that is worn on such occasions represents some part of the aura. You can see for yourselves, too, that Mary and Joseph and Mary Magdalene wear quite different garments. One wears a rose-colored dress with a blue mantle, the other a blue robe with a red mantle. Mary Magdalene is often portrayed in a yellow garment by those who were still familiar with the old tradition or who still retained remnants of clairvoyance. An attempt was always made to reproduce the aura of the individual in question, for people were aware that the aura ought to be indicated, ought to find expression in the clothing worn.

An aberration typical of our materialistic age afflicts certain circles who see an ideal in doing away with clothing and who regard the so-called nudity cult as extremely wholesome; materialism can always be counted upon to draw the practical conclusions of its thinking. There is actually a magazine devoted to this cause that calls itself Beauty. A misunderstanding is at the root of this; the magazine believes itself to be serving something other than the crassest, coarsest materialism. But that is all that can be served when reality is seen exclusively in what external, sense-perceptible nature has brought forth.

The wearing of clothes originated as a means of preserving in ordinary life the state of consciousness that sees human beings surrounded by an aura. We should therefore find out where the contemporary tendency to do away with clothing comes from. It comes from a total absence of any imagination in clothing ourselves. No idealism is involved, but rather a lack of any imagination where beauty is concerned. For clothes are intended to beautify the wearer, and to see beauty only in unclothed human beings would, for our time, reveal an instinct for materialism. I intend at a later date to contrast this with the situation existing in Greek civilization. That civilization provides us with the best means of studying this matter in the light of what has just been said.

Now it becomes more and more important for people to learn how various conditions of consciousness provide insights for a study of life. Sleeping and waking are alternations in states of consciousness. But while sleeping and waking bring about sharply marked changes in our state of consciousness, smaller changes occur as well. Day-waking consciousness also has its nuances, some of which tend more toward sleep, others more toward the waking state. We are all aware that there are individuals given to spending a large part of their lives not actually asleep, but drowsing. We say of them that they are “asleep,” meaning that they go through life as though in a dream. You can tell them something, and in no time at all they have forgotten it. We can't call it real dreaming, but things flit by them as though in a dream and are instantly forgotten. This drowsiness is a nuance of consciousness bordering on sleep. But if somebody beats another up, that is a nuance that goes beyond the state of ordinary sleep and doesn't remain just a mental image. Life presents a variety of nuances of consciousness; we could set up a whole scale of them. But they all have their own rightness.

A lot depends on our developing a feeling for these nuances. A person occasionally has such a sense if he is born healthy and grows up in a healthy state. It is important to have a certain sensitivity for how seriously to take this or that in life, how much or how little attention to pay to it, what matters to take a stand on and what to keep to oneself. All this has to do with the asserting of consciousness, and such nuances do indeed exist. And it is very important to know, as we go through life, that life can develop in us the delicate sensitivity that tells us how much consciousness to focus on any particular matter, how strongly to stress something. We really make important progress both in leading a healthy life and in the possibility of contributing to orderly conditions in our environment if we pay attention to how strongly we should focus our consciousness on this or that. The state of consciousness we are in when we are among people and talking with them in an ordinary way about various matters is different from the state of consciousness in which a sense of delicacy forbids our discussing certain other subjects. These are two distinctly differing nuances of consciousness. But the presence of a sense of the fitness of things is simply another state of consciousness, and it is endlessly important in life to have an awareness of such considerations. I'd like to show you at hand of an example that there are indeed individuals who possess understanding for such nuances of consciousness.

Today is the 27th of August, Hegel's birthday, and tomorrow, the 28th, is Goethe's; they follow on one another's heels. Now Hegel wrote an Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences among other works, and a first edition of it was published.^1: This book is noteworthy in a certain respect. There would be absolutely no point in opening it at random and reading this or that page; you could make exactly as much sense out of it as out of Chinese. A statement taken at random from a page of Hegel would convey nothing whatsoever. In a lecture in Berlin last winter I explained how little sense it made to divorce one of Hegel's sentences from its context. For sentences in Hegel's encyclopedia make sense only when one has skipped over everything that poses riddles for the human mind and arrived at the place where Hegel says, “Considered in and of itself, being is the concept,” and so on. If one begins there and exposes oneself to all the rest of it, then and only then does every sentence make sense at the place where it stands; each sentence owes its meaning to its place in the whole.

Well, so Hegel had his encyclopedia published. In the preface to the first edition he explained why he arranged it as he did. When there had to be a second edition, Hegel wrote a preface to that. Now an author can sometimes have quite an experience of life between two editions of a book. For even if one has already become acquainted with one's fellow men, one feels oneself duty bound not to see them entirely in the light in which they sometimes reveal themselves; and besides, one can tell quite a bit about them from the reception the book is given. That was true in Hegel's case also. So then he wrote a preface to the second edition, and there are important passages in it. I am going to read you two such, one the very first sentence; the second, sentences from the second page. The preface to the second edition begins as follows: “The well-disposed reader will find that several sections have been revised and developed in sharper definition. I have taken pains therein to make my presentation a less formal one and to bring abstract concepts closer to the layman's understanding, making them more concrete by using more extensive exoteric annotations.” He was concerned, you see, to explain esoteric matters exoterically. The book continues:

The extreme brevity necessitated by a summarization of material quite sufficiently abstruse to begin with nevertheless leaves this second edition with the same goal as the first, namely, to serve as a preliminary text requiring further exegesis in the form of lectures. The title “encyclopedia” usually presupposes a less rigid adherence to scientific method and a more general structuring. But it lies in the nature of the subject matter that logical aspects must remain the basis of the presentation.

There were all too many occasions and provocations that seemed to require me to clarify my philosophical position with respect to the spiritual and the insipid concerns of contemporary culture, a thing to be undertaken only exoterically and only in a preface; for even if these concerns claim a relationship to philosophy, they do not do so scientifically, which means not at all; they approach it from without, and remain outside it. It is uncongenial and mistaken to involve oneself in a situation so alien to science. All the clarifying and explaining one might do fails to further that insight which can alone form the object of true knowledge. But it may be useful or necessary to comment on various phenomena.

This is proof that Hegel tried to shape the first edition in what was for him an esoteric manner, and that it was only in the second edition that he added what seemed to him exoteric aspects. Our time often possesses no understanding for these exoteric and esoteric elements; it doesn't so easily embark on the course Hegel travelled, who wanted to keep to himself everything originating in his own subjective view of a matter. And it was only after he had built up a complete organismic structure and freed it from any subjective aspects that he was willing to present this objective material in his book; he remained of the opinion that one's own path in achieving an insight was something that should be kept a private matter. In this, he evidenced sensitive feeling for the difference between two states of consciousness: that into which he wanted to enter when addressing the public, and that other developed for communing with himself. And then the world urged him, as the world so often does, in creating undesirable outcomes, to overcome this embarrassment of his for a certain period. For what lay at the bottom of his feeling was embarrassment, impelling him to silence about the way he had arrived at his concepts. As you know, embarrassment usually makes people blush. We would have to say, meaning something spiritual thereby, that Hegel blushed spiritually when he had to write a thing like his preface to the second edition. Here you see one of those nuances of consciousness over which embarrassment extends.

I wanted to demonstrate with an example how nuances of consciousness show up in life, including nuances in actions of the will and in what we do. We need to become ever more fully aware that life really must consist of such nuances, that we have to relate differences in states of consciousness to everything we do. Sleeping and waking involve very marked differences. But there can also be a nuance of consciousness in which we are aware that a matter concerns not just ourselves but the surrounding world as well; another, in which we confront the world with awareness that we must tread gently; and still another in which we know that what we do must be done with ourselves alone, or only in the most intimate circle.

The concepts and ideas we garner from spiritual science really make a difference in life. They teach us to recognize subtle subjective differences, provided we aren't disposed to know them only from the usual standpoint, realizing instead that a serious concern with spiritual science makes us a gift of this capacity for practical tact. But that serious concern with spiritual science must be present. It is of course absent if we project into spiritual science the sensations, desires, and instincts that ordinarily prevail. If that is the case, what is derived from spiritual science amounts to little more than can be garnered from any other indifferent source of learning. I've been speaking of nuances of consciousness and saying that there are nuances within the waking states very close to sleep. But it can happen that a person lacks the inclination to concern himself with certain details and subtleties, as in the case of the coupon clipper in yesterday's lecture. One may enjoy reading books or lecture cycles, but experience a dwindling consciousness at certain places in the text, and drowsiness sets in; the conscientiousness required to overcome such a condition is simply not there to call upon.

That is why I have continued to stress that things should not be made too easy for people desiring to involve themselves with spiritual science. We hear again and again that books should be written in a popular style, that Theosophy is not popular enough.^2: I discern behind such comments a wish for books that people could drowse through in a way they can't with Theosophy. It is vitally necessary to have sufficient interest for objective facts to rid ourselves of certain feelings and sensations we have had in the past; if we allow ourselves to drowse as we confront this or that theme in spiritual science that ought to engage our interest, we would stay awake only in the case of those matters most easily absorbed. And such a lack of objective interest leads to an inevitable development. The coupon cutter feels obligated to listen to the lecture, for lecture-going is part of a proper lifestyle, but he suffers tortures because of his total lack of interest. But he is gradually relieved; he enjoys himself, and sometimes even falls soundly asleep, a condition he doesn't have to guard against unless he starts snoring. All of this is a perfectly natural development.

Now let us picture this process transferred to another kind of consciousness. Let us imagine a person who lacks the needed full interest in the concrete details of spiritual science. He feels that he is listening best when he is not paying attention to details. I have even heard the comment, “Oh, what he is saying isn't the important thing; it's the ‘vibrations,’ ‘the way it's said.’” The lecturer can often discern this type of drowsy listening in the listener's appearance. This is exactly the same situation on the soul level as that of the coupon clipper in external life. For if attention is being given to “vibrations” instead of to what spiritual science is offering, it turns the hearer's interest inward, as happens when the coupon clipper is enjoying himself. It may be that such a person describes himself between lectures as taking an interest in what the lecture offered, and claims interest in this or that theme. But he is really gossiping about his or someone else's previous incarnations. He has, in other words, shifted everything to an interest in himself in an identical internalizing process. We really see the same process here that goes on in the external life of the coupon clipper, who falls asleep at every lecture, in the case of those who feel that details are not important, but who claim an interest in spiritual science they really lack. So they fall asleep as to details, and their interest is transferred to their own personalities.

Things of this sort have to be made clear. If we were to see them clearly, much that happens would not occur.

I would like to see you make a study of the nuance levels of consciousness as I have tried to describe them. The last example given should perhaps not be taken amiss now or at any other time. There is no question that the movement of spiritual science is met with a good deal of sleepiness, while a strong tendency to self-enjoyment gets the upper hand, with the result that spiritual science is used only as a means of indulging in self-enjoyment. But we want to concentrate on nuances of consciousness, for unless we do so we will not be able to achieve an understanding of necessity, chance, and providence.

• 1:. Georg Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel, 1770–1831, German philosopher. Published Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in 1817.
• 2:. Rudolf Steiner, Theosophy: An Introduction to the Supersensible Knowledge of the World and the Destination of Man, (Hudson, N.Y.: Anthroposophic Press, 1986).

I want, as I've said, to use these days to lay the foundation we will need to bring the right light to bear on the concepts chance, necessity, and providence. But today that will require me to introduce certain preparatory concepts, abstract counterparts, as it were, of the beautiful concrete images we have been considering.¹ And to do the job as thoroughly as we must, a lecture will have to be added on Monday. That will give us today, tomorrow (after the eurythmy performance), and Monday at seven. The performance tomorrow will be at three o'clock, and a further lecture will follow immediately.

For contemporary consciousness as it has come into being and gradually evolved up to the present under the influence of materialistic thought the concepts necessity and chance are indistinguishable. What I am saying is that many a person whose consciousness and mentality have been affected by a materialistic outlook can no longer tell necessity and chance apart.

Now there are a number of facts in relation to which even minds muddled by materialism can still accept the concept of necessity, in a somewhat narrow sense at least. Even individuals limited by materialism still agree that the sun will rise tomorrow out of a certain necessity. In their view, the probability that the sun will rise tomorrow is great enough to be tantamount to necessity. Facts of this kind occurring in the relatively great expanse of nature and natural happenings on our planet are allowed by such people to pass as valid cases of Necessity. Conversely, their concepts of necessity narrow when they are confronted with what may be called historical events. And an outstanding example is Fritz Mauthner, whose name has often been mentioned here; he is the author of Critique of Language, written for the purpose of out-Kanting Kant, as well as of a Philosophical Dictionary. An article on history appears in the latter. It is extremely interesting to see how he tries there to figure out what history is. He says, “When the sun rises, I am confronted with a fact.” To take an example, we have been able today, the 28th of August 1915, to witness the fact that the sun has risen. That is a fact. And now he concludes that we can ascribe this rising of the sun to a law, to necessity, only because it happened yesterday and the day before yesterday, and so on, as long as people have been observing the sun. It was not just a case of a single fact, but of a whole sequence of identical or similar facts in outer nature that brought about this recognition of necessity.

But when it comes to history, says Mauthner, Caesar, for example, was here only once, so we can't speak of necessity in his case. It would be possible to speak of necessity in his existence only if such a fact were to be repeated. But historical facts are not repeated, so we can't talk of necessity in relation to them. In other words, all of history has to be looked upon as chance. And Mauthner, as I've said, is an honest man, a really honest man. Unlike other less honest individuals, he is a man who draws the conclusions of his assumptions. So he says of historical “necessity,” for example, “That Napoleon outdid himself and marched to Russia or that I smoked one cigar more than usual in the past hour are two facts that really happened, both necessary, both—as we rightly expect in the case of the most grandiose as well as the most absurdly insignificant historical facts—not without consequences.” To his honest feeling, something that may be termed historical fact, like Napoleon's campaign against Russia (though it could equally well be some other happening) and the reported fact that he smoked an extra cigar, are both necessary facts if we apply the term “necessity” to historical facts at all.

You will be amazed at my citing this particular sentence from Mauthner's article on history. I cite it because we have here an honest man straightforwardly admitting something that his less honest fellows with a modern scientific background refuse to admit. He is admitting that the fact that Caesar lived cannot be distinguished from the fact of Mauthner himself having smoked an extra cigar by calling upon the means available to us and considered valid by contemporary science. No difference can be ascertained by the methods modern science recognizes! Now he takes a positive stand, declaring his refusal to recognize a valid difference, to be so foolish as to represent history as science, when, according to the hypotheses of present-day science, history cannot qualify as a science.

He is really honest; he says with some justification, for example, that Wundt set up a systematic arrangement of the sciences.² History was, of course, listed among them. But no more objective reason for Wundt's doing this can really be discovered than that it had become customary, or, in other words, it happens to be a fact that universities set up history faculties. If a regular faculty were provided to teach the art of riding, asserts Mauthner—and from his standpoint rightly—professors like Wundt would include the art of riding in their system of the sciences, not from any necessity recognized by current scientific insight, but for quite other reasons.

We really have to say that the present has parted ways to a very considerable extent with what we encounter in Goethe's Faust: this can be quite shattering if we take it seriously enough.³ There is much, very much in Faust that points to the profoundest riddles in the human soul. We simply don't take things sufficiently seriously these days. What does Faust say right at the beginning, after he has spoken of how little philosophy, jurisprudence, medicine, and theology were able to give him as a student, after expressing himself about these four fields of learning? What science and life in general have given him as nourishment for his soul has brought him to the following conviction:

No dog would endure such a curst existence!
Wherefore, from Magic I seek assistance,
That many a secret perchance I reach
Through spirit-power and spirit-speech,
And thus the bitter task forego
Of saying things I do not know,—
That I may detect the inmost force
Which binds the world and guides its course;
Its germs, productive powers explore,
And rummage in empty words no more
(Bayard Taylor translation)

What is it Faust wants to know, then? “Germs and productive powers”! Here, the human heart too senses in its depths a questioning about chance and necessity in life.

Necessity! Let us picture a person like Faust confronting the question of necessity in the history of the human race. Such an individual asks, Why am I present at this point in evolution? What brought me here? What necessity, running its course through what we call history, introduced me into historical evolution at just this moment? Faust asks these questions out of the very depths of his soul. And he believes that they can be answered only if he understands “productive powers and germs,” understands, in other words, how outer experience contains a hidden clue to the way the thread of necessity runs through everything that happens.

Now let us imagine a personality like Faust's having, for some reason or other, to make an admission similar to Fritz Mauthner's. Mauthner is, of course, not sufficiently Faustian to sense the consequences Faust would experience if he had to admit one day that he could distinguish no difference between the fact that Caesar occupied his place in history and the fact of having smoked an extra cigar in the past hour. Just imagine transferring into the mind of Faust the reflection on the nature of historical evolution voiced by Mauthner from his particular standpoint. Faust would have had to say, I am as necessary in ongoing world evolution as smoking an extra cigar once was to Fritz Mauthner. Things are simply not given their due weight. If they were, we would realize how significant it is for human life that an individual who embraces the entire scientific conscience of the present admits the impossibility of distinguishing, with the means currently available to science, between the fact that Caesar lived and the fact that Mauthner smoked an extra cigar, in other words, admits that the necessity in the one case is indistinguishable from the necessity in the other.

When the time comes that people sense this with a truly Faustian intensity, they will be mature enough to understand how essential it is to grasp the element of necessity in historical facts, in the way we have tried to do with the aid of spiritual science in the case of many a historical fact. For spiritual science has shown us how the facts relative to the successive historical epochs have been injected, as it were, into the sphere of external reality by advancing spiritual evolution. And what we might state about the necessity of this or that happening at some particular time differs very sharply indeed from the fact of Fritz Mauthner smoking his extra cigar. We have stressed the connection between the Old and the New Testaments, between the time preceding and the time following the Mystery of Golgotha, and stressed too how the various cultures succeeded one another in the post-Atlantean epoch and how the various facts occurring during these cultural periods sprang from spiritual causes.

The angle from which we view things is tremendously important. We should be aware of the consequences of the assumptions presently held to have sole scientific validity.

Days like yesterday, which was Hegel's birthday, and today, which is Goethe's, should be festive occasions for realizing how necessary it is to recall the great will-impulses of earlier times, to recall Hegel's and Goethe's impulses of will, in order to perceive how deeply humanity has become implicated in materialism. There have always been superficial people. The difference between our time and Goethe's and Hegel's is not that there were no superficial people then, but rather that in those days the superficial people could not manage to get their outlook recognized as the only valid one. There was that slight difference in the situation.

Yesterday was Hegel's birthday; he was born in Stuttgart on August 27, 1770. Since it was impossible for him, living at that time, to penetrate into truly spiritual life as we do today with the aid of spiritual science, he sought in his way to lay hold on the spiritual element in ideas and concepts; he made these his spiritual foothold. When we look at the phenomena surrounding us, we seek the spiritual life, the truly living life of the spirit that underlies them, whereas Hegel, since he could go no further, sought the invisible idea, the fabric of ideas, first the fabric of ideas in pure logic, then that behind nature, and finally that underlying everything that happens as a spiritual element. And he approached history too in such a way that he really accomplished much of significance in his historical studies, even if in the abstract form of ideas rather than in the concrete form of the spiritual.

Now what does a person who honestly adopts Fritz Mauthner's standpoint do if, let us say, he sets about describing the evolution of art from Egyptian and Grecian times up to the present? He examines the documented findings, registers them, and then considers himself the more genuinely scientific the less ideas play into the proceedings and the more he keeps—objectively, as he thinks—to the purely external, factual evidence. Hegel based his attempt to write the history of art on a different approach. And he said something, among other things, that we are of course able to express more spiritually today: If we conceive, behind the outer development of art, the flowing, evolving world of the ideal, then and then only will the idea that has, so to speak, been hiding itself, try to issue forth in the material element, to reveal itself mysteriously in the material medium. In other words, the idea will not at first have wholly mastered matter, but expresses itself symbolically in it, a sphinx to be deciphered, as Hegel sees it. Then, in its further development, the idea gains a further mastery over matter, and harmony then exists between the mastering idea and its external, material expression. That is its classic form. When, finally, the idea has worked its way through the material and mastered it completely, the time will come when the overflowing fullness of the world of ideas will run over out of matter, so to speak; the ideal will be paramount.

At the merely symbolic level, the idea cannot as yet wholly take over the material. At the classic stage, it has reached the point of union with matter. When it has achieved romantic expression, it is as though the idea overflowed in its fullness. And now Hegel says that we should look in the surrounding world to see where these concepts are exemplified: the symbolic, sphinx-like form of art in Egypt, the classic form in Greece, the romantic form in modern times. Hegel thus bases his approach on the unity of the human spirit with the spirit of the world. The world spirit must allow us thoughts about the course of art's evolution. Then we must rediscover in the outer world what the world spirit first gave to us in thought form.

This, says Hegel, is the way external history too is “constructed.” He looks first for the progressive evolution of ideas, and then confirms it at hand of external events. That is what the Philistines, the superficial people, have never been able to grasp, and it is their reason for reproaching Hegel so bitterly. A person who is superficial despite his belonging to a spiritual scientific movement wants above all to know about his own incarnation, and there were of course people in Hegel's time too who were superficial in their own way. You can see from one of Hegel's remarks that there was one such. As you've seen, Hegel followed the principle of first lifting himself into the world of ideas and then rediscovering in the world around him what he had come to know in the ideal world.

Now the superficial critics had of course risen up in arms against this, and Hegel had to make the following comment: “In his many-sided naivete Herr Krug has challenged natural philosophy to perform the sleight of hand of deducing his pen only.” “Deducing” was the term used to denote a rediscovering in the outer world of everything that had first been discovered in the inner world. The person referred to in this remark was Wilhelm Traugott Krug, who was teaching at Leipzig at that time.⁴ Oddly enough, Krug was the predecessor of Mauthner in having written a philosophical dictionary, though he did not succeed in becoming a leading authority in his day. But he said, “If individuals like Hegel search for reality in ideas and then want to show, from the idea's necessity, how external reality coincides with it, then someone like Hegel had better come and demonstrate that he first encountered my pen as an idea.” Krug remarks that Hegel with his “idea” is not convincing in his assertions about the development of art from Egyptian to Greek to modern times, but if Hegel could “deduce” Krug's pen from his idea of it, that would impress him.

Hegel comments in the passage mentioned above, “It would have been possible to give him the hope of seeing this deed accomplished and his pen glorified if science had progressed so far and so cleared up everything of importance in heaven and on earth in the past and present as to leave nothing of greater importance in doubt” than Herr Krug's pen. But in today's world the mentality characteristic of superficial people is really dominant. And Fritz Mauthner would have to say honestly that there is no possibility of distinguishing between the necessity of Greek art coming into being at a certain time and the necessity involving Herr Krug's pen or his own extra cigar.

Now I have already called your attention to the prime importance of finding the proper angle from which to illuminate these lofty concepts of human life. We need to find the right angles from which to study necessity, chance, and providence.

I suggested that you picture Faust in such relation to the world that he would have to despair of the possibility of discovering any element of necessity. But now let's imagine just the opposite and picture Faust conceiving of himself in relation to a world where nothing but necessity exists, a world where he would have to regard every least thing he did as conditioned by necessity. Then he would indeed have to say that if there were no chance happenings, if everything had to be ruled by necessity, “no dog would endure such a curst existence,” and this not because of what he had been learning but because of the way the world had been arranged. And what would a person amount to if there were truth in Spinoza's dictum that everything we do and experience is every bit as necessitated as the path of a billiard ball which, struck by another, has no choice but to move in a way determined by the particular laws involved?⁵ If that were true, nobody could endure such a world order, and it would be even less bearable for natures aware of “productive powers and germs!”

Necessity and chance exist in the universe in such a way that they correspond to a certain human yearning. We feel that we couldn't get along without both of them. But they have to be properly understood, to be judged from the right angle. To do that in the case of the concept of chance naturally requires abandoning any prejudices or preconceptions we may have on the subject. We will have to examine the concept very closely so that we can replace the cliche that this or that “chanced” to happen—as we are often forced to say—with something more suitable. We will have to search out the fitting angle. And we will find it only if we go a bit further in the study we began yesterday.

You are familiar with the alternating states of sleeping and waking. But we recognize that waking consciousness too has its nuances, and that it is possible to distinguish between varying degrees of awakeness. But we can go further in a study of that state. It is basically true that from the moment we awaken until we fall asleep again, our waking consciousness takes in nothing but objects in the world around us, senses their action, and produces our own images, concepts, and ideas. Sleeping consciousness, which has remained at the level of plant consciousness, then lets us behold ourselves as described yesterday, and, since our consciousness in this state is plantlike, this is a pleasurable absorption in ourselves.

Now if we penetrate fully into the nature of human soul life, we come upon something that fits neither day nor night consciousness. I am referring to distinct memories of past experiences. Consider the fact that sleeping consciousness doesn't involve remembering anything. If you were to sleep continuously, you wouldn't need to remember previous experiences; there would be no such necessity, in any case. We do remember to some extent when we are dreaming, but in the plant consciousness of sleep we remember nothing of the past. It is certainly clear that memory plays no special part in sleep. In the case of ordinary day-waking consciousness we must say that we experience what is around us, but experiencing what we have gone through in the past represents a heightening of waking consciousness. In addition to experience of our present surroundings we experience the past, but now in its reflection in ourselves. So if I draw a horizontal line (see drawing) to represent the level of human consciousness, we may say that we look into ourselves in sleep.

I will write “Looking into ourselves” here; we can call it a subconscious looking. Day-waking consciousness can be set down as “Looking out consciously into the world.” Then a third kind of inner experiencing that doesn't coincide with looking into the world is the conscious “Looking into ourselves in memory.” So we have

The fact is, then, that we have not just two sharply different states of consciousness, but three of them. Remembering is actually a deepened and more concentrated form of waking consciousness. The important thing about remembering is more than just being aware of something; we recapitulate awareness of it. Remembering makes sense only if we are aware of something all over again. Think a moment: if I encounter one of you whom I have seen before, but merely see him without recognizing him, memory isn't really involved. Memory, then, is recognition. And spiritual science teaches us too that whereas our ordinary day-waking consciousness, our consciousness of the world outside us, has reached the very peak of perfection, our remembering is actually only just beginning its evolution; it must go on and on developing. Metaphorically speaking, memory is still a very sleepy attribute of human consciousness. When it has undergone further evolution, another element of experience will be added to our present capacity, namely, the inner experiencing of past incarnations. That experiencing rests upon a heightening of our ability to remember, for no matter what else is involved, we are dealing here with recognition, and it must first travel the path of interiorization. Memory is a soul force just beginning its development./

Now let us ask, “What is the nature of this soul-force, this capacity to remember? What really happens in the remembering process?” Another question must be answered first, and that is, “How do we arrive, at this point in time, at correct concepts?”

You get an idea of what a correct concept is if you are not satisfied with a meager picturing of it; in most cases people have their own opinion of things rather than genuine concepts. Most individuals think they know what a circle is. If someone asks, Well, what is it? they answer, Something like this, and draw a circle. That may be a representation of a circle, but that is not what matters. A person who only knows that this drawing approximates a circle and remains satisfied with that has no concept of what a circle is. Only someone who knows enough to say that a circle is a curved line every point of which is equidistant from the center has a correct concept of a circle. An endless number of points is of course involved, but the circle is inwardly present in conceptual form. That is what Hegel was pointing out: that we must get down to the concept underlying external facts, and then recognize what we are dealing with in outer reality on the basis of our familiarity with the concept.

Let us explore what the difference is between the “half-asleep” status of the mere mental images with which most people are satisfied and the active possession of a concept. A concept is always in a process of inner growth, of inner activity. To have nothing more than the mental image of a table is not to have a concept of it. We have the concept “table” if we can say that it is a supported surface upon which other objects can be supported. Concepts are a form of inner liveliness and activity that can be translated into outer reality.

Nowadays one is tempted to resort to some lively movement to explain matters of this sort to one's contemporaries. One really has an impulse to jump about for the sake of demonstrating how a true concept differs from the sleepy holding onto a mental image. One is strongly prompted to go chasing after concepts as a means of bringing people slightly into motion and enlivening the dreadfully lazy modern holding of mental images that now prevails; one wants to devote one's energies to clarifying the distinction between entertaining ordinary mental images and working one's way into the real heart of a matter. And why is one thus prompted? Because we know from spiritual science that the moment something reaches the level of the concept, the etheric body has to carry out this movement; it is involved in this movement. So we really must not shy away from rousing the etheric body if we intend to construct concepts.

What, then, is memory? What is remembering? If I have learned that a circle is a curved line every point of which is equidistant from the center, and am now to recall this concept, I must again carry out this movement in my etheric body. From the aspect of the etheric body, something becomes a memory when carrying out the movement in question has become habitual there. Memory is habit in the etheric body; we remember a thing when our etheric body has become used to carrying out the corresponding movement. We remember nothing except what the etheric body has taken on in the form of habits. Our etheric bodies must take it upon themselves, under the stimulus of re-approaching an object, being repeatedly brought into motion by us and thus given the opportunity of remembering, to repeat the motion they carried out in first approaching that object. And the more often the experience is repeated, the firmer and more ingrained does the habit become, so that memory gradually strengthens.

Now if we are really thinking instead of merely forming mental images, our etheric bodies take on all sorts of habits. But these etheric bodies are what the physical body is based on. You will notice that a person who wants to clarify a concept often tries to make illustrative gestures, even as he is talking about it. Of course we all have our own individual gestures anyway. Differences between people are seen in their characteristic gestures, that is, if we conceive the term “gesture” broadly enough. A person with a feeling for gesture learns a good deal about others from observing their gestures and seeing, for example, how they set their feet down as they walk. And the way we think when remembering something is thus really a habit of the etheric body. This etheric body is a lifelong trainer of the physical body—or perhaps I had better say that it tries to train the latter, but not entirely successfully. We can say, then, that the physical body, for example, the hand, is here:

When we think, we constantly try to send into the etheric body what then becomes habit there. But the physical body presents a barrier. Our etheric bodies can't manage to get everything into the physical body, and they therefore save up the forces thus prevented from entering the physical body. They are saved up and carried through the entire period of life between death and rebirth. The way we think and the way we imprint our memories upon the etheric body then comes to the fore in our next incarnation as our instinctive play of gesture. And when we see a person exhibiting habitual gestures from childhood on, we can attribute them to the fact that in his previous incarnation his thinking imprinted certain quite distinct mannerisms on his etheric body. If, in other words, I study a person's inborn gestures, they can become clues to the way he managed his thinking in past incarnations. But just think what this means! It means that thoughts so impress themselves upon us that they resurface as the next incarnation's gestures. We get an insight here into the way the thinking element evolves into external manifestation: what began as the inwardness of thought becomes the outwardness of gesture.

Modern science, in its ignorance of what distinguishes necessity from chance, looks upon history as happenstance. In a list of words dating back to 1482, which Mauthner refers to, we read the words, “geschicht oder geschehcn ding, historia res gesta.” “Res gesta” is what history used to be called. All that is left of this today is the abstract remnant “regeste.” When notes are taken on some happening, they are called the “register.” Why is this? The word is based on the same root as “gesture.” The genius of speech responsible for the creation of these words was still aware that we have to see something brought over from the past in historical events. If what we observe in individual gesture is to be understood as the residue of past lives on earth, born with the individual into an incarnation, surely it is not complete nonsense to assume something like gestures in what we encounter in the facts of history. A series of facts surfaces in the way we walk, and these are the gestures of our thinking in past incarnations.

Where, then, must we look for the facts underlying history? That is the question now confronting us. In the case of individual lives we have to look for the thoughts underlying gesture. If we regard historical events as gestures, where must we look for the thoughts behind them? We will take up the study of this matter tomorrow.

• 1. This lecture was preceded by a eurythmy performance of the final scenes of Goethe's Faust, II.
• 2. Wilhelm Wundt, 1832–1907, German philosopher and philologist. See also Mauthner's article “History” in his Dictionary of Philosophy.
• 3. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1749–1832, German poet, playwright, and novelist. Faust, dramatic poem. The quotations from Faust in this book are all taken from the translation by Bayard Taylor.
• 4. Wilhelm Traugott Krug, 1770–1842, German philosopher, influenced by Kant.
• 5. Baruch Spinoza, 1632–1677, Dutch philosopher.

If you look at works such as that of Fritz Mauthner, to whom I have repeatedly referred, you will see what consequences necessarily result from taking the prevailing modern outlook seriously. Mauthner arrives at all sorts of very strange conclusions. One example is the way he links the concept “supply” with that of a “supply of words,” for he is a philologist. He divides the word “supply” into two categories of “illusory” and “useful” concepts. The real purpose of his philosophical dictionary is to demonstrate that most philosophical concepts belong in the useless category. Those who give a thorough reading to his comments on a concept or word in his Dictionary of Philosophy always end up with the admittedly subjective feeling of whirling around like a Chinaman trying to grab his own pigtail. You have the feeling as you finish one of his articles that you have been trying all the way through it to get hold of your pigtail, which a Chinaman wears hanging down behind him. But at the end there it is, still behind you; no amount of twirling results in catching up with it. There are, I must say, some very, very upsetting things for healthy minds to endure as they read an article such as the one on “Christianity.” But that is true of almost all the articles Mauthner has written.

Now he takes great pains to eliminate all illusory concepts, admitting some of them into his dictionary for the sole purpose of denouncing them. I'll read a few very characteristic sentences from his introduction by way of illustration:

What is an illusory concept? This dictionary will denounce as illusory many concepts held in general esteem. I am not at a loss, you see, for examples. Nevertheless, it is not an easy matter to describe in general terms what distinguishes a useful from an illusory concept, a true one from a false one, a living concept from a dead one.

These opposite characteristics already point to some sources of the difficulty. The mere appearance of usefulness cannot always be attributed to the same source, and it is not in every case a simple matter to determine a concept's falsity or deadness. It may be that the falsity was inherent, or else became attached to the concept as language underwent changes over a period of time and did not need to wait for a scientifically and critically advanced generation to discover it. A concept could also have been dead to begin with, or death can have overtaken it unnoticed in popular usage after a shorter or longer life. The boundaries cannot be sharply drawn because all these concepts are relative. The concepts absolute and phlogiston were false from the start; exact scrutiny could all along have discovered that they contradicted the facts of experience.

Now wouldn't you agree that this is quite nice? Humanity took many millennia, not just centuries, to replace phlogiston with another concept, and Lavoisier's replacement of phlogiston with evidence of the true nature of combustion was considered a most significant deed.¹ But Mauthner finds it possible to comment that “the concept was false from the start because exact scrutiny could have discovered all along that it contradicted the facts of experience.”

It really sounds as though if Fritz Mauthner had been born early enough, he would have seen to it that people didn't have to suffer for so long a time from the false concept phlogiston. He goes on to say, “The concept which only became a false one when the concept devil fell by the wayside, and the godless female could therefore no longer enter into fleshly commerce with the illusory concept devil. The concept devil too lived a sufficiently lengthy span and died out only when human learning became convinced that neither the devil nor any of his works were observable in the sphere of reality.”

We could be tempted to repeat that
Not if he had them by the neck, I vow,
Would e'er these people scent the devil.

One can't help thinking of this on hearing such a statement. A lot depends today on the decisions people make about searching out viewpoints able to shed light and guide them.

Yesterday we discussed how a deepening of our soul nature must be accompanied by a profounder grasp of concepts such as necessity. It was pointed out how decisive an influence on destiny a sense of the necessity in everything in existence, and the submersion of the individual in that necessity, could have for a person like Faust. But Mauthner says, “Necessity—What is it? Just a way of looking at things.” He finds no reason to think of the element of necessity as existing objectively in things. In his opinion the stream of cosmic events bypasses human beings. People say that “the sun rose today, it rose yesterday and it rose the day before yesterday, so we assume that it will rise tomorrow and the day after tomorrow, and so on.” They form the concept of necessity from these external thoughts about the regular succession of events, saying that the sun necessarily rises. But this necessity of theirs is subjective, just a human concept.

And Mauthner makes the nice rejoinder to the philosopher Husserl,² an exponent of the view that necessity is inherent in the nature of things, “If I only knew how necessity, a human way of regarding reality, could be made objective reality!” “If I only knew,” is Mauthner's reaction. Mauthner, you see, lacks any possibility of understanding how something subjective could turn into objective reality. He's a queer kind of eurythmist, this Mauthner; he can never dance his way from the subjective into the objective because he has totally lost the capacity to involve himself in the inner choreography that leads from the subjective into the objective. And the reason for that is that we are not in a position to look for essential being at the characteristic place where the subjective element actually passes over into the objective realm.

Let us seek out such a place and examine it from a spiritual standpoint. When the human soul raises a question, it seeks an answer to it, and proceeds subjectively to set in motion all those processes, those inner or external actions, that might serve to supply it. You know, of course, that the putting of questions and finding of answers is indeed a subjective process, so subjective that one person engages in it with finesse and another clumsily; all possible nuances exist. It is really an inner activity. But now let us assume the following: Let us picture a person on fire with a desire to know, filled to the brim with a longing for insight, who therefore raises a question in his soul. But he finds no answer to it. The situation thus far is subjective. But now let us imagine time passing and the person continuing to live. What has happened subjectively is that this person has experienced the question and the lack of an answer to it, and he goes on living. He can remember the question later on, and the fact that he has not found an answer. But it could turn out entirely differently: his question can have been totally forgotten. But that doesn't mean that the question and the lack of an answer are completely unreal within him; it just means that he hasn't found the answer.

Someone able to see into the situation may find that what began as a purely subjective element later makes its appearance in the person concerned in the uncertain way he behaves in life. A sensitive observer will be able to say that such a person has a curiously uncertain way of gesturing and glancing. These are very delicate matters when it comes to individual cases, but such situations do exist, and it can be discovered that many an uncertain look and gesture or the like that shows up in later years can be traced back to an unanswered question or complex of questions. The presence of this uncertainty in look and gesture is an objective, an entirely objective fact. An objective situation has actually been created and emerged from a subjective one. We can rediscover years later in the objective processes in us what we experienced at first subjectively.

If you follow up such leads, you will find that they open up a reliable route to answering questions that Mauthner in his incapacity cannot answer. That is why he says, “If I only knew how necessity, a human way of regarding reality, could be made objective reality!” The subjective can indeed become objective! This becomes clear to us particularly when we take fully into account what I pointed out yesterday: that memory is a distinct state of consciousness in addition to sleeping and waking. Remembering is still in its infancy; however, it will play a much larger role when humanity has advanced to the next planetary stage, and it will find expression in the recognition of earlier experiences. This recognition will bring these experiences before us in a form quite different from their previous appearance. Subjective experiences we may have had recur much later in a mild form in our individual lives. They will appear in the next incarnation in a much more significant form. What was once a subjective experience then resurfaces in our external aspect as a characteristic objective element. And if we ask what has become of much that we have forgotten, we would discover it if we were to concern ourselves really seriously with what spiritual science gives us; we would find it in our lives. What has sunk into our souls' depths and no longer remains in the subjective sphere lives and moves down below in our subconsciousness. The subjective invariably becomes objective.

You see that if we are really intent upon understanding life, we have to deal seriously and conscientiously with matters like these. We have to try very conscientiously indeed to develop our thinking, noting errors of thought where they occur, for they are intimately bound up with errors in the way our lives are lived. How often one comes upon people who are constantly saying that they are certainly not vain—but the very fact that they emphasize it at every opportunity is due to vanity. They are so frightfully vain that they have to keep saying how free from vanity they are. They simply haven't dwelt sufficiently and realistically enough on the cancelling out that occurs when a Cretan says that all Cretans are liars. If that were true and a Cretan states it, he would be doing so as a liar. So his statement that all Cretans are liars can't be true.

But all such matters have to be translated into living reality. We need to see to it that we make a habit of a certain discrimination in thinking. In this connection I want to call your attention to an error in thinking that crops up in Mauthner's case too, in one of his many characteristic observations. He has an article on necessity in his philosophical dictionary. He is at pains to show that necessity is merely a human idea and that there is no such element inherent in things. There is a very special reason why this article exemplifies the strange experiment of whirling around and trying unsuccessfully to catch hold of his own pigtail. For the only thing he achieves clarity on is that it is not necessary for necessity to inhere in things, that no such necessity exists. But necessity could indeed inhere in things without there being any necessity for its doing so. The fact that Mauthner sees that it isn't necessary for necessity to inhere in things doesn't prove that it doesn't so inhere. It could just be the case that no necessity exists for it to do so. That is what we must always bear in mind.

The question that concerns us, however, is where to look for necessity. We will make a closer study of this tomorrow; for today I just want to try to guide your thoughts in the right direction by citing examples.

Let's consider the following: The subjective content of our thoughts sinks down to become a content of our memory, but is lost sight of down below there and becomes objective. And now we look out into the surrounding world and seek the objective there. We certainly find objective elements in ourselves, in our individual lives, in the form of gestures, facial expressions, and the like. Remember that I spoke yesterday at the close of the lecture about how what begins as a subjective element is encountered later as objective fact. So we will need to ask whether what is thus externally encountered can perhaps be traced back to something that was once subjective. And we would accordingly find in the external world that everything to which we must ascribe necessity was rendered necessary by the fact that it has left the subjective realm and become objective.

Imagine yourselves transposed from earthly existence back to the ancient sun existence. We were involved there with those beings who reigned during the sun period. And we can picture these beings who went through inner, subjective soul experiences and were active during the period of that sun existence as similar to us in our present day thinking, feeling, and willing. What they went through on the sun at that time is now to be found externalized in the world around us; now it confronts us from outside as world-gesture, world-expressiveness, world-physiognomy. It has become objective. Crudely put, a being of the sun period may have sent out rays of will just as subjectively as we allow what we have thought or felt to sink down into our memory and become objective there. Exactly so did this will element, this raying out of the ancient sun beings, sink down and become memory, and we now find it confronting us. Just as we perceive in a person's glance as externalized, objective fact some earlier experience that he has had, we now perceive in the sun's radiating light a decision of will on the part of beings subjectively active on the ancient sun. We behold it. Indeed, if we should encounter an elderly person with a sour-tempered look around the mouth, we can certainly call it a fact objectively perceptible in the outer world, and if we follow it up, we may well be able to trace it back to bitter experiences of a subjective nature suffered in childhood. What was subjective has become objective.

Where mountains tower up today it is possible to trace back this feature of the earth, for example, in the great chain of the Alps. If we go back far enough, perhaps as far back as ancient Saturn, we come across subjective soul and spiritual events experienced during that period that are retained in present-day physical aspects of the earth. But things could have taken a somewhat different course at that period if the gods who had those experiences of soul and spirit had come to different decisions; in that case, of course, the Alps would not have come to be as they are today. But just picture the gods on Saturn deciding on some particular inner action and then going through the sun and moon periods. Then, as the moon developed into the earth, it was no longer possible for them to change their decisions. That is like the difference we experience in trying to learn in later life something we failed to learn before we reached our eighteenth year. We can catch up, but the fact of having to do so creates a situation that would not have existed had we undergone the learning at an earlier age.

You will see from this that although the gods were free to make this or that decision during the Saturn period, once having made it, they were no longer free during the moon evolution to effect a change in the east-west orientation of the Alps. They bound themselves by the terms of their earlier thinking, and the result could no longer be changed. What has been done cannot be undone if we want to stick by the truth. People can try subjectively to wipe out what they experienced subjectively, but what has developed as objective fact cannot be wiped out.

If, for example, I have been guilty of neglect in younger years in failing to educate someone whose education was my responsibility, that corresponded to my subjective state at the time. Twenty years later I can deny that I was neglectful, but that changes nothing in the objective situation that grew out of the subjective one. The individual who went uneducated became what he is as a result of what I neglected to do. The objective outcome of our subjectivity takes on a necessity that cannot be denied, and necessity enters the picture to the degree that the subjective is transformed into the objective.

If the concepts involved here are followed up with strict logic from this point of view, we come upon an intimate relationship between the past and everything that can be termed necessity. And the past resurfaces in everything we encounter in the present; it is present there. There is as much necessity in the present as there is past in it. Life congeals into the past, but the past becomes necessity in the process.

I'd like to put all this before you more pictorially. It is superstition to assume that what is recognized to be an interrelationship based on law in a series of events can be changed by a miracle. Why is this the case? The past that underlies these events determines what must happen in accordance with the laws of necessity. The gods would not be telling the truth if they were to interfere with the lawfulness governing such a relationship. They would be denying what they had previously established. And we can no more change the past inhering in situations as necessity than we can change what happened in the past by some statement about it. What we cannot change in a situation is the part the past played in it. The concept of necessity must coalesce with the concept of the past; that is tremendously important. The past inheres in every object and in every creature, constituting the necessity in them; necessity is present in them to an extent corresponding to their past. The necessity that inheres in things does so because it is the recurring past, and what has taken place cannot be dismissed. We can easily picture anything that has become necessity now, for it goes back to a previous event. It happened in the past and now confronts us in reflected form.

You can no more change that reflection than you can remove in the mirror a wart on your forehead that you see reflected there; you would have to remove it beforehand. It is equally impossible to make any change in what appears as present necessity, since what appears as necessity now really occurred some time ago. It is past, and now merely shows up in its subsequent reflection. Everything of the nature of necessity in us is of the past and is merely bringing about its reflection in us. Only if people bestir themselves to grasp that the events that took place in the ancient moon, sun, and Saturn periods are now reflected in us, and are merely reflections of those ancient events, will they come to understand necessity.

And now think back to our discovery that our conceptual world is of moon origin. On an earlier occasion I described how we are really looking back on a moon panorama when we observe our present-day environment. Here you have the link. It is simply not true that certain things that seem to be going on in us really happen in the present; they are just reflections in a mirror. The reality is that they took place in earlier stages of the earth's development. I have said in earlier lectures that our heads are actually hollow. And why are they hollow? Because what constitutes their content is of earlier origin, and now there is only a reflection there of earlier events in our heads. But if we are incapable of grasping this concept of mirror images, we will always be prone, as we confront the Maya, the illusion of reality around us, to make the mistake that children (and, if you'll excuse me, modern science too) make when they see objects in a mirror and run around behind it to find them. But the objects have vanished when they get there. What was necessity has gone, and the fact that the past is reflected is the reason why there is necessity in the present. The past cannot be changed.

I agree that much effort is involved in grasping these concepts. So we'll stop here for today, and see if we can manage to think them through by tomorrow. We will then go on to study chance and providence and their connection with necessity.

• 1. Antoine Laurent Lavoisier, 1743–1794, French chemist. In 1774 he refuted the theory claiming that a substance called phlogiston escapes during the combustion process. In 1777 Lavoisier discovered that combustion consists in the combination of a substance with oxygen. He discovered that breathing is also a combustion or oxidation process.
• 2. Edmund Husserl, 1859–1938, German Phenomenological philosopher.

We have seen that necessity must be thought of in connection with the past, that the world contains as much necessity as it does past. For, as we tried to recognize, the past is reflected in the present. And there was another element involved: we hope to be so strengthened by our striving for clarity about just such concepts as we have been considering that we will be fit to take up the study of the truths of spiritual science. It is disastrous in many respects to have a great longing for what we might term deep spiritual-scientific truths if we shy away from strengthening our minds and thinking by taking in and thoroughly mastering concepts of a demanding nature. They are what disciplines our souls and spirits. And if we take pains to remain inwardly true in the process, no danger can ever threaten us from genuine spiritual-scientific concepts.

I have already mentioned, however, how often many people's longing for spiritual-scientific truths is found to outweigh their longing to work their way through to substantial concepts. Right at the beginning of our efforts in spiritual science there were some individuals who declared that they could not attend my lectures because they sank into a kind of sleep-state as a result of the concepts being discussed. A few especially mediumistic natures even carried things to the point of having to leave the lecture hall in Berlin. And one woman was actually found collapsed in sleep outside the hall, so powerful had been the lulling effect of the search for clear concepts!

The reproach was once made to Goethe that he created “pallid concepts” with his ideas about the metamorphosis of plants and animals and the primal phenomena of color. In his “Prophecies of Bakis,” which I have already had occasion to discuss, he inserted a passage referring to this avoidance of what people were calling “pallid concepts.”¹ As a matter of fact, this quatrain was also greatly misunderstood by those who tried to interpret these “Prophecies of Bakis.” Goethe said, “Pallid dost thou appear to me”—the concept, the idea—“and to the eye dead. How is it that you call forth holy life from founts of inner strength?” Goethe expressed with such accuracy the way people react who don't like to listen to clearly defined concepts, and therefore fall asleep, and who are always wanting to hear grand-sounding words about mysterious matters of the kind that give them something to dream about but never challenge them to think. They say, “Pallid dost thus appear to me, and to the eye dead”; they say it to those who want to speak occasionally on more sharply defined concepts. And they ask them, “How is it that you call forth holy life from founts of inner strength?” Goethe answers them, Passive would be your enjoyment if I could show you perfection.

Only the lack of it lifts you to levels beyond your own self.

In other words, the absence of those perfections that delight the eye or the senses in general proves elevating. Deadness overtakes those who do not attempt to take in and energetically work through what people often refer to as “pallid concepts.” It is therefore necessary, if we are to banish all traces of Baroque mysticism from the spiritual science we are pursuing, to devote ourselves occasionally to a concern with concepts of the utmost precision.

Thus far I have been talking about necessity. The question is now whether all the concepts that we tend, in ordinary life, to lump together with the concept of necessity really all deserve to be so linked. People say that what is necessary happens. But is this actually always the case? I would like to answer with a comparison that will clarify the matter. Let us suppose that we have a river with a gradually rising mountain chain beyond it, and we notice a stream or brook starting to run down from the heights. Let's imagine that something prevents our seeing beyond this point. We study the course of the stream or brook as it conforms to the contours of the mountain range and can state that according to what we are able to see from our vantage point it is a matter of necessity that this brook flows into this river. The mountain's formation conditions this, so that our sentence, “This brook flows into this river,” would unquestionably state a necessary fact. But now let us imagine that somebody decided to regulate the course of this brook, diverting it so that it flows in another direction. That person would have obviated the necessity, which would then not have developed. My comparison is crude, but it is a fact in life and in evolution that necessities don't always have to happen. We have to keep happenings and necessities apart. Two different concepts are involved here.

Now let us return to several previous concerns. First, let us review the insight we arrived at yesterday: that the past affects the present, appearing in reflection in it. But let us recall still another occasion on which mention of mirror images was also in order. We have often made a point of describing what takes place in human perception during ordinary waking consciousness. Human beings are really always outside their bodies and their bodily functions with that part of them that is engaged in the cognitive process; they live inside the things under study, as I've often said. And the fact that a person comes to know something is due to the reflection in his body of this experience he has inside things. So we can say that we are outside our bodies with one part of our perception, and our experience within things is reflected in our bodies.

If we now imagine ourselves looking at the color blue, we experience the blue of a flower, of chicory for example, but we do so unconsciously except for the fact of its reflection in our eyes. Our eyes are a part of our reflecting apparatus. We see the experience that we have in the chicory by allowing it to be reflected in our eyes. And we experience tone similarly. The life we live in tone is experienced unconsciously, and only becomes conscious through being reflected by our hearing organism. Our entire perceptive organism is a reflecting apparatus.

This is what I tried to establish as philosophical fact at the last Congress of Philosophers at Bologna.²

Cognition is thus engendered by reflection from our organism, by a reflecting of what we experience. And as you mull over this concept of reflection, both the reflecting of the past in the present and the reflecting of our present experience through our perceptive organism, you will have to admit that what is thus added to a thing or to an event in the form of reflections is a matter of total indifference to them, something that in neither case has anything directly to do with them. As you observe a mirror image you can quite well imagine that everything in it is as it is whether or not it is under observation. Reflections are therefore elements added to what is reproduced in them. That is especially the case with cognition; whether we develop this or that particular insight is not of the least consequence to the mirror image.

Now imagine yourselves walking through a landscape. Do you believe that the landscape would be any the less beautiful or in any way less whatever it is if you were not passing through it and experiencing it as a series of reflections engendered by your organism? No, those are elements added to the landscape and matters of total indifference to it. But is it a matter of indifference to you? No, it is not. For by walking today through a landscape that is reflected in your inner being and experiencing what is thus reflected, you will have become to some extent a different person in your soul tomorrow. What you experienced—a matter of total indifference to the landscape—signifies for you the beginning of an inner richness that can keep on growing there.

But what does all this really mean? It means, with reference again to the landscape metaphor, that we can say, “This situation was thus and such up to this point.” The fact that you walked through the landscape is a further addition to it. The landscape is reflected in you, becoming a further experience in your soul. Now how did what is continuing to grow there come into being? It did so as the result of something quite new being added to what had previously occurred. Something was really engendered in your soul out of nothingness, for contrasted with what had previously occurred, the reflection is of course a nothingness, a real, absolute nothingness. In other words, you relate to something to which there was no necessity to relate. You are an addition to it. You are added to a necessary happening as a living element that relates to it in a way not conditioned by previous events, since you could have stayed away. In that case, all that you gained from the reflection would not have become a part of the situation.

As you ponder examples of this kind, you become acquainted with the concept of chance; the real concept of it is to be found there. And you also gather from such examples that beings, things endowed with being, have to come up against each other, really to collide, for chance to occur. But we see from this that such a thing as chance can occur in the universe. If that were impossible, the enrichment of soul described above could not take place.

In this sense chance is a thoroughly legitimate concept. It is a real occurrence in cosmic events, and it shows us that new aspects of relationship can be garnered in cosmic evolution as products of reflection. If it were impossible for one participant to be linked with others without bringing about reflection in the cosmic process, then the occurrence of everything comprised in the term chance would be wholly out of the question. If the meadow through which you pass were to act as the agent of your passage, pulling you there with strings, and no reflection were to come about in you as described because of the meadow's total indifference, but the meadow were instead actively to imprint its impression on you, then the outcome could be called law-abiding necessity. But though it is hard to imagine it, there could then be no such thing as a present! There would be no present! And what would come of that? Why, beings who have no desire for such a linking up cannot progress any further if they follow such a course. They have to go back again. That is indeed the law governing devils and ghosts; they have to go out again by the door through which they entered. Goethe's Faust depicts this; they can't introduce any new evolutionary waves, and must return to the place they came from. And it is due to the possibility that new evolutionary waves can be set in motion in the developmental process of the cosmos that freedom exists.

In all our cognitive experiences, except for a certain category of them, no pure reflection takes place; the reflection is imperfect insofar as all kinds of impulses are combined with it. Concepts formed on the basis of past cognitive experience are imperfect. Once we have arrived at a pure concept, we no longer need merely to recall it; we can always create it anew. Though it becomes habitual, it is a habit that has finished with the past, and new reflections are constantly being summoned up with it. The concepts we form are pure reflections, which come to us from the beyond as additions to the things perceived. Therefore, when we form an impulse into concepts, it can be an impulse to freedom. That is what I attempted to develop at greater length in my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity.³ That is exactly the thought developed there.

But the concept of chance necessarily includes the concept of freedom. We must accustom ourselves to entertaining sharply defined concepts, for these are of immense significance for life. I want to cite an instance that has often been discussed here, but it is especially illuminating in the present context. Let us assume that we are studying illness. We must invariably look at illness from the standpoint of the present, never from the standpoint of the past, i.e., of necessity. This means enlivening the standpoint of the present by giving help to the full extent possible. Only if the illness terminates in death may we bring in the concept of necessity, realizing that necessity was involved. Anything other than this is the living present. We must be rigorous in adopting the standpoint that necessity inheres in the past; life rules the present. This example shows us that if we try to illumine concepts with the help of more fruitful viewpoints, we will acquire a certain knack for dealing with them.

A good deal could certainly be said on the subject of chance, and that will be done as time goes on. But for now I wanted to define the concept of chance and to clarify the extent to which it is valid. The easiest way to regard events after learning a little bit about karma is to say that everything is caused by karmic necessity. If someone has an incarnation at this point in time, then his life after death, and then his next incarnation, he calls something experienced in this second incarnation the consequence of the former life. But it is not absolutely necessary to look at things from the standpoint of the present; the consequence could be looked for further on, in the third incarnation. Something can occur then that we might be expecting to happen in the karma of the present incarnation. But an occurrence in the present incarnation may well be just the start of a karmic sequence, a reality generated by something presently living as a result of the reflection process. And the essential point here is that something is turned into a reality by a living element as a result of a reflection that is itself unreal. That is the way chance develops into necessity; when chance becomes a thing of the past, it is transformed into necessity.

On an occasion of great suffering, Goethe made a most beautiful statement, called by him “the word of a wise man.” He was speaking about the growth process of humanity, and said, “The rational world is to be looked upon as a single immortal individual engaged in a continuous bringing forth of what is necessary.” That is, bringing forth something, and when it has been brought forth, it is interwoven into the past and becomes necessity, “thus making itself the master of the element of chance.” A glorious saying to meditate upon! We can learn something from it too: Goethe wrote this sentence while experiencing great suffering, suffering that focused his entire feeling, his whole soul life, on the growth process of the human race, and caused him to ask what the actual course of this growth was. And there was wrung from his soul the realization that the rational world, the human race, brings forth what is necessary, and thus makes itself master over chance, in other words, incorporates chance forever into necessity.

I want to digress here for a moment. An insight such as I have just cited makes valuable material for meditation; it contains so much that flows into us as we meditate upon it. We shouldn't rest content with a mere abstract grasping of such a sentence, which emerged from Goethe's soul in his extreme old age, in 1828, when he was in the throes of great suffering. A great deal of life is packed into such a saying. And the digression I would like to make is this: our insights are always to be looked upon as grace bestowed upon us. And it is just those individuals who garner knowledge from the spiritual world who are aware what a matter of grace such knowledge is when they have prepared themselves to receive it, when their being reaches out to receive what flows to them from the spiritual world. One can experience over and over again how suitably prepared one must be for the reception of spiritual knowledge, how one must be able to wait for it, for one is not at just any and every moment in a condition to receive a particular insight from the spiritual world.

This fact must be stated in just such situations as ours, for it is only too easy for misconception to be piled upon misconception concerning the conditions under which supersensible insights flourish and can be fruitfully disseminated. Numbers of individuals come to me asking questions out of the blue about this or that, and often requesting information about matters that, at the time of questioning, are remote from my concern. They demand that I give them the most exact information. People are commonly convinced that a person who speaks out of a connection with the spiritual world knows about everything it contains and is always in a position to give out any information desired. And if he can't answer a question immediately, the comment is often made that the questioner is probably not supposed to be given the information, or something of the sort.

What we are dealing with here is too crude a conception of the relationship that exists between the spiritual world and the human soul. We should realize that “readiness for truth” is especially required for a direct reception of truths from the spiritual world. Misconceptions about these things must gradually be eliminated. Of course, people at some remove from the realm of truth in the life of the spirit feel a need to ask all sorts of questions, and answers can be given them from the investigator's store of memory, based on past research. But uninvestigated truths should not be requested out of the blue from spiritual researchers. Instead, it should be realized that the investigator feels requests for information about still unresearched matters to be like knife- cuts in his body, to use a physical analogy.

Definite laws govern everything that can lift human beings into the spiritual world. We need to familiarize ourselves with these laws to lessen misunderstandings about the flowing of spiritual truths into the physical world. Only by freeing ourselves from every trace of egoism—and this includes the desire for information on just any subject—will we create healthy conditions for the sort of movement this should and must be. Certain spiritual truths simply must be incorporated into the world today. But they should not encounter the kind of aspirations brought in from the world we formerly lived in or be pursued according to our erstwhile habits. The spiritual movement should not be undermined by them. In most cases, spiritual movements have been undermined by people's failure to adapt their habitual ways to spiritual truths, instead of bringing their accustomed habits to the reception of those truths. And so it could come about that a society was founded in the eighteenth century based upon what Jacob Boehme introduced into the spiritual life of Europe.⁴ It is now correctly reported that this society had a number of members, but only one—the founder of the society—survived. I certainly hope that more than one will do so in our case! But that was what happened in one attempt to establish a society. It is said, too, that a tremendous number of those who became members turned later on into really peculiar human beings. I don't want to go into all the further details reported about the adherents of that eighteenth century society at this point.

When we familiarize ourselves with the spiritual world, as we do in the process of absorbing spiritual science, we develop an ever growing sense of what it is to participate in it. And we prepare ourselves to make the right kind of understanding ascent into higher worlds by taking in, in the form of sharply defined concepts, the world we live in. Those who are unwilling to think as penetratingly about chance and necessity as we have been attempting to do here will not find it easy to rise to a conception of providence. For you see, we can learn a great deal from the spiritual beings who surround us.

The mental niveau of our time is that of mindlessness. I've tried to give you an idea of it by citing some of Fritz Mauthner's comments. I want to add one of the most curious remarks he has made so that you will see what an honest man is capable of, a man who not only says of the prevailing science of the day that it is the only science in existence and that we have overcome the ignorance of our stupid ancestors, but who honestly accepts the prevailing outlook and then goes on to draw some remarkable conclusions about a certain matter.

I once described Mauthner as “out-Kanting Kant.” He did not just write a Critique of Pure Reason, but a Critique of Language. He really got going on words. He invented a definition for the way a word moves from one category to another. I am deliberately citing an incorrect example from his Dictionary of Philosophy, but it is one that he himself held to be correct. The earlier periods of Latin civilization had a word for truth: veritas. Now Mauthner says that the word veritas was introduced into more recent German use, was simply taken over, to become the German word Wahrheit. He terms words in this category “borrowings” (literally “loan translations”). And he traces words thus borrowed through civilization after civilization with tremendous acuity and conscientiousness, tracking down their wanderings and transformations. He does an incredible amount of rummaging around in words. Nowhere does he share Faust's longing to behold “germs and productive powers”; he simply rummages around in words with utmost zeal.

He made attempts like the following: Let us imagine some people or other with its characteristic views. Mauthner cares only about the words derived from these views, for, to him, thinking consists of words. Now, he says, there are the words, but they can be traced back to another people. The second group, where we now come upon the words, borrowed them from the first group and transformed them. And he actually perpetrates the following: (I must cite the example, as it is really too nice for words to show you the way adherents of the present outlook must think to be faithful to it. It is vitally important not to pass lightly over things of this sort.) Mauthner traces various borrowings, looking for the various transformations that have come about in words. Among them the following:

Kaffee (“coffee”), borrowed from another language and still a foreign word in the sense that in German at least the way it is written and spoken is not homogeneous. “Potato” is an English loan from some Red Indian language; in the German Kartoffel there is either a borrowing or a bastardization based upon a shift in meaning; whereas in Erd-apfel (“earth-apple”) and Grum- or Bodebirn (“ground-pear”) we are dealing with cases of transliteration or of description.

The Romans adopted the Greek custom of crowning victors of a race, or on the occasion of a feast, with a wreath, and wreaths of flowers were also used elsewhere for these purposes. But it was only at the time of the Renaissance that the term “crown” was re-introduced in noun and verb form; there were poets' crowns and crowned poets, with the word “crown” signifying “wreath” as in Latin. The plant species used was native to Greece, and was imported, in historical times at least, both as a plant and as a word. The German Lorbeer (“laurel”) (the shrub, not the berry; “baccalaureus” became in turn the symbol of an academic title, the baccalauriat; in French, bachelier; its meaning twisted again to become the English “bachelor”) became the “vegetable of fame” of Speidel's jesting. And crowned poets from Petrarch to Tennyson were called “poets laureate.” The cheap laurel needed no replacement. The myrtle-wreath, which, as a result of faulty observation, or of a still more mistaken popular etymology, was regarded somewhere in the Orient as the symbol of sexual life and later became a chastity symbol, was more easily acquired in Germany as a weed than as a blossom; German brides therefore wear wreaths or crowns of the genuine leaves and false blossoms. Palms are replaced at Easter by pussy-willows as the only seasonal green plant available. And because palms, which in the Orient are the obvious plants for decorative purposes, have lent their name as a prefix to such terms as Palm Sunday and Palm Week in characterizations of the festival season, the green willow branches substituted for them have been designated “palm branches” and “palm catkins.”

As you see, Mauthner traces borrowed terms and words like these in their transmutations from one national region to another. And then he adds, “In the case of verbs too there is no end to the carry-over from Christianity to western peoples of such actual borrowings. The migration of the real facts of the Christian ritual and of Christian thinking may be studied in this book (cf. the article on Christianity).”

If we open the book to that article we come upon a remarkable sentence; “I want to state and demonstrate one thing only in regard to the development of Christianity as the creation of the Germanic and Germanic-Roman peoples, and to the way it still dominates western civilization, for the time being, in western usage, vocabulary and concerns. That is, that Christianity as a whole represents the most prodigious borrowing, or chain of borrowings, that it is possible to find in a scrutiny of history.”

What, then, is Christianity, according to Mauthner? A collection of borrowings! There were words at the time Christianity began. And if we want to find Christianity in Europe today, we'll have to make a search for borrowed words! What Mauthner is claiming is that Christianity is nothing but a collection of such borrowings. The whole civilization of Europe would have to have developed quite differently if certain words had just not happened to get borrowed! But the important thing to note here is that this finding is the logical consequence of current scientific assumptions. It is a consequence logically and honestly reached, and those who fail to draw it are simply less honest than Mauthner. Those who have adopted today's scientific outlook can only agree that all of Christianity means nothing more to them than a collection of borrowed words.

Somebody might object that Mauthner is only pointing out the fact that “coffee” entered our language as a borrowed word, but not how coffee itself was introduced into Europe. It is true that Mauthner didn't indicate that Christianity had to be introduced into Europe because it was a collection of borrowings. He made no assertion whatever on this score. This objection cannot be made without further ado; instead we have to say that those who think in the style of modern science are simply incapable of judging the matter. They are excluding themselves from any discussion of the issue; that is the point.

Small wonder, then, that a man who, in addition to all that I've had to say about him, is also really quite a clever fellow, says,

I don't go as far as James does (Psychology, p. 297) when he holds it impossible to improve memory.⁵ It would not be impossible to render the organs that serve memory capable of greater achievement by exercising them, as has been shown to be possible in the case of the muscles. It is certainly true that educational psychology, which believes that it can strengthen memory in the young by senseless exercises, is based upon the old associative psychology, which sees in memory the mental picture of a force, just as it does in the case of imagining other such mental pictures which this force learns to play with. If memory is nothing more than activity in the same sense that the soul is nothing more than its experiences, then nothing remains to be strengthened. Iron will that does not permit itself to forget useful knowledge and exerts itself to remember when remembering is required is a facet of character, and an individual's memory is in this sense unalterable, as character is. But quite aside from all such considerations, the pointless drilling that goes on in schools is every bit as senseless as the training of the wrong muscles for some special use of the limbs would be. A person who has learned nothing in his younger years except to walk on his hands can make no use of this capability later unless he intends to become a circus performer.

In Mauthner's opinion, schoolchildren receive training that teaches them a wrong use of their brains, analogous to a person's learning only to walk on his hands, an equally useless ability. But although this is clear to Mauthner, he has absolutely no suggestions as to what should take the place of this schooling. (I have explained to you how, in this respect too, furthering what we are developing in eurythmy is important).

Walking on their hands, with their heads down, is the chief training being given our young people. Bible verses (in the elementary grades), memorizing all the tributaries of some foreign river (in the middle school), tables and professional data presented in reference books (at the university level) form the memory training defended on the basis of an assumed strengthening of memory! On the occasion of my state examinations in the history of jurisprudence, I was required to list the 13 prerogatives of a cardinal in their God-ordained order, not forgetting the prerogative of a pallium woven by a particular group of nuns in a particular convent.

Schools should limit themselves to training character, to training it for the function of finding the easiest and best means of access to useful concepts of the real world.

By now we might expect this gentleman to be suggesting what the substitute for the above should be. People of any intelligence can only agree that the way mental training has been carried on ought not to continue, so they expect to hear what he suggests instead. But the article ends right there! There is nothing more! He has been chasing his pigtail in vain, to use yesterday's metaphor. Almost every article in his dictionary creates the impression that he is unsuccessfully chasing the pigtail hanging down behind him.

If we work our way through the concepts necessity and chance and learn to recognize that the human world is to be regarded as an “immortal individual” continuously bringing necessity about and thus establishing dominion over chance, and then add to this the concept that must be acquired if we are to understand how the spiritual world streams into the human soul, we gradually work our way through to a concept of something elevated above necessity and chance, and that is providence. It is a concept attained by a gradual working up to it.

I have often called your attention to the fact that merely looking at the world conveys nothing as to the effect of activities going on in it. It would be good to cultivate the right feeling for what I've just been saying by concerning ourselves in depth with the genius of language that lives behind words, instead of doing as Mauthner does in his concern with speech. Mauthner's data could even assist such an effort on occasion, for the tremendous zeal with which he has ferreted things out can sometimes bring a person contemplating the activity of the genius of language to significant insights that he might not otherwise become aware of. The genius of language does indeed guide us to a plane elevated above necessity and chance. A great deal we participate in goes on around us as we are speaking, without our having a true knowledge of it because we are incapable of lifting it fully into our consciousness. This is the spiritual world, holding sway around us. And to take just a random example, when we speak, these spiritual worlds speak too. We should make the attempt to be aware of this.

Let us try to make a small beginning with it. We have associated necessity with the past and chance with the immediate present. For if everything were necessity, it would also be of the past, and nothing new could ever come into being. That would mean that there could be no life. So if we involve ourselves and our own lives in the world's evolution, we would be confronted by necessity or the reflected past, and in our current life by what is called chance. These two interact. We have two streams: our present life, which we think of as simply chance, and the reflected past or necessity flowing along underneath it. What is considered real from the ordinary physical standpoint can only be related to the past, to necessity, if reality is taken to mean conformity with what already exists. The real has to belong to the past, to the necessary, while what is in the living process of coming into being always has to be freshly produced. Our life is lived in this, and we have to develop living concepts that flow out of necessity to deal with that life. Here, we cannot be onlookers at something corresponding to the concept; we can only live in it. When our own lives confront the stream of evolution, we can therefore preserve the past in the developing stream of life by now transforming the reflected picture into a present element. And we can make it into an ongoing present.

We can make a human virtue of transforming into ongoing life the past that has become rigid necessity, carrying reflections further, keeping them alive and evolving in ourselves. And what name do we give the virtue that carries the past into further life stages? Loyalty! Loyalty is the virtue related to the past, just as love is the virtue related to the present, to immediate living.

But speaking of these matters brings us to what I want to say about the genius of language that we need to become aware of. Wahrheit, the German word for truth, has no connection whatsoever with the Latin veritas; it suggests the past and necessity and ordinary truth, for it is related to the German bewahren (“to preserve”), to bewähren (“to hold good”), to währen, (“to last”), with all that is carried over into the present from the past. And there is a still stronger suggestion of the same meaning in the English language, which translates both the German wahr (“true”) and the German treu (“loyal”) as “true.” And if we want to describe someone telling the truth and being believed, the old German saying auf Treu und Glauben (“on trust,” “in good faith”) is still in use, with treu rather than wahr. Here we see the genius of language at work, and its work is wiser than what human beings do.

And when we ascend from the concept of loyalty to that of love, and then to what I have described in the past as grace, a state of being we have to wait for, we come to the concept of providence; we enter the world where providence holds sway.

If Fritz Mauthner were to concern himself with providence, he would of course search out the source from which it is borrowed and trace the connection of the German Vorsehung (“providence”) to sehen (“to see”) and vorhersehen (“to foresee”), and so on. But a person concerned with reality searches for the world indicated when the union of chance and necessity plays the dominant role rather than either one alone. And the world referred to is that in which there is no such thing as the past in our sense.

I have often told you that when we look into the spiritual world and see the past, it is as though the past had remained standing; it is still there. Time becomes space. The past ceases to be simply the past. Then the concept of necessity also ceases to have any meaning. There is no longer a past, a present, and a future, but rather a state of duration. Lucifer remained behind during the moon evolution in exactly the same way that someone on a walk with another person may stay behind, either out of laziness or because his feet are sore, while his companion keeps on walking. Lucifer has as little directly to do with our earth existence as a person who stays behind has to do with places eventually reached by his companion. He stayed behind during the moon evolution, and there he still remains. In the spiritual world we cannot speak of past things, but only of a state of duration. Lucifer has remained as he was on the moon. All our concepts of necessity and chance change when we look into the spiritual world; providence holds sway there.

I wanted at least to particularize the realms in which what we call necessity, chance and providence are to be sought. This has been a beginning only, and we will return to these matters after spending some time on others. For we must devote ourselves occasionally to studies of a kind that more “mystically” oriented natures may consider unnecessary in a movement like ours. I must regard them as very necessary, however, because I believe that it is also essential for every genuine mystic to occupy himself with thinking.

• 1. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1749–1832, German poet, dramatist, and novelist. The quoted quatrain is from his poetry collection entitled The East-West Divan, published in 1819. The poems are influenced by ancient Persian and Arabian poetry.
• 2. Sixth International Congress for Philosophy, Bologna, 1911.
• 3. Rudolf Steiner, Philosophy of Spiritual Activity, (Hudson, N.Y.: Anthroposophic Press, 1986).
• 4. Jacob Boehme, 1575–1624, German pantheist mystic. He was a shoemaker by profession and the first philosopher to write in German rather than in Latin.
• 5. William James, 1842–1910, American psychologist and Pragmatist philosopher. Published Principles of Psychology in 1890

If you think back to the entrance of the Blessed Boys in the final scene of Goethe's Faust, you will recall the verse:

Boys, brought forth in midnights haunted,
Half-unsealed the sense and brain,
For the parents lost when granted,
For the angels sweetest gain!

I've already called your attention to many a profundity in this final scene of Faust, but it contains a great deal more than I was able to point out on that occasion, more indeed than could possibly be brought to light in a limited period of time.

The four lines just quoted are equally fitted to be the leitmotif of the deeper spiritual-scientific expositions with which we will be concerning ourselves today, tomorrow, and next Monday.

I want to point out today by way of introduction that it is possible to delve more deeply, in a truly spiritual-scientific approach, into the statement made here recently when I characterized sleeping and waking and related matters. I spoke of how the whole nature of spiritual science was such as to require finding the correct approach to the facts we encounter in the world. And I showed that this approach is to be found only when we seek it as was done in our study of the alternating states of sleeping and waking. We tried to understand how differently consciousness functions in the waking and the sleeping states. But much else can be learned here by studying the way consciousness works according to whether it is that of human beings or of other beings. The four lines quoted from Faust refer to a human state of consciousness, possessed by the souls of the “boys brought forth in midnights” and “for the parents lost when granted,” in other words, by souls claimed by death immediately after birth. But the verse states expressly that these souls are “for the angels sweetest gain.”

We'll see that the saying that souls of this kind are “gain for the angels” is comprehensible only if we look into the state of consciousness of beings belonging to the hierarchy of angels. But let us first acquire some preliminary concepts of these matters and so prepare ourselves for the deeper understanding of the spiritual world into which they are to lead us.

I'll start from the fact, familiar to us from various spiritual-scientific studies, of how remote from reality the learning, the truth, and our concepts of things in ordinary life all are. People are even glad not to have these add anything to reality as they see it, for in their view the reliability of knowledge and “the unvarnished truth” depend on the fact that our cognitive processes and our soul experiences add nothing to things. Just consider what a point science makes of restricting itself to merely reflecting what goes on in the world and not allowing the soul the least influence on its pronunciamentos. Let us recall what trouble is taken by those who dream up a world view on the basis of all sorts of illusions to show that their fabrications are dictated by some reality or other outside themselves rather than originate within them. This is true all the way up to what is claimed to be valuable “occult knowledge” such as we hear some people touting. Those who desire to have occult insight here on the physical plane are basically concerned with not adding anything to the conceptions they develop. How proud people of this type are when they can report that such and such beings appeared to them, this or that was “dictated” to them, or something else was mysteriously communicated to their spiritual ears! This satisfies them, for then they can have the feeling that the conceptions they have created are reflections of reality, not something they produced. We might say that in their concern for attaining the reliable knowledge they are seeking, they actually make a fifth wheel on the wagon out of it. Knowledge should not add anything to what already exists, for only then do they regard it as something particularly reliable, particularly right.

We can arrive at a true and reliable concept of the relationship of knowledge to reality only if we gradually ascend from ordinary knowledge about physical matters to higher types of insight. We are familiar with the fact that the next level of knowledge is that called imagination. But if imagination is to have any relationship to reality it cannot be attained by living in the physical body; we must make ourselves capable of overcoming all dependence on the physical body to attain genuine imaginative knowledge. We must have progressed beyond using the physical body as our instrument. But we do still use the etheric body when we seek imaginations; we have to make use of our etheric bodies to obtain really objective imaginative experience, exactly as we make use of our physical bodies for perceiving objects in the physical realm.

Now we find that when a person on the path of clairvoyant knowledge has progressed to the point where he has loosened his soul from his physical body and is using his etheric body as his cognitive tool, what is called knowledge in the physical world, the kind of knowledge sought without a wish to add anything to the findings, remains behind on the physical plane. For example, everything that a modern scientist is interested in finding out is left behind on the physical plane by those who leave it to ascend into the imaginative world. Nothing remains of what scientists and natural philosophers think of as a world of whirling atoms, a world, as I have often explained, that is dreamed up and totally lacking in reality; nothing remains but pictures of this world. In other words, on leaving the physical plane we become aware that the conceptions of a world of whirling atoms left behind there were just dreamed up. In the imaginative world into which we have ascended no direct use can be made of any knowledge acquired on the physical plane. Please note the word direct here. We will see the subtleties of what is involved as we progress.

Now in earlier lectures I've already shown that the spiritual energy underlying thinking changes when a clairvoyant seeker frees himself from the instrumentality of his physical body. I've said that it is as though all our thinking comes alive. Instead of living in the passive world of thinking experienced on the physical plane, it is as though all our thinking comes alive and starts to tingle as we enter the imaginative world. Once, in Munich, I used a drastic comparison. I said that upon entering that world the thoughts we were previously accustomed to sending hither and thither and otherwise dispatching them as perfectly passive entities become transformed as though we had stuck our heads into a wasps' nest and our thoughts swirled and whirled about, every thought possessing a life of its own. We have to endure it in the sense that we don't feel unfree as a result of being wrested, as it were, out of ourselves by this independent life of our thoughts.

We gradually make the discovery that the insights, the conceptions we obtain on the physical plane as mere images of external reality fall away from us like a rain that rains back down upon the physical world and doesn't enter the imaginative world; they fall away and stay behind in the physical realm. All that is left of them is a memory. So we can look back on everything we have attained by exerting thinking, but that is now left behind on the physical plane as something we have finished with and no longer have any influence on.

This is a diagram of how it actually is. This would represent the physical body out of which the individual ascends. Then he immediately perceives his knowledge about physical facts falling like raindrops into the physical world. Knowledge of physical things is then outside him.

This is an extremely interesting and extraordinary process. As we ascend into the first spiritual world, the imaginative world, we see our thoughts dropping away from us. And then we see that these thought-forms become beings, and they make a strange impression on us if we really see them. We have the impression as we look at them that they are something wrested from us, something with significance for the physical world only.

Now it is extraordinarily difficult to get a more exact conception of what is dropping away from us there. It is scarcely possible, on ascending into higher worlds, to acquire correct insights by any other means than the most painstaking comparisons. First of all, it is necessary to discover what these thoughts of the physical plane, which have dropped away, can be compared to. These thoughts become very lively indeed. And the curious thing is that these thoughts we see back there on the physical plane are engaging in all sorts of dances similar to eurythmy. It is almost impossible to find these thoughts keeping really still.

I spoke of their dancing resembling eurythmy—not the eurythmy that is being nurtured here, but regular movements of a sort. These thoughts have an extremely peculiar aspect: they are inwardly alive when they have left us. And this fact makes them valuable in this first stage of true clairvoyance.

When a person says something colossally stupid here in physical existence, he certainly doesn't hold on to it for very long, once he has realized the situation. Most people like to skip lightly over their stupidities, once they've recognized them. A really stupid thought laughs when it gets out! It laughs in proportion to its stupidity. And other thoughts can be seen behaving in a similar manner. They manifest an inner life, these thoughts, a very lively play of expression. They convince us that no stupidity we perpetrate escapes being eternalized.

The only way we can get at the facts about these strange thought-forms which put in such a lively appearance is through a comparison. We will find one only if we are in a position to see our thoughts in the way just described. Then we are also in a position to experience what I am going to describe. We need for purposes of comparison the whole wide world of gnomes, the fairy folk that rules all of external earthly nature. These gnomes, who belong to the external inorganic realm in the way other elemental beings belong to plants, water, air, and fire, and so on, this whole world of gnomes has the same character, the same inner nature as the thought-forms described. I could also say that gnomes belong to the same class as our thought- forms, referring however to those thought-forms based on mental images derived from the physical plane alone.

Now as you see, we have a comparison. And that is why there is an inner relationship of sorts between the gnome world and our thoughts about things on the physical plane. As I've mentioned, people make an effort to be faithful to the facts in their knowledge and perceptions, making these into a fifth wheel on the wagon.

The gnomes have a similar relationship to their realm. Speaking euphemistically of course, but in a way corresponding to the facts, when a person talks with a gnome, he finds the gnome regarding the world to which he belongs with tremendous wistfulness, because he is so extremely uninvolved with it. He has as little influence over it as human beings have over the physical world around them with their knowledge. It is a matter of considerable indifference to the physical world surrounding us how we think about it with thoughts derived from the physical plane. A tree grows neither more nor less slowly because of thoughts derived from the physical plane that we may have about it, or because we go past it without giving it any thought at all. As I mentioned recently, we are the only ones to gain by this; our thoughts about the tree have not the least effect upon it.

The gnomes too have a similar external relationship to the world to which they belong externally. I might say that their world belongs to what we call the terrestrial world, the solid element. But we can just as easily disregard the world of the gnomes when we study the solid element as we can disregard watchmakers in a study of the laws involved in watch-making.

It is extremely important to develop a right understanding of a comparison of this kind, one that I have often resorted to, the comparison of the structure of the universe with the mechanism of a watch. If you want to understand a watch, you must study the laws governing its mechanism, and it would be ridiculous to say, Ah ha! The hands of a watch keep moving; there must be tiny demons pushing them. No such demons are involved. But if someone who understands watches as a result of studying them were to say that a watch has nothing to do with the watchmaker who put it together, he would also be talking nonsense. The fact that the world can be understood from its own make-up and that it is possible for scientists to discover natural laws can just as little be taken as proof of the nonexistence of a spiritual basis for the universe. The laws that govern the functioning of a watch are equally discoverable in the watch itself. So when it is stated that the laws that govern nature are to be found within the natural world and it is therefore unnecessary to look for anything divine in the universe, this reflects the same lack of thought as saying of watches that no watchmaker is needed because they are explainable on the basis of their own construction.

In the world surrounding us that is so entirely explainable on the basis of the laws that govern it, gnomes have a function. They too are somewhat comparable to the fifth wheel on a wagon: they accompany the world to which they belong, but without having any effect upon it. I ask you to consider the inner relationship of the world of gnomes to our physical thought world, for then you will realize that we have to make a start at understanding such a thing as the gnome world by taking a state of consciousness into consideration. Then we will ask ourselves how it is that we come to know about the physical world. We do so by forming the reflections I've been discussing. Just as reflections have no real connection with what they reflect, physical knowledge has nothing to do with what it knows about; it doesn't make anything happen in the physical realm. If we come to see physical knowledge as a matter of a state of consciousness and sense in full awareness how unessential, how superfluous, mirrors are to the objects mirrored, we will understand the soul-mood that envelops the world of gnomes. That is their soul-mood. Gnomes are therefore unable to grasp how there can be anything but an ineffectual relationship with this world.

If a clairvoyant person were to feel pain and sorrow, as they can indeed be felt on many occasions in human life, and were then to perceive gnomes, as clairvoyants do, he would find that they cannot comprehend his pain. They are aware that people can feel a general sadness and depression, but they cannot understand how anyone can be attached to physical existence; they laugh at such feelings. Indeed, we might say that our sense of the value of things on the physical plane is lost in encounters with the world of gnomes, because they heap such ridicule upon us for the value we attach to much that exists on the physical plane.

We understand the mental state of gnomes, then, if we become cognizant of the state of consciousness involved in the relationship of physical knowledge to the world reflected in it.

The beings to whom the name undines has been given and who are inwardly related not to the earthly but to the watery element and to everything liquidly rippling and flowing must be pictured somewhat differently. We cannot form a proper concept of plants just by looking at them and making a one-time image of them analogous to a papier-mâché reproduction. To be aware of nothing more than such a one-time impression is to lack any true conception of a plant, and the same holds true in the case of undines. We picture a plant rightly only if we know it in its various states: first in its root development, then growing a stem, then putting forth leaves, then blossoming, the blossoms wilting, fruits appearing, and so on. Goethe tells us in his beautiful Metamorphosis of Plants that we must study a plant's growth process.¹ And there live in the plant, in addition to what it is in and of itself, mobile elemental beings inwardly related to the shaping, rippling, mobile element of water.

And now we have to realize that the imaginative world into whose life we make our way on evolving beyond the physical plane is an inwardly mobile realm resembling the cloud-world in its metamorphoses, resembling the rippling, flowing element. The imaginative world is itself in flowing motion. And just as we encounter the realm of our own physical thoughts when we first enter the spiritual world, under favorable conditions encountering the elemental world of the gnomes, so do we live in the realm of higher elemental beings as waves live in water; we belong to and are part of its encompassing whole; we live in it.

It is of course difficult to give an impression of such matters, but here too we must picture the state of consciousness involved. It helps us to understand to say that all our thinking begins to come alive, that we are swept up by thoughts that become alive as though the thoughts we produce, thoughts endowed with imagination, were to take on a life of their own. Purely physical thoughts such as we had before are left behind, an abandoned realm. Then we can say that the gnomes live in the world we have abandoned. But now we are living in the realm of the undines, and both for them and for us it is a world of movement.

Let us picture this very exactly. We separate from our physical bodies and become strangers to them. We begin to carry on a life of inner mobility, of continuously changing, rippling motion. Everything takes on inner life as we experience ourselves in our etheric bodies. This is the experience we have also immediately upon dying, except that the tempo is slower.

This experiencing of the imaginative world is what we experienced on the moon, except that it is at a higher level now; there, it was a dream-world of imagination, a realm of pictures. On Jupiter we will experience it in full consciousness. We lift ourselves into it upon leaving our physical bodies behind as described. Try to picture it really vividly. The world of the senses is obliterated; what we saw with our eyes and heard with our ears is no longer perceptible. We cease to feel as well. Thoughts related to the outer world are laid aside in a way that could be described as follows: O gnomes, we give you our physical thoughts to keep you company; occupy yourselves with them for awhile.

Now an inner living and weaving sets in, a sharing in everything on earth that is inwardly alive and streams and ripples in the way the earth's fluid element carries on its rhythmic life. It is a sharing with the earth reminiscent too of the ancient moon period. A strange process starts: In addition to being aware of living in a realm of elemental beings belonging to the plant kingdom and to flowing liquids, we realize something else of a very special nature, something quite strange, namely, that we are becoming part of a rhythm that is involved both in the inner rhythm of the earth and in our breathing rhythm. We acquire the idea that the rhythm of our breathing is inwardly related to the rhythm of the earth. In short, we begin to be aware that we are part of the whole earth-organism. We really begin to sense our belonging to it. The earth-organism claims us.

This can be compared to what Goethe described to Eckermann on April 11, 1827, when he said, “I picture the earth with its vapor mantle as a huge living organism involved in an unceasing in- and out-breathing.”² We feel ourselves involved in this. We share in this unique way in the life of the earth.

I'd like to point out something here that demonstrates again how fruitfully spiritual science illuminates the findings of natural science made by some characteristic scientific figures, and how well they go together. So I remind you of the famous exclamation of the Greek philosopher Archimedes, who as he sat in his bath shouted, “Eureka! I've found it!”³ And what had he found out? He lifted his feet out of the bath water and then put them back in again, finding that they were lighter in the water than outside it. So he discovered the important principle that any body suspended in water loses as much weight as the water it displaces weighs. Balloons rise according to the same principle, losing as much weight as the air they displace. In the case of water, a heavy object lying on the bottom does not lose weight, but it does so when it is suspended in the water. This principle obtains throughout nature, and it is an important one, for it is related to something of the greatest importance in human beings.

You will have heard that the human brain weighs on the average 1350 grams. It is therefore quite heavy, almost 1 1/2 kilos. Very fragile organs occupy the space beneath it, organs that would be crushed by laying anything weighing a single kilo on top of them. Yet it is a fact that we all have a brain heavy enough to crush the organs that lie at its base. But the pressure exerted on them actually amounts at most to 20 grams, rather than to a kilo. How is this accounted for? It is due to the fact that the brain is suspended in a fluid; it loses all but 20 grams of its weight because it is floating in the brain fluid. We are speaking here not of what it actually weighs, but of its 20-gram pressure on the organs at its base. We picture it correctly when we conceive the brain floating in the brain fluid and this fluid extending downward into the spinal column.

Now picture this brain fluid rhythmically rising and falling. This fluid with the brain floating in it is involved in rhythmical movement as the diaphragm contracts and expands with the in- and out-movement of the breath, and it is thus involved in the breathing process. Insofar as the brain is its instrument, the whole thought process thus is connected with the breathing process. The brain is thus an extraordinarily sensitive sense organ for the forces continually playing in the earthly realm. Goethe, in his deep insight into matters of this kind, refused, for example, to accept what the crude meteorological science of his time had to say about the rise and fall of barometric pressure being due to atmospheric lightness or heaviness. He spent an endless amount of time registering barometric readings in various localities. And he tried to determine how regular this rise and fall was over the earth as a whole and showed how it could be compared to an inner terrestrial force, an in- and out-breathing on the part of the earth, which is of course closely related to meteorological regularity and irregularity. We need not be surprised at the barometer's changeableness despite the regularity of the earth's in- and out-breathing; human beings too are prone, despite the regularity of their breathing, to contract colds and other conditions that act like barometers showing that something is amiss.

We perceive this wonderful lawfulness in the earth's gravity, this inner life of the terrestrial, even though we are not conscious of it in physical life. We perceive the mysterious inner processes of the “earth-creature” taking place in the continuous rising and falling of the brain fluid in exactly the same way we gaze out into the world and listen to it. Goethe said of it, “I picture the earth with its vapor mantle as a huge living organism involved in an unceasing in- and out-breathing.” We feel that we share in it, though on an unconscious level. But the moment we use our etheric bodies as perceptive organs we begin to perceive it consciously and to participate in it; we become part of this huge earth-creature.

Our age is really the first to confront such matters entirely without understanding. Kepler, whom even those currently eager to wipe out all spiritual insight regard as a great mind, still spoke of our earth as having a periodic respiratory process which he likened to that of whales, a going-to-sleep and reawakening, dependent upon the sun-rhythm and accompanied by a fulling and ebbing of the ocean.⁴ We have an experience of these processes on an unconscious level, and it finds expression in a physical process of which we are not consciously aware.

It will not surprise you, then, that clairvoyant perception reports that what has now withdrawn into the inner organism, the strange relationship between the external atmosphere and our thought process through the blood and the rising and falling of the brain fluid was once an external element on the ancient moon, where dreamlike clairvoyance prevailed. The circulating air was outside. The human being himself was as yet only a vortex in the moon substance, for there was as yet no earthly matter; the moon was still in a fluid state or, at its most material, a thickened fluid. And in this whirling and perceiving the whirling lived moon human beings, floating as condensations in the fluid element.

What we were as moon humanity remains within us. And if we study the brain in the brain fluid and study the nature of the various functions related to the breathing process, we see that it is indeed true that we have inherited the legacy of the ancient moon, but now withdrawn into our interior make-up. We are still there, as brains floating in fluid, in rhythmically alternating motion.

We see here a reflection of the old moon rhythm that constituted human physical nature on the moon. And our whole physical make-up, which we perceive with our nerves and external senses, has spread out over that nature as an outer covering. Hidden beneath it is what remains as a moon legacy.

There are always and everywhere these interrelationships, marvelously wrought. But we have no inner perception of them as long as our eyes and ears are directed only toward the external. The moment we surrender the use of our senses and leave our thoughts behind as described, however, we feel our unity with the life of the earth. And we know ourselves inwardly to be one with the earthly gravity of our etheric life, that life into which we enter upon leaving our physical bodies in the transformed condition known as death.

• 1. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1749–1832, German poet and thinker. Published Metamorphosis of Plants in 1790; in this book he shows the leaf as the primeval organ of the plant out of which all other plant organs evolved.
• 2. Johannes Peter Eckermann, 1792–1854. Published Conversations with Goethe, 1823-1832 in 1836.
• 3. Archimedes, 285–212 B.C., Greek physicist and mathematician.
• 4. Johannes Kepler, 1571–1630, German astronomer. Calculated orbits of the planets and discovered the laws of the movement of the planets.